Mother Nature is the original Performance Artist.

Happening? Shared experience? Performance Art? Enviromental Art ?All of the above?

Just Art as Communication

When the theme of an artist's work is Mother Nature, the environment, how should it be regarded? How should it be judged?

Performance Art has existed since the beginning of time:

Mother Nature was the first to do it, and man is the one to imitate it, learn from it, capture it and try to control it, and some people attempt to explain nature's performances through art.

The classification « Performance Art » as an art form has more or less officially been around since the 1960's. Visual art that includes performance (story-telling, live creation and/or destruction, etc.) is a concept that had been established long before. 

The main concept behind Performance Art is that it is to be witnessed by an audience, it is an experience, a « happening », and it is never the same performance twice, just like nature's performances. 

Even though Ansel Adams is considered by some as it's founder, Environmental Art, I find somewhat coincidentally, also earned its official classification as an art movement in the 1960's. Environmental Art or Land Art visually communicates in an attempt to tell us the story of nature: Its creative process, it's beauty...

And more recently, Environmental Art has also been the vector to communicate about nature's destruction at the hands of mankind.