Paul Herman May 2022 1

I
Art and the Anthropocene Era

The end of the Holocene epoch1, which began at the end of the last ice age nearly 12,000
years ago, was first proposed by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the biologist,
Eugene Stoermer.

Their suggestion that the more appropriate classification for the present age be
Anthropocene2, was widely commented beginning at the turn of this century. In the year
2000 it was discussed in 200 peer-reviewed journals3, and sparked the publishing of a
new academic journal by that title4.

The idea that man's influence on the planet's functioning and future development is now so
great as to be considered of primary geological importance, remained polemical for more
than a decade. The body which decides this type of classification is the International Union
of Geological Sciences (IUGS). IUGS convened in 2013 with the aim to decide by 20165.
An ambitiously rapid decision process for a body that historically moves with glacial
deliberation.

The procedure is interesting. Whitney Autin, a stratigrapher—a branch of geology that

studies the earth's strata—argued that the term was more pop culture than hard science6,
although he conceded that evidence of the agricultural revolution is recognizable in layers of
the earth's mantle beginning around the year 900 CE. Just as the more recent atomic age
has left visible footprints in the form of radiation all over the planet.

The Guardian newspaper reported in August of 20167, that a decision ratified by a vote of
30 to 3, with two abstentions, makes the new era official; we are now in the Anthropocene,
and have been—not since the industrial revolution, as first postulated, but since circa
1950, the beginning of the atomic age.

This paper will examine how art is affected by the factors that define the new geological age.
:
Paul Herman May 2022 2

Guardian, May 30, 2019 (https://tinyurl.com/mpw4fapu):

Evidence for the Anthropocene

Human activity has:

•Pushed extinction rates of animals and plants far above the long-term average.
The Earth is on course to see 75% of species become extinct in the next few
centuries if current trends continue.

•Increased levels of climate-warming CO2 in the atmosphere at the fastest rate

for 66m years, with fossil-fuel burning, pushing levels from 280 parts per million
before the industrial revolution to 400ppm and rising today.

•Put so much plastic in our waterways and oceans that microplastic particles are
now virtually ubiquitous, and plastics will likely leave identifiable fossil records for
future generations to discover.

•Doubled the nitrogen and phosphorous in our soils in the past century with
fertilizer use. This is likely to be the largest impact on the nitrogen cycle in 2.5bn
years.

•Left a permanent layer of airborne particulates in sediment and glacial ice such
as black carbon from fossil fuel burning.”

A sardonic consequence is that along with the mass extinction of animal types the
human animal is responsible for, he is also responsible for an explosion in the chicken
population. (Almost 200 million chickens are slaughtered, worldwide, each day.)
Because of the extraordinary quantity of domestic chicken bones that pepper what is
presently the surface of the earth, but will, eventually, be a fossil-bearing stratum above
the Cenozoic. It may cause future geologists to rename our epoch by that bird's name.

Although the name Anthropocene is based on the negative impact man has on his habitat,
it is worth noting that, if man were to clean up his act, so to speak, repair the damage and
make of the earth an idyll more lovely than the imaginings of the writers of the old
Paul Herman May 2022 3

testament's garden, he would still fit under the definition of the first creature able to impact
an entire planet. That is to say, Anthropocene man. Anthropocene man's influence is
negative by circumstance, not definition.

More importantly, just as we talk of bacteria killing its host, and not individual bacterium, we
are all responsible. How many among us would give up the computers we carry in our
pockets; or the aeroplanes that have done away with cultural diversity; or the heated and lit
houses we grow so long beyond our biological mandates in; or the televisions we grow fat in
front of; or the medicine that allows us to live with our bad habits? How many of us would,
as Harari posits, remedy the mistake that the agricultural revolution was, to go back to the
joys and environmentally equitable ways of hunter gatherers? A few would, and in fact, a
few have; a negligible few. We cannot separate the petroleum miners, the computer
manufacturers, the medicine producers, from the users of these products.

But even then, in a world that held a mere 200 million individual Homo Sapiens at the time
of Jesus and Epictetus; 400 million during the high Renaissance; a 1000 million at the
beginning of the 19th century; 1.6 thousand million one hundred years later, to the present
7000 million one hundred years after that; threatening to increase by more than the total
number in 1900, within twenty years of today, we are each of us to blame for the space
each of our kinespheres occupy.

We are all of us ready to shed a tear for the disappearance of the Bengal tiger or the polar
bear, but none of us will stand up for the primordial, and primary life form on the planet,
bacteria—or at least those bacteria harmful to animal life. By the same token man is a
plague whose members can't be distinguished as guilty or innocent.

The only solution to what ails Anthropocene man is a forceful and extreme reduction in
global human population.
Paul Herman May 2022 4

II
Art and Technology in the
Anthropocene epoch

It is the technologies, beginning with the wheel and the shoes that shod the horses who
pulled the wagons, that define and make possible the Anthropocene era and its art.

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) may become the boon promised, but which was
largely—but not entirely—unrealized, by the industrial revolution. A means by which man no
longer had to give over a third or more of his life to feed and shelter himself. Freeing him to
write poetry and enjoy all that goes beyond the mundane daily effort to stave off biological
entropy. In other words, that which makes man's experience of life something innefably
more than that of other animals.

In the case of artificial intelligence, its potential becomes more pointed by the fact that
though it seems it will be capable of just about anything man now does for himself, from
surgery to urban development to sexual satisfaction, its greatest challenge will always be
precisely the writing of poetry. And all the other creative endeavours man will then be freed
to pursue as practitioner or audience. Will there ever be a machine that can dance in a
way that will astonish, impress, or move humans to an emotional response, the way a
human dancer does? A computer might one day design a holographic figure that dances a
choreography no human could. But even if the figure and the dance are of sublime beauty,
the audience will not be moved because of the lack of human achievement; the fact a
dancer is one of us allows us to celebrate our own potential as human animals.

The more important lesson Harari teaches about the future Homo Deus is that the next
evolutionary leap for hominids will be, not through causal mutation to greater
specialization, but rather through intentional genetic manipulation. Something which has
already begun and which, once the final death throes of religious influence sound, will
accelerate with lightning speed. It will create a hominid so much smarter—among other
improved qualities—than us, that we can't rightfully speculate about the decisions he will
make.
Paul Herman May 2022 5

Globalisation and eventual world government are as good a development as a human

plague can hope for. Globalisation, along with capitalism, will end war (a global economy
brought down to the point where an uneducated maker who has never stepped out of his
tiny village, can, independently, sell his product world-wide, creates a world where
countries cannot kill their customers) and all of the cultural diversity that has goaded man
to be his best. They can only be averted by a gross reduction in population to pre-
nineteenth century numbers.

The idea that Anthropocene man is both new and the last of his species before the
advent—barring extinction of hominids altogether through violence or gluttony—of a better
man, forms only another nail in the coffin of art's cadaver. The twentieth century’s
technology, its asphalt, concrete, plastic and cold gaseous lights, is the ugliest century in
history, it is no wonder its consequence, today’s art, is too.

Art has followed a single undeviating path from its origins in the caves of Lascaux. The
single intent of the painter has been to point out the beauty unavailable to the unseeing
non-practitioner in as realistic a way as the artist's bag of tricks could muster. Until, that is,
toward the end of the 19th century. Not long after the invention of the camera which,
without tricks, captured three-dimensional reality in as perfect a two-dimensional version
as man has ever known10. The world where all images were made by hand ended.

By the 1870s photography had become common enough to both excite and make painters
nervous. Its first applications imitated art; imitated the aesthetic artists sought in their
paintings. They were hung in the academy’s annual shows in Paris and London, not as
alternatives to painting, but direct competition. Painters reacted both by using photographs
as reference material in their paintings and by developing, with haste, impressionism. It was
a way of saying, Okay, you don't need me to record the way the world looks, but no camera
can do this! No photograph can be as expressive, can abbreviate, can guide the viewer's
eye in a way the 17th century Dutch illusionist failed. It cannot paint light, atmosphere; the
reason, instead of the appearance, for a young maid's sexual allure.
 Paul Herman May 2022 6

By the turn of the twentieth century the photograph was taken from the specialised studio
and the trained technician. Brownie cameras were available to even the working class. But
still, Painters were sent as correspondents to the first world war, not photographers. The
camera, however, bit at art's heels like a dog. The post-impressionists took things further,
as did the Fauvists, and the Cubists.

But then the thinking artist, the art theorist, Duchamp, removed art from the arena altogether

by removing beauty from the philosophy of aesthetics.

The photograph continued to spread, the second world war shook everyone from traditions
and, finally, the abstract expressionists refined their canvasses to the essence of what
made beauty, and said to their audience: The camera will never be able to do this. However
much it becomes better at what it does; however much its use spreads; however much you
savages, ignorant of the demands to an artist's eye, learn to use cameras. Were they right?
Were they successful? Did they refine painting to an ethos central to its truth? Some were.
But they went too far too quickly and left art lovers in the lurch. The education necessary to
an elitist enjoyment was difficult to assimilate and available to too few. Like an uneducated
westerner watching the Noh theatre, he says: the masks are un- expressive. While the Noh
actor says: to show our faces would make expression too facile. Look at the subtlety and
skill it takes to be expressive without such vulgar means.

Then the still image was strung together to make moving images, and, by the time of the
post-war, moving images moved indoors. The audience, no longer in possession of an
elitist education, wondered: “What are these crazy painters up to? Surely, they mean to
simply fool us with their antics.” Indeed, to make fools of us.

The world of the high Renaissance, where a few badly made etchings of a few of
Michelangelo's sculptures could change the ethos of all Europe's art, turned to a world where
people are bombarded with such a barrage of images that even the most impressive can
impress but little.

Art now dragged its fatally wounded body through the mud made of the arena's sands and
its own vital blood. A handful of great artists, like dinosaurs unaware of the extinction of their
 Paul Herman May 2022 7

species, continued to make great art in the high traditions of the Renaissance and
Impressionism, and Expressionism, and they still do even today. But now that nearly
everyone carries a camera and even a moving image recorder in his trouser pocket more
often than Bresson or Capa carried their Leicas, art has forgotten its mandate, to create or
reflect beauty with which to move their audience. Art now wallows blind, deaf, and
purposeless, lost in installations, performance, and conceptualism. Art has become a mere
illustration for ideas.

Where Arthur Danto declares that conceptualism spells the end of art, Sir Roger Scruton says
Duchamp did not destroy art, but only eliminated its creativity.

Cameras are now attached to computing brains that can do much of what could only be
done by hand before. Art at its most popular is now the hyper-realism achieved with
mechanical means such as projectors and scanners that can be used to premix RGB
separated colours. This technology applied to art fulfils the painter's final indignity: he
works to imitate photographs.

Is it possible even with the naïve optimism that keeps today's few true artists true, to
imagine a new hominid, a new and improved hominid, who can still hold the art of man's
ten thousand years, sacred?

The species' end, by death or evolution, is foreshadowed by the death of its art.
Paul Herman May 2022 8

1. Etymology circa 2000: Greek: anthropo = human, Greek: cene = new, or, new human
2. Smithsonian article by Joseph Stromberg January 2013
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-the-anthropocene-and-
are-we-in- it-164801414/
3. http://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/ published by Elsevier
4. https://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/
5. Whitney Autin Stratigrapher at the SUNY at Brockport in a paper published in GSA
Today, July 2012 http://www.geosociety.org/gsatoday/archive/22/7/article/i1052-
5173-22-7-60.htm
6. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/29/declare-anthropocene-
epoch- experts-urge-geological-congress-human-impact-earth

7. For a brief review: http://compendium.kosawese.net/term/anthropocene-

capitalocene- chthulucene/

8. It is interesting to note, that the first successful experiments in photography were

as early as 1704, when it was discovered that silver could be oxidised by light in
the same way silver-gelatine prints did nearly two centuries later. In those times,
however, they couldn't figure out how to stop the oxidation after the photograph
was taken. And so, the photographs blackened as the viewers watched. Making a
magical but evanescent experience of photography.