“New awful changes – the human geological stratum rediscovered”: Allowing art to talk about the anthropocene

Alex Ubiratan Goossens Peloggia

doi:10.5935/0100-929x.20180009

Abstract

This paper proposes a confrontation between geology and art, based on the original artistic production made by the author that represents geological concepts related to the new human geological epoch, the Anthropocene, now under discussion. The proposal confrontation draws upon the classical piece of by Henry De La Beche, Awful Changes, from about 1830, which refers to the question of geological time, and also upon Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Cycle, Time’s Arrow (1991), which analyzes this picture, and to Jan Zalasiewicz’s The Earth After Us (2008), which deals with the urban geological stratum as it might be found in the future. The art work thus shows the rediscovery of the geological stratum correlative to the “human event” by intelligent “ichthyosauroid” beings who, in a distant geological future, through stratigraphic analysis, observe the particular characteristics of the episode and interpret the culture that produced it. This paper shows how geological concepts can be adequately represented through creative artistic expression, and how classical geological themes may be of interest for contemporary debate on human geological agency.

Highlights

In a short paper published a few years ago, AUTIN & HOLBROOK (2012) asked: “Is the Anthropocene an issue of stratigraphy or pop culture?”, that is, an issue of academic or scientific interest but concerning to common sense, which is able to inform the collective worldview
This happens because the agency of a completely new element in the history of the Earth, that is, humanity, is at stake, but precisely because the understanding of this agency, which is certainly a “human issue”, is rightly claimed by other fields of knowledge, such as archaeology, anthropology, history, geography, social sciences, environmental sciences, and even psychoanalysis and, art. This has not been the case for any other interval of geological time. These elements are used together by PELOGGIA et al (2017) in an example within research that works with the particularity of the Anthropocene, in an attempt to understand, in a long historical perspective, the processes of formation and expansion of the urban geological stratum in the east of the State of São Paulo (Brazil): there is a set of associated conditions, geological, geomorphological and hydrographic, that place alternatives and challenges to the human being, to which answers are given and from which choices are made about the location of the urban settlements that derived from social causes, the wellbeing and the mentality of the settlers
The idea will be treated in a different way and by different tools: instead of the literary path, painting will be used, and the image of intelligent beings “rediscovering” the vestiges of the human being will be taken as inspiration, precisely for this reason, in a classical pictorial work that, almost two hundred years ago, was used as a form of criticism of ideas within the field of geology

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In a short paper published a few years ago, AUTIN & HOLBROOK (2012) asked: “Is the Anthropocene an issue of stratigraphy or pop culture?”, that is, an issue of academic or scientific interest but concerning to common sense, which is able to inform the collective worldview. This unique characteristic in recognition of a geological epoch in full contemporary development, the only such one produced by the very agents who recognized it - and, bringing to life the famous phrase of Élisée RECLUS (1998): “L’homme est la nature prenant conscience d’elle-même” (Man is nature becoming aware of itself) – indicates to geologists that their work on the formal stratigraphic definition is much more complex and intricate This happens because the agency of a completely new element in the history of the Earth, that is, humanity, is at stake, but precisely because the understanding of this agency, which is certainly a “human issue”, is rightly claimed by other fields of knowledge, such as archaeology, anthropology, history, geography, social sciences, environmental sciences, and even psychoanalysis and, art. It is in this sense that, as a geologist and a plastic artist, I present the proposal of this work

FORMULATING THE PROPOSAL

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

FINAL REMARKS