Human Earthlings In The Anthropocene Artistic Terrain

Aesthetic perception and conception of the Earth’s landscape in the pictorial arts

Sverre Raffnsøe

Professor of Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School

If one wants to get a more nuanced impression of the implications of the Anthropocene, it can be opportune to turn to an investigation of art and the history of art. In the development of the pictorial arts, one finds an ongoing re-presentation and re-articulation of how human beings have continually been re-situated and re-defined in relation to the larger terrain or landscape that they find themselves inhabiting.

*A closer Grand Canyon: An extensive, non-contemporary topography*

A particularly distinguished tradition for depicting human earthlings in their changing historical and geohistorical relation within their natural location can be found in the well-established genre of European landscape painting. In an exemplary and emblematic manner, the genre of landscape painting and aesthetic reflections on landscape painting, as they come to express themselves in the related ideas about natural beauty and the sublime, can be said to articulate the changing role of the landscape as an object and frame of human life, and to render human understanding of the earthly landscape at different times.

To permit a more nuanced articulation of the transition that the collision and coincidence of the history of the Earth and human history occasions, this presentation will thus start from an examination of the development of landscape painting since it originated at the beginning of Early European Modernity and broke with earlier European conceptions of the landscape.

Following this, the presentation will switch to articulating the major conversion of the relationship between human beings and the land they inhabit that arrives with the advent of the Anthropocene. Also here, the emphasis will be on how the conversion is reflected in recent aesthetic pictorial representations.

The talk will draw upon and present art work by Francisco Goya/Asensio, Julia, Jörg Brey the Younger, Lars von Trier, Michael Kvium, Joachim Patinir, Thomas Gainsborough, John Martin, Joseph Turner, NASA, David Hockney, Nicolas Poussin, Ian Hamilton & Julie Mehretu.