Skip to main content
punctum books

From Rock Art To Land Art/From Pleistocene To Anthropocene

  • William L. Fox (author)
Chapter of: Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life(pp. 42–45)

Export Metadata

  • ONIX 3.0
    • Thoth
      Cannot generate record: No publications supplied
    • Project MUSE
      Cannot generate record: No BIC or BISAC subject code
    • OAPEN
      Cannot generate record: Missing PDF URL
    • JSTOR
      Cannot generate record: No BISAC subject code
    • Google Books
      Cannot generate record: No BIC, BISAC or LCC subject code
    • OverDrive
      Cannot generate record: Missing Long Abstract
  • ONIX 2.1
    • EBSCO Host
      Cannot generate record: No PDF or EPUB URL
    • ProQuest Ebrary
      Cannot generate record: No PDF or EPUB URL
  • CSV
  • JSON
  • OCLC KBART
  • BibTeX
  • CrossRef DOI deposit
    Cannot generate record: This work does not have any ISBNs
  • MARC 21 Record
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 Markup
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
  • MARC 21 XML
    Cannot generate record: MARC records are not available for chapters
Metadata
TitleFrom Rock Art To Land Art/From Pleistocene To Anthropocene
ContributorWilliam L. Fox (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0014.1.05
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/making-the-geologic-now/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
CopyrightFox, William L.
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2012-12-04
Long abstractOur species of primate, Homo Sapiens, has been around for perhaps 200,000 years, and since then humans have witnessed two geologic turns. The Pleistocene Epoch lasted from approximately 2,588,000 years to 12,000 years before the present (BP), a period of repeated glaciation during which ice at maximal times covered as much as 30% of the Earth’s landmasses. The Pleistocene turned into the Holocene as the seemingly perpetual El Niño conditions switched off and the ice retreated. The “Recent Time” of this next epoch saw the spread of humanity into virtually every corner of every continent, save the Antarctic. The second turn we’ve seen is from the Holocene into the Anthropocene, which Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen proposes began with the late 18th-century rise of industrialism. This “Human Time” is marked by a global layer of carbon laid down by the burning of fossil fuels, the emergence of a global stratigraphic event being a commonly accepted marker of a change in epochs.When Paul Crutzen announced in 2000 that we were no longer living in the Holocene, but in a new geologic epoch, he reformulated not only the equation of anthropic effect on landscape, but the timeline of art as we understand it. Now the Holocene was not simply the epoch of human endeavor and image making, but a bridge from the hominids who scratched marks on rock surfaces to those who now leave larger marks inscribed on the land. Both can be construed as attempts to map environments, be they at the small scale of a valley or the large scale of a cosmos, committed with intent to last for millennia or to wash away in the first rain.
Page rangepp. 42–45
Print length4 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)