Art & Death:Lives Between the Fifth Assessment & the Sixth Extinction

pp.3-22:  

• Shouldn't art address human suffering and struggle?
• What does it mean  for art to enter the Anthropocene?
• Art is a vehicle of aesthesis .
• 1st: Sensorial phenomena:We live in an increasingly diminished and toxic world.
• 2nd:The visually oriented world in which we live contains many modes including data visualization,satellite imagery,climate models of a whole earth.
• 3rd: art provides a polyarchic site of experimentation for living in a damaged world
• 1789:James Watt invents the steam engine exceeding wind and water power
• The end of WW2 ,1945 with the irradiated soil of both Nagasaki and Hiroshima
• The great acceleration is the postwar growth in population,consumption and technological development
• The population of the world is 7 billion people
• Anthropocene invites we as human beings in the question of whether or not we are arriving or leaving
• Environmental justice begs the question what worlds are we creating while living in our diminished present
• The Capitalocene is the alternative to the Anthropocene in that it focuses solely on profit ;colonialism and slavery;industrialization of agriculture,resource extraction,energy production and petrochemicals
• A homolith is created via aesthetic,creative and imaginative acts in contemporary art practice
• Anthropocentric mountains are now so ordinary, we do not notice them.This used to be a sublime experience;The sky I had seen 10/1/16 at approximately 6: 30 pm in Austin,I describe as extraordinarily beautiful -sublime,on par with a Monet ,yet it was fleeting and quickly had become a skyfull of grey clouds, devoid of intense color;I later on made a connection with our earth in imbalance,becoming, albeit slowly, toxic 
• Shock can become familiar.Shock can wear off-Susan Sontag(it is easy to think hear of the Jewish Holocaust,and yet we are having an earth equivalent
• Art and poetry helps us to move beyond our temporal frameworks ,thinking beyond them
• Krzysztof Wodiczko's work with the homeless: urban space ,the product of conflict(today I saw a homeless person in Killeen;he may or not be a veteran although many are);the defying of the social order
•  Reevaluation of the traditional art museum:how can you fit earth art into this space/?you can't.I also think of the numerous instances of world rock art etched into the earth or into rock faces;Painter John Graham wrote in Systems and Dialectics of Art that art museums are the repositories of the past, a bit like mausoleums
• Numeracy becomes important : 400PPM of atmospheric CO2,-the future of earth systems,etc.
• Science: disassociated,abstract,ignorant of the experiential(human smell/taste);perhaps we seewhat we are paying close attention to ;intentional blindness?  
• the intensity of the Anthropocene:  the worlds we we make through our art practice,science and research are not made to measure
• The future takes us more and more away from the concept of home.We are not free but lost-jean Luc Goddrad and Anne-Marie Mieville;I thought of the Moody Blues song Lost in a Lost World: I woke today, I was crying
  Lost in a lost world
  So many people are dying
  Lost in a lost world
  Some of them are living an illusion
  Bounded by the darkness of their minds
  In their eyes, it's nation against nation against nation
  With racial pride
  Sounds...
  Thinking only of themselves
  They shun the light
  (Shun the light)
  They think they're right
  (Think they're right)
  Living in their empty shells
• The world is all.That is the case -Raqs Media Collective