Kunst im Anthropozän

From Beuys to landscape architecture, exploring a concept

The "Anthropocene" was first mentioned in a scientific context in 2000; since 2007, a geoscientific commission has been dedicated to the question of whether it should be considered a new geological era (following the Holocene). Since the 2010s, the question of a man-made geological age has been increasingly and extensively discussed in the humanities, media and cultural sciences. As a result, more and more considerations are coming to the fore that use the "Anthropocene" less as a historical and more as a systematic category and thus capture functional relationships within and outside the genre more precisely than is possible with the help of traditional dichotomies (such as nature-culture, subject-object). And does such a shift from dichotomies to relationalities not also harbour important political and ethical consequences? This volume approaches this topic from the perspective of art, which has been addressing the connections between human and non-human modes of existence as material, non-linear and dynamic relations for some time - at least since the middle of the 20th century. Phenomena such as environmental disasters and landscape decay, climate change, biotechnological interventions, natural and social metabolisms, urban planning concepts and technical infrastructures, the hubris of human possibilities and post-humanist perspectives, material processes and 'forces behind the forms' come into view. The contributions in this volume unfold a broad spectrum of topics ranging from individual artists (such as Joseph Beuys, Pierre Huyghe, Lara Almarcegui) to curatorial projects, BioArt and landscape architecture.