Yesim Akdeniz by Kellie Buckley
Anthropocene? What is it?
The Anthropocene is a new epoch largely driven by our relationships and interactions between one another. It must be looked at through a social perspective in which we acknowledge the consumerist community that is shaped from these actions among each other. The actions spark a revolution between nature and our global community where we, as humans, inherently induce damaging, irreversible changes onto our environment through our personal selfish lenses.This selfish perspective is what defines our daily motivations and actions upon and within our individual communities. Every person’s actions are inclined toward a self-served end outcome. In other words, we, as humans living amongst each other, make choices that ultimately benefit our own selves in this consumerist world. We guide our actions based on what can “boost” our own personal identity. These actions allow us to secure ourselves as independent among our peers, because our consumerist outlook is constructed with an outline where we determine our identities by the material things that are tied to our own personal names.
However, this outlook it is not personal in any sense. Instead, it disregards any genuine interactions between our peers as it emphasizes the progression of accumulation of things. There is a socially acceptable platform for this lifestyle and it can be noted with these two main focuses:
- Throughout our lives, we are judged on how we have gradually increased in our abilities to participate in this consumerist society.
- We are able to participate this society by accepting that we are individually defined by what we own and not by how we genuinely care for the people and environment around us.
So How is Art Incorporated into the Anthropocene?
Fortunately, art provides a marvelous platform where we can recognize the underlying damages that are being continually molded into this current epoch. It allows us to quickly grasp the progression of harm our actions every day repeatedly leave on our individual relationships, social community, and consumerist-destroyed environment. Each medium art has this opportunity to display an international problem to the world.Anthropocene art, then, should holistically speak to a very broad audience including all groups of people that help make up humanity. There must be a unifying message behind the pieces of art since every individual included in this global community is responsible – to varying degrees – for the damaging effects outlining the Anthropocene epoch. A universal calming familiarity to a work of art would allow artists to speak directly to a more general audience; ultimately this would allow artists to create easily interpreted pieces that moreover strike fear and stimulate social change in us.
And These Pieces of Art Look Like What?
You and Me
Using subjects as symbols of a contemporary consumerism culture, Akdeniz is able to indicate familiar feelings to a broad audience.
This page has paths:
- international perspectives on the Anthropocene students at Xavier University
