If you walk into a cave, write something on walls in spray paint, the end of a charred stick or whatever, and leave, it’s considered vandalism.

If your mark is still visible 100 years later, it becomes history. If your mark sticks around for 1,000 years, it becomes art.

Over time, human perception of things can change, sometimes to the opposite of what was originally thought.

Thomas Hirschhorn’s installation “Cavemanman” — on display in Pittsburgh in Carnegie International, the Carnegie Museum of Art’s world survey of art — asks the viewer to ponder changes in human perception, general and personal.

Hirschhorn’s work is dazzlingly complex in construction, and bombards you with visual images and ideas.

The Swiss-born artist, who lives in Paris, built the thing to look like a real cave, complete with four rooms and “breakdown” — chunks of rock that have fallen off the ceiling — out of cardboard, wood and packing tape.

Videos of the famous Lascaux, France, cave paintings help the viewer to compare the work with what the viewer knows of human history.

Rooms are occupied by mannequins and cutouts of human form, all wrapped in aluminum foil and connected by foil wire to books on philosophy and ethics, and sticks of dynamite. Ideas are as explosive as gunpowder.

Two of the rooms feature waste baskets full of aluminum soft drink cans, which spill out onto the floor, bringing to mind the saying, “Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but pictures, kill nothing but time,” an adage that has been blindingly ignored over the years.

One room is adorned with posters of rock groups, movies and soft porn pinups. This room is mindful of the bedroom of your average teenager, comparing him or her to the early humans who lived in the Lascaux caves and drew pictures of the animals and activities of their days on the walls.

Hirschhorn’s rumination on vandalism vs. art is not foreign to San Francisco artist Barry McGee. He depicts five men stacked on each other’s shoulders so the one on top can spray paint on an unspecified structure, and compares that to ancient civilizations — represented by wooden idols, including that of an American Indian — committing the same sort of defacement.

Matthew Monahan’s sculptures follow this embracing of history and its relevance in the modern world. His mixed media sculptures show faces and body parts — reminiscent of Egyptian or Easter Island sculptures — but alters them in terms of placement and dimension, and makes them look as if they are unfinished or have been violently attacked.

“I travel through all these time zones in the history of art,” Monahan, of Los Angeles, once said.

An image by the late Paul Thek of New York of the earth as seen from space painted on newspaper seems to ask if the history of art — and the history of humanity — will one day no longer be relevant.

Thinking of things on terms of the news, it’s old the next day, forgotten a week later, the paper it is printed on worth no more than cow bedding.