where does art come from?
October 16, 2010 11:15 AM Subscribe
Where does art come from?
How did early humans first learn to make visual symbols?
Any and all perspectives welcome!
I'm looking for great books on prehistoric art with large pictures, and (separately) ideas on how and why people first started using symbols to represent things they saw in the real world.
cognitive, evolutionary, philosophical, or any other perspectives.
Thanks mefites
I'm looking for great books on prehistoric art with large pictures, and (separately) ideas on how and why people first started using symbols to represent things they saw in the real world.
cognitive, evolutionary, philosophical, or any other perspectives.
Thanks mefites
Check out The Story of Art by E.H. Gombrich. I believe he posits that (and this is in a very, very small nutshell) prehistoric artists may have used depictions like the drawings on cave walls as a sort of magic to try and summon those animals closer, so that they could be hunted. Even if I'm not getting that quite right, this is an overall awesome book that you will not regret looking at.
posted by CheeseLouise at 12:32 PM on October 16, 2010
posted by CheeseLouise at 12:32 PM on October 16, 2010
Art is what happened in the moments after the first humans secured adequate food, water, and shelter. IMO.
posted by BitterOldPunk at 12:35 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]
posted by BitterOldPunk at 12:35 PM on October 16, 2010 [1 favorite]
Chauvet Cave: The Art of Earliest Times is a good book.
posted by box at 12:58 PM on October 16, 2010
posted by box at 12:58 PM on October 16, 2010
Alternate perspective ideas: give some crayons and paper to a very young child and ask them to draw a dream they had. It's not prehistoric, but it might be the closest you get to seeing someone attempt to invent their own visual symbols without much experience to back up their interpretation.
posted by vienaragis at 5:51 PM on October 16, 2010
posted by vienaragis at 5:51 PM on October 16, 2010
National Geographic has done a series on prehistoric caves and anthropology over the years. Some of the earliest colonized caves are thought to be submerged in water in our contemporary era. You can look back through their archives for some great, short articles with photographs, drawings and context. The series on the submerged caves is great.
posted by effluvia at 7:29 PM on October 16, 2010
posted by effluvia at 7:29 PM on October 16, 2010
According to The Man From Earth cave drawings came from cave men drawing animals they've hunted and want to hunt (a method of praying for good fortune). :P
posted by iamgoat at 8:07 PM on October 16, 2010
posted by iamgoat at 8:07 PM on October 16, 2010
Having wonderful ideas ...they're their own reward.
What if you discovered a simple way to record thoughts and play them back to other people? What if you discovered a way to preserve food for weeks instead of hours? What if you discovered a way to turn wood into fire?
Someone discovered a way to make people see outdoor scenery and running animals, even while deep inside a mountain. How weird is that?
posted by billb at 8:10 PM on October 16, 2010
What if you discovered a simple way to record thoughts and play them back to other people? What if you discovered a way to preserve food for weeks instead of hours? What if you discovered a way to turn wood into fire?
Someone discovered a way to make people see outdoor scenery and running animals, even while deep inside a mountain. How weird is that?
posted by billb at 8:10 PM on October 16, 2010
You might enjoy this wonderful story from the New Yorker:
After a visit to Lascaux, in the Dordogne, which was discovered in 1940, Picasso reportedly said to his guide, “They’ve invented everything.” What those first artists invented was a language of signs for which there will never be a Rosetta stone; perspective, a technique that was not rediscovered until the Athenian Golden Age; and a bestiary of such vitality and finesse that, by the flicker of torchlight, the animals seem to surge from the walls, and move across them like figures in a magiclantern show (in that sense, the artists invented animation).This is the part that's dizzying:
A new age in the science of prehistory had begun in 1949, when radiocarbon dating was invented by Willard Libby, a chemist from Chicago. One of Libby’s first experiments was on a piece of charcoal from Lascaux. Breuil had, incorrectly, it turns out, classified the cave as Perigordian. (It is Magdalenian.) He had also made the Darwinian assumption that the most ancient art was the most primitive, and Leroi-Gourhan worked on the same premise. In that respect, Chauvet was a bombshell. It is Aurignacian, and its earliest paintings are at least thirty-two thousand years old, yet they are just as sophisticated as much later compositions. What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a “classical civilization.” For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been “deeply satisfying”—and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.posted by jeb at 11:49 PM on October 16, 2010 [3 favorites]
You might be interested in this from earlier this year: A system of symbols in the early cave art of Europe? Some of the links there should give you jumping-off points to read about what we know about early art, and what are some of the main theories that try to fill in what we don't know.
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:00 AM on October 17, 2010
posted by LobsterMitten at 12:00 AM on October 17, 2010
From a paleoanthropological perspective, the short answer is that we don't know, and probably never will. The long answer is, well, long.
First, all of the evidence for symbolic behavior (including art) seems to be associated with, solely, anatomically modern humans. Older hominins (e.g. Neandertals, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo erectus, etc.) just don't have any associated evidence for it. So, with the evidence we have today, it looks like humans are unique in their symbolic abilities. More broadly, this ties into questions of language and culture: did pre-sapiens hominins have language or culture? The evidence for/against language is biologically-based (genes, specifically FOXP2; hyoid bone shape; language areas of the brain in endocasts) but the evidence is so ambiguous that the pro- and con- sides of the argument use these same bits of evidence for opposite conclusions. The evidence for culture is even more ambiguous, and is generally based on the evidence for symbolism. I was a huge fan of a theory proposed by Phil Chase that was essentially an ontological argument for culture as an emergent phenomenon, but I don't know how accepted that is—I left the field shortly after his book was published.
So, art. In Europe, the first art we know comes in the form of cave paintings and show up about 30,000 years ago, concurrent with evidence of modern human arrival in Europe. Most of the depictions, as mentioned above, are of large mammals, with some symbols thrown in—negative hands, dots, and grids—and some other rare things like anthropomorphic figures, the occasional fish, and some other non-figurative work. Why? Well, we don't know, and if anyone tells you they do know, they're wrong. Sympathetic magic is one of the oldest theories, put out there in the '30s by the Abbé Breuil, a French priest and early researcher of cave art. Jean Clottes and David Lewis Williams proposed the shaman theory, that shamans went into the caves, entered trance states, and then painted. Others have pointed to boasting about hunting skills. None of these really seem to hit the mark, but who knows: there's no evidence, aside from parallel behaviors in other extant groups, now 30,000 years in the future.
The one thing that I can say for certain is that this art had importance to the people creating it. I've visited several of the painted caves myself, both as a tourist and in doing archaeological work. What's striking is that they didn't just walk in the cave mouth and throw up some tags on the wall. No, the paintings are deep, deep in the caves, often hundreds of meters through twisting passages, up and down slopes and climbs, through chambers, spread throughout the caves, often high up on walls that would require scaffolding to be reached. And they didn't have flashlights, either. Or lighters. What happens when your oil lamp goes out and you're a kilometer underground through twisting passages and all you have to light it is your flint and a fire drill? One of the most memorable experiences of my life was inching along on my stomach through a passage so low that I couldn't lift my head. At the end of the passage, there was just enough room to turn over, and there I was looking, illuminated by headlamp, into a small chamber full of crystals that had been sprayed completely with red ochre. It was absolutely amazing, and there the import of how much effort went into these paintings really hit me. It's not like drawing in a sketchbook. It's much more like constructing the Sagrada Familia.
Now, of course, the cave art is just the evidence we have. In all likelihood, there were massive amounts of painted surfaces outside the caves, but the caves are the only place where the paintings were preserved. It's like Greek statues which are only 2000-ish years old: all clean marble now, but were originally bright, garish colors. So, we can see only a likely fraction of the wealth of all art created in paleolithic times. And it's a damned shame because we'll never get that back.
What we do have outside the caves are pieces of mobiliary art, particularly "venus" figurines, animal sculptures, and things like that. These are by and large a bit newer than the oldest cave art but contemporaneous with the later caves. A lot of it has been found in eastern Europe and beyond, in places without the limestone caves that are endemic to southwest France and northern Spain. The same caveats apply: we don't know what these things were for, and we only have the slightest idea about their figurative resemblances.
Evidence for adornment shows up around the same time as cave paintings in the form of beads, thousands of which have been found at some sites. The burial site of Dolni Vestonice is probably the number one example, with about 10,000 beads on the corpses. Each bead likely took about an hour to make, so we're talking 10,000 hours of work to adorn the corpses. Even if the beads weren't made for the burial specifically, that's still well over a year of man hours that went into the ground with the bodies. So, again, pretty clearly symbolism, but we have no idea of the "why" and of everything that went into that apparently well-formed cultural act.
I don't want to be Eurocentric and give short shrift to the historically under-studied continent of Africa, but it was never my area of expertise and I'm being long-winded enough as it is. So, if you're interested, look up McBrearty & Brooks' 2000 article The revolution that wasn’t: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior from the Journal of Human Evolution; just know that a lot of people dispute a lot of their evidence, privately if not publicly.
The problem with knowing "where art comes from" is that, as I hinted above, our record is incredibly fragmentary. We have a few examples of early art from a period of thousands and thousands of years with no visible, and those few examples are probably an infinitesimal fraction of all of the art that existed. We don't know what percentage it represents and we don't know what specific niche it represents. This is why its hard to take Gombrich, von Petzinger, Breuil, Clottes, et al seriously: the spread in time and location is just so large that assuming one symbolic system is ridiculous. We can barely read things in English from several hundred years ago, and that's with the aid of codified writing systems. How can a likely oral tradition, or even a written tradition, survive in the way they imagine for several thousand?
But, in lieu of any sort of explanation (beware of charlatans, etc), the best thing to do is just to look. There are lots of monographs about the caves: Lascaux, Niaux, Chauvet, Altamira, Pech Merle, Font de Gaume. Go nuts and see these things. Absorb the images. Heck, if possible, go and see them in person; many or most are open to the public excepting Lascaux, and it will really change your life.
posted by The Michael The at 6:31 AM on October 17, 2010 [3 favorites]
First, all of the evidence for symbolic behavior (including art) seems to be associated with, solely, anatomically modern humans. Older hominins (e.g. Neandertals, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo erectus, etc.) just don't have any associated evidence for it. So, with the evidence we have today, it looks like humans are unique in their symbolic abilities. More broadly, this ties into questions of language and culture: did pre-sapiens hominins have language or culture? The evidence for/against language is biologically-based (genes, specifically FOXP2; hyoid bone shape; language areas of the brain in endocasts) but the evidence is so ambiguous that the pro- and con- sides of the argument use these same bits of evidence for opposite conclusions. The evidence for culture is even more ambiguous, and is generally based on the evidence for symbolism. I was a huge fan of a theory proposed by Phil Chase that was essentially an ontological argument for culture as an emergent phenomenon, but I don't know how accepted that is—I left the field shortly after his book was published.
So, art. In Europe, the first art we know comes in the form of cave paintings and show up about 30,000 years ago, concurrent with evidence of modern human arrival in Europe. Most of the depictions, as mentioned above, are of large mammals, with some symbols thrown in—negative hands, dots, and grids—and some other rare things like anthropomorphic figures, the occasional fish, and some other non-figurative work. Why? Well, we don't know, and if anyone tells you they do know, they're wrong. Sympathetic magic is one of the oldest theories, put out there in the '30s by the Abbé Breuil, a French priest and early researcher of cave art. Jean Clottes and David Lewis Williams proposed the shaman theory, that shamans went into the caves, entered trance states, and then painted. Others have pointed to boasting about hunting skills. None of these really seem to hit the mark, but who knows: there's no evidence, aside from parallel behaviors in other extant groups, now 30,000 years in the future.
The one thing that I can say for certain is that this art had importance to the people creating it. I've visited several of the painted caves myself, both as a tourist and in doing archaeological work. What's striking is that they didn't just walk in the cave mouth and throw up some tags on the wall. No, the paintings are deep, deep in the caves, often hundreds of meters through twisting passages, up and down slopes and climbs, through chambers, spread throughout the caves, often high up on walls that would require scaffolding to be reached. And they didn't have flashlights, either. Or lighters. What happens when your oil lamp goes out and you're a kilometer underground through twisting passages and all you have to light it is your flint and a fire drill? One of the most memorable experiences of my life was inching along on my stomach through a passage so low that I couldn't lift my head. At the end of the passage, there was just enough room to turn over, and there I was looking, illuminated by headlamp, into a small chamber full of crystals that had been sprayed completely with red ochre. It was absolutely amazing, and there the import of how much effort went into these paintings really hit me. It's not like drawing in a sketchbook. It's much more like constructing the Sagrada Familia.
Now, of course, the cave art is just the evidence we have. In all likelihood, there were massive amounts of painted surfaces outside the caves, but the caves are the only place where the paintings were preserved. It's like Greek statues which are only 2000-ish years old: all clean marble now, but were originally bright, garish colors. So, we can see only a likely fraction of the wealth of all art created in paleolithic times. And it's a damned shame because we'll never get that back.
What we do have outside the caves are pieces of mobiliary art, particularly "venus" figurines, animal sculptures, and things like that. These are by and large a bit newer than the oldest cave art but contemporaneous with the later caves. A lot of it has been found in eastern Europe and beyond, in places without the limestone caves that are endemic to southwest France and northern Spain. The same caveats apply: we don't know what these things were for, and we only have the slightest idea about their figurative resemblances.
Evidence for adornment shows up around the same time as cave paintings in the form of beads, thousands of which have been found at some sites. The burial site of Dolni Vestonice is probably the number one example, with about 10,000 beads on the corpses. Each bead likely took about an hour to make, so we're talking 10,000 hours of work to adorn the corpses. Even if the beads weren't made for the burial specifically, that's still well over a year of man hours that went into the ground with the bodies. So, again, pretty clearly symbolism, but we have no idea of the "why" and of everything that went into that apparently well-formed cultural act.
I don't want to be Eurocentric and give short shrift to the historically under-studied continent of Africa, but it was never my area of expertise and I'm being long-winded enough as it is. So, if you're interested, look up McBrearty & Brooks' 2000 article The revolution that wasn’t: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior from the Journal of Human Evolution; just know that a lot of people dispute a lot of their evidence, privately if not publicly.
The problem with knowing "where art comes from" is that, as I hinted above, our record is incredibly fragmentary. We have a few examples of early art from a period of thousands and thousands of years with no visible, and those few examples are probably an infinitesimal fraction of all of the art that existed. We don't know what percentage it represents and we don't know what specific niche it represents. This is why its hard to take Gombrich, von Petzinger, Breuil, Clottes, et al seriously: the spread in time and location is just so large that assuming one symbolic system is ridiculous. We can barely read things in English from several hundred years ago, and that's with the aid of codified writing systems. How can a likely oral tradition, or even a written tradition, survive in the way they imagine for several thousand?
But, in lieu of any sort of explanation (beware of charlatans, etc), the best thing to do is just to look. There are lots of monographs about the caves: Lascaux, Niaux, Chauvet, Altamira, Pech Merle, Font de Gaume. Go nuts and see these things. Absorb the images. Heck, if possible, go and see them in person; many or most are open to the public excepting Lascaux, and it will really change your life.
posted by The Michael The at 6:31 AM on October 17, 2010 [3 favorites]
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by Sys Rq at 12:13 PM on October 16, 2010