To look at every work of art ever
created, particularly with the time
restriction of six hours, is impossible.
All study of historical material involves
selection; with prehistorical material
that's less of an issue as you just
select everything you're lucky enough to
find, but otherwise art historians have
to decide what to study. However and this
is what I call Gombrich's paradox, as
it's a paraphrasing of ajn issue raised by
Ernst Gombrich, to select the material
for study you have to have a criterion
for selection, you have to have a theory of
what the history of art is, but that
theory has to be based on something, and
it has to be based on the study of art
historical objects, but which ones? So
there's the paradox. It's a little bit
like a chicken and egg. So I need to
decide what I'm going to study but in order
to decide what to study I need some kind
of idea of the idea of the thing that
I'm studying, but in order to do that I
need to study. So which ones? My aim is
to use a variety frames; aesthetic,
economic, philosophical, physical,
political, psychological, religious, and
social, to approach the works of art. I've
selected items which although they can
be argued to be a representative of
their era, more importantly, we can use
them to gain special insights into the
thinking and organization of the people
and societies concerned. But there's a
problem. The selection incorporates
issues of mental well-being, expanded
notions of sexuality, we'll encounter
political radicalism, but firstly it's a
list of artists and they're almost all
European,
which for large parts of history is
synonymous with being white and turning
up in big boats with guns in countries
where people aren't white. And secondly,
this list of artists, they're almost all
men, in large parts of history in which
men have orchestrated societies
patriarchally to ensure their positions of
power. It's still a relevant topic today.
To a certain extent you can argue that
this canon of traditional selection is
a reflection of the society that's producing
the art, but we don't have to like it. So
wherever I can I'll be trying to
overturn this traditional selection and
look at artists who are overlooked,
underprivileged, and the fact you don't
have to look too far tells you that the
traditional selection is a selection
based on traditions of thinking. But we're
here to think again. One of the things
that art can do is to defamiliarise, to
allow us to see an object devoid of
accumulated preconceptions afresh and
anew. This is just a bit of fun, I'm not
expecting you to know the answers to
these questions on the board, nor am I
expecting you not to necessarily. So
could I put you in pairs group of three
for two minutes only to discuss possible
answers to these questions. Okay, thank
you. So what ideas did that produce?
So first question what is it? Well it's
known as the Makapansgat pebble. That's
the Makpansgat pebble. It's made of
Jasperite, which was made by
geological processes between
four billion and half a billion years
ago, and by water erosion thereafter
which gave the stone its appearance, and
owing to a psychological process known
as pareidolia, it looks like a human face
Pareidolia is what enables humans to
recognize and extract features of the
human face. But what does all this mean?
Well, the fact that the pebble was found
in a cave high up in the Makapansgat
valley surrounded by the remains of
Australopithecine hominids from around
two million years ago probably meant two
things. It means that the SRGAP2 gene
which was present in Australopithecines,
and which increases cerebral mass and
synaptic efficiency, enabled the
hominid to recognize the pebble as
looking like a face, and if we expand the
definition of art to include 'objets trouves' or objects which are found but not
made, this represents the first
recorded work of art in human history,
and it's a good place to make a
beginning in terms of human history and
the period of the rest of this session.
There's also some terminology here on
this table for a chronology that will be
useful for the rest of this session.
The three Stone Age eras; Paleolithic,
Mesolithic, and Neolithic. So 'paleo' just
means early - we'll see that when we look
at early Christian art made in Rome
it's called paleo Christian art. Mesolithic, middle. If we look at the art of
Central America, middle America: 'Mesoamerican' art. Neolithic, so the latest,
new Stone Age. We'll also look at the
ancient historical areas of Bronze Age
and Iron Age named for the
two metallurgical technologies that
defined and enabled the ages to define
themselves. Briefly a little bit of
technology- in order to understand what
we're looking at we need to know about
relative dates of the objects in order
to see a progression. How do we actually
know about the dates of objects?
Different techniques are to look at
calcite formations in caves. Calcite is
just calcium carbonate CaCo3 - it's what
makes water hard, it's scale in your
kettle, and it drips through caves and
then forms over surfaces including
painted surfaces. Another thing to look
at is relative depths of soil layers in
which you find objects. More reliably,
radiocarbon dating, and briefly, as I
can't claim this to be an area of my
specialism, essentially radiation, mostly from
the Sun, cosmic radiation, damages
nitrogen molecules, the main component of
our atmosphere. That creates unstable and
radioactive carbon molecules which are
absorbed into plants along with normal
carbon molecules as carbon dioxide, and
the plants then create sugars using
carbon (C6H12O6) and this then ends up in
animals, for example. Then, as soon as the
organism, plant, animal dies it starts to
decrease, it starts to decay
radioactively. So the percentage of
radioactive carbon decreases so steadily
over time that we can tell the age of
the object by the ratio of radioactive
carbon molecules that are left to the
normal ones which are permanent with
quite a small margin of error. So that's
how we know when organic compounds
fifty thousand years ago, for example,
were formed. As I said, in prehistory
the criterion for selection is just a
practical matter of what's been found.
Works it art from before the Holocene
are mostly confined to cave wall painting
and adaptive carving of stone, antler or
wood, but nevertheless to interpret the
art you need a theory, and it's
interesting to see how those theories
change over time, according to the ideas
of the societies that created them.
That's why we need to be aware and beware of the art that we're selecting
because it's dictated by a criterion that
comes from a theory that's very much of
its time. Here we have the 20th century
history of art historical theories about
Paleolithic. Mesolithic and Neolithic
cave art. So under Darwinian influence,
historians were looking to emphasize the
progress made by modern man, but with
the Freudian and Jungian revolutions the
primitive became a way of reflecting on
modern man. Then following Saussure,
structuralism meant an analysis of meaning
within an organised network of ideas.
This led to post-structuralism and more
complex ideas of the interconnectedness
of meaning as a kind of language. And in
the more post-colonial era, a recognition
of the social structures and belief
systems still present in some indigenous
non-European societies today. So looking
at this work, the Venus of Willendorf,
one of the oldest Paleolithic works we
have found, we can interpret the work in
different ways as an object of deep
contemplation and of religious worship
and as an expression of primeval needs
of the socio-economic need for fertility
of the tribe and of the land a
deliberate artistic style and an
intensely tactile object expressing
these ideas and simply as an expression
of female beauty. To us it can
represent evidence
of the kinship we have with people living
tens of thousands of years ago. Although
the title, the Venus of Willendorf,
given up the beginning of the 20th
century was intended to be ironic,
it can now actually be reclaimed - it is
the goddess of love - it's an adoration or
a need, something like love, someone lost
someone wanted, someone found and
remembered, something that can represent
all of these. We don't know. Rejecting the
assumption that the artists were men, it's
been speculated that they are self
portraits of women, but there's a debate
on the idea that hominids would have
been able to see themselves in puddles,
so there's no need to exclude the idea
of self-portraits painted from memory.
But in addition to all these theories
that have changed over the last hundred
years on how we should approach
Neolithic art, we've overlooked one by E. H. 
Gombrich, and it offers us a way in,
offers us a way of seeing the link
between the art and the context by asking
us to consider how the items were used.
Now in the case of this carved bone,
which records the phases of the moon
over the period of a month, it shows
an engagement with astronomical
phenomena, it shows an engagement with
recording time, and trying to understand
time, and this is going to be so crucial
later on in the agricultural revolution
that we'll come to later.
With these antler headdresses, the holes
are for straps for it to be worn on top of
the head. It's one of several of these
found in northern England. We can
speculate that it wasn't worn to keep the
wearer warm or dry. It probably had a
function of status or tribal belonging
or a ceremonial or a ritual function, or
perhaps it was recreational, a kind of
deer party hat. But how were cave
paintings used. Not knowing means we
really approach these objects as
functional images, as works of art and
that's really how the filmmaker Werner
Herzog has approached this in his film
'Cave of Forgotten Dreams', which is to be
recommended for its access that it gained
during the making of the film to the Chauvet
caves and the evocative commentary. It's
a full-length film and unfortunately we
don't have time for an excerpt, so that
could be something to watch at home. The
Chauvet Cave is a fairly recent
discovery in very good condition and the
works there are of incredible artistic
quality in terms of the close
observation and naturalistic
representation. Now naturalism is a key
artistic term meaning a representation done
with close observation of and copying of
the visual appearance of things, often of
nature. It's different from realism which
is a decision about what you choose to
represent, and that decision is often a
political one, for example the decision
to paint the hardship of agricultural
workers instead of an idealized world of
mythology or idealized political rulers.
These images were all presumably drawn
from memory and hence show a highly
developed level of artistic awareness
and skill. The period covered in the
caves and the time needed for the works
implies a continuity of artistic
tradition: you have many different hands,
different styles working on one image,
and therefore a high value placed by
this society on these images. In a sense
these practitioners were artists and art
historians all in one. Lascaux in
France is perhaps, along with Altamira in
Spain, the most famous cave containing
wall painting, and Lascaux has the
intriguing man and bird panel, which is
in a deep shaft below the part of the
cave known as the apse, apse being the
end of a church. The terminology is
interesting as it's a part of the cave which
would never have been touched by
daylight at all, in pitch blackness,
although this contrast is lost now as
the whole cave system is now light-
protected, there's a sealed door on the front. Some
theorists have speculated that this may
have been a place of meditation, and the
strange combination of bird man with
phallus and bird-like face with a bison
may have had resonant meaning being
placed as they were next to panel of the
wounded man perhaps meditation here was
on mortality, on the afterlife, on our
place in the natural world, on the link
between procreation and nature, on animism
and the spirits of animals. It's a good
place to pause here. I'll show you a
computer-generated tour of the caves and
I'd like to encourage you to talk in
pairs and just give your personal
responses to these images as you see
them created by people surviving in
hostile environments uncontrolled as our
modern world is, and yet here are the
beginnings of real works of art - this
desire for the ideas and feelings inside
to be projected outside and explored and
shared. This level of analysis, of
reflection of time dedicated to creation -
this is what will explode over the
following ten centuries into what we call
civilization. A quick word about music -
there's evidence of Paleolithic interest
in music. One good reason for
characterizing particular periods in
locations as 'Stone Age' is that much of
the perishable creations they must have
made with feather, wood, reed, leaf, skin,
didn't survive. Paleolithic bone flutes,
bear jaw flutes, vulture wing radii, have
been found which create the pentatonic
scale. However, and cave acoustics would
have provided for sustained notes and
harmonies, but we can only speculate as
to what other instruments existed. Skin
drums? And we can only speculate as to
what music was played, but over the
soundtrack of the Lascaux websites (they
have 21st century music) instead of that
I'll be playing a recording of a
paleolithic bear jawbone flute. Now
obviously it's played by a modern artist,
but the musician is actually finding the
notes which the the flute creates. The
cave, as I said, is now fully lit behind a
closed door with artificial lighting -
Paleolithic lamps using oil, for example,
would have been dimmer, but the eye would
have compensated for that, so you would
have been in an environment which was
seen. As Leonardo da Vinci experienced
going into an unknown cave can provoke
anxiety but for the Paleolithic cave
dweller it would have represented
shelter, security, society, it would have
been a place for, among other things, fire,
light, cooking, eating, physical closeness,
sleeping, dreaming, making music, and
making art.
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