By Clay Wainscott
Cave paintings are like science fiction only in reverse. Here are Paleoliths who don’t weave or cook in pots making art with sensitivity, humor, and uncanny technical facility. It’s hard to fathom. My neighbor informs me their brains were actually larger than modern man’s, and they were hunters and so had the leisure time to tell stories, play flutes, and draw.
I once had a job servicing mechanical voting machines and a lot of them were kept in county jails. Incised on jail cell walls through fifty layers of gooey yellowing enamel were the pictorial musings of our current crop of humans, a sample admittedly bored and down on their luck. Well these guys in caves were different. They weren’t fascinated with body parts—they wanted to paint the animals who shared their forests, some now extinct tens of thousands of years.
Why were they painting deep in the cave? Archeologists speculate. Maybe it was sympathetic magic, somehow imagining these images would give them power in the hunt, or some other religious or ceremonial purpose. In any case it was so long ago all anyone can do is guess.
My guess is that artists, our oldest documented profession, haven’t changed that much in all this time. I imagine their conversation being about a place somebody had found where the rain wouldn’t wash their paintings away. A place out of the wind, out of the cold, and deep in a cave. It’s possible to imagine modern artists thinking that way. The paintings are in the caves because they were a quiet calm place to work and the surfaces were almost fresco-like already—worth the muddy crawl.
It’s more difficult to explain how the artwork could be so good. Art doesn’t pretend to be the thing itself but something more mysterious. Marks of charcoal and ochre applied to a cave wall enter the complex labyrinth of our modern perceptual field and we think that’s an ox, that’s a lion, that’s a bear. The European cave bears, extinct twenty thousand years, who occupied the cave after its walls had been decorated didn’t see antelope, didn’t see the rhinoceros, didn’t see themselves. Only humans translate marks on a flat surface into living reality.
These images in caves aren’t realism, not even close. In one, four horse’s heads appear in succession, like four jacks fanned. Their necks are too thick and their muscles too small. They all have different coats, and the one in front seems to neigh. There’s something about it that goes way beyond just pictures of horses. The artist applied a visual poetry because he knew I’d see it better that way, and I have to nod back. It works. I see horses moving, hear them snort and stamp, and smell them too. I see lions nerving up to attack an unaware beast grazing on the next cave wall prominence twenty feet away. I hear the artists laughing and admiring each other’s work.
‘All in this together’ means something else when you realize it includes those artists. They bought a ticket when they left evidence of who they were and what they’d seen in a visual form all humans coming after would understand. Animals don’t comprehend art and neither will the most complicated machines, ever. Art is totally human, and through art we know each other and ourselves—that’s its job.
Clay Wainscott also blogs at www.owningart.blogspot.com
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