Currently I am reading
The
Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by
David Lewis-Williams.
What a fascinating book!!
As much as it is about the origins of art, it is also about the origins
of human consciousness. Some of the
themes of the book I find most interesting are his connecting normal, universal
neurological activity to our conceptions of reality. For example, many, many
cultures conceive of a three-tiered cosmos; a “normal” level at which “normal”
life and perception take place, a lower level and an upper level (in our
culture that might be hell and heaven).
The author believes this conception arises from neurological activity
that affects our awareness in altered states, like dreaming and
hallucinating. They tend to take on
either the qualities of pressure and sinking feelings or soaring and flying
sensations. Hence, they are later explained
as an underworld and an overworld.
Another theory he develops is that mark making also follows
universal tendencies, those being grids, stars, zigzags etc.
These “images” are what we see when we close
our eyes and are called “phosphenes.”
(More on phosphenes
here).
As
he states on P. 127, “People in this condition are seeing the structure of
their own brains”. So, then when we make these marks, when we idly scratch away
at notepads, we are drawing our own brain.
Whoa! Pretty amazing.
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| “Phosphenes”
28” x 24”, 2008 (yes, this is exactly what the inside of my brain looks like. That's the whole point, is it not?) |
But I am most interested in his theories on the origins of
image making (and, by extension, art).
What’s interesting? Well, one
thing he says is that it could not have arisen from body art. Wow, jewelers,
fashion designers, tattooists, scarification aficionados et al: you have just been demoted! Could this be the origin of Craft vs Art? There's a thought.
Lewis-Williams believes that 2-D representations, which he
calls “parietal” (stuff on walls) art
are a wholly different paradigm. He says that order to “invent pictures” (my quotes, not his) one needs a socially
agreed upon context, something that relies on language. He also notes that it’s a real chicken and
egg dilemma: what arose first? Our
ability to perceive images as meaningful or our ability to make them? He dispatches with some popular theories too:
that drawing arose from cavemen with charcoal embers scratching in the ground
out of boredom and happening to notice they look like something. Or that the shapes of rocks looked like
animals so they just kind of helped them along with pigment. No, these images rely on there being an
existing “database” for 2-D images having meaning.
OK, I am no anthropologist and I may wish I was a
neurologist, but, sadly, I am not one! How
frustrating as I wish I had enough knowledge to really discuss this. I still
find value in the theories he is disparaging.
What about all those facial recognition modules in the brain? What about how we see shapes in clouds? That is surely nature and not nurture (although I gather his point is that without
the social context of language, those images we see would remain “autistic” and
locked away in our individual experience and even un-remembered as we would not
have the language to codify them and to a great extent would be just more
useless detritus of being alive.)
He points out that there is no evidence of stages of
inventing drawing/image making. No evidence of
an “artist” trying out different subjects or styles.
And this really gets me! Why, oh
why, is there so very little images of humans and of human faces? What is with all the bison and aurochs?? I get
it, bison and aurochs were very important to them, but surely so were their own
faces and bodies. I am really astounded by the fact that we did not choose to
draw ourselves!!!
One thing the author doesn’t discuss (but I am not finished
yet, actually, so maybe he does in the last 80 pages) is how images making/drawing
develops in children. Children make
scribbles for a while, which seem to gradually coalesce into something more
meaningful. Then they go on a trajectory
of attempting “realism” and I think (but can’t say for sure since I am also not
a child development expert) that they compulsively draw human forms. Is that nurture? Could be.
But I think the draw (pun intended) towards figuration is very deeply
encoded into us…so why didn’t the cavemen do it??
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| Representation of a human puking by me at age 3 or 4. |
Someone go do a Ph.D. thesis on this, please!
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