Jul

14

Book ‘Em: Being There.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

July 14, 2008 |

At least part of the fascination of cave paintings is the fact that, even though they may be anywhere from 30,000 to 40,000 years old, they were painted by people who were just like us. They were the same species, homo sapiens, so it’s entirely possible that, if we could travel back in time, or bring the artists forward to our time, we could understand each other; we might even finally be able to understand the purpose of those ancient cave paintings. That may be naïve. After all, look at the cultural diversity we have in the present. It may be that the reason there is no rock-solid theory to explain why our not-so-distant ancestors painted extraordinary works deep in caves is because they’re so far removed from us we can’t comprehend the reason. In The Cave Painters: Probing The Mysteries of the World’s First Artists Gregory Curtis doesn’t even try to provide any answers; he just lays out, in a clear, unbiased way, the theories that have been proposed since the modern discovery of cave paintings in 1879. Each one–from the idea that they were intended to promote good hunting to the idea that they may have been painted by shamans in a trance–has its strengths and weaknesses. Curtis also relates his own experiences of visiting some of the caves, and tries to describe them as best he can.

It’s in reading the descriptions of Paleolithic art that I get most frustrated. Judith Thurman in The New Yorker has written her own description of visiting the caves, as well as writing about Curtis’s book and Jean Clottes’ book The Cave Painters. In fact most of her article is taken up with the books, meeting Jean Clottes, with the question of who the painters were, and just getting to the caves. She makes a good effort to describe a section of the Chauvet cave:

From here, one emerges into the deepest recess of Chauvet, the End Chamber, a spectacular vaulted space that contains more than a third of the cave’s etchings and paintings—a few in ochre, most in charcoal, and all meticulously composed. A great frieze covers the back left wall: a pride of lions with Pointillist whiskers seems to be hunting a herd of bison, which appear to have stampeded a troop of rhinos, one of which looks as if it had fallen into, or is climbing out of, a cavity in the rock.

She can’t resist speculating, though, going on to add, ” one has to wonder if cave art didn’t begin with a recognition that bear claws were an expressive tool for engraving a record—poignant and indelible—of a stressed creature’s passage through the dark.” And it must be impossible to stand in front of (or lie underneath) these magnificent works and not to speculate about why they were made. It’s a question that’s at the back of my mind any time I look at any work of art. What drives us to make these things?

What’s even more frustrating than the lack of clear answers about Paleolithic art is an attempt to convey the experience of actually being there in front of it. Access to many caves is severely restricted. Let’s face it: even the breath of a lot of tourists could cause irreparable damage to works that have survived tens of thousands of years in dry, cool caves. Feet and camera flashes could destroy them. And yet I want to visit them. I want to be there in the presence of these works, and I want others to be able to do the same. I don’t know how to balance the need for preservation with a need to connect with the art directly. In an interview for Salon the art critic Robert Hughes responded to the question of why even the most high quality reproduction on a screen of an art work isn’t the same:

And the answer is because paintings are things in the physical world, made out of colored mud smeared on a piece of cloth or a piece of board, with a stick with hairs on the end. They have a particular address to your body, and none of this comes across in the computer image.

He was responding, in his own words, to “some Gatesian nerd” who assumes that computers will make museums obsolete, or already have made them that way, but he could just as easily be speaking about why words and even photographs fail to capture the magnificence of being in the presence of great works of art. Words fail us because images speak so much more eloquently, but even the images fail when they can’t capture the full experience.


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