{"id":1273,"date":"2013-05-04T02:21:26","date_gmt":"2013-05-04T06:21:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/?p=1273"},"modified":"2025-03-26T12:44:24","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T16:44:24","slug":"caves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/?p=1273","title":{"rendered":"Why We Draw: III Caves"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n
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It is fitting that the oldest known drawings lie in caves. Those, dark protected dream-land places feel right for the oldest drawings. All caves are to some degree dangerous. In caves people have to supply the light. They have to explored and whatever light you bring in is not guaranteed to last the journey. Despite the wonder that these caves ignite it is believed that most late paleolithic drawings existed outside of the caves. <\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u00a0 Drawing practice would have been easier to develop in the sunlight. In the arid American Southwest petroglyphs as well as pictographs drawn on canyon walls and exposed rock shelters are relatively numerous. In the more humid, temperate regions of the East and Midwest, however, that art has mostly succumbed to freeze thaw cycles long ago. Though exposed drawings exist on the rock faces France\u2019s V\u00e9z\u00e8re Valley most, like their American counterparts, have washed into the soils below them. The accomplishment of the Lascaux, Altemera and Chauvet drawings are well known. What is less well know is that they are an exception. Most cave art, according to a recent work on the subject, looks like \u201cthe work of a third grader.\u201d<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The point of resting our attention on the drawings of the European late Pleistocene is not to be critics or bask in their beauty nor to necessarily uncover their individual meanings. Instead, because they are representative of some the oldest known drawings, we hope they may help us to grapple with the question: why we draw. In my earlier post \u201cVery Old Art\u201d I called attention to James Harrod\u2019s speculative analysis of Oldowan tool making. Harrod\u2019s perspective opens the possibility that \u2018art,\u2019 far from being a diversion, entertainment or past-time, is better understood to be a basic defining characteristic\/perspective of people. That characteristic lies in the apparent anxiety felt by Homo Habilis in his effort to make a better and sometimes more beautiful edge.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> I extended Harrod\u2019s analysis by suggesting that the exposure of edges, by snapping chips from a core, was described to be indicative the phenomena of that allows us to lay down an \u2018edge\u2019 with a line. Two million years later, more than eighty-thousand generations later, people were swimming in the lines they had created. Lines were everywhere. The lines of Pleistocene drawings are more complex, and develop more significant and interesting ideas than the edges \/ lines of the Olduvai tool maker. We can say this with confidence because, in contrast to the chopped stone tools of Homo Habilis all Pleistocene cave drawings tell stories. The stories are not \u2018read\u2019 like a narrative that comes into being in time word after word. Instead, we grasp the drawn stories significance almost instantaneously. For the artist, the significance of a drawing\u2019s story appears during the making process of drawing using his or her use of edge. If the image is drawn with skill, the meanings of a drawing will take over. If, with skill, we draw a cat \u2013 for example \u2013 he or she will not make a significant amount of mental pauses with questions about this or that line, that whisker or the length of the tail. Drawing, is not a halting process involving \u2018rules\u2019 that need to be accounted for. One drawing in Chauvet Cave, indicative of many, shows just how much more complex these edges are. The drawing called \u201cCave Bear\u201d shows evidence of a sophistication, the kind of which, that has to be developed from years of dedicated practice. (For an image of the Chauvet Cave Bear Click<\/a> )By lending detail and emphasis of line, the artist made it clear what he had cared about or what he felt to have the greatest meaning and significance. What those Pleistocene artists cared about, what they wanted to lend significance to, is not disguised. We immediately recognize that the Cave Bear itself held weight in the artists imagination. The drawing shows the bear to have a huge and imposing head, small ears a large, lumbering body of mussel and bone. There is a sense that the bear is older. It is perhaps hungry. Its skin loosely drapes on its bones and it appears to be wasting away. The thickness of line around the head draws our attention to and lets us know that the artist felt the bear\u2019s face to have significance. We can feel the serious expression artist must have had on his own face in the throws of the drawing as he felt himself to be observer and bear at the same time. If that paleolithic artist of the cave bear drawing was in a trance, like some early interpreters of this art thought, that trance was very probably of the same nature that skilled craftsmen experience today. All technique will have receded into the background. Moving quickly, the artist will not have felt the charcoal or paint brush in his hands or be able to recall dipping his brush into the paint. Having mastered his tools he freely launches into a dance, or \u201cthe zone\u201d within which he pushes forward into bring the weight of significance to the lions, bears and other creatures of his world. Abb\u00e9 Breuil, the first professional archaeologist to speculate why these Paleolithic drawings appeared was attracted to their \u2018mystery.\u2019 We cannot fault him for that. \u2018Mystery\u2019 is an erotic mood within which we feel a looming power that compels us to advance into curiosity. In \u2018mystery\u2019 advancing features appear but on closer inspection recedes leaving us with wishes and gaps. For Breuil mystery was expressed as the cultic \u2018mysterium\u2019 of religion. Breuil, however, is criticized for having too easily accepted an intellectual atmosphere which understood religion to be the basis for significance and that that basis evolved from primitive to civilized. Those late paleolithic artists, according to Breuil, were doing the work of primitive religion. Breuil laid out a scenario which put focus on the artist as a shamanic figure who drew in order to elicit luck for the hunt. His thesis is summed up as \u201csympathetic hunting magic.\u201d<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Religion, for Breuil \u2013 and many interpreters after him \u2013this was why these drawings were made. Breuil left a narrative of hunting and initiation rites which now, fifty years later \u2013 in most quarters \u2013 is understood to have little basis in fact. <\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Breuil\u2019s theological argument wanted to lend weight to the notion that \u2018significance\u2019 lies before and behind the art. The significance of Paleolithic art, according to Breuil, lies within the artists mind, before the art as some kind of god, the gods or the sacred and fills it with significance. In the same sense, significance lies behind the drawing as hidden meaning yet to be uncovered by its observer. If these drawings were not executed by shamans or priests why were they drawn? One alternative, is \u201cart for art\u2019s sake.\u201d<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In a 1987 paper anthropologist John Halverson argues that \u201cart for art\u2019s sake\u201d may be the best explanation for cave art of the Europe\u2019s Pleistocene. Halverson\u2019s \u201cart for art\u2019s sake\u201d is founded on the principal that Pleistocene \u2018art\u2019 is not really what we would call \u2018art\u2019 but, instead pre-art play that is, in emphasis, representation. Pleistocene \u2018art\u2019 is not \u2018art,\u2019 according to Halverson because, these paintings \u2013 being at the spring of art \u2013 were merely a kind of plaything with which their artists took pleasure and marveled in their ability to represent. Halverson supposes that the drawings look like animals of their environment but otherwise, have little or no significance. Paleolithic art is empty. By this suggestion the \u2018appearance\u2019 of an artwork lets function a container that needs to be filled but by itself it has little significance.?His discussion largely ignores the phenomena itself. It is reveling to Halverson\u2019s argument that no individual image is described in depth. Yet, it is to the images that we are drawn and let us care about the world that created them. Though some meanings of these paleolithic paintings are, in part, due to unrecoverable anecdotes of a Pleistocene world, we need only look at the images for the greater weight of their significance. In my discussion of the cave bear I have already described the complexity and significance that pour out of the drawing. We do not need to fill the drawings with meaning or \u2018translate\u2019 them into words for their meaning to exist. In addition to paying attention to accumulating archaeological facts about the paleolithic artists we need only have empathy for the broadest dimensions of being situated in our familiar worlds of people, animals, earth and sky to recognize significance within the figure of the cave bear. Religion or art for art\u2019s sake are situational explanations. Each are dependent on a particular conditions in time and space and each, to a certain extent are factual explanations for which evidence will accumulate. No narrative explanation is absent of time and space. Still, if we ask \u201cwhy we draw\u201d we are in need of a basis upon which drawings ever come to be. The next post will explore in greater detail the basis upon which why drawings come to be.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is fitting that the oldest known drawings lie in caves. Those, dark protected dream-land places feel right for the oldest drawings. All caves are to some degree dangerous. In caves people have to supply the light. They have to explored and whatever light you bring in is not guaranteed…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12654,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-society"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/clay-wood.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/Deer_Chauvet_Cave.jpg?fit=1366%2C768&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/saTshs-caves","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1273"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14622,"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1273\/revisions\/14622"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clay-wood.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}