The following is excerpted from Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science,
Evolution, published by Bloomsbury Press.
Prehistoric
art is as fascinating as it is hazy and remote — we have only shadows of its
exactness, outlines or fragments of the great stories painted in caves or
etched in rock. We can only
speculate to what extent such works were made for practical, or sheerly
aesthetic means. Ancient imagery
is even more vague than the abstractions of the present when we imagine what it
can do to frame the place for our species in the world. Did we need art way back then for any
different reason than we do now?
Are there unique clues in prehistoric art for the ultimate reasons why
humans may have always needed art?
Does this need separate us form or tie us further to the bowerbirds and
elephants of this world?
With this
sketch from the inside of the Cave of the Three Brothers in France we have a magnificent
overlay of animals upon one another like the piles of images catalogued in our
memories or a child's story — drawing upon which he can easily recount the
history of actions, layer upon layer, leading up to the end of the battle or
the hunt. Or, you can just marvel
at the energy and way the real animals so depicted swirl swiftly into
abstraction. But is that only what
the eye of a more contemporary viewer might see? The image must grab us before any story that tries to tell
us what it means. Don't read too
much about any work of art before you look hard enough so that you might
actually see.
What
do we see when we see the image of an animal? Is it different than any other shape? Do we see tonight's dinner, or a
creature in the midst of the vast [web] of evolution on which we also appear in
our own precise place? Does
education or instinct define what such an image does to us? I tend to see the swirl of memory in an
image like that, as when I close my eyes and think of all the myriad things that
have happened to me over the past days, trying to hold onto all of this in a
single image. I see the real
happenings merge into a complex abstraction as I imagine a drawing of it, like
the child's layered storytelling, like the camouflage hidden in a splattered
Pollock.
I
wonder if it is a century of abstraction seeping into our culture that as
enabled me to see like that, or perhaps, these images are so many thousands of
years old that we will never know.
We will have to hypothesize, going for coherent explanations at the far
limits of data. The ancient,
venerable quality of such imagery makes us stand in awe of them. How have they lasted? Why were they made in the dark? Were they any more ritualistic and
specifically meaningful than any individually expressive art made today?
There
is that old truism that primal cultures are far more pragmatic than we
are. When I returned from a trip
in wild Labrador to the Inuit town of Kujjuaq, I talked to an old man about my
two week journey. "See any animals?"
he asked, a common question. "Not
much," I told him. "But there was
one rabbit who walked right up to my boots and sniffed them, like he had never
seen a human before." "And?" he
replied. "And what. He just walked away." "What?" said the native. "You didn't shoot it?" and I laughed, having learned the lesson that any arctic
animal story ought to end with a roast bunny in a pot, or at least a satisfying
meal. No innocent admiration for
creatures when you're living close to them. Eat or be eaten, the simple practical life.
I
don't know how much this story relates to layers of ancient animal imagery, but
it does back up the standard notion that ancient art was meant to recount
important practical stories, rather than abstract imagery common to the root
forces of life. Suggesting that
ancient humans are closer to the world of animals, to those aesthetic
universals that may or may not exist along the evolutionary pathways of life.
If
the beauty in the animal world is either evolved through sexual selection, or
the result of basic patterning possible in the workings of life, then what
lessons can we as humans glean from this?
We evolved with all these forms appearing all around us, so we may have
formed our preferences there? Or
did we always want to distinguish ourselves from
the animals, by asking questions about them, naming them, drawing them so
we could control them?
I
do not want the purpose behind anyone's art to detract attention from its
beauty. More important to marvel
at the bowerbirds' works than to check them off has just the most outlandish
way evolution has figured out to display male quality. The attempt to understand prehistoric
art may be as much a history of how we in contemporary times have strived to
make sense of those human artifacts at the very limits of our ability to
preserve our past.
So
what are our root images, the visual thoughts at the earliest memories in our
brains, those pictures that precede even language or any attempts to organize
thought? This is why I am
interested in the earliest glimmers of human art, not so much to explain why
our species needs art so much, but to ask what are the most basic things our
brains can see. We got to go far
back beyond the idea of representing tasty animals that we would like to kill
and eat, but into the very imagery the brain makes for itself even without any
outside stimuli.
Picture
yourself inside one of these dark prehistoric caves. It is so dark you can see nothing. Or is it nothing that you see? Paleolithic art has elements beyond the outlines of
beautiful beasts, drawn with rare and honest energy. There is also the kind of patterns the eyes reveal even if
they are closed, the lights and patterns one sees even when the eyes are
closed, known as phosphenes. Scholars looking for a biophysical
origin to the forms of human art go back to such images of waves, dots,
zigzags, grids, and nested curves.
We may see them without knowing where the images come from, either the eye
or the brain. Close your eyes
after staring at the sun and they appear, or in the middle of the night, in the
heart of dreams. If you've seen
enough abstract art you may be more inclined to take such images seriously.
David
Lewis-Williams, probably the most psychologically-minded of theorists of
paleolithic art, describes the origins of art not in terms of what it does for
us, but how it might emerge out of attendance to these swirling brain
visions. They reveal a geometry
inherent in the structure of our visual system, which comes to the fore when
the system is cast into sudden darkness or stressed, as in migraine headaches
or when people hallucinate while taking psychotropic substances or when led
into a trance through ritual methods.[i] Human societies throughout history have
valued visions and trances, but of course you don't need drugs to see these
things. The same kinds of images
crop up in recent scientific studies of the neurobiology of sleep:
Depending
on your context, you might see these as a sampling of imagery from indigenous
tribal art, prehistoric patterns seen in ancient caves, or the kind of
hallucinations one gets while either having migraines or taking drugs. Oliver Sacks recognized that such
patterns are fundamental to the physical workings of nature, and he realized
that anyone who suffers migraines would open up the pages of Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature and see not only the
myriad shapes of nature's microscopic creatures, but also the visions that
swirl around in his or her own head.
That's Sacks's explanation for the famous visions of Hildegard of
Bingen; he says they are well known to all who suffer from or study migraine
headaches. The pulsing stars in
the sky, the mandala-like omnivorous circle diagrams that incorporate Christian
imagery with the phosphenes that pulse in our own heads — these too are based on
the fundamental patterns nature makes possible, the circle, the spiral, the
star, the burst. These patterns
have a fundamental gravity because they are the shapes at the very conceptual
root of nature itself. Evolution
makes use of them because physics, mathematics, and chemistry make them
possible. They are deeper in the
world than anything specifically human, and they glimmer forth in the most
ancient of human art, side by side with the practical documentation of the
results of the hunt and the animals of power.
Hildegard
describes it like this, "I saw a great star most splendid and beautiful, and
with it an exceeding multitude of falling stars which with the star followed
southwards." Then they went away. "Suddenly they were all annihilated,
being turned into balc coals… and cast into the abyss so that I could see them
no more." Sacks describes it thus,
"she experienced a shower of phosphenes in transit across the visual field,
their passage being succeeded by a negative scotoma."[ii] In one of his earlier books, before he
became as the great medical essayist he has become today, Sacks presents
paintings done by some of his migraine patients, illustrating the visual
delirium that they experience.
These pictures are full of luminous, repeating, tesselated,
kaleidoscopic, regular patterns like those that make up the very root fabric of
existence, streaming right from within the normal visual field, like dazzle
camouflage coming from within our own mind:
Today
they look like images familiar from a visit to any art museum, but what did
they look like to Hildegard?
Glimmers of the Divine, she says, but all successful art has always had
a tinge of that. Dostoyevsky also
suffered from migraines, and saw in the moments when they overtook him an
eternal harmony, something deeply all consuming, "during those five seconds I
live a whole human existence."
Each artist demands the greatest meaning from such experiences that totally
consume us. It has probably been
like that since humans began to reflect upon and creatively respond to the
world they live in and through.
The late contemporary artist Louise Bourgeois may have been thinking the
same when she said, "once I was beset by anxiety. I could have cried out with terror at being lost. But I pushed the fear away-by studying
the skies…. I saw myself in
relationshiop to the stars. I began
weeping, and I knew that I was all right.
That is the way I make use of geometry today. The miracle is that I am able to do it, by geometry."[iii]
The
brain that experiences such visions, be it a Paleolithic artists inside a
totally dark cave or a migraine sufferer today, first apprehends the visions as
a first stage of understanding, in Lewis-Williams explanation, then tries to
elaborate the patterns into iconic familiar forms in the actual world: waves,
lines, patterns on animals and evolved natural forms. In a third stage, shamans, visionaries, hallucinators talk
about being lured into a tunnel or a vortex, where they themselves enter the
patterns and forms. They become
the animals graced in spots, lines, and camouflage. The whole vision takes us in.
Nancy
Aiken, in her dissertation The Biological
Origins of Art, collects impressive visual evidence showing how phosphenes
take the same form as abstract imagery found in cultures from all over the
world, and also in the doodles of children:
They are
thus imagery that humans have always had the capacity to understand.[iv] How much we value them depends on what
external significance they are given, or how much our appreciation of art leans
toward the abstract.
This
again is one reason I think we possess a heightened sense of aesthetic
possibility today — we take doodles, and hallucinations, more significantly as
art so a larger, richer portion of experience is now available to us as being
aesthetically interesting. And it
gives support for the joy in finding intricacy and symmetry that so touched
Ernst Haeckel, who spread the gospel of Darwin's evolution far and wide with
his revelations of intricate, swirling, symmetrical forms showing just how much
beautiful diversity life did contain.
Something about symmetry has touched us for thousands of years, and it's
probably not just that we see such swirls and patterns in the most intense
kinds of headaches we may get.
There are deeper parallels of form in all the beauties that we most wish
to see, either real or imagined.
[i] David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art,
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), p. . See also James Kent, Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in
the Age of Reason (2010) http://psychedelic-information-theory.com/ebook/index.htm
and Philip Nicholson and Paul Firnhaber, "Autohypnotic induction of sleep
rhythms generates visions of light with form-constant patterns," pp. 56-83, Shamanism in the Interdisciplinary Context,
ed. Art Leete and Paul Firnhaber, (Boca Raton: Brown Walker Press, 2004)
[ii] Oliver
Sacks, The Man
Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York:
Summit Books, 1985) p. 161.
[iii] Ellen Dissanayake, Homo
Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, (New York: Free Press, 1992) p.
84.
[iv] Nancy Aiken, The
Biological Origins of Art, (New York: Praeger, 1998), p.
Image by Gruban, courtesy of Creative Commmons license.
