How Art Made the World

May 13, 2005 Alun Science, The Past 9 Comments Ancient History, Archaeology, Art, Art History, Neuroscience, Prehistoric, Review, Television

This is the new Big Archae­olo­gical Series on the BBC. I really wanted to like the pro­gramme, I really did. But it’s incon­sist­ent at best. The cent­ral theme is that much of the mod­ern world rests on Art and the con­cepts which lie at the root of Art were formed thou­sands of years ago. Dr Nigel Spivey presents the series. He’s a clas­sical archae­olo­gist at Cam­bridge and without wish­ing to sound like I’m snip­ing that’s prob­ably the prob­lem. Spivey appears to be a very good clas­sical archae­olo­gist. The series how­ever stretches from the Palaeo­lithic to the clas­sical period.

I was wary when he intoned that Palaeo­lithic hunter-gatherers for­aged for what they could find. The cas­ual dis­missal of what appear to be soph­ist­ic­ated logist­ical net­works as sub­sist­ence for­aging made me won­der exactly what he knew of the Palaeo­lithic. This is a prob­lem because if you don’t know about the con­text of the ‘art’ then the only mean­ing is what you bring from your own per­spect­ive. I’m ignor­ing the fact that call­ing Venus fig­ur­ines ‘art’ is ana­chron­istic for the moment. My big issue is that without a famili­ar­ity with Palaeo­lithic cul­ture your inter­pret­a­tion of such fig­ur­ines will be rather shal­low. How do you inter­pret Palaeo­lithic art? You use Her­ring Gulls.

Oh dear.

Prof Ramachandran, a neur­os­cient­ist has found that her­ring gull chicks respond the red mark on the under­side of the adult gull’s beak. They tap this and the adult responds by regur­git­at­ing food for them. He found this when he gave them a lol­li­pop stick with red stripe which only looked like a beak in a min­im­al­ist way and they tapped it.

This is inter­est­ing. What is more inter­est­ing is when he showed the gulls a stick with three red stripes. They went wild over that, even ignor­ing single stripe sticks. The con­clu­sion was that as ‘art’ the mul­tiple stick showed that exag­ger­a­tion of cer­tain fea­tures is hard-wired into the brain. Prof Ramachandran thinks that the Venus fig­ur­ines are examples of humans show­ing exag­ger­a­tion hard-wired into their brains. Palaeo­lithic people were respond­ing to neur­o­lo­gical imper­at­ives when they cre­ated their Venuses.

Spivey then leapt to Egypt and found a dif­fer­ent form of styl­isa­tion which con­tra­dicted this imper­at­ive. This was due to the Egyp­tians hav­ing a cul­ture. I’m not con­vinced the con­text of the Egyp­tian art was fairly dealt with, but I accept you can’t cover everything in a hour and the cent­ral thesis was the evol­u­tion­ary basis of art, so it wasn’t neces­sar­ily relevant.

He moved on to the Greek world and their art which took Egyp­tian ideas but allowed them to repro­duce per­fectly real­istic images of the body for the first time in his­tory. I could quibble that Greek sculp­tures have never seemed per­fectly real­istic to me, but it would sound like I was boast­ing. Per­haps it was a frosty day when the model posed. Any­how he said that more or less as soon as they achieved per­fec­tion, they aban­doned it. They star­ted exag­ger­at­ing fea­tures again. This proves artistic per­cep­tion is hard­wired into our brains, art is cent­ral to what makes us human etc…

If the hypo­thesis is cor­rect and this is hard­wired into our brains then really we ought to see a return to pen­du­lous breasts, large but­tocks and swollen bel­lies. Ok, so the lack of pen­du­lous breasts isn’t a prob­lem for the sculp­tures he said were the best ever, because they were male. How­ever Buddha is often rep­res­en­ted as a short fat guy, and these statues weren’t. I sup­pose you could argue Buddhas are cir­cum­stan­tial evid­ence for the evol­u­tion­ary basis of beauty, but I don’t recall sim­ilar Buddhist art for short fat women. I could be wrong on that. Any­how these Greek statues were ath­letic. In mod­ern times we con­tinue with lithe as the ideal, prob­ably because of the effect of the Renais­sance and the notion of clas­sical art. It seems people from every period reject this ideal. The only people who do fit the hypo­thesis are the Palaeo­lithic peoples and if they also had a cul­ture then that rather kills raw neur­o­logy as an explanation.

It is a shame the cent­ral thought was so poor, as the pro­gramme was gen­er­ally shot well and Nigel Spivey is a good presenter, in many ways the male Bet­tany Hughes. Some of the sequences like ren­der­ing the presenter into relief were done well. So I’d really would have liked to enjoyed the pro­gramme. There is def­in­itely an inter­est­ing and intel­li­gent series to be made on the ori­gins of art and its cog­nit­ive implic­a­tions. Unfor­tu­nately on cur­rent form this isn’t it. Hope­fully next week’s pro­gramme on pic­tures, start­ing with Altamira, Las­caux etc will be bet­ter, but that would require some under­stand­ing of Palaeo­lithic culture.

You can visit the programme’s web­site at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/howart/