Making sense of art

Feb 2, 2009 Alun The Past 2 Comments Archaeology, Art, Cognition

I was going to put Brian Hoffman’s post Aniakchak Art — The Bone Face into a Vidi post. Instead I’m post­ing sep­ar­ately because:

1. He’s got a really inter­est­ing prob­lem, one faced by archae­olo­gists across the world.
2. He’s got some nice pho­tos, and I’m a sucker for nice photos.

So here’s the prob­lem. You’re dig­ging in Alaska and you find a bit of bone with a face carved on it. Now what?

In the past I’ve ten­ded to ignore much of Art and Art His­tory. My earli­est intro­duc­tion to it was as art appre­ci­ation which I’ve ten­ded to feel ali­en­ated from for vari­ous reas­ons. It doesn’t help that my memor­ies of Art class were killing time in Pot­tery because the Tech­nical Graph­ics class didn’t have enough space. So I never really under­stood Art. I still don’t under­stand Art, but now for much more inter­est­ing reasons.

Art is much more inter­est­ing when you don’t merely look at form, but also pro­cess. The favoured story at the moment is that Art exploded as part of some great leap in think­ing around 35,000 years ago. I don’t agree, it’s a ter­ribly Euro­centric per­spect­ive and African archae­olo­gists have pushed back the dawn of art twice as far at the very least. Unlike a lot of firsts, the argu­ment over when the first Art emerged is worth hav­ing because Art as sym­bolic resp­resent­a­tion on con­cepts is some­thing which makes humans very spe­cial. There’s argu­ment over the pre­cise defin­i­tion of Art and whether or not that can be applied to pre-Renaissance soci­et­ies because it also car­ries a lot of social and cul­tural bag­gage. Non­ethe­less the prac­tice of cre­at­ing sym­bols and pat­terns which refer to some­thing in an abstract way is found around the world. Read­ing art can be like read­ing lan­guage. I was amazed to dis­cover in a Psy­cho­logy even­ing class that even things like per­spect­ive have to be learned. It’s cul­tur­ally spe­cific and, if you fol­low the Exten­ded Mind hypo­thesis (which I will explain in more detail in a future post) it may even be part of the scaf­fold­ing of thought.

So back to Hoffman’s Aniakchak art. What can it tell him?

Ini­tially he thought it told him about cul­tural diversity. It seemed the Aniakchak were pro­du­cing dif­fer­ent art and so think­ing about the world in dif­fer­ent ways. Non­ethe­less he’s kept and open mind and kept ques­tion his own inter­pret­a­tions. Now he’s look­ing at sim­il­ar­it­ies to Kache­mak art, which dates from around the same time. He’s also bear­ing in mind that Art never exists as a Pla­tonic ideal, but has to have a phys­ical pres­ence. The mater­i­als you use are going to have an effect on the art you can produce.

What I like about this is that his work isn’t mak­ing a lot of assump­tion about mean­ing. The arte­facts must have had mean­ing to people who made and used them but this, like the words they spoke as they used them are lost. Non­ethe­less by look­ing at the form, the con­text and think­ing about the chaîné opératoire the pro­cess of cre­at­ing the arte­fact it is pos­sible to make mean­ing­ful com­par­is­ons and ana­lo­gies with other local peoples. It shows that a min­im­al­ist approach doesn’t have to be Spartan in its outcomes.