Odd Jobs (148 page)

A mark, once made on stone, bone, canvas, or parchment, will remain until erased. Of all the unfathomable, intimidating, anonymous millions of men and women who have preceded us on this planet, the artists and artisans feel closest to us, where the marks made by their hands can still be inspected and still invite empathy. I have stood in the tomb of a pharaoh, in the remotest of many chambers hollowed out of solid rock, and seen the sketchy gray underpainting of an unfinished mural, the strokes of the brush as full of decision and nervous energy as if done the day before rather than three thousand years in the past. That artist, his very bones long dust, was present in that chamber, where his work had been interrupted. The oldest paintings are those that Cro-Magnon people left on the walls of the deep limestone caves of southern France and northern Spain during the Upper Paleolithic—a period from about thirty-five thousand to ten thousand years ago. Cro-Magnon man was, of course,
Homo sapiens sapiens
, as are we. Neanderthal man, Cro-Magnon man’s predecessor on the European stage, had core-struck flint tools, and buried his dead with supplies for their afterlives, and arranged bear skulls and ibex horns in patterns; but he did not produce art. Art that has survived, at any rate—he may well have, like most primitive peoples, painted his body and decorated wood and hides. Some apprenticeship with perishable materials must underlie the sophisticated and vital animal portraiture preserved on the walls of the caves. But in the archaeological record art begins almost as abruptly as books of art history open with the famous wounded (or sleeping) bison from the cave at Altamira, the great frieze of bulls from Lascaux, the Willendorf Venus, and the bison so artfully carved from reindeer horn and found near Les Eyzies. All these are dated “c. 15,000–10,000
B.C.
” in H. W. Janson’s revised
History of Art
. What precipitated, after hundreds of millennia of rather stagnant human existence on this planet, the first outburst of painting and sculpture is the question John E. Pfeiffer undertakes to elucidate in
The Creative Explosion
.

Mr. Pfeiffer is a science writer rather than a scientist; he has worked
for
Newsweek, Scientific American
, and CBS, and has to his credit a list of books whose titles include
The Human Brain, The Search for Early Man
, and
The Emergence of Society
. His strengths as an observer at art’s dawn belong to the left, logical side of the brain: he has done his homework thoroughly, not only in viewing the art itself (no easy matter) and reviewing the considerable pertinent literature but in bringing to bear upon the Upper Paleolithic the latest information and speculation in anthropology. What seemed to me a certain right-brained weakness lies in his failure to make a persuasive intuitive connection with the art and the artists; the cave paintings are illumined by many lights brought from afar but not from within. The generally held impression that they were used in the conjurations of sympathetic magic in aid of the tribal hunt is subordinated to a rather abstract and trendy theory concerning the “chunking” of information necessary when a complication of society, with its informational increase, demands new feats and rites of mnemonics. Maybe so; but we have been taken far from the vivid animals themselves, many of which are shown wounded by arrows and scored by inverted “v”s and some of which “took quite a beating in prehistoric times … mutilated by repeated blows.” A contemporary French investigator, Michel Lorblanchet, has closely re-created the materials of the Paleolithic artists (including their animal-fat lamps) and duplicated, stroke for stroke, on a blank wall, a number of the drawings in the cave at Pech-Merle. “For example, he knew that in the case of one bison the artist had started with a sweeping line at the head end, followed in clockwise direction by successive lines for the back, tail, legs, and then to the head end again, exactly thirty strokes in all. Most of the figures took him from one to four minutes to draw, except for a number of schematic figures which he copied in less than thirty seconds each.” Such speed of execution, along with the cave drawings’ random-seeming superimposition, discrepancy of scale, and frequently unfinished state, suggests an art created in the process of a ceremony—action painting, of a sort, like sand painting among the Navajo now—rather than the mural tableaux of “planned sequence” that Mr. Pfeiffer argues for. “Organization practically shouts at you in the Lascaux rotunda with its converging friezes, the great bison-dominated hall of Altamira, the Salon Noir of Niaux, the Trois Frères sanctuary and its crouching ‘sorcerer’ or ‘horned god.’ ” But to judge from the welter of superimposition in the “sanctuary” at Trois Frères, or the bison in the Salon Noir at Niaux with a tiny horse between his legs and two feet and a muzzle of two other bison intersecting
his back, the artist and the audience “saw” not the drawings already on the wall but only the act of drawing, the conjuration of the animal out of the wall.

However, one argues with Mr. Pfeiffer in a context he has provided and splendidly furnished with facts and first-hand impressions. The extraordinary difficulty of physical access which many of the cave paintings present, quite dissipated when they are reproduced in a book, is well described here. The decorated caves are tortuous watery affairs miles long, and not the shallow caves the Cro-Magnons did their daily living in. “The art [is] located in utter darkness, far from daylight and twilight zones and living places, on wide expanses of wall or doubly hidden inside tiny chambers, caves within caves, secrets within secrets.” Drawings are found at the top of a slippery forty-five-foot limestone flow, on the sheer-drop side of a stalagmite, at the end of passages reached only by squirming through tight, panic-inducing “chatières.” Mr. Pfeiffer intrepidly visited two midget caves in the Les Eyzies region:

The text makes clearer than any reproduction can the involvement the drawings and paintings have with the surface of the wall: curves are fitted into fissures, rocky protuberances are turned into bulging flanks. Visibility is a real problem for investigators; it is common to mistake patterns of cracks and hollows for engravings, and it is possible to miss even with inch-by-inch inspection representations perfectly obvious on another occasion. It is even possible, this reviewer has found, to look at a photograph of the oldest nude relief sculpture, the life-size carving from the Madeleine cave, and see nothing but stone. The Abbé Breuil’s watercolor copies of cave paintings, by which the works achieved their first wide circulation in the world, were marvels of simplification and
clarification, executed under conditions of heroic discomfort. The arcane locations of cave art compel a sense of connection with initiation rituals, with underground ordeal and symbolic rebirth.

The Australian aborigines still practice, in the fastness of their deserts, rock painting; Mr. Pfeiffer devotes several chapters to them, and persuasively interprets as mnemonic devices both their rock art (which is out in the open, not in caves) and their coming-of-age ceremony. The suspense, mysteries, terrors, and pain of the coming-of-age rite, climaxed by circumcision, are “all calculated to attach emotion to information,” so that the imprinted initiates can maintain the tribe’s collective memory, which is crucial to survival. The art, along with the tribal dances, riddles, and songs, relates to the sinuous, intertwining travels of the primal totem figures (Great Rainbow Snake, Blue-Tongue Lizard, etc.) as they roamed over a “dreamtime” earth, “when all the world was young and green”; the practical effect of the legends is to fix names and incidents to every location in the desert, spinning an immense and accurate mental map for people without scale maps or writing. Topographical information is not only stored on the rocks but carved into spear throwers and sacred boards. “It is no surprise that these people are never lost, that they know the locations of more than 400 possible water sources.” The people of the Upper Paleolithic were never lost, either: “In all the galleries of all the art caves no one has ever found skeletal remains of lost individuals.” By justifiable analogy, Mr. Pfeiffer extends the usages of the desert aborigines to the cave dwellers of the European Ice Ages. As bands of scattered hunter-gatherers united to exploit more efficiently the dwindling herds of bison, reindeer, ibex, and mammoth, more information needed to be absorbed and retained; ceremonies became more ornate, shamans more important and powerful. Art, as one of many instruments of indoctrination, was called into being. The creative explosion had taken place.

This thesis is developed with much demographic calculation. The amount of Ice Age territory needed to support a single hunter-gatherer is estimated as being from twenty to two hundred square kilometres. The optimum mating pool, or tribal group, is estimated at about five hundred. The mathematics of hostility and multiplying dyads (two-person relationships) is given in the formula N
²
– N/
²
= D, and we are told that “when the Yanomamo Indians … reach the 100 to 125 level, 4,950 to 7,750 dyads, the atmosphere becomes so charged with hostility that the group must split in two.” Yet organized large-scale killing of
animals is indicated by massive bone heaps and by the concentration of human habitations in river valleys, near natural fords where herds might cross and be ambushed. Neanderthal man lived on the plateaus; Cro-Magnon man moved into the valleys. After the peak of glaciation, around twenty thousand years ago, the ice receded and the Siberia-like climate of Europe warmed; as forests moved into the tundra, the herds thinned and drifted north. Late in the Upper Paleolithic, stone tools bearing “sickle sheen” indicate that the harvesting of cereal grasses had begun. Subsistence pressure may have been increased by the arrival in Europe of southern peoples driven to migrate away from the expanding deserts; so much water was locked up in glaciers that a land bridge existed across the Dardanelles. The numbers involved are poignantly small: “According to one estimate, 2,000 to 3,000 persons were living in France 20,000 years ago, and perhaps 6,000 to 10,000 more in all of Europe. The totals may have doubled or tripled during the next ten millenniums.” Archaeological evidence suggests the rise of “seasonal villages” of bands of hunter-gatherers, akin to county fairs, and of extensive trade networks.

Still, does all this say more than that things became more complicated, and art was one of the complications? The style and intent of the art are still unexplained. Its naturalistic power and accuracy of observation, its submissiveness to natural contour, whether in the surface of the rock or in the anatomy of the animal—these are somewhat anomalous in the history of Western art. Nothing so vitally representational was to occur again until the classic art of Greece and Rome, and after that until the Renaissance. Abstraction and stylization are more the rule. The cave art that preceded the black-and-ochre herds of the Upper Paleolithic, and coexisted with them, limned enigmatic signs: “Claviforms or club-shaped, tectiforms or roof-shaped, scutiform or shield-shaped, tesselated or checkered, bell-shaped, tree-shaped, quadrangular, rayed, barbed, branched, serpentine scrawls … We do not know what they mean, but we know they were full of meaning for the people of the Upper Paleolithic.” When the long Paleolithic period ended, about ten thousand years ago, with the recession of the glaciers and the herds and the rise of fishing as a transition to full-fledged agriculture, the Mesolithic people turned to “abstract designs painted on pebbles.” This was art in search of an alphabet, headed toward Egyptian hieroglyphics. The figurative side of Paleolithic cave painting, however, was not an isolated episode; it had progeny. The rock murals of the Spanish Levant and the Sahara stylize and flatten its motifs and offer an apparent bridge to the
art both of black Africa and of the Nile. In the Spanish Levant, human figures, daubed in lively silhouette, came to dominate the animals, and a calm flatness to supplant an evoked roundness. At the same time, the pain of impaled animals was first represented. The world had, Mr. Pfeiffer speculates, become “a more secular place, bright and sensual,” after the somber “religious, mystical world” of the Cro-Magnons.

Surprisingly, having made a detailed case for the economic genesis of cave art, the author introduces in his last pages the idea of play—“Art seems somehow to have arisen from play, in a uniquely human spinoff process which has acquired a life of its own.” It is true that modern artists, especially uninhibited types like Picasso, give the impression of being lucky individuals who, like professional athletes, have been licensed by society to continue being children. But play is a form of interplay, a social activity that, when solitary, is enacted among imaginary companions. Whereas the artist, like the shaman, is a solitary intermediary between the tribe and the non-human. Play is self-enclosing; art aims outward, and seeks to bring something forward out of invisibility and silence. Art is a transaction. It needs a market. What was the market that the artists of Altamira and Lascaux served? Mr. Pfeiffer must be right in locating it within the tribe’s religious life, though he emphasizes initiation when a ritual of emboldening and solidarity for adult warriors seems no less plausible. His emphasis on memory-stocking is hard to reconcile with the simplicity, and even monotony, of the representations; from their realism one might conclude that their importance was not so much associative as illusionistic, in creating the impression of a living creature emerging from the womb of earth. Fertility and engendering are further suggested by the numerous sexually emphatic representations of women; as one investigator, Annette Leming-Emperaire, has written, “the association of the horse, the bison, and the woman appears to go deeply into Paleolithic beliefs.… We can gradually distinguish the broad lines of a theme by which woman, the universal principle of fertility, occupies a central place.”