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Excavating art
Andrew Meirion Jones
Can one make works that are not works of âartâ ?
Marcel Duchamp 1913
From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.
Susan Sontag 1964
Around 7000 years ago, a person clings to a steep sloping rock at Vingen, deep in the west Norwegian fjords. Overshadowed by the immense peak of Hornelen, they are carving the image of a deer into the rock surface (Figure 1.1). Preparations for carving this image have taken some time; they involved quarrying a special stone from the nearby quarry at Stakaneset, fashioning it into a tool, and then sailing down the fjord to carve the image. The carved deer only measures around 20cm in length, and in this immense landscape is difficult to see from any distance. It joins many other images of deer (a herd?) carved at the same spot. Why go to all this trouble to make an image that is difficult to see, and why do this repeatedly?
Over 5000 years ago on the east coast of Ireland, where the Boyne river bends, a series of stone and turf structures are being built to hold the dead of the community. Materials for building are gathered from near and far to be used in the structures. After the stones are manoeuvred into position, they are carved with sinuous spiralling images. As the structure is enlarged, new stones are carved with similar images. Some of these are visible on the outside, but a great deal of them are built into the structure of the monument and will not be seen again until the site of Newgrange is excavated in the mid twentieth century (Figure 1.2). Why is it important to carve stones used in these burial structures, and why should some of these carvings be buried deep within the buildings, invisible to the community who made them?
Figure 1.1 Image of a deer carved at Vingen, Norway. Photo Copyright: Trond LĂždĂžen
Over 5500 years ago at Chobonaino on the east coast of southern Hokkaido, Japan, a pit was being dug to receive a human body. Placed alongside the body was a small jade pendant and a remarkable clay human sculpture around half a metre in height (Figure 1.3). The figurine was hollow and made in separate sections; the legs as balls of clay, the torso with slabs of clay, and the head with finger impressions into a ball of clay. With the exception of its midriff, intricate cord impressions or lines of ribbed relief cover its surface. The figurine is human-like, maybe a male with a beard, and it is hard to tell whether the figure is asleep, awake, alive or dead. Why was this large ambiguous and hollow sculpture made, why was it placed in the grave, and what did it contain? Was it used for pouring liquid, sand, or some other less material substance?
In the early AD 300s, probably around AD 335â355, the owner of a villa at Hinton St. Mary, Dorset, England wished to embellish the decoration of their homestead. A mosaic was ordered to be laid in a central room of the building (Figure 1.4). The local mosaicists drew on a rich tradition of mosaic patterns for their design, which was laid out in individual tesserae (small coloured stone tiles). At Hinton St. Mary, they chose the bust of a male for the central motif clothed in a tunica and pallium. Behind the head of this figure, they laid out a curious motif known as a Chi Rho. Central busts in mosaic designs were often reserved for figures from mythology, such as Orpheus. Yet this bust and its motif were new. The clothing and Chi Rho motif suggest the figure was of Christ and marked out the owners of the villa as belonging to a new religious tradition â Christianity. Why was this design laid on the floor of the villa? Who was it intended for?
Just after AD 500 at Monte AlbĂĄn, valley of Oaxaca, Mexico, a patio floor was laid down over an earlier tomb structure. At a slightly later stage, someone cut a pit through the patio floor to arrange more than a dozen figurines in a scene (Figure 1.5). Five of the larger figurines with elaborate headdresses hold what may be depictions of mirrors (of obsidian or magnetite). Some of the smaller figurines in the scene seem to be singing or chanting. The figurines are all made of clay, but two other objects of stone accompany them â a small step pyramid and a funerary mask. Why are these figurines deposited in a pit cut into an earlier tomb structure? Why is there such a variety of figurines; what is the significance of the different materials â clay and stone â used in the assemblage? What were the figurines intended to do? Why were they so carefully arranged?
Figure 1.2 Image of passage tomb art from Newgrange, Ireland. Photo Copyright: Ken Williams
Figure 1.3 The Chobonaino dogƫ, Hokkaido, Japan. Image Copyright: Doug Bailey
Figure 1.4 The Hinton St. Mary Mosaic, Dorset, England. Photo Copyright: Trustees of the British Museum
Five examples of people in the past making images or sculptures, laying mosaic pavements, displaying, assembling, destroying or depositing groups of spectacular items. Making and assembling. Impact and display. Disassembly and destruction. These are all themes that will be explored in this book as we look at the role that images play in the lives of people in the past.
As the examples above show, art and imagery can be used in a variety of ways, and can stimulate a variety of things. The use of images also changes over time from prehistory to the post-Medieval period. The study of art and imagery from the past can therefore provide unparalleled access to the lives of past people; they are an important source of information for archaeologists. Yet, we must be wary: we cannot âreadâ art and images directly; art and images are slippery and difficult to pin down. This book will look at various strategies we might use to help us understand art and images in the archaeological record.
Figure 1.5 Figurine from Monte AlbĂĄn, Mexico. Photo Copyright: Alamy Images
We have immediately slipped between using the terms âartâ and âimagesâ. As a rule of thumb, in this book we will discuss âartâ in the sense used by the ancient Greeks (ars), as a way of doing something, as well as the products of that way of working. To define âimagesâ we refer to W.J.T. Mitchellâs (2005, xiiiâxiv) definition: images are âany likeness, figure, motif, or form that appears in some medium or otherâ.
Probably the slipperiest question of all is the most fundamental: how do we define âartâ? How do we study art? We need to think about this now before we go any further. To help us we will recruit scholars from other disciplines, including art history and anthropology, who have considered such questions in depth. We will assess how useful their approaches are for the study of art and imagery in the deep past.
Art history and its origins
To understand how art historians have dealt with the question of art, we need to consider the history of the subject. In fact, the history of art and the study of archaeological art are closely intertwined from the outset, as one of the earliest â if not the first â work of art history is Johan Joachim Winckelmannâs History of Ancient Art, published in Dresden, Germany in 1764. Winckelmann is important as he shifted the discussion of art history away from the chronicle of artistsâ lives and commissions (Giorgio Vasariâs Lives of the Artists â published 1550 â can lay claim to be another early art historical text) to a new level entirely. He pioneered systematic stylistic analysis, historical contextualisation and iconographical analysis (Davis 1996, 261).
Winckelmannâs approach treats art as a universal (he sees art as a timeless and unchanging category); he regards Greek imagery as art in a relatively uncomplicated fashion. Since these early beginnings, art historians, ancient historians and classical archaeologists have been arguing about this point. Michael Squire (2010, 133) puts this well when he asks:
To what extent can we talk about the process of making, viewing and writing about images in classical antiquity as âart historyâ? Is it justified to discuss âartâ as art in the first place? And if modern systems of âthe artsâ are anachronistic, what language should be used to analyze the qualities and experiences associated with viewing images â or indeed, responding to other media â in ancient Greek and Roman historical perspective?
One prominent perspective is that of Paul Oskar Kristeller, who published two essays on âthe modern system of the artsâ between 1951 and 1952 (see Kristeller 1990). Kristeller argues that modern concepts of âFine Artsâ, first conceived in the Enlightenment (the period in the eighteenth century when a belief in reason, freedom of thought and the value of science first arose), do not apply to antiquity or to any culture before the eighteenth century. This view has drawn criticism from a variety of scholars (Neer 2010), while others have gone further and have argued that the critical shift in the emergence of âartâ begins not in the Enlightenment, but in the Renaissance (Belting 1994).
One of the problems with these debates is the close association between modern ways of thinking about the arts and the origins of art history itself, which descends directly from the study of Greco-Roman materials. As we have seen, Winckelmann instigated the study of art history with an analysis of Greek figures, while the roots of the philosophy of art lie in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartenâs description of aesthetics, whose origins he sought in ancient Greek etymology and language. The definitions of art, and the language used to describe art, are so closely integrated with classical antiquity it is difficult to distinguish them.
One route out of this impasse is to borrow an approach derived from a different discipline, such as sociology. Jeremy Tanner (2006) has done this in his book, The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, society and artistic rationalisation. Tannerâs approach aims to overcome the distinction between scholars who emphasise the historical specificity of art, and those who regard art as a universal concept. He examines the chronological development within antiquity, looking especially at shifts in knowledge occurring from the fourth to third centuries BC, and provides a social, political and intellectual history of image-making in antiquity. By taking a sociological perspective â drawing on key figures in sociology such as Max Weber and Talcott Parsons â he examines the âexpressive symbolismâ deployed in antiquity (see Tanner 1992; 2006, 20â21). An âexpressive symbol is any act or object which stands for the feelings or attitudes of one person to anotherâ, such as the bonds of love between mother and child (see Tanner 2006, 20). He also examines the institutional logic, or ârationalisationâ, of arts and artists in ancient society, following Max Weberâs analysis of the rationalisation of different spheres of society (see Tanner 2006; 2010). In âthe case of art, rationalisation processes, can be relevant to reflective thought about the means of achieving specific aesthetic-expressive ends ⊠and to the goals and purposes of artistic production and expressionâ (Tanner 2006, 22).
By utilising a sociological approach, he attempts to bridge the gap between Greco-Roman high culture and modern Western high culture. He argues that each âshare certain structural characteristics â the insistence on an extensive formal aesthetic vocabulary, a knowledge of artistsâ names and of the history of the development of stylesâ (Tanner 2010, 273) as synonymous with a cultivated engagement with art. They differ, though, in terms of the character of aesthetic sensibility.
Through the application of sociological method, Tanner argues that we are able to appreciate the differences between modern and ancient forms of art. This approach has similarities to recent debates in anthropology.
The anthropology of art
Art historians and classical archaeologists have debated the extent to which ancient art can be analysed in the modern era. This is a debate about the cross-cultural applicability of the category we call âartâ. This is an issue that is especially familiar to anthropologists who attempt to study âartâ from cultures very different to the contemporary West.
The scholarly foundations of art history lie in the eighteenth century; while the scholarly foundations of anthropology are much later during the nineteenth century. Anthropologists have long been interested in arts and material culture, as is evident from the extensive collections of ethnographic objects in major museums across Europe and North America. However this early collecting behaviour â which lies in nineteenth-century anthropologyâs impulse to systematise, classify and order humankind â is now a source of some embarrassment, and it is only in the last few decades that an interest in art and material culture has been revived and intellectually rehabilitated (Miller 1983; Miller and Tilley 1996; Hicks and Beaudry 2010; Tilley et al. 2006).
We should also recall that these collections of ethnographic art â both in museums and the marketplace â had an important impact on the development of Western art movements from Romanticism, to Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism. Perhaps the most celebrated of these is Pablo Picassoâs encounter with African sculpture around 1905. The nature of this interchange between Western artists and ethnographic art is still a major area of debate in anthropology (Rubin 1984; Price 1989; Schneider and Wright 2006; Vogel 1988).
The systematic study of art in anthropology is fairly recent, and an important early text is Franz Boasâ Primitive Art, first published in Oslo, Norway in 1927. Boas (1955 [1927]) analyses art in terms that would be familiar to art historians, including a discussion of the formal elements in art, style, representation and symbolism. He offers an expansive definition of art, and includes a discussion of literature, music and dance.
Formal or systematic approaches to art have been an important feature of the anthropology of art since the revolution in thinking heralded by structuralism. Structuralism was an intellectual movement advocated by the French anthropologist Claude LĂ©vi-Strauss during the 1950s and 1960s (e.g. LĂ©vi-Strauss 1963; 1966); it had an enormous impact on academic thinking during the twentieth century. LĂ©vi-Strauss identified systematic structures in human thought; social actions were the outside manifestation of these cognitive structures. LĂ©vi-Strauss borrowed his understanding of cognitive structures from the structural linguistics of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (Saussure 1959) and from the semiotic theories of Prague-based linguist Roman Jakobson (e.g. Jakobson 1962).
Structural linguistics argues that language is composed of words with an arbitrary relationship to the real-world objects that they signify (thus the word âdogâ is used in English to signify specimens of the canine species, while in other European languages the word âchienâ, âhundâ or âperroâ is used â the precise word used is an arbitrary convention of language). The meaning of each linguistic sign (or word) is determined by its position in the sentence, or in the language as a whole.
Jakobsonâs theory of semiotics (the study of signs) is also concerned with communication. Consider messages being sent between two people, sender and receiver. In order that the message is understood, it must refer in some way to a reality that both sender and receiver comprehend. This reality would be the âcontextâ of the message. It must also be in a code that the sender and receiver both understand as intelligible. The key point of Jakobsonâs theory of communication is that signs are primarily communicative and relate to communication as a culturally specific process.
LĂ©vi-Strauss developed the ideas of Saussure and Jakobson in anthropology in two directions, in the analysis of kinship systems and the analysis of myths. In each case, the meaning of cultural signs is determined by their position in the cultural system. Furthermore, these meanings tend to work as a series of binary oppositions.
Anthropologists of art rapidly adopted structuralism (LĂ©vi-Strauss 1963; Forge 1973; Munn 1973; Layton 1991; Morphy 1991, Taylor 1996). For example, Nancy Munnâs classic study of Walbiri (or Walpiri) iconography in western central Australia examined the component parts, the individual graphic signs that make up the art, as a clue to the overall meaning of distinct paintings. The position and relationship of certain graphic elements (or signs) like circles and lines provided an understanding of the symbolism and meaning of the painting. In the case of Walbiri iconography, circles and lines were argued to represent components of Walbiri cosmology, a cosmology focused on paths of movement (lines) between camps or waterholes (circles). These approaches provide anthropologists with clues about the meaning and significance of art, but they say less about the ...
