The Archaeology of Seeing

Science and Interpretation, the Past and Contemporary Visual Art

Liliana Janik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000752632
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Ancient Art

The Archaeology of Seeing provides readers with a new and provocative understanding of material culture through exploring visual narratives captured in cave and rock art, sculpture, paintings, and more.

The engaging argument draws on current thinking in archaeology, on how we can interpret the behaviour of people in the past through their use of material culture, and how this affects our understanding of how we create and see art in the present. Exploring themes of gender, identity, and story-telling in visual material culture, this book forces a radical reassessment of how the ability to see makes us and our ancestors human; as such, it will interest lovers of both art and archaeology.

Illustrated with examples from around the world, from the earliest art from hundreds of thousands of years ago, to the contemporary art scene, including street art and advertising, Janik cogently argues that the human capacity for art, which we share with our most ancient ancestors and cousins, is rooted in our common neurophysiology. The ways in which our brains allow us to see is a common heritage that shapes the creative process; what changes, according to time and place, are the cultural contexts in which art is produced and consumed. The book argues for an innovative understanding of art through the interplay between the way the human brain works and the culturally specific creation and interpretation of meaning, making an important contribution to the debate on art/archaeology.

1

How contemporary is prehistoric art?

Introduction

This chapter presents a series of points of view, inspirations and ideas that are used in the rest of the book as background for the engagement between interpretation of past visual imagery, material culture and a range of theoretical perspectives. When talking about art one needs to use illustrations to avoid a lack of visual comprehension of the subject of the writing. Discussions of visual art without the use of pictures is comparable to trying to describe flint tools to someone who has only heard that tools can be made from stone, and trying to explain verbally how the object might look, where the cutting edge is, or how to handle it. To avoid such problems I use many illustrations to communicate visually the ideas being discussed in this book, along with a written narrative that presents my interpretation of prehistoric visual art.

Until the 17th century most Europeans’ engagement with art did not involve seeing the original object at all, and all they could do was read about it. It was only with the advent of the Grand Tour, when travellers brought etchings home with them as reminders of what they had seen, that images of art objects began to be shared more widely, including those remaining at home (Arnold 2004). Even then, access to images for the majority of people did not come about until the 19th century and the invention of photography. So it was that early art historians often had to rely on what was written about particular objects, rather than knowing what they really looked like. Today’s technology allows the instant sharing of visual messages, and visits to virtual museums make non-verbal communication and discussion about particular images much more informed, even if the actual artworks are located in collections on the other side of the world.

Defining visual vocabulary

In the course of the book I will be looking at visual choices made by different cultures in the past and the present, suggesting that humans have used similar, though diverse, visual approaches at different times and in different places. For example, looking at several depictions of landscape (Figure 1.1) we can see different visual traditions in showing the world around us, hence, I will be using a visual vocabulary, as the way particular cultures use images in communicating ideas, concepts, social belongings and identities.

Figure 1.1 a) Paddy Carlton, Nyarlabarrbarm (redrawn and amended by A. Szczęsny after: Courtesy of the estate of Paddy Carlton and the Waringarri Aboriginal Arts); b) Giovanni-Battista Piranesi. Pyramid of Cestius, c. 1700s (redrawn and amended by A. Szczęsny after: Piranesi, Wikipedia).

The first example (Figure 1.1a) comes from Australia and reflects the dynamics of visual communication via rock art and present-day painting created by contemporary aboriginal artists. The ideas and transition from rock art to canvas were presented by Ken Mulvaney (2003) in his article “Transformations – rock art to canvas: representations of the totemic geography in Aboriginal Australia”. He argues that the use of acrylic paint shifted the focus of aboriginal totemic art from the rock art site into portable visualisation of location, as a ‘mythological narrative in place, by necessity the canvas and art-board become a plan or map’ (Mulvaney 2003: 297). This leads to a change in use from visual narrative as signifier of place, to visual narrative as place location in the landscape. While describing his painting (Figure 1.1a) Paddy Carlton says:

This is my country right in the centre of the painting called Nyarlabarrbarm. The round white and brown circle represents a freshwater spring called Doogbariny; that is where the main Bullo River ends and the line going outwards is the river flowing out to the saltwater ocean. The yellow and white circle represents a billabong called Doorriny. The brown shape near the centre of the painting is a hill called Doowijem or Goorrbarloweny – Magpie Dreaming.

(Carlton desertriversea)

The landscape as a place one visits was captured by Giovanni-Battista Piranesi (Figure 1.1b), whose etchings of ancient Rome added non-existent ruins to enhance the spirit of antiquity so important to those who bought them to take home as a reminder of their Grand Tour, and so essential to the education of 17th century English gentlemen.

The way the landscapes shown here are visually represented depends not only on the type of environmental niche they illustrate, but also reflects the cultural background of the artists who created them and the viewer with whom they have been shared, since the comprehension of what we see and what it means relates to the cultural knowledge of both artist and viewer.

Something as familiar as what we make of the patterns seen on the Moon is also influenced by culture. In Britain the most common understanding is a face (‘the Man on the Moon’), while in Japan people see a rabbit (Figure 1.2). This example illustrates the diversity of culturally based interpretations of the Moon’s surface, full of craters we observe from the Earth.

Figure 1.2 Different interpretations of ‘blobs’ on the Moon’s surface. a) image of the Moon as seen from Earth; b) rabbit on the Moon, as seen in Japanese culture; c) the ‘Man on the Moon’ as seen in European cultures.

The sculpture by Damien Hirst, the Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (Figure 1.3), created in 1991 and comprising a dead shark suspended in formaldehyde, and a small figurine of a horse made from mammoth ivory (48 mm wide, 25 mm high, 7 mm thick) dated to the Upper Palaeolithic (around 31,000 years ago) from the Vogelherd in Germany, can both be interpreted using similar modes of understanding, as shown in subsequent chapters. I suggest that contemporary visual art and archaeological interpretation are created and practiced in the same cultural, social and economic milieu. The people who create art objects or dig objects out of the ground and use these to create interpretations of the past are part of the same societies, the same shared cultures. Therefore, the concerns and ideas of one discipline can be found in the other, since people inhabit and reflect the culture and society in which they live. Both post-processual theoretical standpoints and the use of scientific method reflect the concerns and ideas of the world of which archaeology practitioners are a part.

Figure 1.3 a) Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczęsny after: © Damien Hirst and Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2020); b) unknown artist, horse, Vogelherd, c. 31,000 years old (redrawn and amended by A. Szczęnsy).

Living in the contemporary global world, we share broad and often implicit ways of understanding and communicating imagery through visual media. In a way, the principles of visual vocabulary, such as linear perspective or the way we look at a map, seem natural. We know that the size of an object further away in the distance appears smaller than one closer to us, as in the picture by Meyndert Hobbema, The Alley at Middelharnis (Figure 1.4), in which the trees closer to us are taller while those further away gradually become smaller.

Figure 1.4 Meyndert Hobbema, The Alley at Middelharnis, 1689 (redrawn and amended by A. Szczęsny after: Hobbema. Wikipedia).

When we look at a modern map we know that North is always at the highest point or top of the picture, while South is lowest or at the bottom; the West is on the left while the East is on the right (Figure 1.5). Use of the Western visual tradition allows the viewer to employ the same approach to objects that have been created in different cultural and historical contexts, e.g. a shark suspended in formaldehyde or a bear from the earliest art we know, from Chauvet Cave dated to c. 32,000 years ago. Despite saying that, however, in the course of this book I will be using elements of non-Western visual traditions, making use of visual ‘translation’, to enable us to see and understand different ways of projecting and creating images outside our own visual vocabulary.

Figure 1.5 Map of the world showing the most common projection used in contemporary cartography – with the west to the left and the east to the right.

Visual art and the brain

When talking about art we need to ask ourselves what visual art is, since without clarification of the concept we might be at a loss when discussing particular ideas or material culture. Art can be divided into two different but inseparable categories: first, art as visual expression is a part of the neurophysiological capacities of our bodies; and second, as a culturally moderated understanding of the world we inhabit which allows us to make sense of it, and to derive meaning from what we see and create.

The neurophysiological aspect of seeing constrains the way we conceptualise the world around us, for example, to see in the far distance humans need to use binoculars, while birds can see well both at close proximity and far away. Humans can see a particular spectrum of colours while elks do not see orange – something that hunters make use of as they can see each other during hunting trips but their orange jackets are invisible to the elks they are hunting. This allows humans to experience and conceptualize the world around in a particular way: as philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002: 82) wrote: ‘I am conscious of my body via the world’. We know what we see because we have prior culturally generated knowledge that we acquire mainly during childhood and also in later life through the process of learning. This allows us, for example, to make a distinction between a mug and a cup, or a wine glass and a water glass. We only see 10% of what surrounds us (Ratey 2002), at first concentrating on the edges to detect visual noise so our vision focuses on the most distinctive zones that create divisions between one set of areas and another, as we physiologically make sense of what we are seeing by distinguishing different parts of our surroundings. Figure 1.6 illustrates this: on the right side we have a single face against a clear background, while on the left there are many faces against busy backgrounds.

Figure 1.6 Illustration showing visual noise versus visual silence.

We can immediately make sense of the picture on the right, not because it shows only one face, but because there is enough space around the face to allow us to focus on the image with no further interruption from the clear background. The visual information entering our brain is restricted by the visual silence around the image, with visual noise coming only from the image of the face itself. In the second picture, composed of a number of faces against a busy background, visual noise is much higher and our brains need some time to make sense of what we see. Each of us can recall instances when we looked at an image and felt that we needed to say to the person wanting to know what we thought about it: wait a minute, let me concentrate. In such instances our brains are bombarded with visual information, and need time to distinguish between what is important and what is not.

This principle was used in interpreting prehistoric rock art from northern Russia dated to around 4,500 years ago (Janik et al. 2007). One of the rock art compositions consists of a number of different scenes of marine and terrestrial hunting, where the visual importance is placed on the scene of an elk hunt (Figure 1.7). The implications of this visual signification made us focus our research on this scene, to establish the concept of experiential art based on the experience of skiing and familiarity with local landscapes that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. How contemporary is prehistoric art?
• 2. The origins of art
• 3. The gallery: unveiling visual narrative
• 4. Power of display: the artist and the object
• 5. Embodiment and disembodiment: the corporeality of visual art and interwoven landscapes
• 6. Portraiture and the reverence of the other
• 7. Conclusion
• Index