Transfixed by Prehistory

An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time

Maria Stavrinaki, Jane Marie Todd

• Publisher: Zone Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781942130659
• eBook ISBN:
  9781942130666
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

An examination of how modern art was impacted by the concept of prehistory and the prehistoric

Prehistory is an invention of the late nineteenth century. In that moment of technological progress and acceleration of production and circulation, three major Western narratives about time took shape. One after another, these new fields of inquiry delved into the obscure immensity of the past: first, to surmise the age of the Earth; second, to find the point of emergence of human beings; and third, to ponder the age of art. Maria Stavrinaki considers the inseparability of these accounts of temporality from the disruptive forces of modernity. She asks what a history of modernity and its art would look like if considered through these three interwoven inventions of the longue durée. Transfixed by Prehistory attempts to articulate such a history, which turns out to be more complex than an inevitable march of progress leading up to the Anthropocene. Rather, it is a history of stupor, defamiliarization, regressive acceleration, and incessant invention, since the "new" was also found in the deep sediments of the Earth. Composed of as much speed as slowness, as much change as deep time, as much confidence as skepticism and doubt, modernity is a complex phenomenon that needs to be rethought. Stavrinaki focuses on this intrinsic tension through major artistic practices (Cézanne, Matisse, De Chirico, Ernst, Picasso, Dubuffet, Smithson, Morris, and contemporary artists such as Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Hirschhorn), philosophical discourses (Bataille, Blumenberg, and Jünger), and the human sciences. This groundbreaking book will attract readers interested in the intersections of art history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, mythology, geology, and archaeology.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. 1. See Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
2. 2. In his manuscript for the new edition of Les époques de la nature, Buffon, who had initially given the earth’s age as 75,000 years, hesitated between a few hundreds of thousands and a few millions of years. Was it easy, he wrote, or even possible “to form an idea of the whole or of the parts of such a long series of centuries?” His response was no. In the definitive version of Les époques de la nature, he returned to his first hypothesis of 75,000 years, which he justified in his introduction: “Is it not, one might ask, ‘adding a new cause of obscurity to the difficult things that you claim to explain, when such large numbers and inappropriate lengths of duration are used?’” Quoted in Jacques Roger, Buffon: A Life in Natural History, ed. L. Pearce Williams, trans. Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 412.
3. 3. See Claude Blanckaert, “Nommer le préhistorique au XIXe siècle: Linguistique et transferts lexicaux,” Organon 49 (2017), pp. 57–103.
4. 4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 347.
5. 5. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. and trans. Robert B. Loudon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 120. [The distinction between “discovery” and “invention,” découverte and invention, is less clear-cut in French than it is in English — trans.]
6. 6. Édouard Lartet, “Nouvelles recherches sur la coexistence de l’homme et des grands mammifères fossiles,” Annales des sciences naturelles, 4th series, 15, Zoologie (Paris: Victor Masson et Fils, 1861), pp. 177–253.
7. 7. Patrick Paillet, “Le mammouth de la Madeleine (Tursac, Dordogne),” PALEO 22 (2011), pp. 223–70. But Paillet’s consideration of the first discovery of Paleolithic art is treated with the same axiomatic neutrality that characterizes the writings of the first prehistorians, with no analysis of its epistemological, much less ontological, meanings.
8. 8. Édouard Lartet and Henri Christy, Cavernes du Périgord: Objets gravés et sculptés des temps pré-historiques dans l’Europe occidentale (1864; Whitefish: Kessinger Legacy Reprints, 2010).
9. 9. Jean-François de Nadaillac, Les premiers hommes et les temps préhistoriques, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions G. Masson, 1881), vol. 1, p. 6.
10. 10. John Lubbock, Pre-Historic Times as Illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages, 6th rev. ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1900), p. 319.
11. 11. Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, Breves apuntes sobre algunos objectos prehistóricos de la Provincia de Santander (Santander: Telesforo Martínez, 1880).
12. 12. Vitruvius, De architectura, bk. 6, chap. 5 in Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), p. 212; André Chastel, Le grotesque (Paris: Le Promeneur, 1991); Philippe Morel, Les grotesques: Les figures de l’imaginaire dans la peinture italienne de la fin de la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1997).
13. 13. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 25.
14. 14. The Theaetetus of Plato, trans. F. A. Paley (London: George Bell & Sons, 1875), 155d, p. 26.
15. 15. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen Voss (1649; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), art. 70.
16. 16. Ibid., arts. 76 and 73, translation modified.
17. 17. The mechanism behind this duality and the reasons for it — a duality that allowed modern consciousness to move from denial to appropriation, even obsession — have been neglected in interpretations seeking to explain the hesitancy that marks the reception of parietal art, for example, Ulrich Pfisterer, “Altamira — oder: Die Anfänge von Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft,” in Martin Mosebach, ed., Die Gärten von Capri (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2007), pp. 13–80.
18. 18. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
19. 19. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Hist...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• I. “We Slip Away from Ourselves” : The Discovery and Internalization of the Earth’s Age (Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries)
• II. Reconstituting the Antiquity of Humankind and of Art
• III. The Artificiality of Prehistory: A Disjunctive Genealogy of Art
• IV. The Paradox of the Neolithic: Rupture and Permanence, Order and Disorder
• V. Prehistory in the Atomic Age
• Conclusion: Terra Incognita
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index