Transfixed by Prehistory
An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time
Maria Stavrinaki, Jane Marie Todd
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Transfixed by Prehistory
An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time
Maria Stavrinaki, Jane Marie Todd
About This Book
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 durĂ©e. 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 (CĂ©zanne, Matisse, De Chirico, Ernst, Picasso, Dubuffet, Smithson, Morris, and contemporary artists such as Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Hirschhorn), philosophical discourses (Bataille, Blumenberg, and JĂŒnger), and the human sciences. This groundbreaking book will attract readers interested in the intersections of art history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, mythology, geology, and archaeology.
Frequently asked questions
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Notes
INTRODUCTION
- 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. In his manuscript for the new edition of Les Ă©poques de la nature, Buffon, who had initially given the earthâs 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 âto form an idea of the whole or of the parts of such a long series of centuries?â His response was no. In the definitive version of Les Ă©poques de la nature, he returned to his first hypothesis of 75,000 years, which he justified in his introduction: âIs it not, one might ask, âadding 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?ââ 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. See Claude Blanckaert, âNommer le prĂ©historique au XIXe siĂšcle: Linguistique et transferts lexicaux,â Organon 49 (2017), pp. 57â103.
- 4. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 347.
- 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 âdiscoveryâ and âinvention,â dĂ©couverte and invention, is less clear-cut in French than it is in English â trans.]
- 6. Ădouard Lartet, âNouvelles recherches sur la coexistence de lâhomme et des grands mammifĂšres fossiles,â Annales des sciences naturelles, 4th series, 15, Zoologie (Paris: Victor Masson et Fils, 1861), pp. 177â253.
- 7. Patrick Paillet, âLe mammouth de la Madeleine (Tursac, Dordogne),â PALEO 22 (2011), pp. 223â70. But Pailletâs 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. Ădouard Lartet and Henri Christy, Cavernes du PĂ©rigord: Objets gravĂ©s et sculptĂ©s des temps prĂ©-historiques dans lâEurope occidentale (1864; Whitefish: Kessinger Legacy Reprints, 2010).
- 9. Jean-François de Nadaillac, Les premiers hommes et les temps prĂ©historiques, 2 vols. (Paris: Ăditions G. Masson, 1881), vol. 1, p. 6.
- 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. Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, Breves apuntes sobre algunos objectos prehistĂłricos de la Provincia de Santander (Santander: Telesforo MartĂnez, 1880).
- 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; AndrĂ© Chastel, Le grotesque (Paris: Le Promeneur, 1991); Philippe Morel, Les grotesques: Les figures de lâimaginaire dans la peinture italienne de la fin de la Renaissance (Paris: Flammarion, 1997).
- 13. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 25.
- 14. The Theaetetus of Plato, trans. F. A. Paley (London: George Bell & Sons, 1875), 155d, p. 26.
- 15. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen Voss (1649; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), art. 70.
- 16. Ibid., arts. 76 and 73, translation modified.
- 17. The mechanism behind this duality and the reasons for it â a duality that allowed modern consciousness to move from denial to appropriation, even obsession â have been neglected in interpretations seeking to explain the hesitancy that marks the reception of parietal art, for example, Ulrich Pfisterer, âAltamira â oder: Die AnfĂ€nge von Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft,â in Martin Mosebach, ed., Die GĂ€rten von Capri (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2007), pp. 13â80.
- 18. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
- 19. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Hist...