For all the ART brats.. art as abstraction..Art is always about something hidden. But does it help us connect with that hidden something? I think it moves us away from it. During the first million or so years as reflective beings humans seem to have created no art. As Jameson put it, art had no place in that unfallen social reality because there was no need for it. Though tools were fashioned with an astonishing economy of effort and perfection of form, the old cliche about the aesthetic impulse as one of the irreducible components of the human mind is invalid. The oldest enduring works of art are hand-prints, produced by pressure or blown pigment - a dramatic token of direct impress on nature. Later in the Upper Paleolithic era, about 30,000 years ago, commenced the rather sudden appearance of the cave art associated with names like Altamira and Lascaux. These images of animals possess an often breathtaking vibrancy and naturalism, though concurrent sculpture, such as the widely-found venus statuettes of women, was quite stylized. Perhaps this indicates that domestication of people was to precede domestication of nature. Significantly, the sympathetic magic or hunting theory of earliest art is now waning in the light of evidence that nature was bountiful rather than threatening. The veritable explosion of art at this time bespeaks an anxiety not felt before: in Worringers words, creation in order to subdue the torment of perception. Here is the appearance of the symbolic, as a moment of discontent. It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping away. The rapid development of the earliest ritual or ceremony parallels the birth of art, and we are reminded of the earliest ritual re- enactments of the moment of the beginning, the primordial paradise of the timeless present. Pictorial representation roused the belief in controlling loss, the belief in coercion itself. primitivism/case-art.htm
Posted on: Tue, 29 Jul 2014 21:48:53 +0000
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