In December 1994, three speleologists discovered a cave in Ardèche which would shatter all our knowledge and beliefs regarding prehistoric art. The thirtieth anniversary of the discovery of the Chauvet cave is an opportunity to take stock of what cave paintings have taught us about art and empathy.
6 mins
By Eva Aladro Vico, Complutense University of Madrid
British writer and art critic John Berger was one of the first modern scholars to emphasize, in his study of animal paintings of the Chauvet cavethe eminently artistic character of the primitive Paleolithic paintings that humans have painted for 20,000 years in caves and shelters around the world.
When we ask an expert today what goal the cave painters pursued in representing images of animals, we often come up against a utilitarian interpretation: our ancestors painted to attract game and promote their material interests, in the superstitious belief that by painting they would somehow achieve what they were looking for.
This English essayist, expert in human visual culture of all times, offers a different analysis. According to Berger, “The primitive artist had an intimate and exhaustive knowledge of these animals; his hands were able to imagine them in the darkness.” Inside the immense cave, silent and dark, the emergence of these images gave him the feeling that “most of the animals painted at Chauvet, in real life, were ferocious; however, the images betray no fear. Respect, yes, a fraternal and intimate respect. This is why, in every animal image, there is a human presence. A presence revealed by pleasure. Every creature present here is at home in man; a strange formulation, but indisputable. »
The successive, superimposed, unfinished paintings, interacting with each other thousands of years apart, are the multiplication of an absolutely unique phenomenon, in which, as in the medieval aesthetics of Saint Thomas“the perfect pleasure of the operation. » Rock art testifies to the reflection, thought and communication skills of its creators.
“Normal” art
The first idea you have to get into your head, to see rock art in all its splendor, is that it is art. And probably the most refined artistic mode that human beings have been able to develop and cultivate. As Berger asserts, artistic intention cannot be exploited for basely material purposes – to encourage hunting or ward off bad luck. They would hardly generate this absolute beauty: as the saying goes Guénonthe inferior cannot cause the superior.
But why can rock art be defined as art? It is a traditional art, in the sense that it is understood. Ananda Coomaraswamy when he talks about“normal art” : a means of communication capable of transmitting the best way of doing things, whose fundamental purpose is to transmit experiences that expand human freedom and capacity.
This “normal” conception of art is the one that has prevailed in Eastern culture, and in Western culture until the Renaissance, for millennia. The artist is not a particular type of man, but every man is a particular type of artist. Beauty is a cognition, that is to say a form of knowledge of reality, of its true essence, produced by operations in which we access ideas, which help to represent the experience in a harmonious, clear and integral.
There is no art as a special value, but art, whether fine art or folk art, manual art or high art, crafts , poetry and songs, decoration, architecture or dance, is integrated into all daily experiences, without being confined to museums or constituting speculative value. And in normal traditional art, all artists are anonymous: simple mediators, their function is to immerse themselves and disappear into the perfection of their work, and to give birth to what they are capable of seeing.
The normal conception of art is precisely that which we can appreciate with cave paintings. The artist is anonymous, he does not need to sign, he is not there. There is nothing left but his incredible, eternal gaze on the animal.
Empathy and communication across millennia
Animals are, in a way, mediators, or means for expressing and realizing the most profoundly human experience of existence. This is what the cave paintings tell us. Beyond humans, the cave artist understands better than us that animals – the other living beings on the planet, the beings created with such beauty and harmony on this earth – are the path to realization human existence. Nothing more, nothing less.
This approach is based on ethics and sensitivity that are impossible to surpass.
When we look at a cave painting, we see pure art. Artists cease to be of their species to be the image they paint, as advocated by the great Japanese painter Hokusai : if you want to draw a bird, you have to become a bird. These paintings show us the way towards a mode of communication open to the future, an empathy for living and future beings. They testify to the search for a profound purpose, in which ethics and aesthetics come together.
Eva Aladro VicoCatedrática de Teoría de la Información, Complutense University of Madrid
This article is republished from The Conversation under Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.