I am working on a small terracotta, just to get used to being in the new studio, and also in homage to the Ice Age Art exhibition at the British Museum visited two weeks ago. The artifacts were stunning, pieces that I have only previously seen illustrated in books and thus only two dimensional images, however subtle the photography. The individual objects are so tiny and intense: it was unbelievably frustrating with so many people trying to view them at the same time. But that wasn't as taxing as the interpretation panels - I didn't know whether to protest aloud or fall about on the floor in hysterics, but I fell back on my usual English reserve, and fumed quietly within.
The panel below one very early terracotta figurine described how there were many broken pieces nearby where this was found. It went on to suggest that this might be an early example of performance art, as the makers knew that they could not fire wet clay. Performance art??? Perhaps the scholar writing this text did not appreciate that it is not only wet clay that will result in exploded pieces, but not being hollowed out, trapped air, impurities in the clay, too much heat applied too quickly, all can result in disaster. I expect it took a while before all these difficulties were understood and no doubt a successful outcome was initially much rarer than otherwise. Even with our industrially prepared clay and technologically advanced kilns, explosions are always a possibility.
But that wasn't the worst of it, a miniature head, irregularly modelled with one eye slightly lower than the other and one cheekbone less pronounced than the other, was interpreted as a portrait of a woman with a deformed face. What on earth is going on? This is the British Museum where one would expect expert understanding of the processes of making along with serious consideration of the metaphorical content of these works.
Still, fortunately, the works spoke powerfully for themselves, in spite of the difficulty of viewing, thanks to the press of people around the display cabinets. I have always been inspired by these masterpieces yet seeing them in the round was a far more intense experience than I had imagined - the tenderness of modelling of the Zaraysk Bison combined with its stunning clarity of form, for example, can not be communicated in a two dimensional image. The natural structure and texture of the material was exploited to express a grandeur of scale that one would not have thought possible in such a miniature object.
The Lions in the Chauvet Cave above were obviously not in this Ice Age exhibition, but it is an image I scanned from an article by Peter Campbell in LRB 28.11.2011. An artist I showed it to was disappointed, he said, by the realism. What can you say? There is no willful stylisation, perhaps that is what the artist regretted. Style is signature, and perhaps a wonderfully vital depiction lacking this authority of individual ownership, as it were, is a threat somehow to contemporary fantasy.
This is a long rant, as usual. It takes a lot of pent up frustration to get me round to bothering. This next and last bit of rant is a result of listening to a discussion about nature on Radio 4 - can't remember when or who. But the gist was that nature can no longer be discussed as a valid concept in art because all nature is subject to man's interference, and there is no longer any such thing as virgin nature. Does nature not count unless it is virginal? It's surely a misunderstanding to think that the concept of nature only has power as manifestation of an unobtainable ideal - innocent, untamed, unsullied - only sacred or powerful when uncorrupted by man's penetration (to use a provocative term, for surely there is a sexual parallel here?) What a torment for the man who longs for the virginal, but with opportunity, would break the very thing he holds sacred! What an amazing arrogance to forget the divine fury of nature along with her sacred gift of life, death and regeneration. Breughel's "Fall of Icarus" comes to mind. The ploughman pays lowly homage as he labours upon the land, whilst Icarus falls unregarded from his great height.
OK, so a scholar would query, quite rightly, what exactly is signified by my use of this term 'nature' and I am not capable of presenting a logical argument for it. I am not a philosopher, trained to handle the complex duplicity of language. I hold philosophy in high regard, but we all need some sort of narrative, however philosophically unsound. I start with the premise that we are of nature, born of it and dying into it, symbiotic within it, manipulating and manipulated by it, consuming and consumed by it, and thus I start with the premise, at least, that one can have a concept of nature very, very different from idealisation.
Perhaps the Ice Age image makers were wiser than we modern animals who mistake the replication with which we are conscious of things for the actuality. A philosopher will object to the invalidity of the term 'actual' as something that cannot be known or proved - as if only what can be honed within the structural enclosure of language can be acknowledged as sound thought. Art is language too, pictorial in its form but still structural, and the Ice Age image makers no doubt hoped to control life by replicating it, as we do, confining it within pattern and form to make believable the authority of man's will. But within their images one can yet read a lingering awe and reverence that stretches the boundaries beyond self-reference - and I found it wonderfully inspiring and life enhancing.
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