Ice Age 1: The Current Climate

Apologies, as once again I'm composing a post somewhat after an event.  I actually began writing this about a month ago as the exhibition 'Ice Age, The Arrival Of The Modern Mind' was opening at The British Museum.  Unsurprisingly, the BBC produced a piece of 'proper', informative T.V. to tie-in with, possibly, the most significant exhibition in some years.  This post began in response to it.

I don't watch much television these days but Andrew Graham-Dixon's 'Culture Show Special' on Ice Age Art proved both instructive and inspiring; sufficiently so that I quickly amended plans for a day in London and spent some considerable time in the actual exhibition.  For now I'll concentrate on my thoughts about the program, as originally intended.  Synchronicity of ideas always excites me and it connected rather startlingly with several other, superficially unrelated, issues that currently occupy my head space.

Andrew Graham-Dixon on 'Ice Age Art, A Culture Show Special', BBC2:
A Mission To Educate & Inspire Indiscriminately

The program showed A.G-D. stumbling around various Spanish caves with a torch to reveal cave paintings before visiting the British Museum to marvel over sculptural artifacts as they were curated in London.  In a fascinating section, he also visited a German Experimental Archaeologist, named Wulf Hein, who spends his time researching the methods used to produce such items.  That gentleman may have one of the most specialized and engaging jobs in the world.

Andrew Graham-Dixon on 'Ice Age Art, A Culture Show Special', BBC2

'Ice Age Art, Arrival Of The Modern Mind' Exhibition, British Museum, 2013

  

Amongst the show's wealth of information and amazement surrounding the sophistication of artworks produced over such vast timescales in the deep past, two specific points really struck a chord with me. In his introduction, our presenter stated…

"Everywhere you look in a great modern city like London, you're surrounded by evidence of man's extraordinary cultural achievements; his resourcefulness; his technology, but if you project yourself back through all the layers of the past, to our earliest history, you'll find that it all stems from one fundamental, extraordinary human attribute:  the desire, the impulse to create" [1.].

'Bison Cow', Zaryask, Russia, Mammoth Ivory & Red Ochre,
Approx. 22,000 Years Old

 Towards the end, contemporary sculptor and erstwhile anthropologist, Anthony Gormley pointed out that the Ice Age was a period when human populations were dwarfed by those of animals, for which their art shows such reverence, and seriously jeopardized by the harshness of their frozen living conditions.

"I think that we need to remember that Art was an essential tool, it wasn't just spears and scrapers, our populations were so small so threatened by ice; by immediate freezing over of all of the things that we need to sustain ourselves, that Art was the thing that provided the vehicle, imaginatively, for us to believe in our own survival" [2.].

Education Minister Michael Gove:  Somewhat Less Of A Mission To
Educate & Inspire Indiscriminately

 I was immediately prompted to reflect on the current public debate over The Coalition Government's proposed education reforms and Education Secretary Michael Gove's moves to devalue Creative Arts and Design-Technology subjects within the school curriculum and promotion of a narrow academic bias instead.  I won't get involved in an extended educational discussion here, (it could go on for some time).  Suffice it to say that his dangerous proposals strike me as perniciously short-sighted, particularly at a time when the full implications of successive British governments promoting banking and the non-productive service sector at the expense of manufacturing, innovation and a properly mixed economy are staring us in the face.

'Portrait Head' (L) & 'Mask' (R), Dolni Vestonice, Czech Republic,  Mammoth
Ivory, 31, 000 - 27,000 Years Old.  The World's Oldest Known Portrait.

I value the Comprehensive State education I received in the 70s immensely and, ironically, might even agree that some of the basic, essential skills and knowledge I had access to back then have been sorely neglected or 'dumbed-down' in intervening years.  But to deny equal status to all facets of human achievement and to shape a curriculum through which less academically orientated students are frustrated or more imaginative and 'vocational' achievements devalued, (when did that label become so derided?), IS JUST PLAIN WRONG.  Gove's recent policy reverse over the proposed wonky EBacc qualification is welcome and received much media attention.  Sadly, I'm yet to be convinced that he, or the narrow interests he serves, have suddenly acquired anything like a holistic view of education, or that it will significantly alter the fundamental trend of his misguided reforms.

'Perforated Horse Head Adornment', Duruthy Cave, France,
Limestone, 13,800 - 13,500 Years Old

Many of the ancient artifacts under discussion are simultaneously utilitarian tools and exquisite artistic expressions. Furthermore, as Andrew Graham-Dixon revealed, they seem closely related to a profound ecological understanding, had an important social aspect, and even reveal the ability to respond musically and ritualistically to the physical environment.  It’s revealing that apparent specialists were permitted the time needed to refine them in the face of profound existential jeopardy.  Surely, it's powerful evidence of how inextricably linked and just how intrinsic to human existence the Arts, Technology and "the impulse to create"[3.], really are.  This stuff was part of what makes us human from the time we walked out of Africa.  To discard it now would be like willfully chopping off a limb.

'Flute', Hohne Fels Cave, Germany,  Vulture Wing Bone, 42,000 - 40,000
Years Old.  The World's Oldest Known Musical Instrument

'Decorative, Hooked End Of Weighted Spear Thrower (Mammoth)',
Montastruc, France, Reindeer Antler, 13,000 - 14,000 Years Old

Our own government seems to suggest that the only way to mend our failing economy, (and shore up an increasingly discredited ideology), is to construct an inequitable, nostalgic education model in which many of those very modes of thought needed to survive and prosper are neglected or snobbishly despised.  It seems ironic that the BBC's featured specialist in Ice Age manufacturing techniques is German.  He lives and works in a society that, apparently, gives equal status to academic knowledge, culture and manufacturing, and enjoys the most robust of all post-war European economies.  He hardly seemed like a duffer to me.  Get yourself down the British Museum Mr. Gove!

'Panel Of Hands', El Castillo Cave, Spain.  At Least 40,000 Years Old

I made a couple of other connections while watching 'The Culture Show'.  Both sprang from its depiction of the famous, prehistoric reverse-stenciled hand paintings in Spain's El Castillo Cave.  I find these fascinating and have already referred to them in a previous post when I made a link between them and a contemporary fragment of hand-printed street art that I found in a Leicester back street.

Negative Hand Prints, Ball Discs & Graffiti, Burleys Flyover, Leicester, 2013

The impulse to leave such marks obviously remains strong as more recent photographs of mine demonstrate.  While carrying out a 'psychographic' examination of a current favourite locale, I came across numerous handprints high up on the filthy concrete of an elevated road support. Being negative images, these are even closer in nature to the prehistoric examples and, being inaccessible to normal reach, must also have required both effort and collaboration to produce. (That the accompanying cock & balls motif lacks some of the sensitivity of prehistoric depictions suggests that we cannot risk any further neglect of artistic skills in our own schools). 

Negative Hand Prints, Ball Discs & Graffiti, Burley's Flyover, Leicester, 2013

And whilst on the subject of genital graffiti…

What is singularly intriguing about El Castillo's 'Panel Of Hands' is that their scale and finger length indicate they may have been female.  Later, in his program, A.G-D. showed us a remarkable cave of surreal water-sculpted complexity that contains apparent multiple depictions of female genitalia.  Is it possible that a female-dominated caste of artist was at work in prehistoric Spain?  Might even the shaping of limestone formations into strangely pelvic concavities and the numerous labia-like pictograms be spectacular celebrations of female fertility and sexuality; of the most fundamental mode of creation?  Please, tell me it's not all just pornographic doodling.

'Venus De Lespugue', Lespugue, France, Mammoth
Ivory, Approx. 23,000 Years Old

Jenny Saville, 'Propped', Oil On Canvas, 1992

Thinking about all this I was reminded of German painter George Baselitz's heavily reported (at the time)comment that women are unsuited to becoming great painters.  I'm hoping he was taken out of context, or merely performing a crass piece of self-publicity, and doesn't actually expect us to take him seriously.  Actually, Baselitz's conflation of market value with artistic success to prove his point suggests he has little of interest to say on the matter, (sadly, it also blows my theory about insightful, well-rounded Germans out of the water).  Either way, perhaps he should take a look at the 'Panel of Hands' then have a word with Jenny Saville, Fiona Rae and many others.

'Ice Age, Arrival Of The Modern Mind' runs until 26 May 2013 at The British Museum, London.  I would urge you to take a look if you have any interest at all in who and what we are.

[1.], [3.]:  Andrew Graham-Dixon, 'The Culture Show - Ice Age Art: A Culture Show Special', BBC 2, First Broadcast: Saturday, 9 February 2013.

[2.]:  Anthony Gormley, 'The Culture Show - Ice Age Art: A Culture Show Special', BBC 2, First Broadcast: Saturday, 9 February 2013.