Lascaux cave painting of bulls © 2012 . All rights reserved.

BORN IN A CAVE

When Picasso saw the cave paintings he said there is nothing to invent, no new way to paint, it is already done. It is true, they are amazingly modern yet intensely primitive at the same time. They could be shown in the most important modern gallery and nobody would bat an eye. Alas no one will ever see them as the cave men saw them, as marks on a wall that were no longer marks, but not really animals either. How could such a thing exist…something that was and wasn’t, but that everyone recognized deep in their psyche as sure as the moon traveled across the night sky. It was magic, a magic that still feeds our souls.

Venus of Willendorf looks like man’s first job. It’s a graceless, crudely obvious obsession that would occupy man’s penile brain until it ceased to function. But in the caves the human form is relatively absent, which makes one think man didn’t do it. The paintings are so beaautiful and simple that one assumes they were done by the gods. That the gods went down into the caves so they wouldn’t be bothered and sketched a few ideas of the kinds of animals they would put on the land. This was the birth of art, a gift of the god’s.

Since her birth in a cave, art has reached new highs with every civilization. However, the modern era has dealt her some severe blows. With the invention of photography, art lost her job as portrait painter. We no longer live under the gaze of our ancestor’s portraits, a subtle reminder of legacy, genetics and most important, inheritance. Instead we are subjected to photographs of everyone’s progeny, pets and puritan misdeeds. With the advent of movies, art lost half her audience when sex abandoned the canvas to lay across the silver screen screen shamelessly shedding all sense of mystery in endless chatter.

The American civilization has been particularly hard on Art. Under Abstract Art her new puritan masters forbid her to use images or stories. She had to repent for all those years of pretending she was Jesus and Mary wrapped in ecstasy. Minimalism took away all her clothes, her props, her imagination. Pop art made fun of her. Unable to return to the caves of Lascaux, where she was worshiped, she ended up in the dull secretarial job of supplying proofs for conceptual art’s rather obvious theories

I know what you are thinking – why don’t I just trot down to the California Surplus Market, buy the latest thing in loin cloths, whip up some sort of golden calf deal, and start my own religion instead of haranguing you. But it’s not that easy to return to the naive state of mind. For Art there is no going back. She must go forward no matter how twisted the trail gets, even if she falls off the cliff and is never heard of again. It’s not really art that progresses or dismally detours; it’s us, her audience. Whatever age the artist is in, or with whatever tool he has, there is always some shaman who is touched with magic, from the marks on the cave wall to the touch of God on the Cistine ceiling to the terror of Bacon.

Artillery Magazine Vol 4 no. 1 September/October 2009

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