On Art as an Evolutionary Force
In which I argue that art is among the most important things humans do.
Note: With today’s newsletter, Artlandia for the next ten weeks will be published just once a week, Wednesdays at 10 a.m. The Sunday evening “I am Reading/Watching/Listening” series will be incorporated into this weekly installment. - DB
Last week I remarked that I’d come around—after far too long, in hindsight—to the idea that “art is literally one of the most important things humans do.” I want to expand on that, because it really gets to the crux of things, the reason I created Artlandia as an outlet for my thinking about art.
By art—lest anyone need a reminder—I mean all of it: Painting and music, dance, theater, sculpture, architecture, poetry and fiction, etc. And you’ll get no objection from me by asserting that craft (say, quilting, woodworking, fashion, etc.) is also art. All those and more obviously are art. I’ve taken a couple other swings at this topic, here on Substack and here at Oregon ArtsWatch.
My belief that art is among the most essential things people do was reaffirmed by a remarkable exhibition this spring at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem, Oregon. Singular Visions: Self-Taught Artists From the Permanent Collection is on display a few more days, through April 20. If you’re in the area, I recommend checking it out.
Curated by Jonathan Bucci with assistance from Corvallis artist Bruce Burris, the show features what I described here at Oregon ArtsWatch as the raw material from imaginations unhindered by theory or direction from teachers or other artists. In the art field, there are various names for it, none of which is entirely satisfactory: Folk art, outsider art, and art brut—a term given us by the French artist Jean Dubuffet which translates as “raw” art. In many cases, this is artwork that the makers never dreamed would be seen in a gallery or museum—or, in at least one instance, seen by anyone. In my latest piece at ArtsWatch, I spoke with an Indigenous artist whose photography exhibition is a collection of images he’d taken during a period when it didn’t occur to him to distinguish his artistry from the rest of his life, and the only place you’d likely have seen his work was on his Instagram.
All this reminded me of the Chauvet Cave paintings, created as long ago as 33,000 B.C.
In terms of Paleolithic cave art, Chauvet first comes to mind because it was featured in Werner Herzog’s 2010 documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. But those images are no longer the newest (or rather, oldest) kids on the block. In 2018, the journal Science published a European study showing that images in Maltravieso Cave and two others in Spain were created by Neanderthals more than 64,000 years ago.
Think about that. We’re talking about a species of human that went extinct. Imagine being a bare-assed Neanderthal trying to survive in a world you don’t understand … or rather, a world you understand in profoundly different ways. Sure, you’ve made some very simple tools that help with basic survival needs, but then you go and crawl into a cave and paint. You paint. Why? And how did those and other creative acts birth and fuel human imagination?
The late classics scholar Harold Bloom argued that for the West, Shakespeare “invented the human as we continue to know it” by creating literary works that gave artistic form to interiority and an astounding variety of human personalities. But he didn’t go nearly far enough. Prehistoric humans didn’t just make art; art made us.
Art is sufficiently complex and mysterious that entire books have been written trying to explain what it is, where it comes from, what it does, how it does it, etc. Trying to define it, basically. It’s an impossible task, but the best definition of art I’ve ever seen appears in the book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, by Canadian arts theorist J.F. Martel. He writes:
Art is the name we have given to humanity’s most primal response to the mystery of existence. It was in the face of the mystery that dance, music, poetry and painting were born.
So I stand my ground. Art is literally one of the most important things humans do, and not just because it was among the first things we did. As indicated by the Hallie Ford exhibition, art is among those things that humans do instinctively, on their own. Art was art before it was Art, which is a cultural distinction bestowed by modernity. Left to their own devices, humans can, will and apparently must make art.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this post featured an incorrect date for the Hallie Ford exhibition. It ends April 20.
I love this. It's exactly the type of thinking that is so important, and should be something we, as humans, just realize or "accept" more. I remember reading somewhere, maybe in Hugh Kenner, that Picasso went and saw the cave paintings in France and was so shook/moved by the experience that he "started over" in his work.