I’m a shocking hypocrite when it comes to arts broadcasting, happy to rant and rail that the yarts doesn’t get enough coverage on tv, but scathingly critical whenever anyone attempts it. I was pondering this as I ranted away, watching “How art made the world” this evening, a documentary, about how art made the world. One of my problems with such documentaries is the pace of them. It seems to take an unending length of time to actually get to any point, and you really don’t need to provide any detailed evidence – the occasional reference to an ancient text and a Californian academic, and you’re right as rain to assert how the ancient Greeks felt about realism.
Tonight’s episode discussed the question of why humans distort the body when they depict it.
This practice apparently started with
Venus of Willendorf, 25 000 years ago, one of the earliest sculptures ever discovered. It’s strange how things are talked about has having “started” with the earliest example we’ve yet found, the implication being that we found the very first one ever. And it just happened to be in Europe, entrenching the notion that that is where civilsation in any meaningful sense truly took flight. It was entertaining to hear the description of it as a complete figure and then have the reveal and see a figure with no arms, legs that stop below the knee and who seems to have a crocheted beanie pulled down over her head. Of course, he meant complete as in the figure was complete as it was made, hence its interest to the topic of the program: why the omissions of some parts of the figure and the exaggeration of others (breasts, hips, genitals)? Which I thought was stunningly obvious, but that’s where the opportunity arose to bring in seagulls, so who am I to comment?
This required endless footage of seagulls, just in case you spent the past couple of years
melding with your toilet, and don't remember what they look like. Why, in a program about art, is so much time devoted to showing us seagulls and imagining a time line of world history by looking at a row of trees? Anyway, because seagulls recognise the red stripe on their mother's beak as the thing to bash for food, and will also bash sticks with a red stripe on them in an attempt to get food, and hence if seagulls were to open an art gallery they would put a stick on the wall with a red stripe and be strangely drawn to contemplate it. I thought that they would be drawn to bash it with their faces, but there you go. It is demonstrated therefore, that the human propensity to exaggerate the physical aspects of female bodies in early sculpture is a fertility thing. Well, just lucky they did that study about seagulls in the 50s or heaven knows when we could have ever figured that out.
I paraphrase: After a 100 000 years or so, of humans being nomads, there was a bit of weather, and sustainability became an issue. No one came up with the idea of Earth Hour, so instead they settled around the Nile, and founded Egypt. By 5000 BC Egypt was one of the first fully settled cities on earth with a stable agricultural and government systems. The first to use images of the body in art. Instead of exaggerating physical features as they did in Willendorf they created a stylised figure that was depicted according to a proportional grid that governed Egyptian art for millenia. To understand what this must have been like, we were asked to imagine that Picasso's works were the only image that we saw of the human figure depicted ever. A strangely irrelevant comparison, and one that seemed to imply that Egyptians were entirely muddled by only seeing people represented in one way, and could not read them as bearing particular meanings. It seemed strange to just discuss the human figure isolated from any other aspect of their art, especially hieroglyphs.
Ancient Greek statues would answer the question of why we depict people, if anything possibly could. Now there’s a shock. I paraphrase again: Ancient Greeks were fixated with the body, and they had very set ideas about what the body should look like. The more physically perfect you were, the more godlike you were seen to be. The Greek artists did something that no one had ever done before: they used their eyes. And came up with a greater realism than anyone ever had before. After going to Egypt and discovering that sculpture could be lifesize, or even larger! Although undoubtedly the Greeks came up with technical innovations and extraordinarily beautiful sculpture, to say that no other artists had ever used their eyes before is just bizarre. Realism perhaps became a goal that it had not been before, thus realism in their work is an expression of that, in the same way that the "Venus" is an expression of its maker's value of fertility. Anyway, they achieved realism, looked at it, and decided it was dull. Polyclitus figured out how to make it more interesting again by moving things around to depict a sense of movement in the figure. Everything had been leading to this! They created something more human than human! And so they went back to exaggeration! A strangely circular argument: earlier "primitive" art used exaggeration, the Greek's took us where we had never been before... and so they went back to exaggeration! Then the
5th century bronze warrior statues were declared the best sculptures ever. Quite a claim. I haven't seen them, so maybe when I do I'll have a bit of a Damascus, but although I can see they're stunning, to say that they are the pinnacle of sculpture seems at a tad hyperbolic.
But, this is why bodies in art look the way they do, because we humans don’t like reality. What we choose to exaggerate is "where the science gets left behind and the magic comes in."
Throw forward to a glimpse of Michelangelo & Henry Moore, and we're done.
Motivating the whole show seemed to be the idea that where art ended up, in say, 1950, was some how inevitable in 25 000 BC, rather than it being based on looking at what was around in 1950 and reading back into history, based on available, surviving examples. That isn't necessarily a bad way to discuss what artists in 1950 were doing, afterall, they were looking at those examples, but sweeping generalisations bug me. Particularly because what artists were doing in Papua New Guinea in 1950 had nothing to do with Ancient Greece, and distorted the body in specific and unique ways, and somehow they were "made" by Egyptian and European art... It's not impossible that I'm slightly overexposed, but the examples to make his case were so Art History 101 I couldn't really understand the point of making another documentary about it.
The ABC then proved me wrong by showing a great documentary about art half an hour later, about a community of Aboriginal people who started painting in 2002. They were forced to leave their traditional land in the 1960s by a drought, and had never returned. Last year a trip was arranged and the community travelled the four days it takes to return to their homeland. It was incredibly moving to see their return to the place they had been yearning for, and I found it fascinating to see how they painted in a contemporary form (ie acrylics on canvas) in their traditional visual language, to respond to this hugely emotive event.
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