Rock art aesthetics: Trace on rock, mark of spirit, window on land

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 57, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 451-458

  Heyd, Thomas ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 28944438153     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/432151     Document Type: Review

References (35)

1. James D. Keyser, Indian Rock Art of the Columbia Plateau (University of Washington Press, 1992), p. 125
2. See especially N. A. Cole, "Rock Art in the Laura-Cooktown Region, S.E. Cape York Peninsula," in Quinkan Prehistory: The Archaeology of Aboriginal Art in S.E. Cape York Peninsula, Australia, ed. M. J. Morwood and D. R. Hobbs, vol. 3, Tempus (St. Lucia, Queensland: Anthropology Museum, University of Queensland, 1995), pp. 51-69
3. M. J. Morwood, "Changing Art in a Changing Landscape: A Case Study from the Upper Flinders Region of the North Queensland Highland," in State of the Art: Regional Rock Art Studies in Australia and Melanesia, ed. Jo McDonald
4. and Ivan P. Haskovec (Melbourne: Australian Rock Art Research Association, 1992), p. 60
5. Aesthetics enters in mostly as ancillary, such as for the determination of "styles." This information is then used to understand diffusion of cultures and interaction among various groups within particular geographical areas. See, e.g., Noelene Cole and Percy Trezise, "Laura Engravings - A Preliminary Report on the Amphitheatre Site," in State of the Art, ed. McDonald and Haskovec, pp. 83-88
6. But see, e.g., P. S. Barry, Mystical Themes in Milk River Rock Art (University of Alberta Press, 1991), for an extended and compelling study of the aesthetics of the rock art at Writing-On-Stone (Alberta, Canada) intended to illustrate how the images were meant to render "serious meaning" for their makers
7. My proposal to consider rock art from the point of view of aesthetics peripherally touches the debate in anthropology regarding "art for art's sake" in Paleolithic art. That debate concerned the question whether "Palaeolithic [human beings] were artists simply because they appreciated beautiful things, and that therefore their artistic work had no special functional aim." Peter J. Ucko and Andrée Rosenfeld, "Critical Analysis of Interpretations, and Conclusions and Problems from Palaeolithic Cave Art," in Anthropology and Art: Readings in Cross-cultural Aesthetics, ed. Charlotte M. Otten (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1971), p. 252. Among anthropologists this point of view was rejected "early on" (p. 252), although Ucko and Rosenfeld argue that aesthetic pleasure may well have been the motive for some types of parietal art (p. 281)
8. See also John Halverson, "Art for Art's Sake in the Paleolithic," Current Anthropology 28 (1987): 63-89, for a recent revival of the "art for art's sake" thesis
9. For a developed defense of this view see Katya Mandoki, Prosaica: Introducción a la Estética de lo Colidiano (México: Grijalbo, 1994)
10. See, e.g., Ken Mulvaney, "What to Do on a Rainy Day: Reminiscences of Mirriuwung and Gadjerong Artists," Rock Art Research 13 (1996): 3-20. Although there may be important differences between Paleolithic and later rock art (as argued by Ucko and Rosenfeld, for example), and between rock art from one location and another, I do not discuss rock art in terms of those distinctions because my interest is in aspects of its aesthetics of relevance across time and space
11. See Clement W. Meighan, "Human Nature and Rock Art Production," Rock Art Research 13 (1996): 68. The term "geoglyphs" refers to rock arrangements placed on rock surfaces
12. This, for example, seems to be the upshot of Jerrold Levinson's "intentional-historical characterization of art-making." He argues that "if another culture has art, it must have art in our sense, more or less." See "Extending Art Historically" in his The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 154. Although he is willing to grant that we may speak of art "in culturally remote (including temporally remote, e.g., prehistoric) contexts" (p. 154), on his view this is justified only because those cultural manifestations are either progenitors of our artworks or because they were aimed "at the same kinds of reception or experiencing normative for later art" (pp. 168-169)
13. The institutional theory of art (see George Dickie, "The New Institutional Theory of Art," and Arthur Danto, "The Artistic Enfranchisement of Real Objects: The Artworld," both in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. George Dickie, Richard Sclafani, and Ronald Roblin [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989], pp. 171-182 and pp. 196-205, respectively) also supports this kind of judgment, since according to this theory, art requires the existence of appropriate institutions, including artists, art-appreciating people, and so on. Quite likely one or another (if not all) of the requisite features would be missing in the case of rock art, since the institutions required are those common to the modern European artworld
14. I prefer the expression "traditional art" for objects from traditional, small-scale societies that in the literature have been referred to by a variety of terms, including "primitive art'" (see H. Gene Blocker, The Aesthetics of Primitive Art [Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994])
15. See, for example, Eleanor Heartney, "Recontextualizing African Altars," Art in America 82 (1994): 58-65, which discusses a recent traveling show organized by the Museum for African Art
16. Blocker, The Aesthetics of Primitive Art, p. 21
17. Larry Shiner, "'Primitive Fakes,' 'Tourist Art,' and the Ideology of Authenticity," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (1994): 225-234
18. See, e.g., James Clifford, "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern," in his The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 189-214
19. Also see Kendall L. Walton, "Categories of Art," Philosophical Review 49 (1970): 337. He argues that "(some) facts about the origins of works of art have an essential role in criticism, that aesthetic judgments rest on them in an absolutely fundamental way."
20. Knowing the originary context of candidate artworks becomes problematic in a special sense when we come to think of the "beginning of art"; presumably there must be nonart objects that differ only slightly from the first work of art, and one may wonder how this difference is to be defined (see Levinson, and see Whitney Davis, "Beginning the History of Art," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 [1993]: 327-350, for discussion). I think that the correct way out of this problem is pointed at by Davis when he claims that we assign art status to Paleolithic art like the Lascaux paintings "retrochronologically" (p. 346) through a kind of "delayed activation" (p. 329). This seems to suggest that our procedure is to apply the term "art" provisionally to certain candidate items and, once we have the specifics of each item's context, decide whether we should repeal the designation or, alternatively, expand the concept "art" to keep the item in question within the category. (This account of how we proceed may be described as indebted to Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblances or to Quine's notion of interdependence of beliefs.)
21. See Halverson, and Paul G. Bahn in his commentary on Halverson (included in Halverson's "Art for Art's Sake in the Paleolithic," p. 73), on the appropriateness of supposing there to be composition in rock art panels
22. Cf. Davis, "Beginning the History of Art," p. 338
23. Paul Ziff, "Anything Viewed," in his Antiaesthetics: An Appreciation of the Cow with the Subtile Nose (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984), p. 134
24. See Steven J. Waller, "Sound Reflection as an Explanation for the Content and Context of Rock Art," Rock Art Research 10 (1993): 91-101
25. Notably, most contemporary earthworks and land art similarly depend on their particular location. The affinity in this respect between contemporary earthworks/land art and rock art has been noted by a number of authors, e.g., John Beardsley, Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), p. 8
26. and Lucy R. Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (New York: Pantheon, 1983). One may want to include in the category of environment-dependent art certain, though by no means all, architectural works, since many belonging to the modernist tradition were intended to be autonomous
27. Kari Jones, "Red Hands" (previously unpublished; written in Australia, 1992)
28. Also see Guy Lanoue, Images in Stone: A Theory on Interpreting Rock Art (Rome: Art Center, 1989)
29. Also see Ralph J. Hartley, Rock Art on the Northern Colorado Plateau: Variability in Content and Context (Brookfield, VT: Avebury, 1992), especially "Compiling Knowledge about the Environment," pp. 10-14
30. Richard Bradley, Felipe Criado Boado, and Ramòn Fabregas Valcarce, "Rock Art Research as Landscape Archaeology," World Archaeology 25 (1994): 387
31. Also see, e.g., Paul S. C. Taçon, "Socialising Landscapes: The Long-Term Implications of Signs, Symbols and Marks on the Land," Archaeological Oceania 29 (1994): 117-129
32. and Sven Ouzman, "Spiritual and Political Uses of a Rock Art Engraving Site and Its Imagery by San and Tswana-Speakers," South African Archaeological Bulletin 50 (1995): 55-67
33. See also Linda Connor et al., Marks in Place: Contemporary Responses to Rock Art (University of New Mexico Press, 1988)
34. Richard Bradley, "Rock Art and the Perception of Landscape," Cambridge Archaeological Journal 1 (1991): 77
35. See also Thomas Heyd, "Rock Art and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Natural Landscapes," Survey: Bolletino del Centro Studi e Museo d'Arte Preistorica di Pinerolo (forthcoming)