How Did Art Begin?

When exactly did our ancestors begin to make art? This is an important question that is bound up with the early homo sapiens since making art suggests a sophisticated way of viewing and organizing the world.

While the jury is still out about when and where the first art was made (Australia? Europe? Africa?), there is a compelling argument by the French sociologist Georges Bataille for what drove early humans to make art: that lay in the idea of free spirit and play. It also lay in the growing urgency to express that there was something more to the world, that there were meanings to things and hidden secrets everywhere. Art was a way of recognizing the presence of energy and spirit in addition to brute matter. 

Once Upon a Time, a Group of Boys out Exploring the Hills…

The story is the envy of any adventurous adolescent. In 1940 some boys exploring the hills of Lascaux in the Dordogne region of France (north-east of Bourdeaux) stumbled upon a warren of caves scattered with artifacts, its walls animated by bold paintings of stags and bison, probably some early version of shrine for the sacred rites of Homo Erectus.

Dating from the early Paleolithic period of approximately 15000 BC, the caves are recognised as one of the most significant finds since the mid-eighteenth-century, when countless treasures emerged from the archeological digs in the hills of Herculaneum.

After W. F. Libby invented radiocarbon dating in 1949 and when interest in Australian Aboriginal art and culture took wing in the 1980s, the paintings of the caves of Lascaux were considered the oldest examples of 'art' in the world.

Lascaux cave paintings. 1940. Via History.com

Some still cling to the fact. First or not, the paintings of Lascaux are tenacious symbols of our artistic dawn. People still make the pilgrimage there, but as an ironic testament to our present culture with its uncritical appetite for entertainment and spectacle, what they go to see is a copy put in place to save the real caves from deterioration by the humid breath of ogling hordes.

Today, it is possible to visit a replicated underground passage near the original, duplicated as lovingly as Mad Ludwig's Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria has been for visitors' satisfaction Disneyland.  

The Birth of Art

Despite now being discredited in some of its facts, the most challenging, evocative, and convincing account of the birth of art continues to be 'Lascaux, or the Birth of Art' by the French sociologist and former Surrealist Georges Bataille. Bataille uses the finding of Lascaux to ask the simple question: stepping out of the void, what prompted early humans to make art?

Homo sapiens had long been walking the earth before these paintings; the bipeds well before the Paleolithic were already proficient at making tools.

It was only, as Bataille suggests, when these beings gained awareness of a deeper spiritual experience and, feasibly, a self-consciousness of themselves as beings in a world, that the reflection and affirmation of an inner life sought its outer form in what we call art. To some degree, behind all art is the urge to leave something behind, and in the ritualistic element are premonitions of a life beyond.

It was also a new form of production that was not linked to physical survival. Bataille’s thesis is all the more persuasive for the effort to incorporate his own physical experience of the works (when they were still open to the public). The commanding presence of these works, ‘Prehistory’s Sistine Chapel’, are for Bataille undeniable and of a piece with any masterpiece of any period of civilization. But unlike our most-cited masterpieces, these works lack all manner of attribution.

Their genesis remains obscure. For Bataille, they are decisive markers in the final transition away from appetitive animality to reflective humanity. These beings no longer just preoccupied themselves in the travails of survival, but indulged in the excesses of play, play being an expression of something more to life than the mere processes of self-preservation.

Ritual and Play

At this point, certain tools cease solely to have a merely prosthetic quality and become imbued with ritual significance. They gain added eminence owing to consciousness of the cycles and processes of life.

With this sense that there was something more to life, and the incorporation of ritual and play into life’s texture, the embrace of imaginative desire, language flourished. Language and art came to being through an added responsiveness to the beauties and dangers of life.

In an argument that in some respects presages Bataille’s, the Enlightenment philosophe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau cited music as proof of the origin of language: rhythm, sound, and modulation eventuated into the more regulated structure of language. The beauties of music are reminders that the first languages were 'the daughters of pleasure and not of need'. 

As a celebration of life, play must also permit of its opposite, death; ceremonies of living and dying are two sides of the same coin.

But within the ritual game, as Bataille points out, death is not considered negatively, for it finds itself embedded in the prohibitions that prop up the idea (or ideas) of culture that we cherish today. Thus Bataille's most audacious assertion about humanity and the idea that undergirds most of his writing: 'without prohibition there is no human life.'

All of his major studies, The Interior Experience (1943), Erotism (1957), The Accursed Share (1949), and The Notion of Expenditure (1949), revolve around the notion of humanly excess that should either be hemmed in or expelled.

Bataille’s ideas share affinities with Freud’s concept of repression, the Greek process of katharsis as elucidated by Aristotle, and abreaction as examined by the mid-twentieth century anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. For Bataille, the excesses of our nature that prohibitions protect us from are shunted (or what Freud called cathected, a form of cathartic grafting or projection onto something) into the less damaging realm of art.

Art is, therefore, transgressive since it actualizes, metaphorically or not, what we are not allowed to name or do. But the method of actualizing, or revealing, is through repression, by making us aware that such disclosures are either forbidden, dangerous, or beyond our ken. Art makes the unpalatable palatable or the unrepresentable representable, from the excesses of sexuality to death's vales, excessive because they supersede physical and psychic human boundaries.

From Homo Faber to Homo Sapiens

What the beings in the cave at Lascaux were enacting had to do with their principal activity, hunting yet raised and expanded with all the dalliances of a game. Naming us Homo sapiens, the ‘man who thinks’, the one who supplants homo faber, the 'man who works' is for Bataille a misnomer—for the most significant contribution of homo sapiens is play; homo sapiens is, therefore, better called homo ludens (man who plays).

In this case, knowledge of the world is mediated through play, embodied in ritual, whose aesthetic form is what we now call art. Art-ritual is the physical expression of something additional to their work. It is also what keeps the extremity of their desire—the desire for physical transcendence, to go beyond themselves, which ultimately courts pain and death—in check.

Denis Hollier describes Bataille's birth of painting thesis in terms of a displacement of the productive-reproductive urge, where rather than just discharging desire, the developed intelligence of the new human seeks recourse to symbols of his desire:

Deep within the labyrinth of Lascaux, in the most famous of its wall paintings, Bataille saw a minotauromachy: a man lies, dead on the ground, and beside him is the animal. Les Larmes d’Éros [Tears of Eros] describes the bison as 'a sort of minotaur' and connects the question of the difference between animal and man with the question of painting, to the extent that, for man, painting would be the refusal of reproduction and the assertion of nonspecific difference with himself. Minotauromachy—posited as a myth of the birth (death) of man and the birth of painting, breaking with the classical tradition that, since Alberti, had claimed that the assertion of human form expressed in the Narcissus myth was the original pictorial urge. 

Bataille makes it clear that the rites of life that the early humans of Lascaux celebrated in worshipping the animals that sustained them were matched in equal measure to the end of life.

Death, in the earliest ritual, according to Bataille, was neither feared nor shunned. Art straddled the extremes of the known, named world of things and the unknown, unnamed world of omens and shadows.

In such rituals, the living confronted death with the afterlife, as is the case with all forms of death rites, from Aztec sun worship to Aboriginal and American Indian burial ceremonies, to voodoo dance. 

The earliest art forms are the rites at the centre of such celebration. 'In isolation' concludes Bataille, 'making an outline of a figure is not a ceremony, but it is one of its constitutive elements, consisting of a religious or magical operation’.

The birth of the being who orders life according to laws not solely tied to everyday needs—but with something else, 'magical'—is also the birth of art. This 'human world' that binds 'the signification of man to that of art, […] delivers us, albeit each time for a short time, from sad necessity, and makes us surrender in some way to that marvellous burst of richness for which each of us is born'.