Ur Art - Primordial Art: where it all came from by Bob Cotton 2021
I have this fascination in imagining the kind of primordial campfire gathering that must have been a norm amongst our ancient (paleolithic - neolithic?) nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors. The omnipresence of Sun, Sky, Weather, Moon and Stars, the quest for Water, Food, Shelter, Safety - all these physical necessities married to the psychic essentials of Emotion, Meaning, Friendship, Love, Family, Tribe - of Living.
(illustration: historyinterpreted.com)
The fire-light, the coloured smoke, sparks and flames of different woods, the crackling of the fire, the whirling star-light, the shifting moon-light, the shamen-performer (or just the old ones retelling their tales), the stories drawn from the collective memory and wisdom of the tribe - the long mnemonics - what Albert Lord called the Singer of Tales - the infinite variety of the Song, the weaving together of a story relevant to those listening and participating - singing the chorus, asking the questions, the re-enactments of bits of the story, the miming, the running jokes, mimicry, the laughter, the ribaldry, the dancing, the personal and tribal anecdotes, the origin stories, mimicry and jokes, the acrobatics, the music, the drumming, the face-making and face-paintings, body-markings, the animal and bird costumes and head-masks, the ululation, the cries of fear, of joy, the ghostly moon, flitting clouds, the shooting stars, the vast milky way, the infinitude of it all, the wild, the fire-shine tribal family linked together by firelight…. Is it those 90, 000 - 15000 thousand years of our nomadic evolution, our portability, our seasonal migrations, our family-tribal unity around the fire and the food, after the hunting/gathering - that we try to re-evoke vicariously in these multi-media performances-cum-story-telling performances that we enjoy now?
Of course, the root of our human consciousness is in language...our ability to talk and communicate effectively with others (much more to come on this...) But let's start with Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals - the Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body (2005) - this is the best overview I have found in this ongoing quest to discover the roots of consciousness, of culture, the arts and human interior Life and communal Life. Essentially, Mithen summarises several overviews of what John Pfieffer has termed 'the Creative Explosion' - the period roughly 40,000 - 10,000 years ago, marking the ending of the last Ice Age or the 'upper Paleolithic' this is the period when modern humans - CroMagnons - modern homo sapiens - appeared alongside homo Neanderthalensis in Europe and elsewhere - signified by the appearance of grave goods (implying a belief in the afterlife) portable sculpted stone and boneware (often 'Venuses'), more sophisticated stone-tools, and weapons, more sophisticated hunting tactics, and very sophisticated representational cave art...
Maros Panskop Konst South Sulawesi approx 43,900 years old. This is likely the earliest naturalistic cave painting yet found.
Kakadu National Park, Australia from 20,000 BC to recent - 'x-ray' drawings of men and animals
South African forager art c25,000 BC
Re-drawing from tracing of a ‘horse site dancing group’ in the Maloti-Drakensberg. Humans in various stages of transformation ‘take on’ the qualities of baboons. Colonial-era sources point to their integration of baboon abilities, alongside a social position that mimicked the position of baboons relative to human communities. Thus, as the AmaTola raiders aligned their behaviours and capabilities to baboons, so did they literally and figuratively become them (after Challis 2012). Re-drawing by Challis.
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/12/1099
This is how, over the many hundreds of thousands of years of our human migration across and from Africa, and our nomadic wanderings and explorations around the World, before we had writing, that we ’stored’ our family and tribal memory - in experience and oral memory and in the stories we told ourselves - how we transmitted our culture to each other (our families, our tribe, other humans) through the long childhood of mankind until and even after we invented pictures, sculptures, pictographs, and ‘writing’ to preserve and externalise our memories and our stories. And don’t think that what we did from about 90,000 years ago - when we began to travel outside of Africa - to around 4000 years - when we invented writing - is not important because it was so long ago. It was during these 300,000 - 30, 000+ years (c8000 generations) that we invented talking, gesture, enactment, story-telling, poetry, singing, dancing, dressing-up, music-making, drama, and painting and sculpting of forms and images. And we invented/discovered fire-making, water-carrying vessels, pottery, jewellery, facial cosmetics, tanning hides, sewing fabrics and skins together for clothes, making tools, weapons, and learning the arts of hunting animals to eat, or of foraging food, discovering cooking, and food preservation (sun-drying, salting or smoking) and much else that was essential for our survival and the survival of our collective culture.
And how we preserved our memories in the art of storytelling in drama, and in song, or listening to and participating in storytelling - and in retelling stories to our children - all this was probably our central art-form. Telling and singing stories and listening to stories was our only truly portable culture. Surely, we also made portable images - the tiny Venuses or female carvings- the paintings we made in deep Caves surviving from around 40,000 years ago, which we can imagine were accompanied by verbal stories, even rituals, while they were painted and sometimes inscribed on the cave walls, in the light of animal-fat torches and flickering firelight ...
diagram of homo sapiens dispersion out of Africa (wikipedia)
Much has been written about the origin of myth, religion and fairy-tale - by experts as diverse as Joseph Campbell, James George Frazer, Bruno Bettelheim, Marina Warner, Milman Parry, Albert Lord, the Brothers Grimm, Christopher Booker, and there is general agreement that these stories, though widely different, shared common characteristics across all world cultures - pointing to a common origin, our experiences in Life:
Joseph Campbell: The Hero's Journey from The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949)
I believe that these multifarious UR (primordial) arts, bolted together with narrative (and with the intention of communicating with others - using all the means we were developing - language of words, gesture, sign, shouting, singing, enacting, dancing), remain the core vocabulary of 21st century creativity. They are multimedia, interactive, immersive, story-telling, synesthetic and multi-sensory, stochastic - almost a definition of the zeitgeist of now. Can we use the transposition of imagery, colourways, story-telling, spatial geometry, creative memory, fantasy and enhanced fiction - as Yorgos Lanthimos does so well in Poor Things (2023) and George Miller did in Three Thousand Years of Longing, and the Daniel's have done in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022) (and as Danny Boyle does so effectively in Free Your Mind: The Matrix Now 2023) to create cutting-edge evocations of our Quantum-reality, Large-Language, mega-channel, multi-choice, simultaneously immersive and synesthetic ultra-mediated world?
Q.E.D. - Yes we can!
And what exactly is the role of Large-Language Models in evoking the primordial multimedia fire-light (the Monomyth) experience of our collective unconsciousness? There's lots more to be done - we can evoke Robert Graves' hair-raising, skin-crawling experience of the White Goddess - and we can be inspired by the mind-warping mix of multi-lingual, multi-dimensional narratives and word-play in Joyc'e Finnigans Wake - we can simulate the earliest cultural experiences, and stimulate our contemporary cultural responses through these UR Arts... Here the AI/chat GPT companies are taking - literally stealing - all the knowledge, information and media-forms we have stored electronically and digitally over the last half a century or so - and I mean every thing that we have acquired by dint of observation, science papers, scholarship, art and media history - all the songs, all the art, all the photos, graphics, films, all the newspapers, all the magazines and peer-reviewed journals, all the museum and gallery archives EVERYTHING we have made or recorded since the neolithic creative explosion. That's some Robbery! And they are SELLING it all back us in the form of Large Language Models - that's some fucking CHEEK. The least they should be made to do in recompense is build the best Learning Buddies/Mentor Maidens/lifelong learning champions - tailored specifically for ALL of us to grow and learn with, for all of our lives. it would be like having personal teachers, expert mentors, practical designers, engineers and crafts-people, cuddly nursery teachers, best peer-learning buddies, professional and entrepreneurial wizards, old-age companions, medical experts, care-givers, helpers, and lifelong advisors - and to give us all of this FREE in return for all of mankind's knowledge.
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Approaching the Zeitgeist:
Lazlo Moholy-Nagy: interpretive diagram of Finnegan's Wake (1946) In one picto-gram you get to see something of the complexity (but not the deep poetry) of Finnegans Wake - as analysed by a fellow polymath - closely following Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944)
top Wachowskis: The Matrix (1999);
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKQi3bBA1y8
Antonia Byatt: The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye 1994; George Miller: Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWGvntl9itE&t=151s
Danny Boyle: Free Your Mind: The Matrix Now 2023;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ab-jIaWdLFQ
meta-historical scenes from Yorgos Lanthimos: Poor Things 2023;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5KiC0GgED0
Ames Room 1946 by Adelbart Ames from mediainspiratorium 2020; The Daniels: Everything, Everywhere All at Once 2022;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxN1T1uxQ2g
Exquisite Corpse by Knutson, Hugo and Breton c1930; )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14quqI-El6g
Danny Boyle: Free Your Mind..The Matrix Now (2023)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfHiMd7JAvQ
(bottom): Tony Oursler: Number Seven Plus or minus Two 2010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNrwxYeHw-I
AES+F: The Last Riot 2007 - part of the triple-screen immersive display at the Russian pavilion, Venice Biennale. I sat entranced as AES+F showed their slo-mo mix of computer-animation, high-res multi-cultural tableaux. This was the first in their elegant and eloquent Liminal Space Trilogy - and it was stunning.
https://aesf.art/projects/last_riot/
Trimalcho trailer
"AES+F are Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky and Vladimir Fridkes. The group focuses on photography, photo and computer-based art and video art, along with the use of traditional media such as drawing, painting and sculpture. They create intellectually and emotionally fascinating, wholly immersive visions - a mix of teenage aspiration and fears, high-gloss fashion photography and styling, and CGI scenarios presented in slo-mo - the cumulative effect is breath-taking..."
https://www.cornerhousepublications.org/app/uploads/book-pdfs/book-37382.pdf
It is works like these that seem to occupy the spirit of this age - the 21st century zeitgeist, aiming to realise composite art-works that are immersive, often interactive, multimedia, synesthetic/multi-sensory and suggest or create new hyperspatial, transtemporal, narratives... like those mentioned above. You could argue that this stream of creativity is rooted in William James' description of our experience of our own consciousness as a stream of consciousness - and its apotheosis in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake...
Let's Go!