" ... there are
Still songs to sing beyond
Mankind"
Paul Celan, Threadsuns
Art as violence
The Boy’s Own story of the discovery in 1940 of the linked caves at Lascaux in the Vezere valley in France, and the 600 or so 17, 000-year-old paintings inside them by schoolboy Marcel Ravidat and his mischievous scamp of a dog Robot can be found in all histories of Prehistoric art. Since Lascaux, older sites and cave art have been found: the Chauvet cave, discovered in 1994, contains friezes as well preserved and of comparable beauty as those in Lascaux that are 37, 000 years old. What makes Lascaux so special is that it contains the most written-about and analysed of all prehistoric images, the so-called La Scene du Puits. This is not the most beautiful of the paintings in Lascaux, but it is humanity’s first extant story or narrative, a murder mystery and, like the most disturbing of these, one that remains enigmatic.
Some of the longer prehistoric friezes found in caves may be hunting scenes or show, perhaps, the successive stages of the rutting cycle, but what is sequential or contiguous and denotes the passing of time is not a story. Considering the age of paintings in Chauvet it is extremely unlikely that La Scene du Puits is the first narrative; cave art and some portable objects are the only prehistoric art available to us, but they represent just a fraction of what would have been produced. Most would have been executed on perishable or temporary substrates such as wood, the human body, or outdoor rock exposed to the erasing elements.
La Scene du Puits is found at the bottom of a shaft more than five metres deep. It is extremely difficult of access, in the most profoundly dark and silent part of a place already one of profound darkness and silence. Yet the archaeological evidence indicates that this was the most frequented section of the Lascaux cave. The logistical challenges of creating or even viewing this painting would have been considerable. Yet by the time of Chauvet our prehistoric ancestors had mastered not just the manufacture of brushes, pigment and its binding, and of trompe l’oeil effects utilising the rock surface, but also the manufacture and use of ladders and scaffolding, and lamps for long-lasting light. The mixing of pigments would have been as specialised an activity as painting, one for which a complicated body of technical knowledge needed to be amassed. The women and men who made these paintings were also accomplished drafts-people who had practised a great deal. Such grace and economy of line, such haunting and time-transcending verisimilitude, indicate teaching and many hours of practice.
That the first story is one of violence should not surprise us: a haemoscopophiliac tendency runs through all visual culture from its very beginning, and painting across the ages is full of images of flayed, broken bodies, rapes, massacres, and battles. Mimesis and violence are fundamental to humanity, things of instinct and inherency, not mere ubiquity and inclination. Some cave paintings are thought to have been territorial markers, growing out of and promulgating conflict.
Palaeolithic flint weapons exceeded functionality into the aesthetic and the first symmetrically shaped objects, stone boluses, were likely used as weapons, to crack open bones for marrow, and animal skulls to get to the nutritious brain porridge that was so important for the development of the human brain (recent research suggests that cannibalism in pre-history, and even later, were much more commont than previously thought. A concise summary of this can be found in Richard Overy's recent book, Why War?).
Ancient human artists depicted first not only what they wanted to kill, but by extension and necessity what they wanted to eat, digest and excrete, and from which they would derive strength – digestion being the body’s mode of sublation.The first signs we read were animal tracks leading us to animals to kill, whilst red, the colour of blood, triggered stimuli which are thought to have been foundational for cognitive development and our very capacity for ideation. As Freud put it in Civilisation and its Discontents, “man’s deepest essence lies in drive-impulses that are elemental in nature and identical in all people”, noting that “the history of humanity is a history of race murders”.
In his early essay Primitive Art (1930), Georges Bataille suggests that both children and prehistoric artists assert their personality through a violent destruction of objects and that representation itself constitutes such ‘destruction’, that art is violence in the sense of a violent alteration and reclaiming of given reality: “it is always a question of the alteration of objects, whether the object is a wall, a sheet of paper or a toy”.
This is close to Kant’s notion of transcendental apperception, whereby ‘violence’ is necessarily done to reality in order for us to experience it at all, and in which consciousness itself acts as a manifold-ordering artist, and according to art historian Wilhelm Worringer, “the imaginative life of man is regulated by antithesis” and art began as a way to “tame the terrifying, hallucinatory manifold of reality”, something re-enacted every time an artist “makes an assault on the ineffable”.
According to Bataille, children’s art uses the same deforming, caricatural figuration as cave art and children “draw in their own way and by means of which the oppose themselves to adults “. He recalled his own youthful defacing of his copy books and schoolfellows’ clothing in this essay, claiming that in such activities he had “rediscovered the natural conditions of graphic art … a question of altering what one has to hand”.
La Scene du Puits
La Scene du Puits is a tableau that shows a bison with its entrails spilling out. In front of, almost underneath the bison, is a hybrid figure, part bird, part man. In contrast to the naturalism of the animal figures, he is depicted in a schematic, clumsy, stick-figure style. Underneath this prone, male figure with erect penis, arms outspread as if struck dead, is a bird, seen laterally, atop a stick. To the left of these figures is a rhinoceros, walking away from the scene.
Across the bison’s flank is a spear and next to that, underneath the bison, is what could either be a spear thrower, a stick, arrow, or short thrusting spear. The stick that supports the bird may be a line relating to and illustrating a Palaeolithic understanding of bird-flight and gravity. This bird-headed stick may also be a spear-thrower: it has a very strong resemblance to spear throwers with animals carved at one end that have been found in the Dordognen region. Between the bird and the rhinoceros are two parallel lines of three dots. The same abstract figures can be seen above the large auroch in the Hall of Bulls at Lascaux, and elsewhere. Everything we see in the cave would have had its equivalent in speech. Humans had had a well-developed Broca’s area of the brain (connected with speech) since Homo Habilis, and Neanderthals had full powers of vocalisation, so the abstract signs found in caves corresponded to sounds, both communicating the same things. What we see here is writing, and La Scene du Puits is therefore a written, as well as a visual narrative.
Of the ‘classical’ Palaeontologists, only the Abbé Breuil, the first to explore the caves, accepts that it may have been the rhinoceros and not the human that killed the bison, yet this is by far the most likely explanation. The wound is large enough for the bison’s entrails to spill out, something unlikely to result from a mere spear-point wound. If the wound were made by the rhinoceros’s horn, this would be accurate natural observation on the part of the artist: rhinoceroses charge head down and thrust upward into the belly of an opponent, often tossing smaller adversaries high into the air. Moreover, the spear is not in the bison. The short and long lines in the composition that have been identified as weaponry also have an eye-guiding pictorial function, irrespective of what they may represent. (This belies the accepted art-historical view that arrows used to indicate direction are not found before the eighteenth century, and that the arrow was not used symbolically until the sixteenth century.)
The bison in this image is charging, yet has been fatally wounded with its entrails hanging out: no beast could charge like this whilst so seriously wounded. But this anomaly indicates the presence, not the absence, of sophistication on the part of the prehistoric artist. Three-hundred thousand years before the Futurists, this artist has tried to depict more than one moment of time within a single pictorial composition, and not just within a single composition, but within a single figure.
The method of showing the same limb of an animal in different positions, or adding ‘extra’ limbs or heads to suggest movement can be observed at Lascaux and other caves, preceding the same avant-garde gesture by Giacomo Balla by around 150, 000 years. Often, we see flurries of added contour lines giving an impression of flux, or sequential animation based on retinal persistence through the use of juxtaposed or superimposed successive images of the same animal, giving an impression of rearing, galloping and so on. Inside the dark caves, the flickering of the oil lamps would have added to the sense of movement. In La Scene du Puits the bison has two manes to suggest movement, its front and back half inhabiting different chronological spaces, one the time of the bison’s charging, the other the time of its wounding.
Lost animality, grotesque humanity, the dawn of servility
George Bataille first wrote about La Scene du Puits first in Lascaux, or the Birth of Art (1955). Commissioned by his friend the publisher Albert Skira for a series of monographs for the lay reader on art from around the world, it remains the only art monograph written by a philosopher for a popular readership. Bataille never showed much interest in meaning of the narrative, commenting that “none of the proposed interpretations seems satisfactory to me”. In Lascaux he gave a sympathetic magic explanation which he suggested as being valid for all prehistoric art, a view he later abandoned. Unable to explain precisely what is going on in terms of ‘story’, he self-deprecatingly wrote: “We may perhaps go this far: the rhinoceros disembowelled the bison, the bison killed the man – but that is not, indeed, very far, nor very satisfactory”.
Only three elements of the image really exercised Bataille: the wound, the erection, and the schematic rendering of the human figure, something common to all Upper Palaeolithic art, and crucial to Bataille’s interpretation of cave art generally. He had already drawn attention to the “difference in presentation of the man and the beast … the stiff, childlike manner of the former, and the naturalism which achieved astonishing perfection in the latter”, and how this relates to humankind emerging from its animality, in several short essays: Primitive Art, The Passage from Animal to Man (1952) A Visit to Lascaux (1952) and A Meeting in Lascaux (1953), essays written before he visited Lascaux and based on viewing photographic reproductions in books.
In The Passage from Animal to Man Bataille sees the human form being reduced to a few sticks as denoting humanity’s lost animality, capturing “the very moment when the animal within him became human” and as an “effacement of man before the animal”. This tendency to depict the human form as comic, ugly or deformed he also views as the primitive, violent and negating roots of caricature.
La Scene du Puits not only enacts and represents ‘the passage from animal to man’ but philosophically reflects upon it: “man only partially divulged his own body … its strange character emphasised the interest in a passage from animal to man … and far from feeling ashamed of the share of the animal that remained within him, he masked that face of which we are so proud with it, and flaunted that which our clothes conceal”. Here he is referring to the humanoid’s erection. It is a moot point as to whether it is being ‘flaunted’; it is not hidden, but its size has not been exaggerated, and there is no realism in its depiction – it is a tiny pointed stick, drawn in the same “grotesque and childish” way as the rest of the figure.
Only very recently has it been established that Homo Sapiens wiped-out not only Homo Neanderthalis, but probably also wiped out several other species of hominid. Research on early hominids was in its infancy when Bataille presciently wrote:
“… it seems worthwhile to remind ourselves of the extent to which a monkey’s ugliness disturbs us … Middle Palaeolithic man certainly looked like a monkey. We might ask this question: did Neanderthal Man’s appearance, which the first men who walked fully upright had to have known well, cause the same horror in these men that the sight of a monkey induces in us? ”
So, the guilt over the killing of animals that Bataille insists on may also have been ancestral guilt over the killing off of other, competing, more animalistic-looking hominids, those that were his closest ancestors. In Lascaux, he suggests that the wearing of animal masks by humans was due to species-shame: “the artist felt obliged to clothe a nascent marvel with the animal grace they had lost … the artist achieved a positive virtuosity as a draughtsman, but disdained to portray his own face … The transition from animal to man was, foremost of all, man’s abjuration to animality”.
According to Bataille, that coming into play of transgression and taboo that the unavoidable tasks of hunting and killing represented for Palaeolithic man was one of the processes by which we became fully human, instilling guilt and shame requiring expiation via art and ritual. It is because he has broken the taboo of murder that male figures such as the one in La Scene du Puits are depicted in such a pictographic manner: “Humanity must have been ashamed of itself at that time, but not of its underlying animality”. The very manner in which the human figure is depicted, its style, is an act of expiation, with animal figuration a contrasting gesture of obeisance to animals.
In The Theory of Religion (1973), Bataille admits the obvious, that we have no way of fully accessing animal consciousness. The words 'animal’ and ‘animalism’ do refer to animals in Bataille's writing, but for him they also have figurative as well as literal meanings. He has a particular way of using language that can lead to his work being misinterpreted and seem more baffling than it actually is, this is his overdetermining certain words, giving them significations in excess of those they normally carry. Thus ‘death’ for Bataille is not merely the end of life, but symbolises the most radical negation of objective reality. Similarly, 'sacrifice' is not only the killing of a creature as part of a ritual, but is symbolic of any action which produces sacred things through a negation of given reality. These two concepts are closely related and overlap, and illustrate well how Bataille's system of thought is based on the conceptual contiguity of terms. Thus, 'sacrifice' and death' are both in turn closely related to 'evil', which again, does not just mean the opposite of good, but is in addition anything that resists assimilation to the utilitarian, to futurity, profit and goals. It is that which lives in and for the moment, in what he called the 'continuous sphere of animals and animality’, as opposed to the ’discontinuous sphere’ of the non-sovereign human, a mode of life inaugurated by the appearance of tools, which ‘broke’ the seamless continuity of the world, creating time and history. Along with ‘formless’, 'play', 'transgression', 'the barbaric', immediacy', ‘expenditure', 'animality' the 'accursed share' and 'art', the words form a linguistic-conceptual constellation, each word almost a synonym for the others. They form one half of a dichotomy, the other being the linguistic-conceptual constellation whose meanings are also contiguous and overlapping, formed by the words as 'work', 'conformity', 'the profane' 'the utilitarian', 'slavery', ‘architecture', 'the classical', 'human', 'futurity',’ bureaucracy' ‘profit’, ‘war’, ‘the bourgeoise’ and, filthiest of all, 'servility’.
In Theory of Religion Bataille discusses in more detail how humankind’s emergence is linked with a negation of its animal nature, explaining how tools introduced time, work, futurity and goals, and thus self-consciousness. Becoming human involved humans setting themselves free from the “extreme domination of death and of reproductive activity … under whose sway animals are helpless”. Here, Bataille is referring to nature being subject to the helpless instinct to procreate and to kill. For Bataille’s friend Kojeve, who influenced him in his thinking in this regard, ‘animality’ is ‘mere given being’, a state of existence not created by conscious voluntary action, one “that does not go beyond itself to transform given reality”.
This brings us up against a paradox of Bataille’s claims about the animality of cave art, because art was something human that transformed given reality, but in so doing inculcated a mode of consciousness that was prior to these transforming impulses. If humanity’s journey began with the transcendence of animal nature, for Bataille this transcendence paradoxically created an unrequitable desire for a return to humanity’s prior way of being-in-the-world, to the perfect immanence of animalism, a way of inhabiting the world that is “like water in water”, which humanity can now only express and temporarily achieve through art.
For Bataille, ‘immanence’ means a world in which the relation of a being to its environment is unmediated, with nothing posited beyond the present. Immanence is an “intimacy” between man and the world, with the earth, with animals, that can be achieved onlly by close aesthetic attentiveness to it, and as an emblem of this he suggests the complete and seamless interpenetration of coition. This explains the overpainting in cave art, the lack of concern with posterity and permanence: the artists were interested only in the process of painting, in achieving a privileged mode of inhabiting their world, in experiencing a ‘sovereign moment’. A ‘sovereign moment’, in Bataille’s lexicon, is one in which all calculation, futurity and servility are absent. Achieving such a moment is an act of ‘evil’ - an act which resists the utilitarian, performed for its own sake. Animal existence fulfils all of the conditions of the sovereign and the evil in the senses that Bataille uses these words, and animals function with a “purposeful purposelessness”, like the Kantian artwork.
The return to animality is, must, and can only be intermittent, made up of what painter Willem de Kooning termed ‘slipping glimpses’:
“If man surrendered unconsciously to immanence, he would fall short of humanity; he would achieve it only to lose it and eventually life would return to the unconscious intimacy of animals. There is a tension created by being human without becoming a thing, without returning to animal slumber … Whilst the individual cannot connect himself with that which goes beyond his own limits, he glimpses in a sudden awakening of that which cannot be grasped but which slips precisely away as déjà vu.”
So art, ultimately, is a kind of déjà vu of animalism, of a non-instrumental, unmediated relation with the world, artistic production the benign doppleganger, the Dr Jekyl of work. This radical uncleavedness involves and enacts a becoming-animal and a becoming-human at the same time; and this absence of mediation between human and world is an epiphanic moment of recognition of the truth of the world ‘as it is’. The ecological and political implications of exchanging the rags of perception for the robes of the sovereign through art are obvious enough, and if the experience itself is intermittent, a remainder stays with us and these animal glances at reality give an insight as to how the world might practically be reconfigured in a way that makes human existence per se more sovereign, less alienated from nature, less servile, and how our historico-technical progression may be reconfigured in a less destructive way.