Caitlyn Ordway-Art History

ESSAY #1a

Them and Us

THE QUESTION: How artistically similar, or different, do you think prehistoric people were compared to modern man and, what singular force or need continues to drive the artistic needs and human expressions of the 21st century?  

PART ONE

SUMMARY: What I learned from answering this question was the differences and similarities between mankind then and now and how art impacted both cultures.

REASON: This question is being asked so we can have a better understanding of how art affected people back then and how it affects people now and what drives people from both cultures to display their art.

PURPOSE: The reason I chose to answer this question is because I am interested in how art from the past and art from the future interconnect.  I believe knowing this can give a better understanding of why art continues to be important even in today’s culture and what about art from the past inspired this.

DIRECTION: Answering this question I think will give me a better understanding of art in general and its impact throughout history.

IMPRESSIONS: It really amazes me how much art has evolved over the years. But I suppose that is because people have evolved over the years. The industrial age really changed everything. And not just for people, but also for art. The prehistoric age was megaliths, stone figurines, and cave painting. Now with all this technology we have so many different forms of art including pastel paintings, photography and digital art. So many ways for people to express themselves. I don’t believe that prehistoric artwork was about the people expressing themselves. I believe it was more about leaving something of themselves behind. To be remembered for what they are and where they came from. I think art now is the seed of human expression and emotion. A way for people to have a voice and be heard.

PART TWO:

ANSWER: Because of them having centuries between them I don’t see many similarities between art of the prehistoric age and that of the twenty first century. I think time periods have a huge effect on art and how people choose to see the world. Prehistoric age was freedom and liberty. The twenty first century is soiled by structure, corruption, and government. Our voices are so stifled by right and wrong that art is often the only freedom to really say what you feel. To speak the truth that no one else wants to hear. To really just be yourself. An individual.

The prehistoric age is widely known for its animal cave paintings and abstract symbols.  These paintings and symbols represented their world and their beliefs.

“The first art of the prehistoric age that we can recognize appears in association with the remains of fully modern people. These people were just like us, although their lifestyles depended on hunting and foraging for food or, later, on pastoralism and subsistence agriculture. It is possible that earlier peoples might have decorated their bodies and clothes or marked trees or features in the landscape but, if they did, evidence of their art has not survived. Recognizable art dates from at least 38.000BC in Europe. Africa and Australia. There are also controversial claims for rock art of similar age in South America. Works of this early period are not simple. They do not show development in the manner of a child's drawing, that is, gaining competence and accuracy in realistic representation before perhaps achieving a more mature confidence for abstraction. Instead, the oldest known works of art, including paintings, sculptures, and engravings, seem to show all these qualities at once.” (http://www.all-art.org/history16.html)

“They are the products of minds as intellectually capable and sophisticated as our own. In Europe and Africa, early works of art depict animals and humans and include symbols. The former may be drawn or sculpted realistically or represented by the clever emphasis of a distinctive characteristic, such as the tusks of the mammoth or the horn of a rhinoceros. Paintings, low relief sculptures, and engravings adorned areas of caves and rock shelters where hunter-foragers lived. They also covered dark caverns and recesses visited less frequently where light from fires and lamps illuminated occasions which probably had special social and spiritual significance. With the spread of farming as a way of life, people began to settle in villages, and territories were defined. Drawings like maps and landscapes appeared, along with domesticated animals and more human figures. Changing styles of decorated pottery became the designer labels of successive generations of prehistoric peoples. Of all the known prehistoric works of  art, some 70 per cent may be attributed to hunter-foragers, 13 per cent to herders and stock raisers, and 17 per cent to people with an organized economy (farmers, livestock breeders, and the like). The cave art of all social groups consists of five principal motifs: human figures, animals, tools and weapons, rudimentary local maps, and symbols or ideograms.” (http://www.all-art.org/history16.html)

Artifact Examples:

• The Human-Lion

An early and puzzling example of a sculpture in the round is a human figure-probably male-with a feline head, made about 30,000-26,000 BCE. Archeologist in Germany found broken pieces of ivory made from a mammoths tusk and realized these were parts of a figure. Nearly a foot tall this remarkable statue surpasses most early figurines in size and complexity. Instead of copying what they saw in nature the carver created a unique creature, part human and part beast. Archeologist think that people who lived at this time held very different ideas about what it meant to be human and their distinction from animals as oppose to what those in the twenty-first century think. The theory is that perhaps they thought humans and animals were all part of the same group who shared the world together. What is absolutely known though is that the Lion-Human shows complex thinking and creative imagination, which is the unique human ability to conceive something that has never been seen in nature. (Art History, Marilyn Stokstad/Michael W. Cothren, Fourth Edition/volumn 1, 2011 Pearson Education, Inc., page 5+6)

·         Human-Fish Sculpture

This was found at the site of Lepenski Vir on the Serbian banks of the Danube River. At this site there were various boulders. Some appeared to represent human form while others looked similar to fish. A few even seem to consist of mixtures of both human and fish creatures. Here we have a site with a confusing combination of architecture with a nondomesticated economy, very unusual art, and many burials. Archeologist interprets a site like this as temporary habitations where people carried about special rites and activities linked to death and to the natural and wild worlds. Art played a part in these. (Art History, Marilyn Stokstad/Michael W. Cothren, Fourth Edition/volumn 1, 2011 Pearson Education, Inc., page 13+14)

• Tomb Interior With Corbeling and Engraving Stones

This is an example of megalithic architecture which is a descriptive term derived from Greek culture meanings large and stone. Archeologist disagree about the types of society that created these monuments. Some believe they reflected complex, stratified societies in which powerful religious or political leaders dictated their design and inspired large numbers of people to contribute to their labor. Such as engineering projects for which they devised methods for shaping, transporting, and aligning the stones. Other interpreters argue that these massive monuments are clear evidence for equally shared collaboration within these groups. People working together on a common project and the successful completion of which fueled social cohesion in the absence of a powerful individual. (Art History, Marilyn Stokstad/Michael W. Cothren, Fourth Edition/volumn 1, 2011 Pearson Education, Inc., page 17)

• Gold Face Mask (Neolithic)

Gold was one of the first metals used in prehistory. Over time objects made from copper and gold became more complicated and technologies of extraction and metalworking improved.  Some of the most sensational gold and copper objects were discovered by Ivan Ivanov in the late Neolithic cemetery at Varna on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast. While the cemetery consisted of several hundred burials of men, women, and children, a few burials contained gold and copper artifacts. As in other prehistoric contexts, death and its attendant ceremonies were the focus for large and visually expressive displays of status and authority. (Art History, Marilyn Stokstad/Michael W. Cothren, Fourth Edition/volumn 1, 2011 Pearson Education, Inc., page 22)

Modern art is all about human expression and emotion. For some it’s an escape from reality for others it’s simply a way for them to tell the world how they really feel about the world we live in. But for everyone it’s all about having a voice and letting it be heard.

“Modern Art starts as the Impressionists were winding down. While this is acceptable, strong arguments can be (and have been) made that Modern Art began at a variety of different dates. Depending on which survey course a person takes, Modern Art is said to have begun with:

•Romanticism, in the early 1800's,

•Realism, in the 1830's,

•Daguerre's announcement, in 1839, that he had invented a method for making a direct positive image,

•The writer Baudelaire who, in 1846, called upon artists to "be of their time",

•The first Impressionist show in 1874 or

•The "-isms" of the 1880's (Tonal-, Symbol-, Post-Impression- and Neo-Impression-)

Which one is right? Well, none of them are "wrong". (Here, it was simply a case of "1880" working out well, for me, in terms of organization.) For simplicity's sake, let's just say that Modern Art began in the 19th-century, and ran through a whole slew of "-isms" up until the end of the 1960's.

Regardless of chosen starting date, the crucial factor is that Modern Art means: "The point at which artists (1) felt free to trust their inner visions, (2) express those visions in their work, (3) use Real Life (social issues and images from modern life) as a source of subject matter and (4) experiment and innovate as often as possible."  (http://arthistory.about.com/od/modernart/f/what_is.-Eoj.htm)

Examples of Modern Art:

• Photography

“Photography started with a camera and the basic idea has been around since about the 5th Century B.C. For centuries these were just ideas until an Iraqi scientist developed something called the camera obscura sometime in the 11th Century. Even then, the camera did not actually record images, they simply projected them onto another surface. The images were also upside down. The first camera obscuras used a pinhole in a tent to project an image from outside the tent into the darkened area. It took until the 17th Century for camera obscuras to be made small enough to be portable and basic lenses to be added.” (http://photography.about.com/od/historyofphotography/a/photohistory.html)

• Film

• Digital Art

“Digital art was born when the first IBM computer was used in conjunction with a digital printer to make a photo out of asterisks. This crude and ugly photo was the first digital picture ever printed. This occurred in the late 1970s. Since then, printers have improved greatly and so has the quality of the medium. In time, digital art progressed into something that we can call the “active medium”.  This realm of art is just about contemporary with today but with one exception. This type of show was popular in the Soho community among bohemians except that there was something lost in the digital hype. Art has a strong history of personality. There is something lost when microchips do the painting, and these modern exhibits lacked character. The latest craze in digital art is to recreate the past using a digital filter on modern photos. This branch of art is exploding as the commercial requests for it come pouring in. This branch comes from the fact that these artistic filters can be used to transform average digital photos into elaborate impressionist paintings. This can be done with a standard filter and a unique photo. Commercially this product has found success because when it is paired with an exceptional color printer, it produces what looks like custom paintings on canvas. Artists can take a basic digital photo and transform it into a “faux masterpiece”. When these photos are printed out on canvas, the look like a classic impressionist painting.” (http://digitalartempire.com/2010/11/history-digital-art/)

So, in conclusion I would say the force or need that drives an artist is truth. Whether the truth is memories to be left behind or simply the way an individual sees the world. Truth is the seed to human art.