BIBLIOGRAPHY
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© 1999-00 John W. Dixon, Jr.
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Towards an Aesthetic of Early Earth Art
An aesthetic, not a history. A way of looking at and thinking about early earth art, not a systematic account.
Given the nature of the evidence, there are not many alternatives. Almost nothing is known of what early earth art meant to its makers, so there is no possibility of doing the customary iconological study. Except for a few late monuments, the evidence and the testimony we are accustomed to using are not there. We have only the monuments themselves and a few artifacts to suggest the way they were used, but almost nothing to enable us to go beyond educated guesses about what they meant to those who built them.
The canons of scholarship require us to stick to what we can know, to what is demonstrable, in drawing conclusions about the objects we study. This is honorable, but it is ultimately useless if we want to determine what the monuments meant to the people who made them and, therefore, what they might mean to us who study them. We can, if we wish, treat them as artifacts for scholarship or as aesthetic objects that function in modern taste. This would contradict one of the few things we can be certain of about them: they were not made for investigation by art historians or for the titillation of modern aesthetes. If we choose to treat them only as objects of modern scholarship or taste we are in danger of shutting ourselves off from what they might have to say to us.
` Contemporary earth mystics think they have recovered the original meaning of the works. They, however, do not know any more than scholars do what the works originally meant. Therefore, they succeed only in turning them into icons for a new religion, a religion intended to give access to the ultimate meaning of things, to unity with the one or with the all or with the fundamental energies of the earth. This approach has the advantage over the restraints of scholarship in that it takes the works seriously as embedded in the search for human meaning. But the meanings, albeit religious, are still those of a twentieth-century sensibility.1
Each approach falsifies the works, in one direction or the other. If we use them together, we may learn something from each, but it will be necessary to transpose what we learn into a new key. We must pay the most precise, the most exact, attention to what we can see in these works, to what we can know on the basis of what we see, lest we violate both their integrity and ours, Equally, we must attend to what is seen and known with the most sympathetic, the most empathetic, identification if we hope to see in these works those things that are not as we are.
We face still another temptation that may falsify the works for us. Our scholarship itself has progressed to the point where we know we cannot turn the artifacts of the past wholly into objects of scholarship. Our scholarship controls any temptation we feel to construct a new religion around other people's icons. We might. therefore, conclude that we are closer to understanding than our predecessors were. We understand the processes of history better than we once did. Our temptation is to think we understand those processes better than we do.
Specifically, our temptation is to treat these works according to the model of our own symbolic activity and of what we think we know about the symbolic activity of our immediate predecessors. That is, we tend to assume early people had a body of meanings that needed to be dealt with by symbolic forms in order to be brought under control. We have come to understand something of the workings of symbols in our own consciousness; we are probably correct if we identify earth art as symbolic. But to us a symbol is always a symbol of something, something beyond itself to which the symbol refers. Therefore, we seek the body of meaning lying behind or beyond the symbols we think we see in earth art. We can never be fully sure, but it is probable that we should not look at the works this way. More of this later.
It is probable that early people were engaged in something like the forming of a consciousness that could function symbolically. They were, in effect. making the human mind. They were establishing the symbolic processes according to which the rest of us, their inheritors, work out our thinking, our feeling. our responses.
The forming of the mind, the shaping of consciousness, is a more complex task than art alone can handle; there is still a vital role for myth, ritual, and technique, each of which is intimately related to art. Yet an has a central role, an indispensable role, and retracing the act of art is retracing our own human genesis. In shaping the mind, early people were not making objects to think about, to represent or symbolize thoughts: they were shaping the instruments we think with.
The distinction I am making is somewhat overly dramatic. The time period for early earth art may be close to thirty thousand years (from the earliest cave art somewhere around 30,000 BC to megalithic art around 2,000 BC During that time, we find distinctive types of symbolic objects and distinctive combinations that owe little, if anything, to other surviving forms. The vocabulary of consciousness was being engendered. At some point, however, new items of vocabulary and syntax had been developed and incorporated into the increasingly complex artistic rhetoric: people stopped being originators and began being inheritors.
Therefore, early earth art does not stop at Stonehenge; it includes the later developments that use the same elements, right down to Versailles and the Forbidden City of Peking. This raises an inescapable question: What use can we make of these later, more complex, monuments in the interpretation of the earlier works? Every motif or theme of early art is an essential element in many later works; equally. the later works are not separable from the significance of the elements incorporated in them. Yet the later works are not understandable adaptively simply as combinations of motifs from an earlier age. The problem of interpretation is more complex than that, and the reasons for the complexity are worth looking into.
1. The original theme or element may represent something so basic, so necessary to human psychic operations, that it recurs not because it is inherited but because it represents a human universal, perpetually rediscovered and restated.
2. The element may be truly inherited but used for different symbolic purposes. This proposition cannot be verified; if we don't really know the symbolic function of the motif in its original appearance, we have no way of knowing how much it was transformed in its later manifestations. This possibility must be kept in mind in any attempt to use later monuments in the interpretation of earlier ones.
3. Numbers I and 2 may coexist. The original theme endures because it is fundamental, a necessary part of human intercourse with the world. At the same time, the initial statement did not exhaust the possibilities of the motif but had simply set it out in its basic form. Later people find more and more in the original theme, both in itself and in its interrelations with other elements of the artistic language. Stonehenge and Lascaux are not simply interesting artifacts from the ancient past; they are part of our nature.
Given what we now think we know about human thought, the third possibility seems to me by far the most likely. In a practical sense, then, later monuments are useful in the interpretation of earlier ones, so long as we are scrupulously careful not to conflate the two.
It remains next to identify what I have variously referred to as elements, themes, motifs. There are several classes that interlock:
1. Those which use an existing feature of the earth or construct an equivalent to it. The major types are the cave and the mountain.
2. Those which establish a new feature on the earth that is intended to make manifest and accessible some quality of the earth. A major example is the menhir.
3. Those which establish a pattern on the surface of the earth. The pattern is often established on or within the elements of #1 and often by the use of the elements of #2. The pattern is of necessity geometric, but the geometry is abstracted either from the earth experience as determined by the interaction of gravity (the vertical) and the cardinal directions (the horizontal) or from the mythical drama (e.g., the perilous journey).
Originally, of course, the cave was used in its natural, unaltered state. Later, where the soil permitted, artificial caves were hollowed out: Mediterranean tombs, the temples of Malta, the cave temples of India (Fig. 1). Throughout the historic period. monuments were built that are understandable only as symbolic caves: many Roman temples, Romanesque churches, some of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses.
No truly early example of an artificial (i.e., symbolic) mountain survives, so we have no way of knowing if any ever existed; nor can we know what early people did ritually with actual mountains or hills. The artificial mountain has been a major art form during the entire historic period, from the pyramid and ziggurat to the great Christian churches.
Mound-building (which the work of modern earth artists most closely resembles) is widespread, ranging from the American Indian mounds in Ohio to the Japanese Imperial tombs. This form of earthwork appears to have a different motivation from that of the artificial mountain. Some mounds were used for the burial of the dead, and their shape seems to have had no special significance.2 Others, which may or may not have been used for burials, resemble some living creature, such as a bird or a snake. Almost nothing is known of the symbolic function of these zoomorphic forms. My guess (and it can only be a guess) is that these low, crouching, largely horizontal forms have more to do with a sense of the earth spirit than with the ideas of loftiness and transcendence associated with the sacred mountain.
This poses the problem of the interpretation of these early monuments. Early earth art cannot be looked on as art in our sense of the word; it was much more nearly an act, and an object that was the occasion for the act. As such, it cannot be understood phenomenologically simply as form. In ways that are only distantly accessible to us, earthworks are inseparable from the energies of existence. Modern earth mystics may speak with great confidence about these energies as though they know precisely what they are. But they only know what they think these energies are; there is no way of knowing what the makers of the monuments felt or believed. Terms such as "earth spirit" or "fertility figure" are part of the modern vocabulary. In a modem sensibility, modern ideas are triggered by ancient forms, and there is no doubt that the ancient monuments can function iconically in new religions. What we cannot know is how they functioned in the making of consciousness. We can only do our best to bracket out our own vocabulary and to see these forms as they are.
We might, for example, postulate, on the evidence of much later peoples, that early earthworks had something to do with the femaleness of the earth and the maleness of the sky, linked by the fertilizing rain: or that "energy" (our word) was experienced as something more general, and sexual energy as only a particular manifestation of general energy. The question must be left open.
The gravest danger is the misuse of our own term "symbol." With the degeneration of our inherited symbolic speech, "symbol" has become almost synonymous with "sign"; something is a symbol of something else. That is not the way the symbolic imagination works. Because the symbol participates in the thing symbolized, there is no signifying separation between them. To grasp the one is to grasp the other; the symbol is the means for participating in the other. Thus the cave does not "symbolize" the womb, it is the womb of the earth. Human wombs are wordlessly understandable by means of ritualistic participation in the womb of the earth. Thus, the great painted animals are not wholly explicable by means of the causal principle embodied in our notion of hunting magic or fertility magic. Rather, they bring the essential nature of the cave to realization and make possible the sacramental participation in the engendering energy that is at the center of things.
This problem of interpretation must be kept in mind as we grapple with the kinds of monuments I have, somewhat artificially, divided into Group 2 and Group 3, those which are a new feature placed on the earth and those which constitute a pattern on the earth. Linking the two is the menhir, which is both an independent element intended to give access to earth powers and a means of forming the pattern. The first step in creating a pattern, which may also be the first act in generating a distinctively human mentality, is the establishment of a center.3 The idea of the center inexorably carries with it the establishment of pathway, level, direction, and ultimately shape.4
The shapes are relatively few and can be described as or reduced to a few basic elements: the avenue, the spiral, the labyrinth, and the mandala (any pattern that has equality of emphasis around the center).
The center must be determined and marked or, rather, it is determined in the act of being marked. The menhir is a way of establishing and fixing the center. (This does not satisfactorily account for the long avenues of menhirs - for example, at Carnac - but these may have led to a center since lost.) The menhir is a focal point for energies. It is not illuminating to call it a phallic symbol - a modern idea. It is equally possible that the phallus was considered a symbol of the menhir, and that human sexuality was seen as a way of participating not just in the fertility of the earth but also in the larger meanings of which fertility is a part.5
The best-known use of menhirs is in the establishment of a pattern, such as Stonehenge (Fig. 2), which is both vertical and horizontal, on the earth and moving up from the earth. The menhir modulates into the pillar and column and becomes the principal structural and symbolic element of a major art, the Greek temple. Indeed, the Greek temple provides a paradigm for the stylistic and psychological processes involved. Greek architecture is traditionally, and I think correctly, understood as an art of perfectly designed and articulated masses, not as an art of space. This is too simple. In our vocabulary the naos may be architecturally unimportant but psychologically it is vital. It is the dark inner room, the cave, inhabited by the cult image - a room reminiscent of the inner shrine of an Indian temple with its remarkable name, the garba griha (womb cell). We are not here dealing with something so jejune as a combination of phallic and vaginal symbols. Rather, the powerful psychic force of the Greek temple has its source in the creative, generative combination of elementals that realize, fulfill and transcend specific human forms and acts which are special cases of the universal interaction of forms.
Similarly, Stonehenge is neither an observatory nor a computer. it appears to be beyond doubt that it was used for prolonged and detailed observation of the heavenly bodies and almost certainly these observations were used to calculate planetary cycles in order to make predictions. Both the mathematical and the astronomical procedures seem to have been of a high order of skill. But to call Stonehenge an observatory or a computer is condescending, as if its meaning was merely an anticipation of our own. Its observations and calculations were not practical and scientific; such functions could have been equally well achieved by far simpler means. Rather, the observations and calculations were directed to a different end, which was certainly ritualistic and psychological: the ordering of human psychic existence across the surface of the earth under the sky.
The Greek temple has a comparable purpose. In many ways, it is the most self-contained work of architecture ever achieved, yet part of its essence is its relation to the earth. The temple is a concentration of the formal and psychic essentials of a landscape and climate: it grows vertically out of the particularities of the earth.6 In turn, it is the focal point of the shape of the land, establishing horizontal order.7 The pyramid shares with the menhir the function of establishing the center, but it does not have the same potential for manifesting bodily (or earthly) energy. As fundamentally a geometric form, the pyramid affirms a static order. As the center, it establishes the horizontal order; as the sacred mountain, it links heaven and earth, establishing the vertical order. The pyramid both shapes and analyzes elemental acts of human psychic formation: the interlocking of the vertical and the horizontal into a comprehensive image of order.
If we look back at early earth art from the standpoint of later developments, we can demonstrate the importance of this motif. The last. and one of the greatest, essays on this subject took place in the area extending from central Mexico to Guatemala. Although each complex used a strikingly distinct formal syntax, all used the same vocabulary of elements: pyramidal forms, terraces, plazas, and monumental stairways. With these means, the ancient Americans undertook the most detailed, and most complex, essay on this problem ever seen. It is unique in its attention to both internal and external order. Apparently each site functioned as a sacred complex: focusing the spiritual and psychic life of a whole region, dividing the surface of the earth into its appropriate directions, and ordering the constructed monuments towards the celestial phenomena. But each differs from all the others in the subtle intricacy of its internal spatial order. Teotihuacan is the least complex and the most powerful, as well as the most direct in its balancing of verticals and horizontals Monte Alban is internally the most subtle in its spatial ordering. Tikal has the most eloquent vertical ordering, Uxmal the most horizontal (Fig. 3), Copan the most complex interaction of verticals and horizontals. We know nearly nothing about the use made of these complexes. We can see them only as a culmination of a process of thought going back to the earliest stages of human development, even though they probably stand aside from the direct line of descent.8
Another late great monument, Borobudur, provides a different insight into its predecessors. it combines three of the four American elements: the pyramid. the terrace, and the monumental stairway (which, indeed, go all the way back to the Sumerian ziggurat). The added element, which goes back at least to Sanchi, if not earlier, is the labyrinthine journey, which circumambulates the stupa so that the established spatial cosmic order is joined with the perilous journey.
We have no way of knowing to what extent the labyrinthine journey represents the development of a motif from cave art. Although cave paintings are not always found deep in the earth, for the most part they are found at the end of what was quite literally a perilous journey.9 A cave might not be considered earth art: indeed, except for the significant embellishment of the surface with the energies of the great animals, there is no human act of forming. But in a modern aesthetic, human use can make a work of art; the caves, thereby, are fundamental earth works. The symbolic significance of the cave is emphasized in the later passage tombs such as Newgrange, which combine the hill, the artificial cave. and the passage with the inscribed labyrinth as its most important symbolic decoration.10
The last great integral earth artworks, the palace at Versailles and the Forbidden City, Peking, are almost wholly patterned on the earth, but nonetheless set out a cosmic order relating the order of the earth to the gods of the sky.11 After that, the great designs, even when, as at Brasilia, they are actually executed, become private fantasies of universal order.
Peking may, indeed, provide a most fitting conclusion to this brief account. It is virtually an anthology of the themes and motifs I have tried to sketch. it includes all the vocabulary of elements: center, pathway, direction, level, and shape. It is an organization of verticals and horizontals, relating the earth and the sky. it is an ordering of interior and exterior. What is more, it is a kind of summa of Chinese thought on this matter and, significantly. the end of a development that goes in a continuous line back to very early beginnings (probably traceable to the second millenium BC) Although, of course, much of it is quite specifically Chinese. it also sets out the more general sense that may underlie most, if not all, earth art: the sense of a peculiar personality in particular landscapes and features of landscapes, a spirit within the earth, and lines of force or energy that relate nodal points to each other and that can be concentrated within the monuments erected over them.12
It is not the purpose of this essay to relate this elemental aesthetic to the modern works called earth art. Rather, its intention is to establish the symbolically fundamental character of the enterprise and to propose a method of critical understanding. Subordinating early art to the taxonomies of art history short-circuits their power and makes them humanly irrelevant. Rather, we should seek to make them accessible as acts of human beings contending with the world they lived in and, in the process, forming us by establishing the vocabulary that is still essential to our own psychic processes, our own forming of our selves in the world.
The issue is both aesthetic (the general act of understanding what it is we are about) and methodological (the specific art of executing our understanding). The link between the two is an intricate psychological act.
As historians, we are faced with the task of rediscovering and reconstructing the past. As human beings, we cannot escape the question the historian too often avoids, the question of the meaning of our own activity. Why should we want to reconstruct the past? What does the reconstruction of the past have to do with us as human beings unless it in some ways adds to our humanity?
To reconstruct the past, the only instrument we have is our present humanity, which is not alto ether the same as the humanity of those who made the past. Thus, inevitably, we color the past with the hues of the spectacles we use to look at it. On the other hand, our present humanity, is a product of the past, made up of elements that in part are innate and in part were created by our predecessors. Thus, in reconstructing the past we trace the lines of our own construction. In the dialectic of now and then, we try to maintain the integrity of the then from the deprecations of the now. We can respect either one only insofar as we can clearly establish the character of the other in our minds, yet we can establish that character only by means of - both with and against - the other.
The aesthetic, therefore, is not a detached act of the understanding; it is useful only when it is a part of the methodology. Neither is methodology an unchanging objective technique; it succeeds only when it is informed by the aesthetic. The intersection of the two cannot be described simply as a psychological act, as though psychology were a third element. Our psyche is, rather, the interaction of the two; and psychology as the study of the psyche is itself not a detached and objective technique but is inseparable from the act of imaginatively reconstructing history as the making of the mind.
The reconstruction is, in good part, the work of the historian and the critic, but it has also been a prominent part of the work of the modern artist. Picasso looked deeply into much of the whole development of art, but others have searchingly examined particular themes; DeKooning the so-called Venus of Willendorf, Pollock, the Celtic interface, Ossorio, the primitive fetish. Earth artists likewise are doing two things. They are again asserting the interaction of the human spirit with the surface and the energies of the earth and, in doing so, they are helping to rediscover the energies' of a past human act.
The crucial act in relation to any earthwork is not primarily detached contemplation of an object of aesthetic significance. It is, rather, placement of ourselves in a dimension of our being.
Notes
I. Among the more responsible of these studies is the Art and Cosmos series, published by Avon Books and Thames and Hudson. See especially John Michell, The Earth Spirit (New York, Avon Books, 1975). See also Janet and Colin Bord, Mysterious Britain (London, Paladin Books, Granada Publishing, Ltd., 1971) which is uncritically credulous but assembles a lot of material. There are many others. return to text
2. Michael Dames, however, finds body imagery and birth symbolism in the British barrow graves. See his The Silbury Treasure (London, Thames and Hudson, 1976), and The Avebury Cycle (London. Thames and Hudson, 1977). return to text
3. The major studies here are those of Mircea Eliade. See especially Patterns in Comparative Religion, translated by Rosemary Sheed, (Cleveland, The World Publishing Co., Meridian Books, 1963). return to text
4. The most notable exception to this generalization is one of the most significant examples of early earth art, the Nazca Markings in Peru. These are pure patterns without elevation at all. They include a variety of geometrical forms - circles, rectangles, straight lines - and outline representations of birds, flowers, fish, etc. We do not know when or why they were made. There is no evidence of an organizing center. There is a comparable development in North America in Navaho dry paintings. Although these are literally done on the earth, they are not, strictly speaking, earth art since they involve no modification of the earth. Nevertheless, they use natural materials, they are on the earth, and they place human life within a cosmic order including the earth. They are emphatically organized around center and direction. return to text
5. Compare the various studies by Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg edited by Peter H. von Blanckenhagen and Helga von Heintze. Berlin, Verlag Gebr. Mann. 1967. return to text
6. Compare Rhys Carpenter, The Esthetic Basis of Greek Art, (Bloomington, Indiana Universitv Press, 1959), especially Chapter IV "The Esthetics of Greek Architecture." See also Henri Focillon's statement: "Greece. for example, exists as a geographical basis for certain ideas about man. but the landscape of Doric art, or rather Doric art as a landscape, created a Greece without which the real Greece is merely a great, luminous desert." The Life of Forms in Art, translated by, Charles Beecher Hogan and George Kubler, (New York, George Wittenborn, Inc., 1948). return to text
7. I am here accepting the much disputed position of Vincent Scully in The Earth. the Temple and the Gods, (New York, Frederick A. Praeger, 1969). return to text
8. The source for this paragraph is essentially my own observation. See also Paul Westheim, The Art of Ancient Mexico, (Garden City NY., Doubleday & Co., 1965). return to text
9. For the most cogent discussion of this issue, see Peter J. Ucko and André Rosenfeld, Paleolithic Cave Art, (New York, McGraw Hill Book Co., 1967), especially pp. 101-15. return to text
10. Newgrange is mentioned simply as one fine and well-known example of a very widespread art. return to text
11. This notation involves a contradiction as much as anything else. Versailles is in many ways the antithesis of a true earth art, since it is the imposition of human reason on the earth, subduing nature to human will. The Forbidden City may appear to be the same thing but it is not. It is the last major statement of the ancient Chinese art of geomancy, feng-sui. return to text
12. See Nelson Wu, Chinese and Indian Architecture, (New York, George Braziller, 1963), and Michele Pirazzolo T'sevstevens, Living Architecture: Chinese, translated by Robert Allen, (New York, Grosset and Dunlap, 1971). return to text
"Towards An Aesthetic of Early Earth Art was originally published in The Art Journal, Fall, 1982