Wonders of Rock Art a chance to redeem acts of image making
Professor David Hawkes of Arizona State University explains in a recent article how literary and dramatic works of the early modern period in Europe, 400 or 500 years ago, express the economic anxieties of the time: an age when capitalism was in its infancy.
In this era there was a widening discrepancy between the “worth” of an object (based on its inherent qualities and its uses) and its “value” as a commodity (how much it can fetch on the market, often based on external factors). Karl Marx later drew on this distinction in his famous critique of capital, comparing “use-value” to “exchange-value”.
From there, via a few centuries of imaginative banking experimentation and the replacement of assets with access to credit as the measure of wealth, it’s a hop, skip and jump to derivatives and futures trading. From a certain point in history — 2008, say — there has no longer been a connection between worth and value. Money (itself a symbolic representation) has become “hypermoney, metamoney, money squared, or even the money of money”. So junk housing bonds can be magically turned into a source of revenue because the financial system is entirely self-referential, a closed universe of signs and symbols with little connection to the symbols those signs supposedly represent.
For Hawkes, this is symptomatic of the postmodern condition, in which it is taken for granted that there is no meaning beyond representation; everything is an image, nothing has substance. All identity is constructed, a performance — there is no “essence”. This might be liberating. But when we only have images, there can be no real meaning to life.
Half a millennium might seem like a long time ago. Yet if the world has now compounded those early-modern worries about the disconnection between representation and reality — if the function of postmodern consumer capitalism is to turn this relationship on its head, so we now take it for granted that there is only representation and that representation is reality — then we may need to look further into our collective past to redeem the acts of image making and image viewing.
I don’t mean a few thousand years into the past. Plato was sceptical about artifice and imagination; Aristotle, as Hawkes reminds us, fretted about materialism’s effect on the mind and soul. We have to go way back, to the earliest records of human beings using images to convey a meaning that may or may not relate directly to the observable world.
Joburgers have a wonderful opportunity to do so with the opening of Wonders of Rock Art: Lascaux Cave and Africa at Sci-Bono Discovery Centre in Newtown.
When a group of teenagers followed a dog chasing a rabbit down a hole (or so the story goes) in the southwest of unoccupied France in 1940, they discovered a network of caves that had been sealed off for 8,000 years.
About 8,000 years before that, a group of Cro-Magnon artists had produced spectacular paintings on the cave walls, leaving behind a record of the oldest known modern humans in Europe. Following the Second World War, the caves of Lascaux became a place of pilgrimage — to the point that, in 1963, they had to be closed to the public because throngs of visitors were damaging the paintings.
Since then, artists and scientists have worked together to produce replicas that provide an experience as close as possible to seeing the original works. Indeed, with Wonders of Rock Art, we are arguably able to see more than was previously possible on the site itself: through old-school illumination, video display and virtual modelling, the complex dynamics of the animal paintings can be vividly demonstrated.
SA has rock art so old it makes Lascaux seem recent. The exhibition gives visitors the chance to reconsider our own ancient artistic heritage. We have evidence of Homo sapiens scraping and carving, painting and marking 100,000 years ago, starting that process of symbolic association and representation that makes all art possible. Humans have always been obsessed with images.