I never really got around to talking about the documentary we watched about Chauvet Cave even though I found it incredibly fascinating. I have since journeyed back to Netflix and seen the entirety of the film. As the earliest and arguably some of the most beautiful cave paintings, the works of art in Chauvet Cave raise tons of questions about the very roots of human cultural development. These roots would eventually become the Greek pantheon, the American Indian shape shifting tricksters, the benevolent rainbow serpent, YHWH, Shakespeare's plays, Victorian poetry, cheesy infomercials, Spongebob Squarepants, and everything else we've either fabricated out of sheer boredom or tried so hard to represent across whatever medium speaks to us.
The main reason these paleolithic drawings pull me in is they way they provide a window into the birth of complex artistic, rather than scientific, thought. These people were probably not even aware of what they were doing. They had seen animals, they had figured out you could create likenesses out of charcoal and a wall, and they went about their self-appointed task. With their lives consumed by fear of predators and the necessity of hunting, it only makes sense that the entirety of this proto-culture revolves around animal figures. In a way, it's much more interesting to speculate about the motives behind these creations than it is to do the same thing for contemporary art. even though we understand the depth that goes into modern day creative thought, we can't really wrap our heads around the 'first' creative thoughts because we can't remember our own. When was the first time, in your faded and sporadic memories of young childhood, that you created something? Imagination is just a given in our modern culture. From the moment we're born all we're seeing is the results of other people's creativity. We are immersed in unnatural and stimulating representations of physical objects and intangible ideas while our personalities are forming, so we can't even begin to simulate the mind of a paleolithic child.
Imagine being a young member of a tribe that stayed in that cave. You've only seen 'real' things your entire life. Every lion has been either a threat or a carcass. Every owl has been a thing of feathers and eyes that soars silently away. You walk into the cave and recoil in terror at the site of a veritable stampede. Your reaction is much like the people who saw the first films and jumped out of the way when they though a moving train would careen off the screen and into the theater.
Or is it? Do you grasp the concept almost immediately? Have you done this before in a less concrete way? Maybe your favorite thing to do is look up into the clouds and decide what they look like. Think about that. Somewhere on our timeline, some hominid looked up at a cloud and decided it looked like something. It wasn't convinced that it was that thing, just aware of the similarities. It was the moment our thoughts became creative. it was the moment we learned to draw artistic conclusions. We had art galleries back then. They weren't thousand dollar canvases obscurely portraying the plight of the artist, they were collections of clouds and derived images in the brains of hairy cave dwellers.
I first thought about this when comparing the trickster tales to Greek mythology but I didn't have a way to say what I wanted to until the cave was brought in as a cultural root for mankind. We're all prejudiced with the specific creative tenets in our cultures. Everyone's ability to tell a story or paint a picture is decided for them before they're even born. (picture one of those silly expectant mothers with headphones on her abdomen trying to upgrade her child's I.Q. with Mozart)
I think about this and I'm overcome with a desire to rewind. I want to extract these gargantuan but unidentifiable tenets of western European creativity and move back to the starting line. I'm a hominid. I've never stepped inside Chauvet Cave. I look up at the sky, or down at the ground, or close my eyes and see something that's not there. I create.
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