“… And Those Who Expect to Return to the Source Will Find Fog”: Resonances of Prehistory in Modern Art

Abstract

AbstractSince the authentication of Paleolithic cave paintings at the beginning of the twentieth century, modern artists have approached deep-time remnants (including images, tools, and traces of all sorts) in three main ways: they have either represented them, imitated them, or made them resonate conceptually and emotionally in their own artwork. In general, these attitudes—representation (or contextualization), imitation (or reenactment), and resonance (or meditation)—are at the core of modern ‘primitivism’. They have shaped the different ways of dealing with aesthetically-distant artworks and the quest for supposedly authentic origins in them. Within this ‘primitivist’ framework, I argue in this chapter that modern artists have a specific kind of relation with ‘prehistoric art’, one that privileges time rather than space. I suggest that what has attracted them is the “dark abyss of time” and, in particular, the shocking contrast between the sheer materiality of ‘prehistoric art’ (see, for instance, the freshness of a number of rock images) and the immesurable temporal lapse that separates these images from us. To be more precise, I will show how, at least in modern art, the ‘quest for the origins’ (so popular in the field of archaeology) has somewhat been substituted by a fascination for the unaccountability of time. In this context, I argue that modern and contemporary artists did not only react to new discoveries and interpretations in the archeological field but, moreover, they have actively contributed to promoting a relationship to prehistory that is more conceptual than factual and, therefore, producing a globalized concept of ‘prehistoric art’ that has been with us for many decades.