Abstract
Art and shamanism are often represented as timeless, universal features of human experience, with an apparently immutable relationship. Shamanism is frequently held to represent the origin of religion and shamans are characterized as the first artists, leaving their infamous mark in the cave art of Upper Palaeolithic Europe. Despite a disconnect of several millennia, modern artists too, from Wassily Kandinsky and Vincent van Gogh, to Joseph Beuys and Marcus Coates, have been labelled as inspired visionaries who access the trance-like states of shamans, and these artists of the ‘white cube’ or gallery setting are cited as the inheritors of an enduring tradition of shamanic art. But critical engagement with the history of thinking on art and shamanism, drawing on discourse analysis, shows these concepts are not unchanging, timeless ‘elective affinities’; they are constructed, historically situated and contentious. In this paper, I examine how art and shamanism have been conceived and their relationship entangled from the Renaissance to the present, focussing on the interpretation of Upper Palaeolithic cave art in the first half of the twentieth century—a key moment in this trajectory—to illustrate my case.
Highlights
In this paper, I examine the concepts of art and shamanism, their emergence as terms in European thought, and the way in which they have been perceived to interface in various ways, over time.I show how the terms art and shamanism emerge at the same time and quickly become entangled in European thought, from the late Renaissance
Drawing on Gloria Flaherty’s work (1988, 1989, 1992), which sets out how the shaman was co-opted as the performing artist of higher civilization in the eighteenth century, I propose that the discovery of Upper Palaeolithic cave art in Europe in the nineteenth century, and its authentification in the early twentieth century, enabled the co-option of shamanism into the visual arts
‘Art’ was iterated as a special category discrete from craft by Vasari, the ‘father’ of art history, and the first Siberian shaman was recorded by a European, Englishman Richard Johnson, during Vasari’s lifetime
Summary
I examine the concepts of art and shamanism, their emergence as terms in European thought, and the way in which they have been perceived to interface in various ways, over time. Treating these three works separately rather than as linked by the general terms art and shamanism, it is clear that they are unrelated in fundamental ways, such as in terms of medium, date, and social and cultural context Despite these radical differences, for some thinkers the connective thread of shamanism makes perfect, if problematic, sense, raising the concern of why and how such a wide range of art and almost any artist, has been termed a ‘shaman’—from Palaeolithic cave artists to artists of the ‘white cube’ contemporary gallery space. Despite these radical differences, for some thinkers the connective thread of shamanism makes perfect, if problematic, sense, raising the concern of why and how such a wide range of art and almost any artist, has been termed a ‘shaman’—from Palaeolithic cave artists. In order to critically examine how this entanglement of art and shamanism has come about historically and persists in the non-specialist scholarship, insisting on artist-shamans from prehistory to the present and across cultures, I trace the construction of the terms and the history of their relationship in Western intellectual history
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