Joining Forces: Neuroaesthetics, Contemporary Visual art and Archaeological Interpretation of the Past

Abstract

Archaeological research has brought to our attention two strands in the interpretation of the past. The first is linked with processes and patterns that transcend time, human communities and the material culture that people used to express the world that they were part of. The second focuses on individual expression via material culture as a reflection of being part of a wider community, while at the same time negotiating one’s own place in that community. By combining those approaches, I propose a new understanding of human visual expression as a timeless form of communication where neuroaesthetics creates a platform that cross-cuts time and space, and where the cultural and historical integrity of the creative context in which the visual metaphor is executed is a guide for how to look at material culture. In particular, I concentrate on the idea of the corporality of the human body and visual art. Examples presented include some of the earliest cases known as well as contemporary art. These are, however, not to be understood in terms of one being more complex than the other, but rather as expressions of the same neurophysiological capacities of being human, in particular the social, ritual and symbolic contexts of the cultures of which the artists were part. Such an approach allows us to go beyond the constraints of the nineteenth and twentieth century evolutionary schema where ethnographic analogies provided the basis for comparing the visual expression of small scale societies in the past and which supported the notion of the idea of an evolution from simple to complex.