The gesture of sight

Abstract

The origin of images (defined as figurative drawings and including paintings and engravings) constitutes a question that remains unresolved. Ernst H. Gombrich (1971) and Whitney Davis (1986) have formulated hypotheses that prioritize different fundamental factors in their appearance in the European Upper Paleolithic. The current article identifies some problematic assumptions and oversights of these models, and proposes an alternative model for the origins of drawing in the Paleolithic. For Gombrich, images were originally suggested by shapes in natural features, such as cracks and evocative rocks, upon which people imposed semantic values. People would have discovered horses and bulls in vaguely suggestive rock surfaces and would have highlighted them with colors to render them visible to other onlookers. Whitney Davis reverses this process: objects (as evocative rocks) are no longer perceived as marks; rather, marks (traced by hand) are seen as objects. “Once marks are perceived as things, the full analogical power of the line is logically derived and even detached from mere experience of perceptual ambiguity.” Gombrich's hypothetis is paradoxal, as it requires the intellectual ability of “seeing as”- through the previous existence of “natural” images - to explain the emergence of such an ability as intentional drawing. But in David's view, the birth of images arises as a happenstance, even considered as a “logical” and necessary possibility inscribed in lines, that keeps drawing activities separated from any intentionality. If figurative tracings were only a technical development latent in the power of lines, they would have given form to all kinds of figures instead of being so strictly circumscribed to a limited range, namely animals and sexually-charged figures. In that sense, making images reveals an expectation, rooted in drawing activities, that emerges through the specific technical innovation of drawing: the outline. It encircles the dimension of time, internal to the line, in the spatial unity of a surface. It is an inherent and primary symbol of a living body. The visual threshold of resemblance arises from this significant shift. The outlined figures embody the limits of time (death and regeneration) through the sexual theme; and they embody spatial limits, through the animal/species theme. With these living ensembles of simultaneously shared and divided spaces, the question of identity (similar/dissimilar, unity/diversity) begins to be visually revealed.