Art: the Pleistocene made us do it
Mr. Scatter apologizes for his recent silence. He’s been a little scattered.
One of the things he’s been doing is reading The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, by Denis Dutton, the philosopher of art who is also founder and editor of the invaluable Web site Arts & Letters Daily.
The Art Instinct talks a lot about the evolutionary bases of the urge to make art: the biological hard-wiring, if you will. Dutton likes to take his readers back to the Pleistocene era, when the combination of natural selection and the more “designed” selection of socialization, or “human self-domestication,” was creating the ways we still think and feel. To oversimplify grossly, he takes us to that place where short-term survival (the ability to hunt; a prudent fear of snakes) meets long-term survival (the choosing of sexual mates on the basis of desirable personal traits including “intelligence, industriousness, courage, imagination, eloquence”). Somewhere in there, peacock plumage enters into the equation.
There’s a lot to like and a little to argue about in this book, which comes down squarely on the biologically determined as opposed to the culturally determined side of the art-theory fence. Mr. Scatter is an agnostic on this subject, although he leans slightly toward the Darwinian explanation, if for no better reason than that he finds Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and their academic acolytes a bit fatiguing, and he sees no reason why we should consider the analysts of art more important than the artists themselves. Mr. Scatter says this despite his own penchant for analyzing stuff. Besides, The Art Instinct uses a lot of anthropological evidence in support of its argument, and long ago Mr. Scatter was actually awarded (he hesitates to say “earned”) a university degree in sociology and anthropology, although he usually just says “anthro” because that’s the part that seems to have stuck with him in his later adventures in life.
One of Mr. Dutton’s most entertaining passages comes in his first chapter, when he examines the infamous America’s Most Wanted, the 1993 painting by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. You probably recall it. It’s a sort of “paint-by-survey” artwork, created after polling lots of people on what subject matter they liked most and least in their art. (The Russian expatriates created versions for several nationalities.)
As it turns out, most people want comforting pictures of natural surroundings, and Komar and Melamid’s project, which seems to have purposely wired its survey questions to get specific sorts of answers, makes great sport of that. It was seized upon by experimentalists and academics alike as proof of the cultural cretinism of the common person, who lacks creative imagination and is no doubt a dullard in most other ways, to boot. The most prominent feature of America’s Most Wanted, it could be argued, is the long nose down which it looks.
Dutton proposes another, far more fascinating, way to look at the Most Wanted series of paintings. Never mind how George Washington got at the center of the action: The key is the terrain, which seems like something vaguely out of the Hudson River School. More precisely (or ancestrally), Dutton argues, the ideal human landscape, “what human beings would find intrinsically pleasurable,” is from our common genetic recollection of East Africa. Quoting Gordon H. Orians from his 1992 essay with Judith H. Heerwagen, Evolved Responses to Landscapes, published in the book The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, Dutton describes an emotional “home base” landscape of open spaces with low grasses, water either directly in view or nearby, an opening that offers a view of the horizon, animal and bird life, and a lushness of flowers, fruit plants and greenery. In other words: precisely the sort of place that our forebears found fortifiable and capable of providing a good life. A garden, if not precisely Eden.
Is this lowbrow, or unsophisticated, or sentimental? Or is it simply the way we’re wired? Is it, in fact, an extremely sophisticated emotional connection to the defining physical factors of our beginnings as a social species? When Dutton calls it the art “instinct,” he isn’t kidding, although he takes pains to stress that there is no single source, no “art gene,” that can be isolated: It’s a combination of many evolutionary factors, some more direct than others. We are all out of Africa, we are all out of the Pleistocene, and we all have an inbred stake in this thing called art.
Maybe we don’t know much about it, and maybe even our lords of culture know far less about it than they think. But if we can believe Komar and Melamid, at least we all know what we like. It’s in our blood.
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ILLUSTRATION: “America’s Most Wanted,” by Komar and Melamid.
April 14th, 2010 at 7:57 am
It seems to me difficult to talk about why we make “art” unless we are clear about what art IS — and I’m not sure we are. What most of us now think of as “art” was first, it seems to me, very functional activity in an environment without much leisure — art actually DID SOMETHING, which maybe (in truth) it hasn’t done for a very long time.
In a book I was intro’d to in grad school, MAN’S RAGE FOR CHAOS by Morse Peckham, art is defined as “whatever we regard with a disposition for looking at art,” and I think there is insight here in moving the definition away from the object and to the context of the observation. Since today art has, at best, a leisurely function, not an essential function, it can be anything.
Philip Glass recently said something important in this context: he said that all of us are artists and all art should be shown anonymously. That is, get art out of the personality cult and superstar fame environment and back into the realm of doing something that has a function, and who cares who did it?
I think the important question is not where art comes from, or why we do art, but what is art and what does it actually DO? Surely before anyone talked about “art” there were objects and activities that today we’d call “art” and surely those objects and activities had a very practical, non-leisurely, essential function (religious festivals etc) in the lifeblood of the early cultures. We lost that essential link long ago.
April 14th, 2010 at 12:09 pm
Back when I was doing formal debate, we always started off by attempting to define the terms of the issue at hand in a way acceptable to both sides, under the theory that reasoned debate must operate from a common foundation. The problem is that there is no definition of “art” that’s likely to satisfy both sides of any debate on the subject. And nowhere is this more significant, perhaps, than in the disconnect between consumers of art (audiences, sponsors, legislators) and artists themselves. Consumers (speaking in generalities now) are indeed likely to go for the familiar, the comfortable, the “pretty,” perhaps due to hard wiring, perhaps because it’s what they’ve been conditioned to expect or demand from “art.”
Artists, on the other hand, are supposed to challenge expectations, to attempt to break through to something new, to advance the ways we experience an ever-changing world. As centuries of art build upon each other and the challenge of finding the new becomes ever more difficult, art will naturally become more distanced from the consumer’s comfort zone. This, I think, is art’s job — not completely what it “does,” Charles, but close enough to be going on with.
Remarkably, it seems to work out, if not easily or prettily. The universe of art moves forward, pulling consumers along willingly or reluctantly. Art that inflames anger in one era becomes soothing room décor in a later one. Long-dead artists continue to mentor new ones. Yes, some good stuff gets ignored and a lot of bad stuff lives on, but, hey, it’s an imperfect world.
This I do believe, and have said and written many times: Whatever we know about past civilizations, we learned through their art. I don’t know if there’s a definition in there anyplace, but for me, it’s reason enough to make art, however we define it, an essential function in our lives and our culture. And that concludes my sermon for today.
April 14th, 2010 at 3:24 pm
Isn’t this fun? Of course, we can never agree on a definition of art, which is partly why these arguments about it never abate. A historian (art or otherwise), an anthropologist (physical or comparative), a psychiatrist, a philosopher, a bricklayer, an “artist,” whatever or whoever that is, are going to have different points of view.
Dutton doesn’t argue that because Pleistocene humans developed both aggressive and cooperative survival skills and passed them along genetically, Picasso created “Guernica.” He argues that traits bred into humans during the Pleistocene era created a specifically human (and specifically GENETIC) outlook on the world that made the creation of a “Guernica” possible. (He does argue that storytelling is innately, genetically human.) Does this make a lot of difference to how we think about art? Maybe, maybe not. If you buy his thesis, it does suggest that specifically cultural constructions of what art “is” and what it “means” (whoa! I’m beginning to sound like Bill Clinton!) are less important than many modern theorists believe, and that art therefore might still be as much an emotional game as an intellectual game.
The question of whether art exists on its own, without reference to the artist who created it, is an interesting one. Does it matter whether Shakespeare or De Vere or a warehouse full of monkeys with typewriters created all those plays and poems? Does the artist’s intention matter, or is that purely the purview of the critics and curators who analyze it? You could argue that particularly in the visual arts, a lot of artists have begun to create work in response to the pronouncements of the critics/curators, rather than the other way around. So who’s doing the “creating” here?
Dutton’s viewpoint suggests something that I find attractive, which is that art responds to certain basic needs. (His comparison of art to other shows of skill, such as sports, makes for interesting reading.) This appeals to the anthropologist in me, and he has some fascinating things to say about cross-cultural analysis of art. On a simple level, I would say that for people who venerate or find comfort in them, a needlepointed “Home Sweet Home” or a picture of Jesus on the wall or a retablo serve much of the function that a Miro or a Hockney or a Mapplethorpe on the wall serve someone else. Does that make the needlepoint a work of art? Is it art, but not “good” art? Do we dislike it because it affirms a cultural bias that its owner holds and so is largely a matter of comfort? But isn’t the owner of the Miro or Hockney or Mapplethorpe also affirming his own biases, and therefore spending a lot more money to provide himself with an emblem of comfort? Is comfort bad? And I think if we talk about a definition of art that involves a response to built-in urges, we need to recognize that certain things we might feel like shutting out of the conversation (cheesy stadium rock ‘n’ roll, Thomas Kinkade paintings, Miley Cyrus, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Planet 9 from Outer Space, the Ice Capades) are part of the family, although even Caliban might be tempted to pretend he doesn’t know them. Oh, my, we’re never going to argue our way out of this corner!
I’ve had artists tell me that art is what they decide it is, because they are artists. But who decided they were artists? Is one culturally appointed such? Does one simply decide on one’s own? Does god-if-there-be-a-god strike one with an artist-creating thunderbolt? Is one genetically hardwired to be an artist? And even if art is what an artist decides it is, does that mean it’s GOOD art?
Dutton approaches the question of the authorship of art (and whether we even need to consider it) with some interesting takes on things that many people consider “outside” the realm of art. Is Duchamp’s “Fountain” urinal art or anti-art? What about forgers such as Han Van Meegeren, who briefly pulled the wool over the world’s eyes with his ersatz Vermeers? What about the prodigious elderly pianist Joyce Hatto, whose amazing feats of virtuosity turned out to be recording studio tricks by her engineer husband? Is it real, or is it Memorex? And if it’s NOT real, does it matter?
I happen to think Dutton’s Darwinian approach is valuable. And to a certain extent I’m not sure it matters whether he’s “right.” It’s a provocative and elegant mind game, and I suppose you could say that’s an art in itself.