Bruno David - Cave Art

. Upper Palaeolithic paintings dating to the Ice Age in the Hall of Bulls, Lascaux, France.

After decades of enquiry, sometimes with considerable insights, we continue to ask: who made these fantastic paintings, deeply buried in the hollows of the earth, and why? The artists of Naj Tunich and Lascaux belonged to very different worlds and very different times, and they came from cultures utterly unlike our own. Understanding their artwork thus necessitates understanding not just the artists as individuals who painted, but also the cultures from which they came. While to some degree the works of art can be seen as the creations of individual artists, they cannot be reduced to the genius of entirely free minds, of blank slates, because how people choose to do things is to some degree conditioned by their cultural traditions. Furthermore, while an artist can decide to make or do something, the end product is rarely exactly what was anticipated at the start of the work. What we see in the art that adorns the cave walls of Naj Tunich and Lascaux, as with cave art all over the world, is as much the product of subliminal cultural forces that shaped how people once saw the world as it is the intentions of individual artists. And what we see in those caves also reflects how we ourselves, as observers, have been conditioned to see.

Many theories have been developed over the past 150 years to explain cave art. These have tended to be Grand Theories that tried to make sense of the art by reference to a single, overarching logic. Back in the nineteenth century, when cave art first began to be rediscovered in Spain and France, it was generally thought that the art was made for its own sake art for arts sake as presumably ancient humans were too primitive for higher kinds of reason. Then notions of totemism and hunting magic became prevalent, as the world views and religious practices of living Indigenous peoples came to be documented, those new inspirations being applied to the art of Ice Age Europe. But as Indigenous communities continue to remind us today, their cultures, their artistic practices, relate to their own ways of doing things, to their own, very particular histories, not to that of others with whom they have never had any direct or even indirect contact in other parts of the world (see as the 1970s had done. Yet the new explanations again came to marginalize peoples, cultures and ways of being, and as much so as the earlier Grand Theories had done, for these new explanations were also Grand Theories that paid no real attention to the reasons why particular cultures had made art in the distant past, or, in the case of most Indigenous groups across the world, why they made art recently or continue to do so today. They did not give voice to the practices and motivations of the very people who had made the art, where this was known. This is often the fate of Grand Theories that do not address or neatly fit into the ways of all.