There is No Progress in Art
There is No Progress in Art
On 20,000 year old art galleries, and deeper forms of time.
I’m not an artist, or an art historian. Most of what I know about making art I’ve learned by osmosis from artists I’m close to (some of my favorite people are artists). Most of what I’ve learned about art history I know because the art was relevant to some philosophical movement, or moment in history, that I was studying. But I’m not someone with opinions about art that people care about. No one seeks me out, to talk about art. And yet, I speak about it anyhow. We should all be talking about art, shouldn’t we?
Something I heard while I was recently in a cave in France, to see Paleolithic art, has been swimming around in my head and I wanted to think about it with you this week.
One of my favorite Paleolithic frescoes, as I’ve mentioned, was the spotted horses at Pech Merle; a work of art that could have been painted more than 20,000 years ago, but which also struck me as incredibly modern in its aesthetic. This probably isn’t an accident. Artists like Picasso were influenced, aesthetically, by the Paleolithic art that was being uncovered in caves around them in the mid 20th century. But the modern feel isn’t what draws me to the piece. At least not consciously.
Instead, I love the color palette. These dark earthy tones are all my best colors; they’re the ones I surround myself with. And I love the way that the hands at the bottom of the image seem to be conjuring up these spots that dapple the horses. What looks, at first glance, like a vision of spotted horses turns out instead to be more like a dream image of horses emerging from the dense smoke of consciousness. It’s an illusory kind of play. Are we seeing the animals? Or a dream image of the animals? I like not knowing, and I like wondering what this Paleolithic artist might have seen, or wanted me to see. It makes me wonder if animal life, animal power, animal beauty was as much a part of their dream life as it is mine. It makes me feel like I’m being stretched out across time. As if something in me that I consider myself isn’t really mine but instead some sort of deep time inheritance that I will also end up passing along.
Our guide through the decorated caves at Pech Merle was a small, quiet, unassuming woman who made big pronouncements and had the uncanny ability to inject conversation with an element of surprise. At one point she led us deep into a cavernous cave with excessive formations frozen in a descending pattern along the walls and ceilings. It felt, to me, like the prototype for a fabulous cathedral. “Do you mind if I turn off the lights just briefly?” she asked us. Nods rippled through the small crowd and then a thick darkness descended, driving a whirlpool of panic in my gut before she turned on a small lantern. “This is what the artists would have seen,” she whispered excitedly. The ornate details on the walls and high ceiling were all but gone: lost as if they were just a dream that belongs to the future and its electric light.
When we stopped to marvel at the “masterpiece” of Pech Merle—the spotted horses— she stood to the back of our group with her hands folded patiently in front of her. “It’s proof,” I heard her say to no one in particular, “that there is no such thing as progress in art.”
I’ve been hearing that phrase, in her soft voice, over and over as I’ve been trying to think about this cave art. She was probably referencing a famous quote from Man Ray. And Man Ray’s drive to resist the narrative of progress, in art, was probably a side effect of his Dadaist sensibilities: a critique of the way that capitalism feeds and foments and structures that narrative of progress. But when I think of that phrase now (there is no progress in art) I don’t hear it as a critique. Instead, I hear it in the soft voice of my underworld guide, who spoke this phrase with a sense of wonder and awe. For her, it seemed, there was something exciting and marvelous (perhaps even magical) in this lack of progress in art.
I like to think that I’ve never thought about art as something that progress has liberated or revealed or illuminated. Postmodernity had already corroded the old faith in progress by the time I started college. I learned at a relatively young age not to read narratives of progress onto our material reality. This might be one reason why I study theology. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the way that secularization narratives are automatically coupled with progress and freedom. This has always seemed optimistic, hasty, and naive to me. But I suppose that I do have the relics of that progress narrative embedded in my imagination, in complex ways.
I can recall a creeping sense of surprise, looking at ancient Roman sculptures in the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence. I remember it felt surprising to me that this delicate, sensitive, attentive representation of the human form could be so ancient. And I suppose that’s when it really sunk in (when my own progress narrative really shattered): what happened, culturally and aesthetically, to the human body in those intervening years before the Renaissance. I had a more visceral awareness, a sudden muscle memory, of what had been repressed and what powers had gone unspoken, unobserved. How the public, the commons, must have shifted in response. It was chilling.
There are some forms of writing that are frequently classified as “art”: poetry, maybe even fiction. But I think that most of the writing that I do is artless in a technical sense. I try to present it as artfully as I can, of course. But in the end, for me, writing is a form of well-crafted but utilitarian communication. There’s an internal war that’s always being waged inside of me, between something whimsical and something pragmatic. And for some reason, writing is the only craft that seems to soothe both of these interior tremors. I have a compulsive need to write, which is partly a response to this conflict. But it does feel like a way of engaging in something like the creative process that one also engages in, while making art.
So perhaps it’s presumptuous, but I like to imagine that some of what I get from writing (and reading) is resonant with what I get from from seeing and experiencing art. Perhaps it’s even resonant with what someone might get from making art. These are all things that change the way I move through the world. They are things that remind me, in the midst of what can often feel like an insufferable onslaught of days, of care and craft and thoughtfulness. They are part of what makes living feel more survivable, to me. They help to restore my faith that I might be able to navigate this thing we call living, and to help others navigate it. To let myself be led in new directions, and to be less afraid of change.
But none of these arts or crafts that make living feel more survivable give me the sense that things are “getting better.” They don’t feed a hope that our quality of life will keep “improving” by all of the economic measures we’ve been taught to believe are important. Instead, these arts and crafts that help me navigate this world of the living are part of another experience of time, or another temporal reality.
The narrative of progress—the idea that human development and technology have been leading us into a “better world”—is an experience of time. It’s a temporal reality. It tells us that our relationship to the past should be a pure struggle for liberation, that the present is always better than the swampy bog of the past, and that the future is the space of freedom and hope and promise.
Many people who’ve had the chance to see, and get close to, Paleolithic art testify that it changes them in some way. Or it illuminates something, for them. I think this is one reason why so many people make pilgrimages to see this art, and why they describe it as somehow “sacred.” It seems to me that what made this cave art sacred, for my soft-spoken underworld guide, is that is gave her another experience of time. This art reminded her of a world in which there is no progress, where progress isn’t what we need or hunger for. I felt this, too, perhaps in part because she encouraged me to.
Standing in these caves that were already millions of years old, by the time that a Paleolithic artist would have stated composing with them, I felt my whole experience of time deepening. I felt connected to someone who lived, and created, and dreamt, and imagined, tens of thousands of years ago. I felt myself moving both backwards and forwards, in time, at once. I felt extended and held by the time that stretched me. I didn’t feel superior to those people who created long ago. I didn’t feel more advanced, or less primitive, than them. Instead, I felt a sense of gratitude for this message they had left for us to decode, in whatever messy and stumbling way we could. I felt a sense of shock that we could speak to one another, in any form, across this long and deep stretch of time. I felt so small, and insignificant, in the face of this long and deep stretch of time. And yet, at the same time, this tinyness felt almost freeing. It was a reminder that my anxieties and self-seriousness are symptoms of my resentful feelings about my smallness. And my impulse to shape and craft the world, to leave codes embedded on the walls that I find, is part of something much bigger and more beautiful than me that’s always stirring around in me.