Interesting article about cave paintings

WHAT THE CAVES ARE TRYING TO TELL US    

                                                                    (image from the article) 

I came across a 2017 article by Sam Kriss about cave paintings (linked above) and I thought it was relevant to the Painted Rice Cakes reading. Cave paintings embody the idea that artistic representations are somehow more than just an image. It is a fun read and pretty short, but I'll include some of the passages that made me think of our class readings:

"There's a powerful magic in representation, the gift of creating the world in simulation, the ability to turn charcoal and ochre into something that is also a real horse: might it have had an effect on the horse itself? If you draw horses, do horses appear?"

"It could be that the people of the Pleistocene made their entire world into a gallery, that animals charged across every rock-face, that wherever the tremendous herds of Ice Age beasts roamed, they were surrounded on all sides by echoes and images of themselves, in a world where image and object had not yet torn themselves apart" (or perhaps before we conceptually tore them apart)

"With art, humanity enters the realm of ideals and universals"

"something painted in marks on the stone, something that communicates not one or another specific meaning, but the ultimate irrelevancy of meaning itself"

Happy reading!

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