Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 3, December 2006
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Bataille,
Georges. Edited and Introduced by
Stuart Kendall. Translated by
Michelle Kendall. The Cradle of
Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture. London.
The MIT Press. 210 pages.
ISBN: 1-890951-55-2. £18.95
hardback.
Reviewed by
Trent University in Peterborough, Canada
For
readers who have not comprehended the nuances of Georges Bataille’s
fascination with prehistoric art, and the role it plays in his conception of the
erotic, this new collection of translations by Stuart and Michelle Kendall
entitled The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture is a vital
addition to one’s library. Collected
here in English is Georges Bataille’s various writings on prehistoric art and
culture not published already in The
Birth of Art, Eroticism,
or The Tears of Eros. These
eleven pieces together comprise Bataille’s reflections on the passage from
animal to man. Here, Bataille
explores prehistoric art and culture, and examines the equivocal relationship
between man and animal, and how it is this influences our meaning of the sacred.
In his
introduction to this collection, Stuart Kendall traces the importance of
prehistoric art for Bataille, commenting upon Bataille’s ongoing efforts to
simultaneously straddle various discourses.
Kendall outlines as well the inherent tensions in Bataille’s thinking
between dialectics and the Marquis de Sade.
By noting the importance of Sade for Bataille, Kendall observes how the
passage from animal to man is predicated upon an impossible identification with
the animal within, and how this is emphasized in Bataille’s insistence upon
the effacement of man confronted with the animal world.
As
Kendall also observes in his introduction, the timeliness of Bataille’s
analysis of prehistoric art is evident in his brief but crisp comments upon
Hiroshima and Auschwitz, and how it is that knowledge of our origins seemed to
occur for Bataille precisely at the moment coinciding with the possibility of
our extinction. More obliquely,
Bataille comments upon the role 20th Century aesthetics, and
particularly Picasso, play in our ability to be moved by these childish but
necessarily figural drawings and sculptures.
Perhaps more than any other element though, these collected writings
indicate to the reader Bataille’s tremendous regard for his contemporaries
examining prehistoric art, foremost amongst being Henri Breuil.
The
first and earliest document presented in The Cradle of Humanity, entitled
“Primitive Art” presents a review of Georges-Henri Luquet’s book L’
Art primitif. Here Bataille
retraces Luquet’s “genesis of figurative art,” wherein the art of young
children is contrasted with prehistoric art.
He examines how figuration occurs as formless sets of lines
crisscrossing, which develop slowly into form.
For both children and the earliest examples of prehistoric art, according
to Bataille and Luquet, this early stage of figuration occurs as a destructive
dragging of fingers across otherwise untouched surfaces.
Additionally, Bataille presents the reader with some autobiographical
anecdotes and samples of graffiti taken from of Abyssinian children, in order to
put forward his own theory on the advent of figuration.
In his
review of Dr. Leo Frobenius’ exhibit of South African or Bushman mural
paintings at the Salle Pleyel, he prosaically observes how, upon visiting the
exhibit, the hall was virtually empty. Nonetheless,
for Bataille these images are even more remarkable than European examples of
prehistoric art. Here, the negation
of man in the face of nature is so persistent that man appears in these
paintings as a blatant heterogeneity, a separation of inconceivable violence and
waste.
In his
lecture entitled “A Visit to Lascaux,” Bataille explores the relationship
between animals and primitive humanity, observing how—for primitive
hunters—animals are not yet things. Here,
he calls upon the sensibilities of hunters to observe how, for the hunter, there
is a sense of nobility in the hunted animal, and the act of killing carries no
sense of hatred toward the animals. According
to Bataille, the proximity of these hunters to animals extends so that man is
man represented only in relation to animals, one reason perhaps why the
only human image in Lascaux is adorned with a bird’s face.
The
longest essay in The Cradle of Humanity, from which the title of this
collection draws its name, was unpublished in Bataille’s lifetime.
In questioning the Vézère valley civilization, Bataille observes
our coming into the world as such. Here,
Bataille identifies two moments, the first being the extended incubation of the
second, which he tells us, occurred discreetly but which nonetheless constitutes
our birth as such. This consisted
of arrival of Upper Paleolithic man into the Vézère valley.
For Bataille, the arrival of this more developed human, the first our
ancestors to engage in art, set the path for all human civilization to come.
In this essay, the most thorough of his inquiries within this collection,
Bataille observes the role death plays in our evolution of the sacred, and how
this was prefaced upon the divine nature of animality.
Additionally,
The Cradle of Humanity offers the reader a review of Henri Breuil’s Four
Hundred Centuries of Cave Art entitled “The Passage from Animal to Man and
the Birth of Art.” The reader
also finds a long essay entitled “Prehistoric Religion,” wherein he inquires
into the meaning bear cults in prehistory, and “The Lespugue Venus” which
explores the potential meaning of the erotic for prehistoric humanity.
As well, one is presented with his January 18th, 1955 lecture
on Lascaux, which predated the publication of The Birth of Art by three
months.
Whether
or not the reader is moved by Georges Bataille’s explorations within the
introduction to The Tears of Eros or Lascaux, these new
translations by Stuart and Michelle Kendall are vital additions to anyone
interested in exploring the complexities of a thinker exploring, what Stuart
Kendall calls in his introduction, the sediments of the possible.