7 February – 26 May 2013 Now open

British Museum – London

By Giuseppe Marasco

We are all related to the persons who made this art.

The exhibitors have through done a good job through the modern and luxurious exhibition design, injecting the excitement of just how cutting edge this art was, and appreciating the material context in which it was made. the exhibition has done quite a job in having been  of stopping us fetishes a preference for the primitive as Gombrich would have put it. S o that we take on the object without misty mythical rose-tinted wonderings. And think about seeing these people as much as on their own terms as, possible. It does bring up the issue of what substantively does it mean to be surrounded by technology today. And have we really progressed as much? Is progress in a sense really an illusion? We certainly can’t be as blase and patronising about the far past as once was possible.

Art as driving technology and thinking. Art as developing the mind and brain. Even evolving us.

I love to know what a speculative archeology and anthropology would come up with, with regards to how an Art Crit at the time would have proceeded. And  of the language production that would have proceeded from that making.

Incredible jewel like. But occasionally being made from wood. You see just how incredible sensitive and delicate and exquisite theses works are.

Though the peoples at this time had jewelery, and decoration at this time, beats and so on. It is really these ritual objects. Figuring like that That makes us think of how similar they are to modern jewellery, in that such extraordinary, touch in making can be witnessed . Though invested with very different meaning and attentions.

This is an exhibition of small things, often fragmentary, often deliberately broken as soon as made, for reasons not explicable, but perhaps ritual.

The animal stand in For people, and for the main part women. So that when animals are shown copulating, this is in fact a reference to human act portrayed in a ritual manner.

realism in the depiction of the  horse, bison, reindeer, mammoth, musk ox, bear, rhinoceros, leaping lion and swimming deer.

Until five or six years ago, the matter of the nature and intention of this art was entirely speculative.

David Lewis-Williams recent finding have revolutionised our understanding of how this art should be contextualized. By having shown this Ice age art to South African Bushmen and learning from them the meaning that they could derive from this art. Though the makers of this art, those Informants, in the Language of anthropology – no longer can be found, better understood.

but this does not explain the uncomely bulky swathe of fat so often depicted around the hips and belly.

anthropologists, rather than archeologists, point out that These Figures are more likely to have been part of a ritual were the young woman would have produced this figure. The famous voluptuous qualities of this sculpture figures are due to it being not a direct visual representation of the body but rather a sensorial exploratory representation of the young woman own body. The proportion of the figure being in relation to proximity of that body part to the center of the body and how that part of the body made sense as it was felt  .And is thought to be an integration of the self with the public social self.

a live.

and part of self exploration and self-identity and self extension. It seem to much more salutary an art and a way of entering adulthood than anything we have in modern rites of passage or in terms of how modern contemporary art has of negotiating the self, its relation to the body and the social and the land (Or environment). Another occasion were we should put the myth of progress behind us. I as astounded to learn of this as contemporary art has nothing on this, this come from the isolated work of anthropology.

The rope that can be seen on various figures seem to bind the hands or frame some part of the body in variated ways. and seem to have ritual meaning. While It understood that these figures also have a cosmological connection, to the world and universe.

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There are some testicular beads but the balance of opinion is that these represent breasts and not scrotal sacs.

It has arisen as an interesting point of contention. That modernist works were included in the exhibition.

But does confuse, the sense of what is old and what is new.  Throwing enough. so that your shaken out of that cloudy myth seeking, and you just see the object as one that was once contemporary as now. Its full meaning, not available .

Pieces that are cut into pieces of rib, essential regular in share. did have me thinking of what it would be like for a young man so long ago, to be handed this artifact. Knowing perhaps that his father had made it. Wondering it This boy would have felt a nostalgia, peering at this cut drawing. Something remarkable about how it seem like an old photo. But it would have been rarer to come by in its day. requiring more time and effort to make in its day. How many object would an individual own or looked after in that day. How many would persist of over time. So that if these object were handed over, there would be a special personal meaning. I thought about how a young man would covet this cut drawing, in the way that a contemporary youth would covet comic books or even the ability to draw well. What would it have been like to have learnt those magical skills? It’s easy to imagine the absorption of use tasks. But to imagine the pride?

Til 40,000 year ago we were all pigmented