The Impulse to Make Art

Denis Dutton, an American, is Professor of the Philosophy of Art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. He publishes Arts and Letters Daily—a rewarding website which assembles notable essays and reviews from broadsheets and magazines worldwide. This alone makes him a pearl amongst the heaving tide of dross on the internet. Now he has written a book called The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution, proposing that our response to art and our desire to make it are rooted in our origins—that is to say, our 1.6-million-year-old cousins.

It is a tantalising proposition and is conducted in a fluent and lively manner—spinning out of propositions that occasionally seem like common sense while others encourage scepticism. His main assertion is that our response to certain art forms—the visual arts, music and story-telling for example, and the skills involved in creating them—have an evolutionary basis. They are not only hardwired into our systems but may have been instrumental in our survival. Surveys, he suggests, have found that human beings, regardless of culture and geography, prefer green and blue landscapes, presumably with some woodland and a bit of water trickling through it—the type of landscapes that appear on calendars. This he attributes to the memories and experiences of our Pleistocene background when man inhabited the savannahs and woodlands of East Africa.

And yet, if man found this environment so congenial, why did he move up and out, into deserts, into icy and mountainous regions and sparsely furnished plains. We must factor in wanderlust and the prestige which derived from satisfyingly brutal encounters with others of his kind.

Further, the book suggests more questions than it answers. To take one manifestation of man’s creative apparatus—the visual arts. Dutton is right to say that the impulse to make marks is a universal one. Across the entire globe, thousands and thousands of years ago, men and women were etching or painting circles, chevrons, concentric rings, and cross-hatchings on rock and clay. Some ultimately mutated into more sophisticated images we know and understand, just as many didn’t. But this is how it started—the impulse towards elaboration beyond utilitarian requirements and the pleasure taken in it—so aptly expressed by Jacob Bronowksi in his Ascent of Man. Even today we might find that the carpenter and the glass blower take more pleasure from their work than the man in the dark suit in the glass tower.

But what do we mean by art? When did man’s creative expressions take that name? Is craft art or just the perfection of technique? And most importantly, is art the manifestation of ritualised activities? Yes, almost always, one might argue.

And where did these ritualised activities come from? Our ancient cousins shared their world with a lot of large and unpredictable animals and also terrifying and inexplicable phenomena—floods, thunder, firestorms, volcanic eruptions, locust plagues, droughts—for a very long time. Just how much time is neatly illustrated by Cynthia Stokes Brown in her book Big History:

If the universe had begun thirteen years ago, then at this moment … the asteroids that killed off the dinosaurs would have landed three weeks ago … our own species, Homo Sapiens, would have existed for fifty-three minutes [and] modern industrial societies would have existed for six seconds.

We might argue that the origin of all art, regardless of culture, was in a sense propitiatory: placating the restless gods, taking good care of the ancestors through careful burial, and making continuous offerings of food, humans, animals, and carefully crafted objects in rare materials. These rare materials came from booty and from trade. In fact trading patterns from prehistoric times, and the ingrained male desire for prestige through territorial acquisition and subjugation of whoever was on the spot at the time, were great encouragers of what we now describe as art: the decorated bronze shields and swords of the Celts, the gold funerary masks of the Mycenaeans, and the bronze greaves of the Macedonian warriors all point to embellishment for status and power. Towering stone statues and relief carvings of endless gods and goddesses who mutated along with the cultures they represented, also provide ample evidence of the need to give concrete expression (as it were) to the most fundamental beliefs of antiquity. The growth of elites within tribes who were defined by their ownership of the finest crafted objects, and their capacity to compel others to do the making of them, is apparent in past and current archaeological digs worldwide.

But it is fair to say that for hundreds and thousands of years, no one who made anything that may not have been strictly functional thought of it as “art”. Art is a modern concept, although the word derives from the Latin ars, meaning skill, craft or expertise. The fact that we find much primitive or prehistoric art pleasing to the modern eye would have been irrelevant to prehistoric man.

What Dutton hasn’t addressed is that the creation of art has been contingent on diversification of labour, increased leisure time, and the infinitely protracted accretion of skills. And curiously, Dutton dents his own argument on the first page of his introduction, where he suggests that art-making requires “the highest levels of learned, not innate, skills”. This is in fact a Lamarckian proposition, not a Darwinian one. However, he must certainly be onto something when he talks about the evolutionary origins and value of story-telling, especially the admonitory kind. Mankind learnt early on to fear fire, wild animals, snakes, spiders, and strange-tasting food.

Humans of all cultures dream—which is the subconscious telling stories to itself. Their dreams’ content is contingent on the extent of their own experiences of the world and their immediate environment. For example, a medieval tinker or metalsmith is not going to have dreams about white goods on a factory floor. The shaman, druid or high priest held an important place in ancient cultures, because their dreams, visions and stories were seen as portents that could affect the well-being of the whole tribe or clan. Thus story-telling was woven into every culture from antiquity. The stories told today are no more complex than those of early man. Everything that humanity was capable of, both base and noble, is known to us through the epics of antiquity and the activities of the gods.

To return to the visual arts. The earliest surviving paintings are assumed to be those of the Lascaux, Altamira and Chauvet caves. Their makers would have been astonished to know how they have been admired and puzzled over ever since their discovery. Far down the list of speculations about their purpose—but perfectly plausible—is the slow elaboration of ideas generated by new experiences, the pleasure in exercising a skill, and boredom from being cooped up in a cave all day.

If we have religious beliefs, or rather specifically Christian beliefs, we may think of the visual arts in terms of cathedral decoration: murals, mosaics, stained-glass windows, stiff-backed saints, monsters and gargoyles. We understand the faith that spurred such developments, but not how the shimmering Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna with their saucer-eyed supplicants eventually mutated into the plastic frenzy of St Theresa by Bernini. These are mysteries of assimilation of technical skills by individual genius—elaborated over the centuries.

The painted canvas—a portable square of linen tacked to a stretcher and covered with coloured pigments—has been the site of every conceivable aesthetic development since the mercantile Dutch first popular-ised it as a domestic status symbol in the seventeenth century. This was the moment when art began distancing itself from religion and the beginning of the artist becoming master of his own creations—the final manifestation of this development being the artist who creates the unsaleable or the self-destructing art work.

Dutton proposes certain characteristics—twelve of them, including virtuosity, representation, imagination. But if art is about instincts, it is also about the denial of them. While early man made figures in his own image, and especially the female form, and continued to do so throughout the millennia, certain religions proscribed the depiction of it, namely Islam and Judaism. Furthermore, the fiercer elements of the Protestant faith denuded Catholic Britain of much of its religious iconography during the Reformation.

With the growth in popularity of contemporary art we are witnessing another phenomenon which is still associated with entry into an elite group (a chimeric notion but one which is irresistible to art snobs). There is no better example of this impulse than the performance of the Manhattan art dealer Arnold Glimcher, owner of the Pace Gallery, who stage-managed the aesthetic experience to perfection. There is a moment in a BBC documentary Relative Values where Glimcher takes a client to a “viewing room”. They step out of a private elevator and walk past a glass wall with two absolutely emblematic works of the twentieth century—a Jean Dubuffet and a Louise Nevelson no less. They enter a white-walled room with carefully calibrated light and the ubiquitous bowl of tulips. There is a hush. A Rothko is carried solemnly into the space by two factotums. There is some fiddling with the light. “You know, Mark always liked his paintings in natural light so that over a period of time, the painting begins to reveal itself more strongly … and ah, these paintings … you know, deal with the finer levels of perception.”

Even as Glimcher was paying his wealthy client the ultimate compliment of assuming his grasp of the furthest edge of the modernist aesthetic, he himself was enacting an enduring truth. Art is pure artifice. It is the invisible tightrope between the subliminal impulse and the disciplined gesture. As Picasso once said: “Art is the lie that tells the truth.”

But to turn again to the past and the long march out of the cave. When man first started making things, either for utilitarian purposes, or for symbolic or ritual needs, there may have been someone around the stone-age fishing village campfire who could impart that little je ne sais quoi, to the carving of an ivory fishing-hook; some little flourish or a little etched motif. Lo and behold, the group decides that he should be making all the fishing hooks, because he has not only demonstrated his skill, he has displayed something more. He has displayed a flair for what Bronowski called “the elaboration of processes” and he takes pleasure in it—he is an artisan.

Most early crafted objects (in the sense of the application of skill) had some relationship with the human body, and this most enduring relationship has been demonstrated to us by the burial practices of our older cousins. In almost every corner of the globe, they have preserved a record of the dawning of human consciousness—of life and death—by placing objects on bodies before burial. Thus the jewellery, figurines, cave paintings, and rock carvings represent the first human consciousness, which became self-consciousness, and self-consciousness was made manifest in objects we now call art.

This impulse to make marks is a particularly early—and compelling—expression of man’s capacity for abstract thought. When man domesticated himself and his animals, and began to live and work in one place, the diversification of labours began in earnest. It would fall to particular individuals to hammer the gold wreaths found in burials at Ur, to weave cloth, to engrave small seal stones and so on. The symbolism invested in them increased with habitual use, as did the sense of their inherent beauty. Incrementally, such objects would be coveted for their beauty alone—divorced from any practical or ritualistic purpose.

In the ancient world, wealthy Romans were partial to Greek statuary. When they couldn’t own the originals, they had them carefully copied. When less-settled groups breached Roman borders, they came with their own aesthetic preoccupations, which focused on highly portable and useful objects, such as decorations for their prized horses, in filigreed and enamelled gold, bronze and silver. Marble buildings and their accoutrements meant little at the time to these people. They left statues they encountered armless and headless but seized objects whose appeal transcended cultural differences. The concordance of beauty and desirability is an enduring one and the history of the Western world and the Eastern world has been in part the story of this phenomenon. It is the story of the sacking of cities, the search for booty, the demands for ransom, the expanding collections of emperors and popes, and of course, the black market.

The impulse to collect is as old as the impulse to make, and these impulses have historically placed the maker on one side, and the acquirer on the other, of an unequal equation. Yet while artisans bridled at the inequity of patrons lording it over them with unceasing demands and tight-fistedness, we recognise that some of the world’s most resonant art works have been created with the dictates of the client uppermost. However, during the Renaissance, artisans or craftsmen—who were well down the pecking order of their communities—flexed their muscles. One can hear the modern in the voice of Benvenuto Cellini, who finds himself assisted by King Francis I at Fontainebleau: “I thanked his majesty for having freed me from prison, saying that a prince such as his majesty … was bound to liberate men who had some talent.”

Cellini was a celebrated goldsmith, but to our modern world, his time signalled the ascendancy of the painter, who, while still at the beck and call of clients, could generate a degree of competitiveness among those who desired his presence and his handiwork. While the painter’s ascendancy begins here, his independence from the client does not. That would commence with the Realists and the Impressionists, and find its greatest expression in the postwar art world, the bureaucratic infrastructure of the 1970s, and beyond. When the French Impressionists decided to break with academic traditions, choosing subjects and scenes for the sheer pleasure of exploring how transient atmospheric affects transformed them, their informality would set in train further freedoms on the canvas—taking painters further and further away from the traditional expectations of clients.

To return to art’s purpose. Many claims have been made on its behalf. The Christian church believed that its messages could most eloquently be conveyed through sober and stylised—and later flamboyant—imagery to an illiterate public. Influential ruling families in Renaissance Italy employed the artist to record and celebrate their civic successes by recasting them and their retinues as antique gods and heroes—and perhaps to fabricate a lineage or two. On the other hand, Michelangelo believed that the artist was a heroic figure; one who subjected himself to the whims of popes with the greatest reluctance. The burghers of Northern Europe believed that art could edify and educate, nineteenth-century robber barons believed art would clothe their rapacity in respectability, while the English landed gentry simply wanted their horses, dogs and mistresses to wallpaper the staircase.

Van Gogh believed that art should offer consolation for the broken-hearted, while Picasso believed that art should be convulsive. Matisse painted in order “to be a calming influence for the mind tired by the working day of the contemporary man”. “What an ambition,” quipped Howard Jacobson, “to consoler le bourgeois!”

Marxist art historians thought that art reflected much that was base about civilisation, its greed, its vanity, and the capacity of the well-heeled—who could indulge their appetites for the original and the beautiful—to oblige the less well off, that is to say, the artisan and the labourer, to be at their disposal. And they were quite correct in this assumption, until the Impressionists flexed their brushes and started to paint air and light—commodities that did not initially guarantee them a buying audience. Art historian John Berger in particular championed the forlorn view that Western painting was, in the final count, just a celebration of the commodity.

Painters of historical events have provided records—or propaganda—for events which changed the complexion of nations. Some of these works have enlarged or narrowed our view of an event, and even created their very own political frisson in a demi-tasse.

One spectacular example was the painter Vasily Vereshchagin, who was the darling of the nineteenth-century Russian court. He rendered so faithfully the battles against Turkestan, in a series of epics he was commissioned to paint in 1874, that he exposed the Russian public to the savagery of their own soldiers. He was denounced as a traitor, exiled, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

Other examples? Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat, Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, and Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix. These paintings, among others, were discussed by John Russell, the former art critic for the Times, who examined them in the context of “the painter as newsman”. Of the latter work, Russell tells us that it was taken down lest it inflame the public, exiled to the provinces and finally returned to the artist to be kept safely out of sight until 1945. Later, it appeared on a French bank-note.

Oscar Wilde thought art had a purpose—and that this purpose was to be useless. The American critic Clement Greenberg found art a ready vehicle to express dissent, but he found sanctuary too: “it seemed to me that here I was more at home than with literature. I felt comfortable.” The Australian novelist David Malouf observed:

The great business of art is to people our consciousness with images, objects, sounds, events and characters that do not exist in nature and never existed at all until the artist found them. Once created they live in us with the same immediacy as the world we know—a second nature that might be as vital to us as the first.

The notion that an artwork was an object that could be created, displayed, sold and resold, gave a lot of contemporary artists heartburn. The 1970s were characterised by an efflorescence of works that eluded the traditional market place. Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) in Utah, which used earth-moving equipment to reposition earth, rocks, algae and salt crystals, is certainly one of the most celebrated and emblematic. But “land art” is not new, as we have discovered with the aerial photography of ancient sites in Celtic Britain. What is new is the kind of technology which allows large-scale works to be produced in a short time, and without the kind of ideological or religious impulses that underpinned archaic examples. And while the significance of many of these has yet to be established, we know that the enactment of rituals, enhanced by aesthetic exertions, is another supreme source of pleasure. Ask a Catholic—or a High Anglican.

Towards the end of his book, Dutton discusses that unhappy contribution to the visual scene—kitsch. One tantalising road not taken is why dictators such as Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and countless others, were so taken by it, and what that might indicate about our evolutionary imperatives.