ORDER/SUBSCRIBE          SPONSORS          CONTACT          WHAT'S NEW          INDEX/SEARCH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reviewer biography

Current Reviews

Review Articles

Book Reviews Archive

The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture

by Georges Bataille; trans. by Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall
Zone Books, New York, 2005
210 pp. Trade, $28.95
ISBN: 1-890951-55-2.

Reviewed by Allan Graubard
2900 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20008, USA

a.graubard@starpower.net

"…for the animal, being essentially man’s double, had something of the divine, the very thing he no longer attains except in the prodigious effervescence of festival." (p. 177)

With this, Georges Bataille makes bold a suggestion that, along with several others, clarifies a means to comprehend prehistoric art and culture——as much as it existed for them, our Paleolithic ancestors, as for us. But that, of course, is characteristic of Bataille. His research into the formative complexities of culture is also a means to inspire, as it seems, a desire we share across epochs, and which because of its vitality eschews any notion of nostalgia.

It is something we call the marvelous.

What then did the birth of art mean 40,000 to 50,000 years ago? How did it mark the emergence of human culture; what are its ties to the community of hunter-gatherers, who embraced equally the animals they ate and used for clothing; and where does it link with the otherness of death——traits in whole or in part that distinguish sentient beings and cultures?

Such are the questions that Bataille struggles with in these 10 texts and appendix, written over a 30-year period (1930 to 1960), and which, despite their sometime brevity, captivate a sensibility at work in the aftermath of two World Wars, during other more local conflicts, and when the possibility of global atomic catastrophe first bore an immanence that we have yet to resolve.

We should not forget that Bataille visited the cave at Lascaux in 1952, which he describes in A Visit to Lascaux. He notes the magical character of the drawings, the differences in depiction between animal and man——the former rendered with startling acuity, the latter as a rudimentary sign in an animal mask——and the exceptional qualities of the place. Then in the last paragraph he returns to a history we know as our own, and which begins with a form of slavery: the subjugation to work.

In this light it seems less important to test Bataille’s accounts by way of their scientific truth as by what we gain and lose in our reading of them, a value that underlies much of his work and which also enabled him to conflate his research on prehistoric man with three aptitudes: a philosopher’s skill in suspending judgment, an anthropologist’s need for specificity in observation, and a poet’s desire to reveal existential qualities perhaps previously unknown but which, when recognized, gain precision by virtue of our assent to their immediacy.

We find this, most notably, in the text Unlivable Earth, which also concludes the work prior to the Notes for a Film in the appendix. For here, Bataille writes with a conviction that surprise infects with astonishment. In Les Trois Frères, our ancestors have depicted "all jumbled up [in] an immense crowd of animals" the emergence of "figures half-human, half-animal" that "lead to a musical tumult, a dance of deliverance into intoxication." Bataille continues: "the straightforward animal figures were those of the hunt, but these strange — human yet animal — figures were in fact divine, for the animal…" And we return to the excerpt at the start of this review.

In matters of concern to art and poetry, philosophy, and science, George Bataille is a provocateur. That his studies inevitably turn to tracking the rapport between them, as he wrote and when we read, are why we greet them with the attention they deserve.

The current book of 210 pages does not fail us in this respect.

 

 




Updated 1st September 2005


Contact LDR: ldr@leonardo.org

Contact Leonardo: isast@leonardo.info


copyright © 2005 ISAST