Janet Strayer: When Art Began

When Did Art Begin?

It's a good guess that art began when the first humans were born with an opposing thumb to their fingers. No originating date like, say the first Tuesday in 300,000 B.C.E., marks this birthday. But art must be at least that old.

Venus of Berekhat Ram, 230,000-500,000 BCE, internet photo

Just as we remain uncertain of who the first humans were to poke fingers into mud and ashes to draw or sculpt, we don't know what were the first things they made or why. Different from making tools or utensils for functional use, why did humans create apparently non-functional drawings and sculptures?

Art made by the earliest human beings has endured from millenia ago. Examples of what we've come to call "fertility or earth-goddess" or "Venus" figurines date back to 500,000 BCE. Then again, think of all the art that has not endured, painted onto now eroded rocks or into shifting sands!

Art as the Greatest Human Invention of All

from DaVinci drawing

Anthropologists tell us that the ability to make and use tools is one of the prime definitions of "humankind", as distinct from other "kinds" on the planet. We know that other primates use tools, as do other animals. Nevertheless, the technological reach of tool-making and its applications has remained singular among humans.

Despite this triumph of tool-making, a National Geographic article reports (along with gorgeous photographs) that "the greatest innovation in the history of humankind was neither the stone tool nor the steel sword, but the invention of symbolic expression by the first artists." (January, 2015, p. 33). Art marks the invention of invention!

A Defining Feature of Being Human

For all the reasons mentioned, art is a defining feature of being human. We are "homo aestheticus"or art-makers and art appreciators. This takes on an entirely different emphasis than tool-makers. Tools are, by definition, concrete and functional. Art is not. Although tools can be beautifully and elegantly crafted, their reason for being is to be useful. They serve to get us something we need or want: like a stick poked into water catches us a fish for supper.

What does a stick poked into mud or ashes and then dabbed as a design onto a rock get us? Art serves no such concrete, material function as does a tool. Yet, for eons of pre-written history, humans have been impelled to create in this manner, even under the most hazardous of conditions. Interestingly, many creation myths across the globe have a divine creator artfully making humans, often out of some earthy material like mud or clay, and then breathing or decreeing life into it.

Why Make Art?

Why did the first humans make art? We can only speculate about the reasons. The question continues to intrigue us and applies to contemporary art as well. Why do we make art now? What we do know is that art is a fundamental human experience, both the making and the experiencing of it.

This is the first sentence in S. Giedion's renowned and illustrated volume that tackles this question: The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Art. Can we infer the earliest experiences of our ancestors from their art? We can try by attending to the content of the work, what is most emphasized, and its manner of presentation in its context (e.g., innermost part of caves).

With us from the dawn of our consciousness, art does more than register experience. It is useful, not in the same way that tools and utensils are useful. Yet art serves important functions. More in the way ornament or ritual are useful: art contributes to making or marking a sense of specialness in the world. And,, in the way visual language is useful, art is a means of communicating to others, even to some transcendental "other'.

Art expresses in both symbol and visual metaphors for what we experience, need, want, fear, or yearn for, be it material in nature or immaterial, physical or metaphysical.

Art is an experienced act of exploring our minds, creating and re-creating experiences, dreams, wishes, or worlds that others, too, can experience. It is an act of exploring our powers to create, elevating or submerging us into what we do not quite know ... but somehow begin to imagine. And so, it begins to take shape and form. It makes meaning.