Play is primal
- “The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities.”
Eric Hoffer
(1902 – 1983)
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The latter proposition may be true; the former is certainly not. Neanderthal Man made tools, but it’s not clear that he had anything like what we would call art. As for the cave paintings themselves, they were certainly made by modern man.
Moreover, we would also have to careful not to project an “art for art’s sake” attitude onto Paleolithic Man. People who made cave paintings in historical time – Bushmen and North American Indians – are known to have done so as part of ritual activities connected with altered states of consciousness.
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?i=56121049&id=310241441
There’s no reason to think the same was not true of Altimira and Lascaux, and some evidence internal to the paintings to indicate that it was:
http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Cave-Consciousness-Origins-Art/dp/0500284652/
What the cave paintings probably tell us is that modern man, unlike his precursors, has the kind of mind that can, at times (and sometimes with deliberate help – dancing, drumming, extreme pain, drugs, sensory deprivation), experience states of mind different from ordinary waking consciousness. Art seem originally to have been tied up with that.
Actually, that madman Nietzsche, in his first and most interesting book, had seen the connection between “religion” and art – the Greek theatre was originally religious ritual. We could understand “religion” as an attempt to understand and codify what the mind experiences in these extreme states.
The bison, to those who painted it, probably spoke not so much of play as of spirits, death, other realms, and power.