Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 7 Number 3, December 2006

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Bataille, Georges.  Edited and Introduced by Stuart Kendall.  Translated by Michelle Kendall.  The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture.  London.  The MIT Press.  210 pages.  ISBN: 1-890951-55-2.  £18.95 hardback.  

For readers who have not comprehended the nuances of Georges Bataille’s fascination with prehistoric art, and the role it plays in his conception of the erotic, this new collection of translations by Stuart and Michelle Kendall entitled The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture is a vital addition to one’s library.  Collected here in English is Georges Bataille’s various writings on prehistoric art and culture not published already in The Birth of Art, Eroticism, or The Tears of Eros.   These eleven pieces together comprise Bataille’s reflections on the passage from animal to man.  Here, Bataille explores prehistoric art and culture, and examines the equivocal relationship between man and animal, and how it is this influences our meaning of the sacred. 

In his introduction to this collection, Stuart Kendall traces the importance of prehistoric art for Bataille, commenting upon Bataille’s ongoing efforts to simultaneously straddle various discourses.  Kendall outlines as well the inherent tensions in Bataille’s thinking between dialectics and the Marquis de Sade.  By noting the importance of Sade for Bataille, Kendall observes how the passage from animal to man is predicated upon an impossible identification with the animal within, and how this is emphasized in Bataille’s insistence upon the effacement of man confronted with the animal world.

As Kendall also observes in his introduction, the timeliness of Bataille’s analysis of prehistoric art is evident in his brief but crisp comments upon Hiroshima and Auschwitz, and how it is that knowledge of our origins seemed to occur for Bataille precisely at the moment coinciding with the possibility of our extinction.  More obliquely, Bataille comments upon the role 20^th Century aesthetics, and particularly Picasso, play in our ability to be moved by these childish but necessarily figural drawings and sculptures.  Perhaps more than any other element though, these collected writings indicate to the reader Bataille’s tremendous regard for his contemporaries examining prehistoric art, foremost amongst being Henri Breuil.

The first and earliest document presented in The Cradle of Humanity, entitled “Primitive Art” presents a review of Georges-Henri Luquet’s book L’ Art primitif.  Here Bataille retraces Luquet’s “genesis of figurative art,” wherein the art of young children is contrasted with prehistoric art.  He examines how figuration occurs as formless sets of lines crisscrossing, which develop slowly into form.  For both children and the earliest examples of prehistoric art, according to Bataille and Luquet, this early stage of figuration occurs as a destructive dragging of fingers across otherwise untouched surfaces.  Additionally, Bataille presents the reader with some autobiographical anecdotes and samples of graffiti taken from of Abyssinian children, in order to put forward his own theory on the advent of figuration.

In his review of Dr. Leo Frobenius’ exhibit of South African or Bushman mural paintings at the Salle Pleyel, he prosaically observes how, upon visiting the exhibit, the hall was virtually empty.  Nonetheless, for Bataille these images are even more remarkable than European examples of prehistoric art.  Here, the negation of man in the face of nature is so persistent that man appears in these paintings as a blatant heterogeneity, a separation of inconceivable violence and waste. 

In his lecture entitled “A Visit to Lascaux,” Bataille explores the relationship between animals and primitive humanity, observing how—for primitive hunters—animals are not yet things.  Here, he calls upon the sensibilities of hunters to observe how, for the hunter, there is a sense of nobility in the hunted animal, and the act of killing carries no sense of hatred toward the animals.  According to Bataille, the proximity of these hunters to animals extends so that man is man represented only in relation to animals, one reason perhaps why the only human image in Lascaux is adorned with a bird’s face.

The longest essay in The Cradle of Humanity, from which the title of this collection draws its name, was unpublished in Bataille’s lifetime.  In questioning the Vézère valley civilization, Bataille observes our coming into the world as such.  Here, Bataille identifies two moments, the first being the extended incubation of the second, which he tells us, occurred discreetly but which nonetheless constitutes our birth as such.  This consisted of arrival of Upper Paleolithic man into the Vézère valley.  For Bataille, the arrival of this more developed human, the first our ancestors to engage in art, set the path for all human civilization to come.  In this essay, the most thorough of his inquiries within this collection, Bataille observes the role death plays in our evolution of the sacred, and how this was prefaced upon the divine nature of animality.

Additionally, The Cradle of Humanity offers the reader a review of Henri Breuil’s Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art entitled “The Passage from Animal to Man and the Birth of Art.”  The reader also finds a long essay entitled “Prehistoric Religion,” wherein he inquires into the meaning bear cults in prehistory, and “The Lespugue Venus” which explores the potential meaning of the erotic for prehistoric humanity.  As well, one is presented with his January 18^th, 1955 lecture on Lascaux, which predated the publication of The Birth of Art by three months.

Whether or not the reader is moved by Georges Bataille’s explorations within the introduction to The Tears of Eros or Lascaux, these new translations by Stuart and Michelle Kendall are vital additions to anyone interested in exploring the complexities of a thinker exploring, what Stuart Kendall calls in his introduction, the sediments of the possible.