Finding The Finish Line
- An analysis of More Human Than Human (from How Art Made the World)
According to the Oxford (online) dictionary, art may be defined as the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture producing works to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power. Simply put, according to this definition, art is anything that invokes a strong emotional connect with the art piece and observer or anything that one finds appealing, whether visually or emotionally. Here, you may ask yourself what art is to you. What you find artistic - what you find visually and emotionally stimulating.
Consider any artist today. If you are at all artistic in any way, whatever your art form may be, consider your art. Look at some of your most recent art works. Beautiful, aren't they? You may now look at some of your older art work. Are you as happy with your old work as you are with your most recent pieces? One may be almost confident that you are not. Take up a similar case with any reputed artist. One may observe that as time passes, the artist's work is only getting better. This can be attributed to the fact that skill can be bettered by practice and patience. However, another interesting attribution can be made to the evolution of the artist's taste in art. One may observe an artist's sketches getting more detailed by the day or getting more minimalist by the day. One may also observe that some artists have a certain growth period from the very beginning of their practice after which his art style remains constant. It can hence be concluded, that according to the evolving or constant tastes of different artists, their art styles come to be the way they are. It is just like building on to achieve what's as close to perfection as it may be. Now perfection is subjective as it is what each one finds most appealing, desirable or pure. In other words, everyone either finds a point of perfection or they continue to look for the point of perfection.
In How Art Made the World - More Human than Human, Dr. Spivey starts his journey to find answers to the question of where unrealistic depictions of the human figure come from, at Willendorf with the Venus of Willendorf. One can clearly see by both name and the sculpture itself that it is more or less a figure of the female human being. The Venus of Willendorf was made by a bunch of nomads. Certain features of the figurine seem to have been exaggerated, particularly the breasts, hips, behind and front. To a common man, with no art background, it looks like the body of a stout, obese woman. At this point, we must recall the kind of weather environment the nomads were in. Cold and icy. What would be most desirable to a common man when left in a big, cold, icy and lonely environment? Warmth. Human contact. Need for survival and survival of one's own 'legacy' - one's DNA. To a man in this situation, perfection is warmth and survival. The figurine here of Venus is hence perfect to him. One can find similar traces in other Venus figurines made by nomads from different regions (all cold). Hence, in conclusion came about the exaggerated breasts and wide hips, signifying both the existence and creation of life. During this period, one can only assume that this female body type was more than just desirable. It was an obsession to find this ideal piece of warmth, energy and hence life. One can only assume that the figurines then made were a source of comfort and hope to the lonely, often lost and mostly cold nomads.
When Spivey moves onto Egypt, he finds striking dissimilarities between the statuettes of the ancient nomads and the carvings and big statues of a much more civilized society. Unlike the ancient nomads, here, the human forms sculpted by the Egyptians are relatively closer to reality than those sculpted by the nomads but still comparatively far from the real human body. Hips are narrower and almost every other body part is relatively narrow. One can observe the consistency the of the human form carvings on the rocks of the pyramids. It was observed that even after three thousand years, the human body was depicted the same way. Compare this to the artist whose art style is constant. In the early Egyptian civilization, in the heat of the desert, order was in seek and chaos was to be minimized. Hence, this was desirable to the Egyptian civilization and this to them, remained the point of perfection for many centuries.
The last stop but the most pivotal part of his journey to the answer of the question in discussion here was Greece. The Greece were the first to depict human body as the way it really is. This was because the Greek believed that Gods were in perfect human forms and they wanted to feel as Godly as a mortal human possibly could. Why do many artists in modern day prefer to draw from imagination than make still lives? It is because what we really see is simply boring. What one seeks is beauty. What one follows is lust. What one really craves is the desire to be able to crave for a certain qualities. So they modified the real depiction of human form to beauty that was more artistic. Human statues were sculpted in ways that exceeded the beauty of normal humans to such a level that one can crave for that kind of beauty. This, Spivey says is more human than human.
Spivey tries to convey that the standards of beauty today are unnatural to achieve. One can spend a lot to alter their natural bodies to meet these standards. However, one may look at it from another angle. One may argue that the natural body has capacity to change and those who are close to meeting the standards of beauty today are examples of such natural and permissible ways to the point of perfection, that this point really does exist and we crave to get to this point. There are many who are considered to have actually reached this point today (eg. models, bodybuilders, etc.) So perhaps there existed women in the nomadic times, may be rare, with large bodily features. These rare and sought after women to the nomads, was the point of perfection. To the Egyptians, the thin, rigid and bold figures was the point of perfection. These points are what artists and all human beings crave. They want to crave to get to these points whether or not it is possible. One can conclude that it is only human to want to better ourselves. Carl Roger's theory of self actualization and conditioned self actualization may be applied to this. In this sense, the evolution of unrealistic depictions of the human body is only very real. Although comparatively different from Spivey's theory, in a sense, this evolution of the depiction of human body to all the different human body forms but not unrealistic portrayal of human body is thus more human than human.
