In this short piece, Onians discusses the evolution and emergence of prehistoric art. He begins with prehistoric artifacts, finding biological justification for their aesthetic resonance with early hominids. He rationalizes the emergence of sculpture and the protection of sculptural objects with the following argument:
- Early hominids needed to be socially attracted to the facial features of their tribe and sexually attracted to the secondary sex organs of their potential mates.
- Neural network design reinforces repeated positive stimulation.
- Those early hominids who collected biologically sculptural objects would be more likely to interact sexually and socially with their tribe.
- They would therefore have greater reproductive fitness.
He thus roots the objectification of the body in an argument for the reproductive fitness of early hominids.
This argument he extends to the uniformity of rectangular architectural forms and their influence on aesthetics through the ages.
Le Fur, Yves. "Displaced Objects On Display." Compression vs. expression. Ed. John Onians. 2006, New Haven : Distributed by Yale University Press.
This article stood out due to its enumeration of the ostensible reasons for bringing together the artifacts of the world into formal museums:
The goals are not only to further research on various cultures and their history and to foster exploration of values of identity in collaboration with people of the five continents, but also to displace existing categories in order to offer elements for reflexive attitudes to all the various publics and to create a dynamic place that is always open to questioning. [10]Indeed this seems to be a common practice among avant-garde artists, but at what expense? The collaboration seems to be eternally one sided, and closer to appropriation. Is the exotic historicism mirrored in the perceived facture of the object or is it forgotten?
No comments:
Post a Comment