There is no doubt that life is carried forward
because molecules of DNA, which constitute the genes, embody a
coded history of life’s genealogical past. In this
respect we are part of nature in everything we do, from stepping on
a bus to painting a house. Like all other living things our
behaviour is governed by a chemical coding of our genes, which is a
record of successful long-term interactions with the environments
of our ancestors, near and in the distant past. It is a
biochemical memory that 'remembers' the body’s responses of
growth reproduction and behaviour that have been responsible for
survival. In this respect, the body of a plant, animal or
microbe represents a kind of prediction that its future
environmental experiences will, to a general extent, resemble those
of its ancestors. Animals, especially those with brains, are
particularly good survivors because the nervous system also has a
remarkable picturing ability for remembering what is the most
useful way of responding to short-term variations in the
environment. As a computer model, the brain (hardware) and
its networks of memory cells (the software) have evolved to
continuously scan the environment, and use memories of good and bad
responses to keep short-term survival strategies up to date. The
genes model the basic aspects of the environment that change very
slowly over generations. The brain produces models of
survival as day-to-day interactions between perception via the
senses and a mental representation of environment that triggers the
correct response. This interplay between changes in the environment
and their representation as virtual images in the central nervous
system allows us to move through a mental world of our
brain’s making, and produce neuromuscular responses that aid
survival. Since brains are also products of natural selection,
ancestors, near and in the distant past, also carried virtual
worlds of their contemporary environments in their heads.
Brains are a particular expression of DNA tasked with the role of
recording lifespan-events as pictures to help predict the immediate
future.
We describe these virtual worlds as
‘patterns of thought’ and the process of perception
that generates them as ‘reading the
environment’. This faculty of
‘graphicity’ is a vital process of comprehension.
We become interested in shapes and colours that do not fit into the
known. In this we prefer intriguing suggestions to actual
representation. For example, a trail of footprints occurring
together with disturbed vegetation and dung deposits is read
intently by a hunter as the pattern of his prey. It is comprehended
as a detailed mental map of events over a wide area that points to
the course of action necessary if the hunt is to be
successful. According to Steven Dawkins it seems plausible
that the ability to perceive the signs and generate such pictures
might have arisen in our ancestors before the origin of speech in
words. If the thought-picture could be represented as an
arrangement of shapes and signs, constructing an environmental
model in the head is a helpful way to communicate, and coordinate
what has to be done in a social group. Such mental imagery
could be an educational resource to help group cohesion and promote
social evolution. This seems the likely origin of art, which
depends on noticing that something can be made to stand for
something else in order to assist comprehension and
communication. Dawkins suggests that it could have been the
drawing of mind-maps in the sand that drove the expansion of human
evolution beyond the critical threshold of communication that other
apes just failed to cross. It may be pertinent that
ceremonial sand-pictures of native Australians function as maps.
They are patterns created by an individual ‘dreamer’
through the two-dimensional spacing of symbols standing for people
and local topographical detail. The fact that these patterns are
closely associated with ‘dreaming’ is
significant. Dreams are set up by our simulation software
using the same modelling techniques used by the brain when it
presents its updated editions of reality. These aboriginal
maps of the dreamtime were community properties. Their role was to
codify the neighbourhood and its use by the community in the form
of a locally accepted non-representational pattern of
relationships. The collection of pictographs reinforced the
existence of a tribal territory and its natural resources by
incorporating stories about its occupation by the group’s
ancestors. The pictures, now being made permanent works of
art on cloth and hardboard, had a social function to maintain a
subculture of understanding by reinforcing comprehension of group
identity and space. Rock art of North America, which consists
of pictographs constructed from circles, spirals and lines, also
seems to have its origins in dreams, and a significance in carrying
messages about origins and group identity across generations.
Reaching from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego there is
tremendous variety in all aspects of indigenous art from prehistory
to the arrival of Europeans, differing region by region, era by
era, and often tribe by tribe. There are representations of
flora and fauna, men and gods, earth and sky; symbols of clan and
tribe, religion and magic; formal designs from the primal to the
highly intricate. They appear in examples of basketry,
weaving, pottery, sculpture, painting, lapidary work, masks,
drum-heads, weapons, apparel, beadwork, goldwork, blankets,
ponchos, and may other forms.
In the cave art of the European Palaeaolithic we
may contemplate on the existence of the bovine quality in art which
is 35,000 years old, and may conclude that since then there has
really been no fundamental development in our imaginative and
technical abilities to represent natural forms that are close to us
practically, emotionally, and spiritually. Sometimes the whole body
of an animal is contained in the shape of the rock. It was the rock
that revealed its animal 'spirit'. Their common mental ground is
specific material features, such as cracks and smooth, rounded
surfaces, which are used to enhance animal features in the mind of
the artist. Most of the paintings consist of collections of
symbols arranged haphazardly on the surface indicating that they
were contributed at different times by several individuals.
Occasionally they occur as if welded by one person into an overall
composition. For example, the Chumash, who once inhabited the
coast of southern California from Malibu to Morrow Bay, created
painted compositions in which dozens of interrelated shapes
were confined within a limited space. At Arrow Head Springs two
rounded boulders with painted panels mark a Chumash sacred site on
a steep slope overlooking Santa Barbara and the Channel
Islands.
Although the animal forms of Palaeolithic art
have a high aesthetic profile, they are usually found together with
abstract shapes, such as circles, spirals, and grids. These shapes
emerge in the trances of modern spiritualists, and people with
certain sight defects, where they are generated from particular
regions of the brain. These findings have led to the belief that
the rock faces played a spiritual role in the social life of
prehistoric peoples. Beyond the rock face was their spirit world;
the rock wall is a spiritual place where shamans sought power in a
personal interaction at an important boundary between the living
and material worlds. Trances have a practical purpose- healing
people who are sick. In other words, in making art against stone, a
spiritual healer was trying to understand what the brain makes us
feel. We are essentially human when we use graphic ways of
portraying other realities, and the Palaeolithic artist deep in a
cave, or balancing on a rocky mountain-side, was expressing a mind
identical to our own in order to serve his community.
An equally powerful biological imperative is to
promote ‘self’. In the sense of the
‘selfish gene’ scenario, any behavioural characteristic
that gives one’s own genetic endowment an advantage in
passing to the next generation is subject to natural
selection. From this aspect, art is also one of many
behavioural expressions that allows an individual to be
distinguished from the crowd. Piet Mondrian put it this
way:
“Although art is fundamentally everywhere and
always the same, nevertheless two main human inclinations,
diametrically opposed to each other, appear in its many and varied
expressions. One aims at the direct creation of universal
beauty, the other at the aesthetic expression of oneself, in other
words, of that which one thinks and experiences. The first
aims at representing reality objectively, the second
subjectively”.
The advantages of contributing to group identity
by reinforcing the contemporary norms of representation
(subscribing to locally agreed icons of beauty and meaning), and
the cultivation of an individual output are not opposing principles
of artistic creativity. They represent primeval skills of being
able to help highlight group identity through mapping one’s
social unit, and having the ability to produce new ideas about the
environment which improve one’s own survival.