Whitney Davis

The Archaeology of Perception: Traces of Depiction and Language [and Comments and Reply]

Depiction, particularly the making of images to resemble things, can only have emerged prehistorically incommunities with shared systems of meanings. We argue, on the basis of an articulation of Gibsons ecological theory of perception, Meads distinction between communication and language, and a portmanteau theory of language and mind relying on the insights of, among others, Ryle, Vygotsky, and Olson, that depiction transforms communication into language. The rapid change in numerous practices observable at the end of the Upper Pleistocene becomes understandable when communication is seen to be tuming into language as here defined. It is for this reason that the period in question represents the point of evolution of modem human beings.

The Economic and Social Context of Southern San Rock Art [and Comments and Reply]

This paper suggests a new theoretical framework for understanding southern San rock art. The traditional explanations have been either innatist or functionalist. To escape the tautology of the former and the restrictions of the latter it is suggested that the articulation between the art and the social relations of production be sought. This articulation was expressed in the activities of medicine men, whose symbolic work acted upon the reproduction of the natural order by making rain and controlling animals and then upon the social relations necessary for efficient production and distribution by reducing tensions within the camp. By reports of supposed out-of-body travel the medicine men also reflected the networks of links between camps which facilitated the reproduction of the social formation over extended periods that might include times of extreme strain on local resources. At least some of the medicine men were also artists and painted symbols of trance performance as well as representations of their hallucinatory experiences. The art thus contributed to a pooling of religious experience and imparted a special reality to the cognitive system on which the practice of symbolic work was based.

The Origins of Image Making

Although often mythologized as sudden, primal, and spontaneous, image making is a predictable adaptation which should be coherently situated in the overall trajectory of hominid evolution. It was a distinctive and specific cultural achievement but one that can be derived logically from simple and archaic perceptual and cognitive processes. In the view presented here, image making originated in the discovery of the representational capacity of lines, marks, or blots of color which need not and often do not have a representational status. Continually marking the world will continually in crease the probability that marks will be seen as things. Thus the emergence of representation is the predictable logical and perceptual consequence of the increasing elaboration of the man-made visual world.

On the Argument From Ceramics to History: A Challenge Based on Evidence From Medieval Nubia [and Comments and Reply]

The assumption that major changes in pottery closely reflect change in other areas of culture has been widely accepted by prehistorians, but it has seldom been tested against independent historical or ethnographic evidence. It is here suggested, on the basis of dated pottery types and of independently dated historical developments, that there is not necessarily a close connection between the two. The evidence for this conclusion is derived from historically dated archaeological contexts in ancient and medieval Nubia.

Plato on Egyptian Art

IN this brief paper I wish to discuss Platos few but interesting references to Egyptian art. These references are interesting for several reasons. We may perhaps determine exactly how much Plato knew of Egyptian art. We may be able to add some intriguing footnotes to what we already know of Platos aesthetic theory and opinion of contemporary Greek art. From another point of view, we will note that Platos astute observations help us to understand Egyptian art itself.1 But first of all, it should be asked what Plato knew of Egypt which would have enabled him to say anything sensible about Egyptian art. The dialogues contain at least twenty references to Egypt and the Egyptians. Several of these, however, are purely geographical (Critias 114-Cj Timaeus 2Sb; Menexenus 239e, 241ej Gorgias sud). Plato locates Egypt correctly but his interest in it is incidental to his theme. Other of his remarks are ostensibly anthropological. None, however, seems to depend upon anything more than a current and vague popular view about Egyptian habits and character (Republic 4· 346a; Laws 5· 747c, 12. 953a). Plato seems to have a knowledge of the Egyptian climate (Epinomis 987a) and of Egyptian embalming practices (Phaedo Soc). His remarks are so brief that there is scarcely opportunity for error. Again, his slightly more extensive references to the Egyptian military ( Timaeus 24-b) and habit of teaching arithmetical procedures to children (Laws, 7· 819) do not stand contradicted by Egyptian evidence, yet do not depend upon a special acquaintance with an Egyptian source. There is the possibility that Platos remarks about the priestly role of the Egyptian monarch (Statesman 29od-e) were based upon some special understanding; what Plato says in this connection is true, but to have known it was true the philosopher would have had to have a close knowledge of Egyptian political history.2 Plato repeats tales which Solon was supposed to have brought to Greece from Egypt ( Critias Io8d, 113a; Timaeus 21c-22a). Solon perhaps did visit Egypt, as Herodotus (1. 30) and Diodorus Siculus (I. 98) testify, and Plato is probably repeating the stories from his own Greek sources for Solons journey. The Egyptian content itself in these stories is accurate in all essential respects, but is, of course, not presented as special material acquired

Homoerotic Art Collection from 1750 to 1920

This paper considers the general structural logic of homoerotic art collections from the later eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, focusing on their collation of contemporary with non-modern (usually classical Greek and Roman or Italian Renaissance) arts. The mere appreciation of a homoerotically attractive work of art, such as a sculptural depiction of a beautiful and desirable male body, whether contemporary or not, did not necessarily create a homoerotic display or collection. Patrons and viewers could aesthetically admire such canonical objects without thereby expressing any awareness of, let alone attachment to, their original and to possible contemporary pederastic or homosexual connotations. But canonically homoerotic aesthetic appreciation could be inflected pederastically or homosexually by acquiring, admiring and displaying objects in configurations that suggested their phallic significance or potential; the non-canonical, sometimes subversive, appeal of phallica and homoerotica – again, usually ancient or early modern, though modern replications were frequently produced – was a crucial element in the constitution of the ‘homosexual’ (or, better, homosexualized) collections of the nineteenth century. Recognized in ironic and quasi-pornographic representations by d’Hancarville, Noel, Goethe, Forberg, Famin and other writers and collectors, the phallic inflection of homoerotic beauty offered an alternative to Winckelmannian and Kantian aesthetics. In particular, the paper considers the phenomenon of ‘phallic doubling’– the representation or display of homoerotically beautiful works such that they appeared to respond to one another, to address one another’s implied narratives, and to supplement and sometimes to undermine one another’s stable erotic connotations – as the key principle of ‘homosexual’ art collections, necessarily clandestine in their formation and circulation, even as they worked with canonical ideals.

The deconstruction of intentionality in archaeology

All (or almost all) archaeology seeks to know the things that were by the evidence of the things that are, as battered and fragmented by centuries of collapse, decay, wear and breaking. And from the things that were, all (or almost all) archaeology seeks to know the people who were, to grasp the human meanings that were held in those things. The unthinking assumptions, common to old and new programmes for good archaeology, that go with this common framework are explored.

So-Called Jaguar-Human Copulation Scenes in Olmec Art

Three Olmec sculptures are frequently thought to represent copulation between human beings and jaguars, an important element in what we are able to reconstruct of Olmec belief, but evidence and parallels discussed here suggest that this interpretation of the sculptures is incorrect. Alternate explanations which are consistent with a new view would assign an aggressive, ritual, or allegorical meaning to these sculptures and to certain other related Olmec representations.

World Series: The Unruly Orders of World Art History

Many practitioners of ‘world art studies’ are sceptical of systematic global models of world art history and of material and visual culture developed by such recent writers as John Onians and David Summers, though such models were common in art history in the past. The article distinguishes two theories of history in ‘liberal’ and ‘radical’ world art history respectively, identified with the historiography of George Kubler and Michel Foucault respectively. Kublers ‘rule of series’ stresses determined and developmental serial order whereas Foucaults model of ‘conjunction’ stresses contingent occurrence and unintended consequences. Though seemingly opposed, both models can be useful in describing the worldwide topography and chronology of visual and material culture and both have certain limits. The article suggests that they can be combined to yield a model of ‘devolution’ in the global or worldwide transcultural replication of series of visual and material culture – of causally ordered series that are nonetheless not governed by any ‘rule’. This model may be more palatable to sceptics of systematic models of art history than the existing evolutionary models.

Queer Family Romance in Collecting Visual Culture

The essay presents a model of “queer family romance” (adapted from Freud’s concept of family romance) in historical practices of collecting visual culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though queer collections of visual culture and queer family romance are independent variables, the essay addresses their intersection. The first part briefly outlines how queer collections, regardless of the stylistic and iconographic affiliations of particular objects, are constituted in “family resemblances” among objects that tend, overall, to inflect the entire array in terms of nonstandard sexualities and erotic attractions. The second part considers how Freud handled the question of family romance in his most notable treatment of a famous historical artist, Leonardo da Vinci, and suggests that a concept of queer family romance, though overlooked by Freud, might extend and improve the Freudian account of Leonardo’s sexual subjectivity (as well as his subjectivity as an artist) and go some way toward explaining why Leonardo’s art played a paradigmatic role in later collections of queer visual culture and why Leonardo occupied a major place in later family romances of artistic subjectivity. The third section considers an example of the intersection of queer family romance and the collection of visual culture, namely, the collection of paintings, objets d’art, and other items of visual and material culture gathered and exhibited by William Beckford at Fonthill Abbey from about 1795 to about 1820. The essay concludes by suggesting that queer family romance in collecting visual and material culture constitutes a possible matrix of queer bonding that might supplement, or even provide an alternative to, the social relations of juridical kin or real biological family; because queer families constituted extrabiologically (i.e., in activities of generating cultural forms) can function psychically and socially as family in the fullest sense, they deserve more attention in contemporary debates about the legal-political status—even the very identity—of nontraditional family structures.