Tag Archive for Prehistoric Art

Lecture | A Thin Red Line: The Presence of Prehistoric Pictoriality | Whitney Davis

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The lecture addresses one of the most well-established and influential ideas about prehistoric (and specifically Paleolithic) pictorial representation, namely, the idea that their original makers and beholders did not take them and use them as pictures ‘in our sense’ but instead considered them to be the ‘things themselves’, that is, the objects depicted, such as bison and other animals. But how do we reconcile this idea, which has some anthropological justification, with the visible activity of mark-making and of ‘painterliness’-of making visible the process of making the picture? What is…