October journal No.37 Summer (1986)

Art I Theory | Criticism I Politics

OCTO

37 Annette Michelson Andre Leroi-Gourhan Rosalind Krauss Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

In Praiseof Horizontality TheReligionof the Caves TheHandsof Gargas Originalityas Repetition ThePrimaryColorsfor theSecond Time

Molly Nesbit Steven Z. Levine Linda Nochlin Michael Fried Louis Marin Klaus Herding Yve-Alain Bois

Ready-MadeOriginals Repetition,Obsession The Originwithoutan Original AntiquityNow In Praiseof Appearance Manet'sImageryReconstructed Paintingas Model

$6.00/Summer

Publishedby theMIT Press

1986

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editors Douglas Crimp Rosalind Krauss Annette Michelson associateeditor Joan Copjec

OCTOBER (ISSN 0162-2870) (ISBN 0-262-75187-9) is published quarterly by the MIT Press. Subscriptions: individuals $20.00; institutions $49.00; students and retired $18.00. Foreign subscriptions outside USA and Canada add $4.00 for surface mail or $18.00 for air mail. Prices subject to change without notice. Address subscriptions to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 28 Carleton Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. Manuscripts, accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelope, should be sent to OCTOBER, 19 Union Square West, New York, NY 10003. No responsibility is assumed for loss or injury. Second class postage paid at Boston, MA, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: send address changes to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 28 Carleton Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. OCTOBER is distributed in the USA by B. DeBoer, Inc., 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, NJ 07110. Copyright ? 1986 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and October Magazine, Ltd. The editors of OCTOBER are wholly responsible for its editorial contents.

37

Annette Michelson Andre Leroi-Gourhan

Rosalind Krauss Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Molly Nesbit Steven Z. Levine Linda Nochlin Michael Fried Louis Marin Klaus Herding Yve-Alain Bois

In Praise of Horizontality. Andre Leroi-Gourhan1911-1986 The Religion of the Caves. Magic or Metaphysics? The Hands of Gargas. Toward a GeneralStudy Originalityas Repetition. Introduction The Primary.Colorsfor the Second Time. A ParadigmRepetitionof the Neo-Avant-Garde Ready-Made Originals. The Duchamp Model Monet's Series. Repetition, Obsession Courbet'sL'origine du monde: The Origin without an Original Antiquity Now. Reading Winckelmann on Imitation In Praise of Appearance Manet's ImageryReconstructed Painting as Model

3 7 19 35

41 53 65 77 87 99 113 125

2

YVE-ALAIN BOIS, a founding editor of Macula, is Associate Professor of Art History at The Johns Hopkins University. BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH is Associate Professor of Art History at SUNY, Old Westbury, and the editor of the Nova Scotia Series. MICHAEL FRIED is Professor of Humanities and the History of Art and Director of the Humanities Center at The Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and StephenCrane, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. KLAUS HERDING, Professor of Art History at Hamburg University, is editor of Fischer Verlag's Kunststiick series. His many publications include PierrePuget (Berlin, Mann, 1970) and Realismusals Widerspruch(Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1984). ANDRE LEROI-GOURHAN was acting director of the Musee de l'Homme, Paris, from 1945 to 1950 and professor at the College de France from 1968 until his death this year. STEPHEN Z. LEVINE is Professor of the History of Art at Bryn Mawr College. LOUIS MARIN is Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He also teaches in the Department of French and Italian at the University of California, Davis. MOLLY NESBIT is Assistant Professor of Art History at Barnard College, Columbia University. LINDA NOCHLIN, Distinguished Professor of Art History at the Graduate School, CUNY, is currently preparing an exhibition of the work of Gustave Courbet for the Brooklyn Museum.

OCTOBER

In Praise of Horizontality: Andre Leroi-Gourhan 1911-1986

ANNETTE MICHELSON

We publish, in this issue, two essays by Andre Leroi-Gourhan, whose death in Februaryof this year took from us the greatestof modern prehistorians. A student of Granet and of Mauss, he was of that lineage which, in its transgression of the limits of academic parochialism, provided models for theoretical endeavors central to our time. The range of Leroi-Gourhan'swork was exceptional even considered within that tradition. His contributions, singular in their boldness and originality, included work on chronology, physical anthropology, ethnology, and the analysis of prehistoric technology seen in its relation to the development of cognitive and linguistic faculties. He was, as well, the major force over the past four decades in the renewal of our understanding of the art of prehistoric man. It is October's concern with cultural texts that impels the modest tribute represented by publication of these essays. The first of these offers a succinct and lucid summary (one of many available to the general reader)of Leroi-Gourhan'sengagement with the problematic of prehistoric art. It presents the theoretical grounding for his radical revision of its deciphering and interpretation, supported by statistical analysis of distribution and topography. It redefines the prehistorian'senterprise, extending our readings through the repertoryof abstractsigns. Locating a central, generalized mythogram, it proposes a general intelligibility of paleolithic culture, while correcting a certain hermeneutical hubris characteristicof a preceding generation of scholars. In so doing, it offersa chastening model for art history of all periods, and for none more urgently than that of modern painting, in view of recent attempts to impose upon the corpus of modernist painting a traditional and highly impertinent iconography. The second essay implements the methodological provisions of the first in a virtuosic solution of one of the most enigmatic problems confronting the student of prehistory:the distribution, in variable density, of hand prints upon the cave walls of the Franco-Cantabrianregion, here analyzed in its most arresting instance, at Gargas. These essays of the late 1960s succeeded the publication of Prehistoire del'art

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occidental,' Leroi-Gourhan's summa of the art of prehistory. This was, as well, the time (1964) of his establishment, on the site of Pincevent, near Fontainebleau, of a model laboratory of archeological research. It was here, through the work of a group under the direction of Michel Brezillon, that Leroi-Gourhan's insistent plea for a revision of the techniques of archaeological practice was carried out, yielding an abundance of detailed documentation of Upper Paleolithic culture. In what did this revision, then, consist? In the substitution of a planographic method of digging for that of the stratigraphy prevailing from the time of Boucher de Perthes and epitomized in the work of Leroi-Gourhan's celebrated predecessor in the field, the Abbe Breuil. The axis of inquiry was, quite literally, rotated, and the horizontal cut replaced the vertical. At Pincevent, the minute inspection, inventory, and preservation (through casting) of large surfaces of prehistoric remains made possible the analysis and surprisingly detailed account of successive generations of paleolithic men and women upon that site. Leroi-Gourhan, adept in the art of homely illustration, liked to clarify the difference between his methods and those of tradition by invoking the image of a birthday cake containing beneath its layers of dough the inscription "Happy Birthday!" "If you cut through vertically, as was still widely done at this time, you can read nothing at all. All you see are the little bits of cream on the slice of cake, nothing more. You've got to cut horizontally if you want to see the inscription. Prehistoric terrain is exactly the same. If you want to find what men have had to say, you must proceed layer by layer." The old method of stratigraphy had, in this view, yielded layers that were chronologically ordered, but dead. At Pincevent, his group produced, by work upon surfaces, confirmation of the fundamental principle of prehistorical ethnology, for its harvest was abundant. This rotation of axis can, then, be seen to have vital consequences, for it facilitated the reading of a terrain in terms of its inner relationships; it forced the recognition that the vestiges of former life as spatially situated are not fortuitously disposed; rather, they articulate those inter-relationships which form the text of paleolithic culture. Thus, "the very fact of casting a used object off has meaning" and the grouping of even scattered and heterogeneous vestiges may, upon analysis, be resolved into a structure of inhabitation that is intelligible. We recognize, then, in Leroi-Gourhan's digging technique, the exact and concrete grounding of theory in praxis, for the rotation of the digging axis, the replacement of the stratigraphic by the planographic, rehearses for us that privileging of synchronic over diachronic in relational analysis of cultural texts which characterizes the structuralist enterprise. And indeed, the sense of rigor 1. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Prehistoirede 'art occidental, Paris, Mazenod, 1965, translated as Treasuresof PrehistoricArt, trans. Norbert Guterman, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1967.

In Praise of Horizontality

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and illumination generated by these readings marks them as significant documents of the era which saw the adoption of the linguistic model as central to that analysis. The excitement generated by Leroi-Gourhan's project is that of the legitimate euphoria which responds to the promise of the world's intelligibility and the exploration of its limits.

The Religion of the Caves: Magic or Metaphysics?*

ANDRE

LEROI-GOURHAN

translated by ANNETTE

MICHELSON

More than a century has passed since E. B. Tylor, an English ethnologist, first formulated the idea that the art of prehistoric man, then a recent discovery, was one essentially dictated by magic. This art, which was born 30,000 years before our era and vanished at about 10,000 B.C., is the oldest known to us. It would appear to have developed simultaneously with the first explicit manifestations of concern with the supernatural. To reach this conviction, the prehistorian has at his disposal only the figures that decorate objects or cave walls. It is comparison with the decorated objects or wall paintings made by the last primitives of the present-day world that has guided perception of the religious content of the artistic remains bequeathed by our distant ancestors. This hypothesis, which in no way excludes real artistic effort on the part of prehistoric man, now encounters hardly any objection in principle, but the mystery of the contents of these works remains almost complete. It can indeed be demonstrated with reasonable certainty that paleolithic men, twenty thousand years before the end of the Ice Age, poured into their images of bison or mammoths feelings which correspond to religion as we understand it, but we have no way of reconstituting the manner of their religious thinking. Our thought, developing out of classical civilizations, has evolved in a manner such that understanding the thought of even living Australian primitives involves great effort on our part. How much greater, then, are the risks involved in the reconstruction of the beliefs of men who lived thousands of years before the appearance of writing. Within the century of our study of living primitives-of Australians, Bushmen, Amazonians, Eskimos-ethnologists' ideas have greatly developed; theories have deepened, so that the very structure of religious thought appears in its fundamental outlines. The work of Levi-Strauss has greatly contributed to the shifting of problems such as those of totemism to a level upon which the superstructure of tradition proper to each human group *

The two

translated here are

from Andre Leroi-Gourhan,

essays excerpted ? Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1983. Reprinted by permission.

Lefil du temps,

6

Schematic plan of thecaveof Combarelles, Dordogne, arestylizedtofacilitatereading. France.Theanimalfigures Notethehighfrequency pairsin theopenpart of bison-horse in the of thegalleries(B, D, G), thepresence of mammoths transitional areas,and thatof bearsand representations of menin theturningpassages.

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is located. The influence of methods of structural linguistics and the use of mathematical models have introduced a scaffolding or framework within living and shifting masses of thought. Prehistory is on its way to a comparable evolution. Work on the products of human industry and, in particular, upon chipped flint instruments has for a considerable number of years attempted, through the use of statistics, to provide a framework for the figures and to set forth the pertinent characteristics of each era. Tools and flintstones, however, reflect only a part of thought, and the realm of art still resists investigation. Can we, like the prehistorians of the past half-century, expect that prehistory's artistic message will present no serious problems and that it is to be understood through a simple transposition of currently held beliefs, primitive or popular? Or can we, on the contrary, suppose that since the words out of which paleolithic men wove their ideas are forever lost, nothing remains but the certainty of a life in which the material realities of the hunt were reflected in that which we think of as lying beyond ideas? The PaleolithicMessage The remains of paleolithic symbolic thought, as it has come down to us, is composed, on the one hand, of decorated objects found during digs (mobiliary art) and, on the other hand, of paintings, engravings, or sculptures decorating the walls of caves and rock shelters (mural art). In both we find human figures (rare), more or less abstract signs (abundant in mural art), figures of animals belonging to a certain number of species of that era (these are, in descending order of frequency, horses, bison, wild oxen, stags and reindeer, ibex, and, less frequently, other species). Traditional studies of paleolithic religion have used these materials according to very simple procedures, founded on the concomitance of different figures (bison + line = image of a bison subjected to magic spell); on the comparison with primitive customs of recent times (horse + small figure = representation of spirit of fertility penetrating a mare); on merely logical consideration (animal with rounded forms = wish for fertility) or historical reference (woman of ample forms = mother goddess), and so forth. The totality of representations thus interpreted falls easily into a few general headings: magical rights of fertility or of the hunt, totemic representation. Interpretations of this sort may quite reasonably be presumed to have some accuracy, but on a level detached from reality: paleolithic men were quite like us, they probably had some familiarity with magical practices, and they very well might have left traces of this in their artistic work. In order to establish this interpretation of the message as a truth exclusive of others, prehistorians of the classical period would have required a framework or key which accounted, if not for the totality, at least for the majority of the figures. Now, there are numerous bison unmarked by lines, personnages without corresponding animals, male animals with full forms resembling those of the supposedly full females, and silhouettes of slender

The Religion of the Caves

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women. Furthermore, if we pursue the theory to its furthest consequence and consider the paleolithics as men comparable to present-day primitives, we must recognize that for them as for us, magic would have been simply a technique for insuring control over mysterious forces, with no explicit demarcation between the visible and invisible worlds. However, magic can exist only if founded upon a representation of the world, since it is composed of practical procedures for the mastery of external elements such as game, for the benefit of the magician. It would then have been logical first to seek out subsisting traces of metaphysical thought in the art of the paleolithic era. This line of investigation was impeded by several kinds of difficulty. The ProblemRemains The obstacles derive from the fact that the interpretations are made along with the discoveries, and that it took three-quarters of a century before we possessed the thousands of examples which authorize a general investigation. Absorbed in the abundance of new documents, the prehistorians of the Abbe Breuil's generation lacked distance. Another obstacle, almost as great, lay in the prehistorians' close dependence on the evolution of ethnological theory. Lacking direct contact with living primitives, their access to the Australians was limited to the work of the ethnologists, and they selected only that which could, as things progressed, lend explanation to a given paleolithic work. On the other hand, the universe of decorated caves is quite disconcerting, chaotic in its natural contours, and, at first glance, incoherent in the disposition of its figures. Finally, paleolithic art, mobiliary and mural, covers Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals between 30,000 to 9,000 B.C., and although we may admit the possibility of even very long survivals, we find it difficult to suppose that the practices and the stock of Cro-Magnon man of the Dordogne in 30,000 B.C. were identical with those in the Valley of the Don in 15,000 B.C. The establishment of the religious character of paleolithic art and the contribution of even incomplete proof constitute a glorious record for the prehistorical scholarship of preceding generations, but the fundamental problem nevertheless remains unsolved. It is quite out of the question to recapitulate here, even in considerably abbreviated form, the lengthy demonstration of my Treasuresof PrehistoricArt, the simultaneous study of chronology and content in paleolithic imagery; it is, however, fitting to isolate the method which might lead to the formulation of new problems. A study of this sort might, at the start, have been directed toward mobiliary art, to the abundance of isolated documents, or toward the art of wall painting, to the large numbers of well-preserved representations offered by more than sixty sites. Wall paintings were chosen for the following reasons: a well preserved cave can be considered a message whose elements (frame and figures) occupy the position chosen by the author of the figures decorating the

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walls. Whether the figures corresponded to magical or to any other sort of religious intention, the order and frequency of these figures were bound, in some manner, to express the image - even if unconscious or incompletely formulated - which their maker had of the world upon which those practices were exercised. Unless the figures involved were completely independent of each other (and this could not be maintained without proof), a certain syntax must have governed the arrangement of the images considered as symbols. Three modes possibly governing the assemblage of graphic symbols were: that in which the figures are arranged around a central point, as in a picture (mythogram); that in which the figures are articulated in chronological order following a line, as in a cartoon strip (pictogram); finally, that in which the figures form units of verbal language, as in an Egyptian text (writing). In the caves it is difficult to find the traces of writing properly so-called, or even of pictographics; both presuppose a linear arrangement directed by the line of narrative. The adherence of graphic symbols to the unfolding of speech, which led to alphabetical writing, came much later than the paleolithic period. There remain, therefore, two possibilities. Either the cave artists, whom we suppose to have possessed a coherent image of the world, have left only traces of isolated magical operations in the caves (in which case one could register only an abbreviated message, an accumulation of independent representations) or, on the contrary, the caves' decor does really form a decor, that is to say, a framework within which something magically or mythically unfolds.

Entryto theaxialgalleryof Lascaux,Dordogne,France. Thisgroupprovidesa remarkable demonstration of the constancy of therulesgoverning paleolithicrepresentation and thedifficulties of decoding.At Lascauxthetransitional animalsarestags,thetransitional signs, linesof dots. This greatstagandlineof blackdotsmarkthetransition fromthe rotundaof greatbullsto thegroupof thegallery,in which therearetwo bullsand cowsaccompanied by horsesand pairs of signs, completed by two ibexfacing eachother.

..4....

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Analyzing the Figures Now that the problem has been formulated, it remains to discover the method of decoding best suited to the "texts" constituted by several dozens of caves, oddly shaped and covered with figures arranged in no apparent order. We can speak of "texts"because the procedure finally adopted is related to those used to interpret unknown systems of writing; each figure is considered a signifying part disposed in an order provided by the very configuration of the cave. A set of perforated cards reproducing the cave, in sections delimited by natural irregularities (entry, first recess, chamber, other recesses, galleries, terminuses) with the figures in place, allows us to try out the possible combinations formed by figures and locations. The establishment of a "vocabulary" out of more than 2,000 figures allows for the division of parts into two classes, the first of animals, the second of signs, human shapes, or stenciled hands. These two classes are always represented within a single cave, implying a relation between them, if only one of simple concomitance. While animals are always present, however, the figures of the second class may be partially missing, which implies their possible interchangeability. The animals represented do not by any means exhaust the list of fauna in the Age of the Reindeer. Bison and wild oxen, on the one hand, horses, on the other, compose, in roughly equal proportions, seventy percent of the whole; mammoths and ibex, in roughly equal numbers, take up twenty percent more of the whole, while the remaining ten percent are divided among species that occur with fair frequency but are represented in each cave by few individual figures (deer, felines, bears, rhinoceroses) and, finally, by occasionally represented species (canines, chamois, antelope). There may very well have been a link between the number of figures and the economic importance of the animal species, but purely magical practices do not necessarily account for things. Our own medieval bestiary, which includes many bulls, donkeys, horses, lambs, swine, and, in lesser quantity, lions and dragons, owes nothing to magic, while the medieval representation of both the visible and invisible worlds is directly linked to our civilization's economic supports. It would be surprising if paleolithic man had covered his caves with images bearing no apparent relation to his own existence. Two Series of Signs The second class of figures is, at first glance, heterogeneous, since it is composed of male and female figures; genital representations; signs of very varied types which divide into two series: the first are "full" signs (ovals, triangles, rectangles), the second are "thin" signs (lines which are straight, hooked, or branched, and series of dots); and, finally, there are imprints of hands placed upon the wall and outlined in color. Comparison of the subjects of each series of signs leads us to see them as multiple variants of sexual symbols, masculine

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for the thin ones and female for the full ones. This explains why we very rarely encounter all representations of the second class in the same place, but, most frequently, either realistic figures of man and woman (complete or in part) or symbolic signs, often highly abstract. As for the stenciled hands, represented by a limited number of cases, there is simply a reasonable presumption of their value as equivalents of full signs. The concomitance of animal figures and of signs poses a new problem. The majority of figures of the second class are placed near animals, others are isolated, and, finally, a certain number are located on the animals. This last category includes examples of all the variants: from Laussel, the woman holding a bison's horn; from Angles-sur-l'Anglin, women covering the body of a sculpted bison, the female sex, or full and thin signs inscribed on the bodies of bison. In one entire series of cases, the full sign is replaced by the representa-

Panel of the women-bison,ca. 15, 000 B. C., cave of Pech-Merle,Lot, France. In a niche near silhouettesof women in profile and leaningforward, the artist has made

a visualpun on thesilhouette of a bisonwith raisedtail and loweredheadand thatof a stoutwomanin profile.

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tion of a bleeding wound and the thin sign by a line which may represent a spear stuck in the animal. It was in these examples that the hypothesis of figures "under spells" originated, with the hunter presumed to have been representing, with magical intent, the mortally wounded animal. A group of data such as this does not exclude the possibility of magical intervention, but it does singularly extend the problem, for it may already offer part of a metaphysical framework, certainly as yet undecipherable, but articulated nonetheless. If it were true that woman and wound, on the one hand, and man and spear, on the other, were symbolic equivalents, and that they had unknown but precise relations with the animals, the limits of simply magical behavior would then be far transcended. The Structureof the Mythogram This research in its present state can be admitted solely as a clearing of terrain, but this clearing reveals a paleolithic thought which is far more finely detailed than that which traditional interpretation would lead us to believe. The first fact to emerge clearly from the general analysis of the sites in relation to the group of caves studied is the nonfortuitous role of the cave itself. Its configuration plays a part in the choice of site for decoration, which is not surprising. If we take into account only the presence of figures and set aside those open walls upon which figures are widely distributed, we observe that certain particular locations, such as the first recesses, corridor entrances, fissure edges, and terminal funnels very frequently bear images. We are then entitled to think that the cave, whatever its form may be, lends itself to the placing of a preconceived arrangement, as if the paleolithics had somehow superimposed upon it a traditionally shaped intellectual schema. This schema, more or less strict, depending upon the area and period and the cave's adaptability to such a schema, is clearly revealed by statistical superimposition of subject represented and its locations. When we consider the following sections: (1) open walls (or centers of panels), (2) transitional walls (entries, passages between chambers, panel margins), (3) the far ends of spaces (terminal spaces or extreme margins of panels), we derive the following plan of distribution: (1) open walls: more than eighty percent of bison, wild oxen, horses, and full signs; (2) transitional walls: approximately seventy percent of the ibex and mammoths; (3) furthermost end walls: seventy-five to eighty percent of stags, felines, bears, and rhinoceroses. The thin signs appear throughout in equal proportions, but are differently situated on the open walls, where they are generally paired with full signs, as opposed to those in the rest of the cave, where they are often isolated on the edge of a recess or fissure or at the end of a gallery.

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To anyone who has attempted to unravel the skein of oral traditions among surviving primitives, it will come as no surprise that the mythographic image of the paleolithics emerges only when filtered through statistics; in each particular cave the profusion of traces, the topographical approximations, the overlapping periodicity of different series create imprecisions of detail within compositions which are blurred by a general treatment. If we consider Lascaux, with its great panels of wild oxen and horses accompanied by pairs of signs, its ibex and stags at the margins, its felines and rhinoceroses on the end walls; if we consider Niaux, with its successive panels of bison (marked with wounds and lines) and horses, its ibex accompanying each group of figures, its stags both on the ends and on sides; if we consider Altamira's painted ceiling, with its compact mass of bison surrounding paired horses and its margin bordered by a doe and two wild boars, and if we then compare them with Rouffignac's ceiling, with its groups of bison-horse-mammoth, its ibex and surrounding rhinoceroses, we are inevitably struck by the discovery within the great examples of cave art -and this despite variations due to distance in time and space -of the mythogram in an almost ideal state. In the light of this deciphering of the walls, mobiliary art is somewhat clarified; we find in it the same male and female figures and the curious assemblage of bison and horse. Although lacking the armature provided by the cave for the grouping of figures, mobiliary art offers, nonetheless, a very useful aid to the understanding of this phenomenon's chronology and geography. The caves are actually limited, geographically, to the West, with the exception of one in the Urals. In addition, the oldest period of this art (between 30,000 and 20,000 B.C.) is almost completely missing. The mobiliary works, decorative objects and graven plaques of stone or bone, show that the representational system was spread from Russia in the East to Spain over the entire duration of the Upper Paleolithic period. This observation dictates some reflection upon the possible content of this assemblage of figures. Most succinctly put, it comes down to the copresence of male and female figures, of horse and bison (or of wild ox), with the addition of a third animal (ibex, mammoth, or deer) and a fourth possible animal (feline or rhinoceros). The steadiness of arrangement implies a determinate association between the different couplings of the assemblage. There is no indication of appreciable variation in this association over time, since in the Aurignacian period, toward 30,000 B.C., animals and symbols, both full and thin, are already grouped on graven plaques, and in the more recent Magdalenian, toward 10,000 before our era, both in Teyjat and in the Dordogne, bison and wild oxen are still placed in proximity to horses and surrounded with deer and bear. A system of this kind corresponds more closely to the framework of myth than to the traces of magical operations. But can we appropriately speak of mythological content? Do we not rather have a container? Can we really claim that the same figurative framework articulated identical concepts over immense

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periods of time and areas of space? A familiar example will help us understand the flexibility of interpretation which the paleolithic mythogram may have retained over so many thousands of years. Beginning in the Bronze Age, there appears in the Middle East a figurative theme which later spreads throughout all of Eurasia; it associates eagle, lion, and bull. The symbolism of these figures has served to cover myths, legends, and semihistorical narratives of great variety, eventually serving as symbols of the Gospels for Christianity. The same mythographic vessel has thus served twenty different religions, offering a schema upon which each civilization has woven the symbolic convention appropriate to it. The superstructure of myths enveloping the associated images of the paleolithic era may also have varied considerably. We would, in this case, possess not the vestiges of practices, as the older prehistorians believed, not even a religion or a metaphysics, but rather an infrastructural framework which could serve as a basis for an infinite number of detailed moral symbols and operational practices. Once we are no longer wholly concerned with the search for practical or mythological narrative, several points appear to be established, or highly probable: -The cave itself is integrated into the infrastructural schema, since its natural accidents are used by the artist. These accidents are of two kinds. The first are natural reliefs which have lent their shape to the back, the neck, or the thigh of an animal, which is completed by the painter, while others are fissures or galleries whose assimilation to female symbolism is demonstrated by the addition of thin signs or dots. The cave was thus "an active participant." -The constant coexistence of bovines and horses assumes the aspect of pairing, comparable to that of the signs. The alternating of bison and horse may correspond to an order comparable to that of "female/male" in the signs. -The realistic sexual symbols are numerous enough that, even without the help of abstract signs, the presence of sexual polarization is evident. This is of a very particular character, for there exists no known scene of coupling. Furthermore, the great majority of animals do not have primary sex characteristics. This restriction of realist symbolism explains the abstract character of most signs, full and thin. To reach the deepest level of the religious schema of paleolithic times, we can add to this basic schema (woman/man, bovine/horse) the almost constant presence of some complementary kind. At a higher level would appear concepts such as identification of wound or hand with woman, of red with full sign and bovine, of black with thin sign and horse. At this point, however, we touch upon things particular to different paleolithic cultures. Our documentation of those elements concerning ethnic differentiation of thought allows us only to formulate hypotheses. In conclusion, the themes which emerge from paleolithic art more directly

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invite psychoanalytical study than that of the history of religion. And this should not surprise us, for we might have expected the general analysis of documents to reveal the substratum of metaphysical thinking. Like operational magic, this can appear only after the decor has been set up, and it will be the task of future research to establish out of their variations the detailed picture of paleolithic religion. 1966

The Hands of Gargas: Toward a General Study

ANDRE LEROI-GOURHAN translated by ANNETTE

MICHELSON

Beginning in 1906, the year of Cartailhac's writing on the hands outlined in red and black in the cave of Gargas, several articles and numerous allusions have confronted the problem raised by the 160 or so hands grouped on the cave walls. In 1952 the Abbe Breuil devoted forty lines to them in his Quartrecentsiecles d'artparietal, summing up his point of view at that time: "The majority of these hands, outlined in black or red, sometimes in white or yellow, are left hands; there are more than 150 of them, many of which appear mutilated, as if the joints of one or several fingers had been cut off."2 He adds one very important detail which does honor to his power of observation: "It is certain that we have here the same hand, with the same mutilation, in multiple examples." Finally, he states, "Gargas is thus far the only European cave, among the approximately dozen discovered containing hands in outline, in which these mutilations appear." In 1958, upon republishing the text of Four Hundred Centuriesin the Melanges J.-B. Noulet, he added a mention of the outlined hands recently discovered in the cave of Tibiran, a few hundred yards from Gargas.3 Indeed, except for Maltravieso in Estramadura, Gargas and Tibiran are the only caves in which hands with missing fingers are to be found. Gargas and Maltravieso, furthermore, differ considerably from each other. In the latter cave, all the hands uniformly lack the last two joints of the little finger, while at Gargas we find ten different forms out of the fifteen possible combinations obtainable by cutting the finger. This variety in "mutilation," the grouping of hands in separate pairs, the pairs of identical hands, and the distribution of red in relation to black have gone unnoticed by writers on the subject. Assisted by Father Hours and Monsieur Brezillon, we undertook a survey of the totality of hands in their topo1. Emile Cartailhac, "Les mains inscrites de rouge ou de noir de Gargas," L'anthropologie, vol. XVII (1906), pp. 624-625. 2. Henri Breuil, Quatrecents siecles d'artparietal, Montignac, Centre d'etudes et de documentation prehistoriques, 1952, pp. 246-257. 3. Henri Breuil, "La decoration parietale prehistorique de la grotte de Gargas," Bulletin de la Societemeridionalede speleologieet de prehistoire,vol. V (1954-1955 [1958]), pp. 391-409.

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graphical setting, completing it in 1966. This first essay is intended not as a solution to all the problems raised by the hands of Gargas, but rather to provide insight into the main aspects of their study as a whole. Inventoryof Hypotheses The classical hypothesis, maintained by the Abbe Breuil, is that, like certain present-day primitives, the "Aurignacians" of Gargas cut off their fingers for sacrificial reasons. Although plausible at first glance, this hypothesis has at least two weaknesses: (1) It does not account for the variety of forms of subtraction of fingers. We must therefore suppose that the author considered them to be anarchic, for he would otherwise have implied the existence of a veritable "code of mutilation," which was not his view. (2) It accepts the possibility of impairments which go as far as elimination of all fingers except the thumb on more than fifty percent of the hands represented; this, upon reflection, seems extraordinary. The hypothesis of mutilated hands has nevertheless been accepted by most prehistorians and has passed into scientific tradition without being subjected to strict verification. The second hypothesis is that of the pathological origin of the amputations, already raised by Hugo Obermaier and by Breuil; set forth by Dr. Dekeyer in 1953, it was revived and developed by Dr. Sahly.4 According to his study, the loss of fingers was caused by a thrombo-angitis obliterans, probably due to frostbite or dietary deficiency. This would explain the variety of missing joints and the constant preservation of the thumb, normally spared by the pathological process. The arguments against this thesis are: (1) At least ten percent of the legible hands are intact. (2) Several of them are located in places unexplained by the pathological hypothesis, such as the whole hand of point 25 (see fig. 3), executed under a ledge about fifteen feet off the ground. (3) This hypothesis, like the first, at no point takes into account the topographical distribution of different mutilations nor, generally speaking, the fact that the distribution of hands may present characteristics not due to chance. The third hypothesis is that of bent fingers, which we have formulated and will here develop.5 It was G.-H. Luquet who, in Art et religiondes hommes fossibles (1926), seems to have presented it for the first time. M. Frank Bourdier has kindly reminded me that P. Saintyves, in "La main dans la magie,"6 had revived this hypothesis, which has probably not received the attention it de4. Doctor Sahly has kindly made available to me the contents of his work, now in preparation, on the hands of Gargas. I am not competent to evaluate the pathological alterations of some of the hands at Gargas; they offer a very interesting field for research, but do not, in my view, appear to explain the features which emerge from a study of the whole. 5. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Les religionsde la prehistoire,Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1964, p. 102. See also Leroi-Gourhan, Prehistoirede l'artoccidental,Paris, Mazenod, 1965, p. 109. 6. In Aesculape, no. 6 (March 1934).

The Hands of Gargas

21

serves. It is, in any case, perfectly possible, by bending the fingers and placing either the palm or back of the hand against the wall, to reproduce all of the mutilations at Gargas. Although we do not theoretically exclude the procedure of spraying from a distance, the technique which produces the effect closest to that of the original hands consists in applying ochre powder with a brush (a simple tuft of hair, straightened and bound) on the damp surface of the wall. The operation can be performed in three stages: (1) application at the base and curve of the thumb; (2) application between the spread fingers; (3) application on the outer border. The procedure takes scarcely more than thirty seconds. Whatever the mode of execution, and even if we grant the possibility of voluntary or pathological mutilations, two critical operations should normally have been in order: inquiry into the possible scheme of hand groups within the cave as a whole, and the analysis of the digital forms, since there is no reason to reject a priori the hypothesis of a deliberate arrangement. The Digital Forms If we take into account the acceptable degree of legibility of approximately half of the figures, it would appear that with rare exceptions the subtractions usually involve the first two joints. In order to establish a code of the finger combinations we simply noted the fact that a subtraction had been practiced on one finger or another. Since the thumb seems never to have been cut off, we therefore find fifteen possible basic combinations (fig. 1) from that of the whole hand (form A) to that of the hand with four missing fingers (form 0).

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Formsnotpresentaremarkedbya cross.In the Fig. 1. Tableof digitalformsshowingfrequencies. secondline theformof bentindex/littlefinger (J') is omittedsinceit is not represented.

22

OCTOBER

Not all forms are represented in the cave, and the order of frequency reveals an interesting feature: the combinations O A C H N K, represented by a relatively high number of figures, are the easiest to assume by bending the fingers. The combinations B C F G, which are rare, are still relatively easy to reproduce. The others, D IJ L M, are more difficult. A certain figurative logic, independent of the criterion of ease, is apparent in the choice of digital forms. We note a very marked preference for the series of contiguous fingers, as shown in table A.

forms accounted for

Fingers subtracted

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3

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5

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N

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J .......

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As we see at first glance, neither "ritual" amputation nor pathological defit this description. It implies, rather, that these finger positions were familcay iar enough to the paleolithics at Gargas to produce a selection in terms of ease of movement. Had it been simply a matter of pressing the bent fingers against the wall, all combinations could have been obtained. The fact that those that are most difficult to produce with upraised hand seem absent leads us to think that the choice of finger positions corresponded to a manual code in common practice like that still used for the hunt by the Bushmen (fig. 2).

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Fig. 2. Huntingor narrative gesturesof theBushmenin theKalaharidesert,representing (a) monkey,(b) warthog,(c) giraffe.ComparewithformsA, K, and C at Gargas.

23

The Hands of Gargas

Analysis of Sets The topography of the outlined hands is composed of three clearly established sets (fig. 3). Set I occupies a length of thirty-five meters on the left-hand wall of the first chamber. Set II occupies part of the right-hand wall of the same chamber. Set III is located in the second chamber; it includes one isolated hand under a ledge of the left wall (27) and, on the right-hand side, thirty-eight hands

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24

OCTOBER

arranged around a pillar or inside a small chamber hollowed out of this pillar. There are, finally, under the very low ceiling, toward the "dungeon," two hands outlined in white (28). The hands, then, occupy very sharply delimited sections: the two sides at the entrance and the second chamber's pillar, hollowed out into a sriiall apselike chamber. The isolated subjects are located beneath a vault, one (27) facing the pillar at the entry to an elevated gallery and the other two at the end of a series in the passage which follows the pillar. The general arrangement in distinct sets, with figures placed at the entry or at the ends of galleries, recalls that of most caves which contain animal figures. Set I can be divided into five sections, according to the different groups arranged upon them. The wall surface is animated by folds of greater or lesser depth (fig. 4, nos. 1, 4, 11, 14, 18), forming niches or straightened between the flat and convex panels. We have used these irregularities of the surface to determine the sections. This sort of division appears to correspond to the rhythm imposed upon the paleolithics as upon ourselves, for each section thus determined presents characteristics that can be superimposed on those of other sections. The tendency of set I considered as a whole presents some rather curious features, as shown in table B. concavity Section Section Section Section Section

1 2 3 4 5

. . . . .... . . . .

. . . .

1 red spots 1 1 2

Flat or convex surface red spot 4 + 4 4 11 3

4 8 8 11 36

Total 5 16 13 23 41

The number of hands therefore increases as we proceed from the entrance to the furthest end point (from five to forty-one elements). The same phenomenon seems to occur within each section beginning with one or two hands placed in concave parts and developing into two or three groups of increasing size. We find the situations repeated five times in a row. Set II (fig. 5) includes two sections arranged on a rather convoluted surface, opening into a gallery (37) at the entry to which we find two pairs of red lines and a series of dots of the same color. The first section, beginning at the entrance (38), is formed of six black hands plus one red; the second section has nine black hands and four red. In each of these sections we find an oval depression smeared with ochre. Here too, beginning with the entrance, the hands increase from seven to thirteen as they pass from one section to another. Set III, apart from the isolated hand no. 27 (fig. 5), is arranged around and within a free-standing mass (29). Walking around it, we find the following groups of figures (fig. 6): a red spot (A), one black hand placed in a hollow (B), then two red hands (C), then an oval depression smeared with red (D); next

25

The Hands of Gargas

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