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Essay/Review : Lascaux à Paris
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Lascaux à Paris
Paris Expo (Pavilion 8/B)
1 Place de la Porte de Versailles
May 20 – August 30th 2015
Published at Hyperallergic.com as What the Lascaux Caves Facsimiles Fail to Capture
http://hyperallergic.com/227969/what-the-lascaux-caves-facsimiles-fail-to-capture/
Grotte de Lascaux being inspected in 1940 © CNP-MCC-DRAC
Grotte de Lascaux being copied for the first time © Alain Roussot
For many the cave of Lascaux is the honey pot for what became artistic in the Western tradition. Georges Bataille in his text
Lascaux: La Naissance de l'Art put forth the even bolder proposition that humanity first became human in the cave of
Lascaux when we first made (magical) art to communicate states of consciousness. More recently, Stacey Spiegel
proclaimed Lascaux's transparently stacked images to be the first work of total art (gesamtkunstwerk) and Howard
Rheingold described it as the first example of virtual reality. Henri Breuil, the first scientist to study the cave of Lascaux
after its discovery in 1940, called it the Sistine Chapel of prehistory and it was determined in 1979 to be a World Heritage
site. Closed to the public by André Malraux in 1963, it remains the finest collection of rock paintings and etchings in the
world.
Such high praise is not to suggest that it is the first human artistic expression made. The creation of Lascaux (located in the
Périgord region of south-west France) and the period between the invention of drawing, when animal forms and human
genitals were engraved into rocks and bones 35,000 to 40,000 years ago by the Cro-Magnon on the banks of the Vézère, is
as long as the period of time which separates us from the civilization of Lascaux. As much time elapsed between the first
artistic engravings and the cave paintings of Lascaux (about 17 millennia) as separates Lascaux from the first TV
broadcasts.
With Lascaux and other prehistoric painted caves, early humans penetrated deeply into the womb of darkness to paint and
scratch semi-transparent images of animals on every surface of the roughly rounded spaces, including the floor. Commonly
the walls, which warp and bend overhead (wrapping a human in an enveloping total space) are painted and occasionally the
floor is put to use also. Sadly, these are features which are impossible to convey through flat rectilinear photos. Nonetheless
after Lascaux’s discovery, the art in the cave amazed the world when reproduced flat in books and magazines. These photos
brought more than a million visitors to Lascaux between 1948 and 1963. Having survived in a stable and somewhat sterile
environment for 17,000 years, in a relatively short space of time the cave and its images were suddenly exposed to
destructive elements brought in by the human visitors. That resulted in its forced closure.
Given the increasingly fragile state of the 17,000 year-old paintings and engravings, entering this pièce de résistance grows
ever more unlikely for most of us. I consider myself extremely privileged to have been inside the actual cave of Lascaux as a
research student.
In 1980 the first full-scale simulation was opened to the public. The Salle des Taureaux area in Lascaux was created by the
transfer of life-sized color photographs onto a base made to reproduce the shape of the original chamber. That simulation
can now be seen in the Musée des Antiquités Nationales in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Then, starting in 1983, visitors to
Montignac in the Dordogne could see Lascaux II, a replica of part of the cave in an enormous concrete bunker 300 meters
from the real cave. It copies the shape of the Salle des Taureaux and the Axial Gallery (where 90% of the original’s
paintings are located) and is part of the Centre International de l'Art Pariétal Montignac-Lascaux (CIAPML). Some 250,000
people visit Lascaux II each year (ten million since its opening).
A full-scale laser-created facsimile of the entire cave, housed in the sleek architecture of Snøhetta (with SRA Architectes
from Châtillon) called Lascaux IV is now underway (opening in 2016), the future CIAPML site in Montignacsur-Vézère
between the Vézère Valley and the Lascaux hill. Virtual Reality specialist Jangled Nerves from Stuttgart have been brought
into the project to oversee that aspect, as there will be two avant-gardes areas where links between cave art and
contemporary art will be explored in an interactive digital gallery.
Snøhetta’s design for Lascaux IV (CIAPML) © Snøhetta, Duncan Lewis
Snøhetta’s simulation of the interior of their facsimile Lascaux IV (CIAPML) © Snøhetta, Duncan Lewis
Verily the grand central attraction will always be the leitmotiv of the huge groupings of horses hovering in and around large
semi-transparent dominating bulls from the Salle des Taureaux and the Axial Gallery (the gallery which follows the vast
Bull's Chamber). Here the cavern tapers to form a more compressed overhead ceiling display where one finds a tremendous
stag 1.38 metres high (4.6 feet) with an enormous rack of entangled antlers flanked by three horses and an abstract door-like
form and rows of dots. A sense of unspeakable tragedy is conveyed there though by an apparently wounded and fallen horse
which concludes the gallery.
For Lascaux II, painters (principlely French artist Monique Peytral) reproduced the figures and symbols of these two
galleries exactly as possible using the same painting materials as the Magdalenians used. What is particularly noteworthy is
that this tangle of animal forms exists in a groundless (virtual) atmosphere where bodies are not anchored to anything
suggesting land. Rather, what is suggested is a 360° non-Euclidean space. There is no attempt at depicting the ground or
defining a landscape, and there are no plants, trees or rocks depicted. Moreover the dominating figures here are not simply
bulls, but rather bull-apparitions, hung with and interposed by a dainty petticoat made up of smaller animals (stags, horses
and bison) - all organized in crescents and cruseiforms in and around them in interpenetrating and profuse fashion.
When I visited it, the mural in the Salle des Taureaux struck me as aesthetically deluxe in its capacity to evoke visual
intelligence through the management of line and its unification of the semi-sculptural with the graphic by using the swells of
the bumpy forms of the cave walls. Formidable!
After my privilaged visit to the real Lascaux (well a good part of it anyway, as I was not permitted to see the remote gallery
called The Chamber of Felines or the Shaft, which was considered too difficult and dangerous to visit) I took time to visit
Lascaux II to compare the two places in terms of the quality of immersive experience and philosophical soul. I also popped
into artist Benjamin Britton's 16 million color, high quality definition VR Cave at Lascaux. This virtual reality setup utilized
an HMD system to view high-resolution image maps. All of these facsimile/simulations provide educationally rewarding
experiences and show something of the cave to those (almost everyone) who may never enter the real Lascaux. However we
would be deluding ourselves in pretending that these simulations approach the experience which can be gained within the
actual, full field of view, Grotte de Lascaux (without even considering grit, smell, temperature, humidity and lighting). I
will go into an even greater discrepancy below, one that most likely will never be simulated.
Installation view of Lascaux III as Lascaux à Paris © JML
On the internet at http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/#/fr/00.xml there is a very good virtual tour of Lascaux well worth a visit.
But there now is a relatively new kid on the block, the Lascaux III facsimile (exhibited here in Paris as Lascaux à Paris)
that is traveling the world until at least 2020. Three-dimensional imaging technology has made it possible to create an
extraordinarily precise 1:10 scale-model of the cave so as to make something of Lascaux accessible to an international
public. This scaled reproduction presents five new parts of the cave to the public, including replicas of the paintings in the
Nave and Shaft. The Shaft was one of the places I could not go, so I was particularly interested in visiting its simulation at
Lascaux à Paris, as it is a 6 metre (20 foot) deep hole, just wide enough for one person to fit in comfortably, located
halfway along the Passageway toward the Chamber of Felines. It contains the famous scene of the wounded bison who is
literally spilling his guts and the bird-headed reclining man with an erection (the sole human-narrative scene in Lascaux).
Lascaux III has pretty good replicas of the paintings from the Nave known as the Panel of the Imprint, Panel of the Black
Cow, Panel of the Crossed Bison, and the Frieze of the Stags (exquisitly swimming in line). These scenes are reproduced by
hand by painters, engravers, and artists using a digital laser survey from a complete micrometric scan of the cave. The
surface of the paintings at Lascaux III are rich, but, honestly very far from what I saw in the cave. In that the walls of the
real cavern have been coated with crystallised calcite due to flooding long long ago, the paintings there glimmer with a
subtle sparkle which is enchanting to the eye. Thankfully the congealed calcite served as well as a protective sealing and
safeguarding varnish-coat which has kept the painting's color looking remarkably fresh and well preserved. This glimmering
effect was heightened further when my Ministère de la Culture guide dowsed all the electrical lights (designed to reproduce
the tallow lamp originals which burned animal fat with Juniper wicks) and lit a cigarette lighter to better convey an idea of
the original visual effect of tallow and burning wicks which provided an unsteady twinkling light (as a candle flame does).
At that point the calcite twinkle burst into a full-blown flicker.
Panel of the Imprint © Conseil départemental de la Dordogne
Black Cow ©Denis Nidos © CG24
Frieze of the Stags © Conseil départemental de la Dordogne
Detail installation view of Frieze of the Stags at Lascaux à Paris © JML
Even though, the paintings are presented in a monumental setting recreating as closely as possible the conditions found in a
cave: darkness, silence, position of one panel in relation to the others, and scale. The feeling was still impressive, and it was
possible to contemplate, in silence and in the dark, without commentary, a bit of what I know of Lascaux. Yet the clean
modern supporting structure for the paintings told me otherwise. Indeed they reminded me of Asian Shadow Theatre where
you are expected to pay no attention to the humans dressed in black animating the puppets.
Partial installation view at Lascaux à Paris © JML
Four hyper-realistic anatomical sculptures of an old man, a woman, a teenager and a child (by the artist Elisabeth Daynes
based on data from paleoanthropology), a virtual visit to the cave, scale models, archive footage, and interactive games,
provided further distractions that seriously mitigated the contemplations formed in dark silence. But the worse offender
(unavoidable I know) for that destruction recalled to me Jean-Paul Sartre's especially famous and often misinterpreted
quotation, “L’enfer, c'est les autres” (Hell is other people). The views and sounds of other people at the exhibition are
contemplation killers, that took me far from my actual experience in the real cave.
Bordeaux was the first city to host the splendor of Lascaux III in 2012, followed by The Field Museum in Chicago, The
Houston Museum of Natural Science, Le Centre des Sciences Montréal, Musée du Cinquantenaire Brussels, and now the
Parc des Expositions in Paris. These exhibitions were supported by the Departmental Council of the Dordogne, with the
support of the Aquitaine Regional Council, the French Ministry of Culture and Communication and the European Union. It
uses a unique technique developed for Lascaux III called the Stone Veil, a new moulding and mineral wall recreation
technology.
II
The limits of simulation: what cannot be reproduced from Lascaux (but only described).
Lascaux Apse detail © Norbert Aujoulat
In the real cave, just prior to the Shaft is the Apse, a roundish, semi-spherical, penumbra-like chamber (like those adjacent
to romanesque basiliques) approximately 4.5 metres in diameter (about 5 yards) covered on every wall surface (including
the ceiling) with thousands of entangled, overlapping, engraved drawings. The ceiling of the Apse (which ranges from 1.6
up to 2.7 metres high (about 5.2 to 8.9 feet) as measured from the original floor height) is so completely and richly
bedecked with such engravings that it indicates that the prehistoric people who executed them first constructed a scaffold to
do so. This indicates to me that the Apse was an important and sacred part of the cave, and unique. I can say with assurance
that the Apse's brimful style (what Bataille called its fouillis) is almost unprecedented, save for certain panels in Les Trois
Frères and at the cave of Combarelles, a nearby Périgord cavern which I subsequently visited.
In the Apse of Lascaux, representation was made problematic and the normal linear depiction of figurative assurance made
to fail. The etched walls did not have one singular point of view or a fixed position from which it depicted representational
form. Here animals are superimposed in chaotic discourse, some fully and carefully rendered, others unfulfilled and left
open to penetration by the environment, all commingled with an extraordinary confused jumble of lines including,
remarkably, the sole claviform sign in the Périgord and, even more remarkably, Lascaux's only reindeer, an animal which
existed in plenitude during the period of the adornment of Lascaux. Its extensive use of superimposed multiple-operative
renderings presents the viewer with no single point of reference, no orientation, no top, no bottom, no left, no right, and no
separate parts to its whole. Hence, freed from representational obligations, dark chaotic powers of consciousness were
unleashed via the Apse's repressed and excessive exuberance. Certainly easy conceptions of one beautiful being as
distinguished from another (in specificity) are denied and an aberrant invalidation takes place where previous concepts of
the finite and the infinite implode (as do concepts of the voluminous and the vacuous) into a unified field of multiple-
reproductive disembodied existences.
Lascaux Apse detail © Norbert Aujoulat
Keeping in mind that the human's natural field-of-view is roughly 120° vertical by 180° horizontal and that the Apse's
perceptual-field far exceeds these parameters, the resulting flooding-over effect of the Apse (which is significant in creating
immersive effects) accounts for some of the visual chicanery experienced here. However, in the Apse, the level of evasive
mono-complexity (given the uniform shading in which the one sombre value dominates the complex visual arena) of the
fouillis also challenges preconceptions of legibility based on our ability to identify and locate figures in their ground. This
made me wonder if the visualisation chamber I was in was not perhaps a training spot for the hunters to improve their
discerning vision, so as to aid them in visually discovering animals from within their tangled natural camouflage.
But also on scanning the intricate and perplexing spread of the Apse, one cannot but sense that in some way one is looking
at a representation of the metaphysics of orgasm and death, and that by absorbing its visual code one was looking sex/death
in the face. To be, or not to be: that is the paradigmatic choice when visualizing form into and out of existence when
examining the elusive alternatives made manifest here. Being, beings, or nothingness: all are tentative conditions of
resolution (or forestalled resolution) here; all spout their own ontological/neurological preferences. Hence I was confronted
with nihilistic amanuensis and jubilant catastrophic implosion here, not only in how this staggering image-dump can be
read, but also in terms of how its creation entailed the task of disrespecting the care with which marks achieve
representational artistry in an apparent desire to achieve and contemplate radical negation.
This scouring assertive art must have been deemed necessary only precisely here, as in the other galleries, very often,
superimposed images respected the marks previous laid down and sensitively incorporated them into the ensuing hybrid
super-impositional compositions. But by ransacking representational vision, the Apse paradoxically partakes in the category
typical of major art (regardless of its marginal standing within the cave and within Prehistory) as it seemingly rejects the
figurative tradition in order to reinvent it as entrancing meta-(or supra)-representation. Thus it is major in the way that John
Cage's musical composition/non-composition 4'33" is in forcing us to astutely consider silence as sound. And as such it is a
meditation on fullness and emptiness: on the emptiness of fullness and the fullness of emptiness. And this is its key
unreproducable value.
That is why generally the Apse has been ignored by art theoreticians (and there is only one widely published scholarly
investigation of it per se, by Denis Vialou in Arlette Leroi-Gourhan's Lascaux Inconnu even though Abbé Glory spent
several years trying to decipher this inextricable chamber) as nowhere is the eye permitted to linger over any detail (even
though it holds an immense 2.5 metre engraving (8.2 foot) in its midst). Rather, the gaze is urged on by an all-inclusive
flood of sublimated optic information in need of visual stamina. All the same, the Apse holds a semi-legible comprehensive
index of all of the forms of representation found scattered throughout the entire cave, thus making it (for me) Lascaux's
veritable conceptual center.
What pleased and fascinated me about the Apse is exactly what cannot be simulated for the grand public: its foreboding,
cryptic, over-all, hyper-totalizing iconographic character - granted by its boundless, palimpsestesque, wall-paper-like, image
explosion. The overlapping, near non-photo-reproducible, stockpiled drawings found here defy representation. Yet, when
sustained visual attention is maintained, unexpected configurations visually emerge. As such, it seemed an imposition onto
Paleolithic culture of the very thing that should unstabilise it: nihilism. Nihilism in that it is no longer a matter of
heterogeneous figuration, but of scanning a homospatial criss-crossing (and oscillating) battle scene between interwoven
figures, immersed in their ideational ground with which they have merged in a deliberate process of constitutional
defigurisation. There is no longer any space outside of the figures to define them, and hence, in a mental reversal, space is
immersed in the overlapping figures. The nihilistic cancellation at work here seemed to be an attempt to deny the validity of
subject/object understanding and to deny that any visual erudition of anything whatsoever is possible, in the interests of dark
introspection.
Bataille said that what was curious about the Apse was that the artists abandoned their oeuvre to the next to come after them
in an ant-like activity, yet they did not engrave their figures with less conviction or care. Obviously the artists here did not
work from a life model but from the overlapping, introspective depths of their visual memories. Indeed likewise, the Apse
seems to call upon the viewer to construct a mnemonic psychological interpretation of it based on its tightly woven, intricate
abundance, i.e., its latent excess.
But even after introspectively synthesising the Apse’s overlapping, imploded, mnemonic, coherent whole, it retained its
provocative discord/irritation as it transcended the limitations of pictorial assumption.
Clearly what I am saying about the Apse runs counter to positivism, as the positivist ideal is a search for rational, systematic
thought where images can be seen, broken down, explored, understood, and explained. The Apse in Lascaux is a place for
the rejection of positivist realism and it's values (or at least a place to save oneself from the futile and finally unreasonable
claims of dogmatic realism and rationalism). The Apse represents a thrusting off of optic and mental boundaries and thus is
a complex mirroring of our own fleeting impressions, which constitute the movement of our consciousness; the perpetual
weaving and unweaving of ourselves.
Bataille said that the Apse of Lascaux, with its dynamic cluster of representational/anti-representational operations, was a
place of anguish and religious horror. These are emotional aesthetic states difficult to simulate and even more difficult to
market.
Joseph Nechvatal