How Art Made the World More Human Than Human
| How Art Made the World | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Documentary |
| Presented past | Nigel Spivey |
| Land of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language | English |
| No. of series | 1 |
| No. of episodes | five |
| Product | |
| Executive producer | Kim Thomas |
| Producer | Marker Hedgecoe |
| Running fourth dimension | 60 minutes |
| Distributor | BBC |
| Release | |
| Original network | BBC One |
| Original release | 26 June (2005-06-26) – 24 July 2005 (2005-07-24) |
How Art Fabricated the Globe is a 2005 five-office BBC Ane documentary series, with each episode looking at the influence of fine art on the current day situation of our society.[1] [2]
"The essential premise of the show," according to Nigel Spivey, "is that of all the defining characteristics of humanity equally a species, none is more bones than the inclination to brand art. Great apes will smear paint on canvas if they are given brushes and shown how, just they do not instinctively produce art any more than than parrots produce conversation. We humans are solitary in developing the capacity for symbolic imagery."[three]
Episodes [edit]
Images boss our lives. They tell us how to carry, even how to feel. They mould and define us. But why exercise these images, the pictures, symbols and the art we run across around us every 24-hour interval, accept such a powerful agree on usa? The reply lies not here in our fourth dimension but thousands of years ago. Because when our ancient ancestors starting time created the images that made sense of their world, they produced a visual legacy which has helped to shape our own.
In this series we'll be travelling around the globe, discovering the world'south most stunning treasures. We'll come across how the struggles of early artists led to the triumphs of the globe's bully civilisations. Our journey volition take us through a hundred 1000 years of history. We'll be witnessing some of the extraordinary ceremonies of the world's oldest creative cultures. And we'll reveal how they unlock the deepest secrets of ancient art, Nosotros'll be hearing from the people who made these discoveries. And we'll be using science to uncover how thousands of years ago the human being heed drove us to create astonishing images, You'll never look at our earth the aforementioned way again, for this is the ballsy story of how we humans made art and how fine art made us human.
—Nigel Spivey'due south opening narration
Episode one: More Man Than Human... [edit]
The first episode asks why humans surroundings themselves with images of the torso that are so unrealistic.[4] [five]
The fact is people rarely create images of the body that are realistic. What's going on? Why is our world then dominated past images of the body that are so unrealistic?
—Nigel Spivey's opening narration
Dr. Spive begins his investigation past travelling to Willendorf, where in 1908 three Austrian archaeologists discovered the Venus of Willendorf, an xi cm (4.3 in) high statuette of a female person figure, estimated to have been made betwixt 24,000 and 22,000 BCE. Spivey travels to the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna to examine the Venus'south grotesquely exaggerated breasts and abdomen, as well as its lack of arms and confront, which shows the desire to exaggerate dates back to the very first images of the human trunk created by our ancestors. Spivey speculates that, The people who made this statue lived in a harsh ice-age surroundings where features of fatness and fertility would have been highly desirable, and several similar statuettes collectively referred to every bit Venus figurines show that this exaggerated torso image continued for millennia.[half dozen]
Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran speculates that the reason for this lies in a neurological principle known as the supernormal stimulus, which Spivey demonstrates past replicating Nikolaas Tinbergen'south experiment with Herring gull chicks. When the chicks are shown a yellow stick with a unmarried ruby line made to correspond their mother'due south beak, they tap on it as they are programmed to practice to need nutrient. Still, when they are presented with a stick with three red lines they tap on it with increased enthusiasm even in comparing to the original beak. Ramachandran concludes, "I think in that location'due south an illustration here in that what's going on in the brains of our ancestors, the artists who were creating these Venus figurines were producing grossly exaggerated versions, the equivalent for their brain of what the stick with the three ruddy stripes is for the chick'due south brain."[vii]
Spivey side by side travels to Egypt to discover if the gross exaggerations of hard-wired herring dupe instincts of the nomadic artisans survived into the era of civilization. The Egyptian images of the human body, which he discovers at the Tomb of Pharaoh Rameses VI and the Karnak Temple Complex, were regular and repeated, and nothing about them was exaggerated. Mapped onto the wall at the unfinished Tomb of Amenhotep III's vizier Ramose he discovers the grid which dictated the precise proportions and composition of these images for three thousand years. The Egyptians created images of the body this way, Spivy concludes, non because of how their brains were hard-wired but because of their civilisation. [8]
Spivey finally travels to Italia, where Stefano Mariottini relates his extraordinary discovery off the coast of Riace, near Reggio Calabria. As revealed in an antique copy of Herodotus in St John's Higher Onetime Library, Greek sculptors learned the Egyptians' techniques and initially created truly realistic depictions of the human body, like Kritian Boy at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece. Yet, co-ordinate to Ramachandran, the problem with the Kritian Boy is it was besides realistic, that makes it boring, and the manner was presently abandoned. Spivey states that, the Greeks discovered they had to do interesting things with the human grade, such every bit distorting it in lawful means, and examines the pioneering piece of work of a sculptor and mathematician called Polyclitus, every bit exemplified in the Riace bronzes at the Museo Nazionale della Magna Grecia. Spivey concludes that the beginning civilization capable of realism had used exaggeration to go further, and it'due south that instinct which still dominates our world today. [9]
This is the reply to our mystery. This is why the bodies in our modern world look the way they do. The reality is nosotros humans don't like reality. The shared biological instinct to prefer advisedly exaggerated images links us inexorably with our aboriginal ancestors, and even so what we choose to exaggerate is where science gets left backside. That's where the magic comes in.
—Nigel Spivey'southward closing narration
Episode two: The Day Pictures Were Built-in [edit]
The 2nd episode asks how the very first pictures ever fabricated were created and reveals how images may have triggered the greatest change in human being history.[4] [10]
I could describe about anything in the world and you'd probably guess what it was, But there must have been some point in our human being story when we first got this ability, some moment in time when we began to create pictures and to understand what they meant. So what happened back then? How did we outset become this ability to create images? To detect the answer, we need to become manner dorsum in time.
—Nigel Spivey'due south opening narration
Dr. Spivey begins his investigation by travelling to the Cavern of Altamira near the town of Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, Kingdom of spain, where in 1879 a young daughter'due south exclamation of Papa. Look, oxen. to her father, local amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, is explained to accept meant that Maria had just become the first mod human to set eyes on the first gallery of prehistoric paintings e'er to be discovered. The find revealed that, About 35,000 years ago, we began to create pictures and to empathise what they meant. French priest Henri Breuil believed that, prehistoric artists painted animals to increase their chances of a successful hunt, but the animals painted here and at other sites such every bit the Pech Merle in France, also visited past Spivey, did not lucifer the bones discovered and abstract patterns revealed the artists weren't simply copying from existent life.
Spivey side by side travels to the Drakensberg Mountains of Due south Africa, where rock painting made 200 years ago by the San people and similarly dismissed as hunting scenes, are revealed by anthropologist David Lewis-Williams to comprise many of the same unusual features. 19th century interviews with the San by German language linguist Wilhelm Bleek reveal the importance of trance within their culture, an ascertainment confirmed past Spivey subsequently watching a shamanistic ritual performed by their nowadays-solar day descendants in a hamlet well-nigh Tsumkwe, Namibia far from the mountains. Lewis-Williams theorises that, the paintings were not just pictures of everyday life, but they were virtually spiritual experiences in a trance land.
Media information [edit]
DVD release [edit]
Released on Region 2 DVD by BBC DVD on 30 May 2005.[11]
Companion book [edit]
The 2005 companion book to the series was written past presenter Nigel Spivey.[12]
Selected editions [edit]
- Spivey, Nigel (28 April 2005). How Art Made the Globe: A Journey to the Origins of Art. BBC Books (hardcover). ISBN978-0563522058.
- Spivey, Nigel (8 November 2005). How Art Made the World: A Journey to the Origins of Art. Basic Books (hardcover). ISBN978-0465081813.
- Spivey, Nigel (7 November 2006). How Art Made the Earth: A Journeying to the Origins of Fine art. Bones Books (paperback). ISBN978-0465081820.
References [edit]
- ^ "How Art Made the Globe". BBC Science & Nature. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "How Art Made The World – function of a rich summer of arts on BBC Television". BBC Printing Office. 31 March 2005. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "How Fine art Made the World: Nigh the Series". PBS. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ a b "How Art Made the World: Programmes". BBC Science & Nature. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "How Fine art Made the World: More Man Than Human being". PBS. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "The Venus of Willendorf: Exaggerated Beauty". PBS. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "V.S. Ramachandran: The Herring Gull Test". PBS. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "Egypt: Obsessive Order". PBS. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "Ancient Greece: Naked Perfection". PBS. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "How Art Made the World: The Day Pictures Were Born". PBS. Retrieved 16 June 2012.
- ^ "How Art Fabricated the Globe". BBC Shop. Retrieved 16 June 2012.
- ^ "How Art Made the World: A Journeying to the Origins of Art". BBC Store. Retrieved sixteen June 2012.
External links [edit]
- How Fine art Made the World at BBC Online
- How Fine art Made the World at IMDb
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Art_Made_the_World