Fowles. 2017. Absorption, Theatricality and The Image in Deep Time

Absorption, Theatricality and the Image in Deep Time
Severin Fowles
For well over a century, archaeology has been animated by the construction—and, increas-
ingly, the critique—of grand narratives surveying the evolution of politics, economics, tech-
nologies, religion and so on. Deep histories of ‘art’ have not been pursued with comparable
energy. This essay explores why this is so, and it considers what might be gained from ex-
tending the distinctively archaeological approach to human history to include analyses of
long-term shifts in the organization and functions of images. In doing so, it proposes that
notions of ‘absorption’ and ‘theatricality’ drawn from art-historical conversations might
profitably be redeployed to examine deeper cross-cultural patterns.
A thorny irony hangs about the archaeology of art. On receive attention as objects that humanize the past.
one hand, image production is central to archaeologi- But art, as such, rarely enters into evolutionary con-
cal accounts of the greatest evolutionary transition in versations. Technology has a clear trajectory: from
human history: the onset of behavioural modernity stone to copper, to iron, to electrical and, now, digital
in Homo sapiens at the start of the Upper Palaeolithic. systems. Subsistence practices do as well: from hunt-
Those who write about this topic disagree about a ing and gathering to agriculture, to mechanized food
great deal, but all accept that images provide key ev- production, to genetic engineering. Even religion
idence of basic shifts, not just in human cognition, has been narrated as an evolutionary progression:
but also in human social organization. Much atten- from shamanism, it is said, arose priesthoods, divine
tion, quite understandably, focuses on the remark- kings, theocracies, world religions and, ultimately,
able cave art of Palaeolithic Europe, where biology, secular society. And art? Are there stages in its de-
sociology, geology and history have all conspired to velopment over time? Do certain kinds of images
leave behind stunning iconographic confirmation of characterize certain types of societies? Are particular
the emergence of a seemingly unprecedented way of forms of egalitarianism or despotism, for instance,
being human soon after 40,000 bp. Indeed, the eviden- causally correlated with iconographic production in
tiary sway of images is so great that, on their own, any way, or is it only food production that has this
they have the power to upend the basic storyline of close relationship with politics? Moreover, do the
the Palaeolithic. Were archaeologists to discover, let images of one historical period afford, limit, or help
us imagine, 200,000-year-old paintings of eland on the determine the images of the next period (similar to
walls of a South African cave, our introductory text- the way one technology might serve as the founda-
books would immediately be re-written. In the study tion for the next technology)? Are there necessary
of hominin evolution, then, the earliest art plays as intermediate steps, perhaps, in the movement from
prominent a role as the earliest stone tools or the ear- one iconographic tradition to another? Are there
liest bipedal body. common strategies for organizing images that have
On the other hand, once image production cross-cultural purchase, such that they might be used
arises and becomes widespread, its evidentiary status in fashioning global histories? All these questions
largely evaporates. It is as if images, having inaugu- remain largely unexplored. Art, in other words, is
rated human history, suddenly become irrelevant to one of the few aspects of the human experience
archaeological explanations of how and why the past that seems to have escaped the archaeological pen-
unfolded as it did. Figurines, statuary, petroglyphs, chant for making all things submit to overarching
murals, painted imagery on ceramics and so on may metanarratives.
Cambridge Archaeological Journal page 1 of 11

C 2017 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
doi:10.1017/S0959774317000701 Received 30 May 2017; Accepted 13 August 2017; Revised 9 August 2017
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Severin Fowles
No doubt there are many reasons why artistic genealogy that might be traced cross-culturally back
production has evaded the evolutionists. Archaeol- into pre-Neolithic times. As such, I offer the absorp-
ogy’s deep-seated materialism surely has something tion/theatricality contrast as one example of how a
to do with it, as does anthropological archaeology’s more ambitious archaeological analysis of the deep
tendency to use art history as its disciplinary foil. history of art might be pursued.
To a certain extent, empirical discoveries may be re-
sponsible as well. In recent decades, the careful dat- Nineteenth-century pictures of boats
ing of a number of key Palaeolithic sites in Western
Europe has made a mockery of the few evolutionary Let us begin, then, in the familiar terrain of modern
assumptions about art that once seemed reasonable. Western painting, before moving both outward into
Chauvet Cave, in particular, has conclusively demon- non-Western art and backward into pre-modern art.
strated that art did not gradually develop from child- Certainly much has been made of the way modern
ish dots and squiggles to stick figures and only later Western painting provides a point of entrée into not
to highly realistic representations (Clottes & Geneste just the idiosyncrasies of the artist, but also the so-
2012). Rather, Chauvet’s high sophistication—already cial world of the times in which it was produced.
at the start of image production and far in excess of Hodder (2012) has recently written in useful terms
many of the historical traditions that followed it— about the ‘fittingness’ of objects—ancient no less than
seems sufficient reason to conclude that any attempt modern—vis-à-vis their historical context, and it is a
at an evolutionary study of art would be a fool’s er- basic premise of art-historical analysis that this is true
rand. Unlike food production or tool production, im- of images in particular. Generally speaking, images
age production is simply too idiosyncratic and contin- tend to fit their historical context (despite the compli-
gent. Or at least this is the common conclusion. cations of Pinney 2005).
And yet, as John Robb (2015) has recently em- Consider Figure 1: ‘Yachts Racing on the So-
phasized, when large amounts of multi-temporal data lent’, by Arthur Wellington Fowles, a nineteenth-
are laid on the table, strong patterns in the deep his- century marine artist (and the author’s great-great-
tory of image production do appear to exist, demand- great grandfather). This painting ‘fits’ securely within
ing some sort of explanation. Of course, art historians the historical setting of Victorian England where hun-
have always recognized strong patterns in the devel- dreds of its kind were commissioned as highly mascu-
opment of Western art during the past millennium or line celebrations of British naval muscle. Today, such
so, the shift from pre-modern to modern art serving images strike us as decidedly anachronistic, and most
as a means of tracing the rise of secularism in particu- are destined to spend the remainder of their lives
lar. The question is whether such analyses can be ex- gathering dust in neglected side rooms and storage
panded to include the recent histories of non-Western areas of museums. Marine painting participated in a
traditions and also the deep antiquity of archaeologi- maritime world where seafaring was valorized, and
cal research, where the emergence of the modern secu- we no longer live in such a world. It is precisely this
lar world is less pressing than the emergence of broad- contemporary poorness of fit—or what we might re-
spectrum economies, or agricultural villages, or the fer to as the growing alterity of such images—that
rise of stratified social inequalities. permits them to serve as the foci of historical in-
My goal in this brief essay is to sketch out what quiries into the wider cultural logics that once ani-
a deep historical or evolutionary analysis of art might mated them.
look like—or, rather, to establish the sorts of questions Indeed, nineteenth-century marine paintings are
it might entertain. I join Robb in following the ap- closely related to other types of landscape art that also
proach to ‘art’ developed by Gell (1998), which places developed hand-in-hand with European imperialism
its emphasis on the social relations arising around from the seventeenth century up to the start of the
objects that have been designed to be viewed. How- twentieth. And landscape art is often interpreted as
ever, I also draw inspiration from conversations in art having a symbiotic relationship with a distinctively
history, particularly Michael Fried’s (1980) distinction modern way of seeing nature as an object of reflec-
between ‘absorption’ and ‘theatricality’ as contrast- tion, set over against the human subject, which in
ing terms of engagement between images and their a more ominous sense encourages an understanding
audiences. Far from being relevant simply to eigh- of nature as a thing to be mastered, possessed and
teenth century France (Fried’s focus) or even to the mined for its resources. Landscape painting is ‘like the
shift from medieval to modern art (as Mitchell (2005) “dreamwork” of imperialism’, writes Mitchell (2002,
has proposed in his extension of Fried’s argument), 10), ‘unfolding its own movement in time and space
this distinction, I suggest, helps us envision a deeper from a central point of origin and folding back on
Figure 1. (Colour online) ‘Yachts Racing in the Solent’, by Arthur Wellington Fowles (1815–1883). (Courtesy of Patrick
Fowles.)
itself to disclose both utopian fantasies of the per- ontologically rooted to particular places and, hence,
fected imperial prospect and fractured images of un- are ‘of nature’, modern subjects typically assert that,
resolved ambivalence and unsuppressed resistance’. in the end, they are self-made. It should not surprise
One might argue that marine imagery has a special us, then, that Arthur Wellington Fowles’ obituary not
position within the landscape tradition, insofar as only described him as competitive (‘he believed him-
it often renders nature in a way that entirely elimi- self to be an underrated man’) but also commented on
nates the specificity of place. Indeed, nothing locates the pride he took in being entirely self-taught (‘it was
Figure 1 in the Solent between the Isle of Wight and his boast that he had never had a lesson in his life’)
mainland England except the title. The image could (Anonymous 1883).
easily be imagined as set in any large body of water, Another way of thinking about such paintings
anywhere in the world. is to draw on Fried’s (1980) distinction between ab-
Figure 1 is a quintessentially modern image sorption and theatricality as divergent logics under-
in this sense. Nature has been universalized and pinning the relationship between viewer and image in
transformed into a fluid medium enabling human the Western tradition. There is, to be sure, a voyeuris-
transport between points (or ports). Actors are pre- tic quality to most landscape painting. Canonically,
sented as corporations of men whose technological the viewer looks out upon a scene that exists unto it-
prowess, in the form of ship engineering, permits self and makes no demands; the viewer is, at most, an
them to compete in races with other corporations of overseer, surveying a domain he might act on but that
men and, by extension, to exert global economic and only acts upon him in a quietly aesthetic sense. Fried
military influence. Here it is worth noting that our demonstrates that this understanding of the audience
implied position as viewers of Figure 1 is on another as voyeur and of the image as a withdrawn object
yacht, squinting off the port side at our competitors. of the audience’s contemplation is characteristic of a
Indeed, everything about this image announces a much wider range of European art and also that it has
strange new form of subjectivity characterized by un- a history traceable back to a mid eighteenth-century
tethered non-indigeneity. Unlike the ‘natives’ who are moment in France when artists and critics came to
Severin Fowles
Figure 2. (Colour online) ‘The Raft of the Medusa’, by Jean Louis Théodore Géricault (1819). (Wikipedia public domain.)
place new value on scenes that ignored the viewer al- motivated not simply by a desire for rescue from the
together. Such images were anti-theatrical, not neces- appalling circumstances depicted in the painting but
sarily in the sense of lacking dramatic action (Figure 1, also by the need to escape our gaze, to put an end to
for instance, depicts a race in progress), but rather in being beheld by us … . (Fried 1980, 154)
the sense that they were disengaged from the audi- This is an image that seems not to want to be looked
ence, providing a window on to a world of which the at (sensu Mitchell 2005), or at least that pretends to
viewer was not a part. A number of these paintings ac- have turned away from the viewer. It is ‘absorbed’
tually depicted artists consumed in their work, thus in this sense; it may be tragically dramatic, but it is
serving as explicit mirrors for the absorption of the decidedly ‘anti-theatrical’ insofar as the viewer is not
real artist in his painterly craft. But images of, say, an addressed and remains a voyeur, fully outside the
old man engrossed in reading his book, or of a boy action.
intently building a house of cards, functioned in the Thematically, ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ is a night-
same fashion. marish inversion of Figure 1’s hubristic assertion of
Fried sees a kind of culmination of absorptive human mastery over nature. The corporation, while
imagery in Théodore Géricault’s depiction of the still present, is in a state of total abjection: the ship
tragic wreck of the Medusa, a French frigate that ran has been reduced to a hastily lashed together raft;
aground on a sandbar off the coast of Mauritania the dead are strewn about, untended; and nature
in 1816, leaving dozens of passengers adrift on a threatens to consume those who have not already
makeshift raft for over a week, during which time perished—that is, if they do not consume each other
many perished (Fig. 2). ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ (1819) first. Nineteenth-century viewers of the painting
is duly famous, and Fried argues that it can be read as would all have known that the French victims of the
a meta-commentary on ‘certain ontological preoccu- actual Medusa’s wreck eventually resorted to canni-
pations’ regarding the modern image and its relation- balism, the most fundamental breakdown of the social
ship to the beholder: contract. The tragic consequences of the ontological
the strivings of the men on the raft to be beheld by separation of social bodies from one another is further
the tiny ship on the horizon … may be viewed as signified by the portrayal of the rescue ship as the
tiniest of specks on the horizon. The painting, then, emerges as a separate field of study in eighteenth-
is as quintessentially modern as heroic depictions of century European philosophy when the notion of
racing yachts. the Godhead as an organizing principle in the world
Within the cultural traditions of Western moder- is on the wane and while the scientific outlook
nity, art can often be read as a commentary on its becomes ever more pervasive and dominant. In
the perspective of aesthetics, art acquires some of
times in this way. But to identify a wider and more
the transcendental qualities traditionally associated
generalizable set of relationships between images is with religion. ‘Art’, which used to be thought of
to shift the focus towards criteria that make pos- largely as craft, becomes the work of [individual] ge-
sible a deeper historical analysis. Needless to say, nius, to be placed on a pedestal as embodying ‘di-
not all images produced in the West since the eigh- vine values’.
teenth century are withdrawn from the viewer, ab-
sorbed in their own pictorial worlds, and, in this In the modern West, then, art is supposed increasingly
sense, set apart from human subjects as discrete ob- to occupy a space once held by religion. Such accounts
jects of reflection. (In commercial advertising, for in- tend to valorize aesthetic experience at the same time
stance, theatrical images that make overt demands that they portray religious experience as backward
on the viewer have found a very wide niche to ex- and illusory due to the latter’s misrecognition of mere
pand into.) But an impressive number are. And this objects (paint, wood and stone) as powerful subjects
distinctive attitude of withdrawal from the viewer— (idols). And they also provide an explanation for the
which cuts across traditional art-historical typolo- adaptive radiation of images of absorption, which,
gies and characterizes images of everything from since the eighteenth century, have permitted view-
boats at sea to old men reading books, to bowls ers to adore images without appearing to abnegate
of apples on kitchen tables, to abstract explorations their (the viewers’) position of control. If theatrical
of form and texture—distinguishes them from the images smack of idolatry, then absorbed images use
more theatrical images whose heyday is typically voyeurism to maintain at least the illusion that the
described as preceding the emergence of European iconophile is still in the driver’s seat.
modernity. The eighteenth-century shift in Western philos-
ophy not only revalued theatricality and the reli-
Non-modern theatricality gious icons of pre-modern Christian communities; it
also transformed attitudes towards the visual culture
‘Theatrical’ images are distinct from images of absorp- of the many non-modern communities brought into
tion insofar as they directly address or make overt de- view during the age of imperialism. Much indige-
mands upon the viewer. In this way, they stand more nous iconography of Africa, the Pacific islands, South-
in the position of an active subject than in the posi- east Asia and the Americas, for instance, was ini-
tion of a passive object. We tend to think of such im- tially considered idolatrous, and many images were
ages as religious in nature. One is not a voyeur when actively destroyed in iconoclastic shows. Over time,
kneeling before the image of Christ. On the contrary, however, such ‘heathen idols’ came to be reconceived
Christ is the viewer’s saviour; he conveys blessings, as ‘tribal’ or ‘primitive’ art, opening up new traditions
hears prayers and intercedes on behalf of the faith- of collecting as well as new conversations about non-
ful. In his canonical form on the cross, Christ is not Western aesthetics (Pasztory 2005, 7–8).
suffering in isolation, like the poor wretches adrift It is difficult not to view this extension of an aes-
on the raft of the Medusa. His anguish is precisely thetic discourse as an effort to assert a kind of final
that which establishes a relationship with the viewer, mastery over images that the missionary project had
whose personal sins are bound up in the image of holy already defanged. Indeed, the aestheticization of non-
sacrifice. Western images continues to be regarded as an act of
There is no lack of theatrical Christ statues and Western imperialism and to be vigorously opposed
paintings in the contemporary Western tradition; but for precisely this reason. We see this with particular
insofar as secularization narratives are closely linked visibility in the Hopi tribe’s recent international ef-
to the modernist project, such images are typically forts to stop the sale of their ancestral kachina images
understood as more characteristic of a pre-modern at an auction house in Paris (see Shannon & Lamar
world that is rapidly fading. Within art-historical 2013 for commentaries on these efforts). For outsiders,
discussions, for instance, the aesthetic experience of most kachina images are regarded as tribal masks, eth-
modern art is frequently contrasted with the religious nic objects worn by Pueblo individuals in Arizona
experience of pre-modern art. ‘Aesthetics’, observes and New Mexico (US) as part of colourful ritual dra-
Pasztory (1996, 319), mas that supposedly transform dancing humans into
Severin Fowles
vehicles of the gods. They are, from this perspective,

extreme examples of theatricality. Human bodies be-
come object-like extensions of the mask, whose fearful
subjectivity stares out at the audience through goggle-
eyes that, in some examples, have been designed to
bobble about as the dancer goes through his motions.
These are animate images that stare down the au-
dience and, in the midst of ceremonials, sometimes
reach out actively to strike viewers with a yucca whip
(Fig. 3). When Western art collectors treat kachina im-
ages as aesthetic objects, then, they are asserting their
own invincibility. Unlike the natives, the Westerner
claims to be immune to the gaze of false idols; he sees
the mask for what it allegedly is: merely an interesting
organization of paint, wood, leather and feathers. He
sees it aesthetically.
The Pueblos, not surprisingly, understand the
kachina somewhat differently. As the controversy over
the recent Paris auctions has made clear, they see
these images not as tribal ‘masks’, but as commu-
nity ‘friends’ and ‘relatives’—indeed, as ‘sentient liv-
ing beings’ (Shannon & Lamar 2013, 106). Early an-
thropologists documented the elaborate care given
to such friends, the way they would be addressed
and fed with cornmeal. But contemporary native com-
mentaries are emphasizing the intimacy of these rela-
tionships in starker terms. Tony Chavarria (in Shan-
non & Lamar 2013, 103) of Santa Clara puts it this
way: ‘Seeing such closely held [kachina] images dis-
played to the world is like having a sacred organ that
you share with your family and community around
you yanked out, pulled apart, and left hung for sale to
the highest bidder’. In fact, the lawyers representing
the Hopi attempted to argue this very point: that for
the Hopi these images were embodied subjects and
so should be protected by laws prohibiting the sale of
bodies and body parts. Little surprise that neither the
language of religion, nor that of images as living be-
ings, held any currency in France—homeland of secu-
larism and liberal humanism—whose courts quickly
authorized the market in Native American ‘art’ to
continue. Figure 3. Masked kachina dancer. (Redrawn from
Most kachina masks are like most Christ icons Roediger 1961, 11.)
in their reliance on theatricality, and it seems accept-
able to say that Pueblo people and devout Chris-
tians respectively have commitments to them partly there a much larger cross-cultural family of theatri-
for this reason. Both iconographic traditions, to be cal images that cuts across the diverse expanse of
sure, stand apart from the detached images of absorp- ‘non-modernity’?
tion discussed above. And this raises the challeng- By ‘theatricality’, again, I am referring to the
ing anthropological question of how to think about nature of the relationship between the viewer and
the various similarities that at least superficially seem the image: an image is theatrical to the extent that
to exist between the visual cultures of certain non- it directly engages the viewer. There are many ways
Western societies and those of the pre-modern West. this engagement might play out. In New Kingdom
If absorbed images are characteristically ‘modern’, is Egypt certain cult statues housed in temples were, as
David Lorton (1999, 131) puts it, ‘served endlessly—

one might almost want to say, relentlessly … accord-
ing to the principle of reciprocity, or do ut des: just as
the recourses of the community … were put to the ser-
vice of the god [as a statuary image], so the god in
return would “protect Egypt”.’ In practice, human at-
tendants were required daily to awaken, wash, feed,
dress, light fires for and anoint the cult statues, as they
would a human master. Many cross-cultural examples
might be mobilized to underscore the regularity with
which humans have found themselves in a position of
having to care physically for images of various sorts.
The inverse is also true: just as many cross-cultural
examples might be found of the need to destroy im-
ages, iconoclasm having an expansive human history
beyond its Abrahamic variants. Whether tended, or
attacked, or consulted, or supplicated, theatrical im-
ages stand before the viewer as more subject than Figure 4. A rock-art depiction of a kachina, probably
object. produced at some point between the fifteenth and
Whereas Fried provides us with the seminal eighteenth centuries, Galisteo Basin, New Mexico.
treatment of iconographic absorption, it is Gell (1998) (Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico.)
who has developed the most careful analysis of icono-
graphic theatricality. Gell’s indexical approach to the
study of art—which, arguably, could be extended to Eye-contact prompts self-awareness of how one ap-
the study of all material culture—is capacious, but it pears to the other, at which point one sees one-
builds to a crescendo during his attempt (in chapter self ‘from the outside’ as if one were, oneself, an
7) to revalue idolatry as a reasonable, which is to say object (or an idol) … Thus, in image-worship, the
logical, undertaking. ‘Idol worship’, for Gell, involves devotee does not just see the idol, but sees herself
(as an object) being seen by the idol (as a subject).
the attribution of a mind, will, or hidden sentience to
(Gell 1998, 120)
an image, be that image another human body, an an-
thropomorphic painting or sculpture of a human fig- Anthropomorphic eye icons are not the only way of
ure, or a non-anthropomorphic image that neverthe- indexing the presence of a mind lying somewhere
less has certain formal properties that compel us to behind it. In Gell’s analysis, any formal referent to
posit a mind hidden away within it. In practice, this a hidden interiority triggers the same cognitive leap
turns idolatry into the basic underlying principle of for human viewers. But there is no denying that
intersubjective sociality. Idols, one might say, are sim- there is something especially theatrical (that is, ‘idol-
ply mindful subjects; ‘false idols’ are those deemed by atrous’) about images of faces with eyes that return
someone in power to be improperly or mistakenly at- the viewer’s gaze (Fig. 4). And these, of course, are
tributed with subjectivity; and ‘true idols’—were one precisely the sorts of images that have been progres-
to invoke this apparent oxymoron—thus emerge as sively marginalized in Western high art circles since
all those social others, human and otherwise, who are the eighteenth century.
conventionally accepted as intentional subjects. Gell Should the pre-modern Christ icon and the
develops this argument at length; for my purposes, it non-modern kachina, then, be placed within the same
is enough to acknowledge that theatricality and idol- family of theatrical images, insofar as both build
atry are two ways of talking about the same phe- relationships with viewers via a staged form of ocular
nomenon of intersubjectivity. exchange?
Much of Gell’s argument hinges on the cognitive
effects of eye icons and the ocular exchange that oc- Before theatricality
curs when humans look at images that are looking at
them: As an anthropological discipline, archaeology must
Eye-contact, mutual looking, is a basic mechanism constantly tack back and forth between the study
for intersubjectivity because to look into another’s of cultural difference and the study of cross-cultural
eyes is not just to see the other, but to see the other patterning. Confronted with an iconographic com-
seeing you (I see you see me see you see me etc.) parison between Christ and kachina, then, we would
Severin Fowles
Figure 5. Theatrical imagery at the onset of the Neolithic around the world: (centre) ‘Ain Ghazal, Jordan; (left) Lepenski
Vir, Serbia; (upper right) Awatovi, New Mexico, US; (lower right) Banpo, China.
do well to inquire into both their radical alterity Fowles 2013, 12–23). This is why Childe wrote of
and their fundamental affinities, pushing each anal- the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ as a prehistoric parallel
ysis as far as possible. However, I also regard ar- to the ‘Industrial Revolution’: as the latter ushered
chaeology as a historical discipline with a special in the modern world, so did the former draw hu-
mandate to examine critically the sweeping narra- man communities out of the so-called Palaeolithic
tives of the human past. In this sense, it falls on the simplicity of hunter-gatherer existence and into the
shoulders of archaeologists to interject when an over- complexity of Neolithic settlements with their more
simplistic contrast is made between the dominant exploitative modes of production. Generations of
logic of absorption within modern imagery and the archaeologists have explored the ramifications of this
dominant logic of theatricality within pre-modern im- Neolithic rupture on the global history of agriculture,
agery. At the very least, one must contend with the social inequality, demography, pottery production
simple fact that, whereas ‘modernity’ can be talked and so on. Less attention has been devoted to the
about as a single historical phenomenon (drawn to- evolution of images across this boundary; how-
gether by the rise of maritime imperialism, global ever, the general patterns would seem to be clear
capitalism, colonialism, international warfare and so enough.
on), neither ‘pre-modernity’ nor ‘non-modernity’ de- Simply put, the apparent theatricality of pre-
scribe even a very general historical tradition. The modern art is only really true of ‘late’ pre-modernity
latter are simply negative categories that vaguely and of societies that had already organized their
gesture towards a massive temporal and spatial ex- worlds according to broadly Neolithic logics. Indeed,
panse of heterogeneous and historically unrelated so- were one to build a global iconographic database, the
cieties. This, needless to say, is the noble protest of the origin and spread of theatrical images would certainly
particularist. be found to have a strong positive correlation with the
The generalist has her own protest to register as origin and spread of sedentary villages, if not of agri-
well, however—which, while painted with a broader culture more specifically (see Robb 2015 and papers in
brush, is no less important. I am referring to the fact Renfrew & Morley 2007) (Fig. 5).
that the pre-modern/modern split is not the only The best-documented historical trajectory ex-
historical rupture used to construct the grand narra- hibiting this pattern—and also the earliest—is in the
tives of the West. In most accounts, pre-modernity Near East, where images begin to stare back at their
itself is divided into two overarching chapters (see makers beginning in the Late Epipaleolithic, broadly
Figure 6. Characteristic Archaic imagery from the Northern Rio Grande Valley, New Mexico, US.
coinciding with shifts toward more permanent ar- nor by the hot ‘idolatry’ of certain post-Neolithic im-
chitecture, storage pits and the first hints of agricul- ages.
tural experimentation. Plastered skulls with recon- Telling examples of the correlation between
structed eyes provide some of the initial evidence of sedentary villages and theatrical imagery, on the one
theatricality. In the Neolithic proper, these images are hand, and of the non-theatricality of pre-Neolithic
accompanied by stone masks and sculptures in which imagery, on the other, come not just from ancient
ocular exchange is a clear goal. The strange anthropo- contexts, but from more recent ones as well. The
morphic statues of ‘Ain Ghazal are exemplary in this American Southwest is particularly useful in this re-
regard, but what makes such imagery especially inter- gard. There, the theatrical kachina mask imagery dis-
esting from an evolutionary or deep-time perspective cussed above has a shallow history, only arising in
is the fact that it would have been so out of place dur- the fourteenth century ad, on the heels of a regional
ing the thousands of years of Palaeolithic history that shift towards life in aggregated farming villages. In-
preceded it. deed, the ‘Neolithic Revolution’, as it were, took place
There is little evidence of overt theatricality later in the Southwest than elsewhere in the Ameri-
within Pleistocene imagery anywhere, in fact. Even cas, resulting in opportunities to explore this correla-
in Europe’s famous Upper Palaeolithic artistic tradition with greater archaeological resolution. Moreover,
tions, the beautifully painted animals on cave walls the long and persistent histories of dispersed hunter-
do not look back at us, and most anthropomorphic gatherers in parts of the Southwest invite detailed
figurines lack facial features altogether. It is as though inquiry into the alterity of image production among
there was a calculated effort to avoid the image’s gaze, those who never did choose a settled, agricultural
a pattern that Bataille (2005) interpreted as a deep- life.
seated attitude of human ‘effacement’ before the an- In the rock art of the Northern Rio Grande val-
imal world at the onset of image production. One ley in New Mexico, where my research is situated,
might also say that human faces in Palaeolithic im- a growing database of thousands of panels created
agery seem absorbed into themselves, purposefully over the past 10 millennia clearly demonstrates the
denying the viewer the possibility of an intersubjec- profound unwillingness of rock artists to create any
tive relationship. Be that as it may, we are clearly in the iconic imagery at all prior to the arrival of agriculture
province of an entirely different type of imagery, char- in the tenth century ad. Here, the most pressing ques-
acterized neither by the cool ‘aesthetics’ of modern art tion for the deep-time iconologist is surely why, for
Severin Fowles
the bulk of the Holocene, local Archaic foragers al- and places—these are all empirical questions that can
most entirely restricted their rock art to dots, squig- only be answered through sustained archaeological
gles, meandering lines, circles, animal tracks, hands research.
and footprints (Fig. 6). Why, in other words, were they
so unwaveringly committed to imagery that, on the Severin Fowles
surface, would seem to be just as anti-theatrical as Anthropology
twentieth-century abstract art hanging in the galleries Barnard College
of the modern West? And why did such very differ- Columbia University
ent sorts of images—namely, iconic images, often ex- 3009 Broadway
pressing a theatrical engagement with the viewer— New York, NY 10027-6598
begin suddenly to propagate with the arrival of set- USA
tled villages, and not just on rock faces, but on ceramic Email: sfowles@barnard.edu
vessels, architectural walls and the masked bodies of
dancers as well? What was it about this new ‘Neolithic
niche’, as it were, that gave rise to such an adaptive ra-
diation of iconography? References
Conclusion Anonymous, 1883. Shocking fatality death of Mr. Arthur W.
Fowles. Isle of Wight Observer Saturday, 27 January.
Images tend to ‘fit’ within the historical contexts of Bataille, G., 2005. The passage from animal to man and
their creation, but they also play vital roles in bringing the birth of art, in The Cradle of Humanity: Prehis-
those historical contexts into being in the first place. toric art and culture. New York (NY): Zone Books,
The relationship between people and images is mu- 57–80.
tually constitutive in this sense. We might therefore Clottes, J. & J. Geneste, 2012. Twelve years of research
legitimately wonder why the evolution of visual cul- in Chauvet Cave: methodology and main results, in
Companion to Rock Art, eds. J. McDonald & P. Veth.
ture has not been taken up by archaeologists with the
Malden (MA): Wiley-Blackwell, 583–604.
same commitment and energy as the evolution of po- Fowles, S., 2013. An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and the
litical or economic culture. Why are there vastly more study of Pueblo religion. Santa Fe (NM): School for Ad-
articles published each year on subsistence strategies vanced Research Press.
and settlement patterns than on artistic strategies and Fried, M., 1980. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and be-
iconographic patterns? This situation has, I suspect, a holder in the age of Diderot. Chicago (IL): University of
double source. First, anthropological archaeology de- Chicago Press.
veloped in the twentieth century as a scientific disci- Gell, A., 1998. Art and Agency: An anthropological theory. New
pline that used the humanistic inquiries of art histo- York (NY): Clarendon Press.
rians as its foil; ‘art’, as such, became a disreputable Hodder, I., 2012. Entangled: An archaeology of the relation-
object of archaeological study. Second, the discipline ships between humans and things. Malden (MA): Wiley-
Blackwell.
further anchored its identity through a commitment
Lorton, D., 1999. The theology of cult statues in Ancient
to a vigorous form of secular materialism in which Egypt, in Born in Heaven, Made on Earth: The creation
pre-modern relations with images were regarded as of the cult image in the ancient Near East, ed. M.B. Dick.
‘religious’ and, hence, epiphenomenal aspects of the Winona Lake (IN): Eisenbrauns, 123–210.
human past. Mitchell, W.J.T., [1994] 2002. Imperial landscape, in Land-
But we need not be tethered by this intellectual scape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago (IL): Uni-
inheritance. Important historical patterns exist within versity of Chicago Press, 6–34.
the global archaeological archive of images, and they Mitchell, W.J.T., 2005. What Do Pictures Want? Chicago (IL):
await our critical study. Here, I have pointed to one University of Chicago Press.
pattern: the apparent alteration from absorption to Pasztory, E., 1996. Aesthetics and pre-Columbian art. RES:
theatricality to absorption in the relationship between Anthropology and Aesthetics 29–30, 318–25.
Pasztory, E., 2005. Thinking with Things: Toward a new vision
image and audience over the course of deep histor-
of art. Austin (TX): University of Texas Press.
ical time. Whether or not it holds up, whether or
Pinney, C., 2005. Things happen: or, from which moment
not the pattern is found to have cross-cultural pur- does that object come?, in Materiality, ed. D. Miller.
chase despite its exceptions, whether or not it might Durham (NC): Duke University Press, 25–72.
therefore serve as a springboard for the develop- Renfrew, C. & I. Morley (eds.), 2007. Image and Imagina-
ment of explanatory models to account for shifts be- tion. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeolog-
tween absorption and theatricality in specific times ical Research.
10
Robb, J., 2015. Prehistoric art in Europe: a deep-time social Author biography
history. American Antiquity 80(4), 635–54.
Roediger, V.M., 1961. Ceremonial Costumes of the Pueblo Severin Fowles is an Associate Professor in the Anthropol-
Indians. Berkeley (CA): University of California ogy Department at Barnard College, Columbia University.
Press. He is the author of An Archaeology of Doings: Secularism and
Shannon, J.A. & C.C. Lamar (eds.), 2013. Commentaries fol- the study of Pueblo religion (School for Advanced Research
lowing ‘The April 2013 Auction in Paris, France’. Mu- Press, 2012) and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of
seum Anthropology 36(2), 101–12. Southwest Archaeology (Oxford University Press, 2017).
11

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Absorption, Theatricality and the Image in Deep Time

Cambridge Archaeological Journal page 1 of 11

vehicles of the gods. They are, from this perspective,

David Lorton (1999, 131) puts it, ‘served endlessly—

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