What Is Art Made of What Is Art Made
| How Art Made the World | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Documentary |
| Presented by | Nigel Spivey |
| Country of origin | United kingdom |
| Original linguistic communication | English |
| No. of series | i |
| No. of episodes | 5 |
| Production | |
| Executive producer | Kim Thomas |
| Producer | Mark Hedgecoe |
| Running time | 60 minutes |
| Benefactor | BBC |
| Release | |
| Original network | BBC One |
| Original release | 26 June (2005-06-26) – 24 July 2005 (2005-07-24) |
How Fine art Made the Globe is a 2005 five-function BBC One documentary series, with each episode looking at the influence of fine art on the current day situation of our society.[1] [two]
"The essential premise of the testify," according to Nigel Spivey, "is that of all the defining characteristics of humanity every bit a species, none is more basic than the inclination to make art. Slap-up apes will smear pigment on sheet if they are given brushes and shown how, just they exercise non instinctively produce art any more than parrots produce conversation. We humans are alone in developing the capacity for symbolic imagery."[3]
Episodes [edit]
Images dominate our lives. They tell u.s. how to behave, even how to feel. They mould and define usa. But why exercise these images, the pictures, symbols and the art we meet effectually us every day, take such a powerful hold on us? The respond lies not here in our fourth dimension but thousands of years ago. Because when our ancient ancestors outset created the images that made sense of their globe, 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's most stunning treasures. We'll run into how the struggles of early artists led to the triumphs of the globe'south swell civilisations. Our journey will take us through a hundred thou years of history. We'll be witnessing some of the extraordinary ceremonies of the world's oldest artistic cultures. And we'll reveal how they unlock the deepest secrets of ancient art, We'll be hearing from the people who made these discoveries. And we'll exist using science to uncover how thousands of years agone the human heed collection us to create amazing images, Y'all'll never expect at our world the same way again, for this is the epic story of how we humans fabricated fine art and how art fabricated us man.
—Nigel Spivey's opening narration
Episode 1: More Human Than Human being... [edit]
The commencement episode asks why humans surround themselves with images of the trunk that are so unrealistic.[four] [5]
The fact is people rarely create images of the body that are realistic. What's going on? Why is our globe so dominated by images of the torso that are so unrealistic?
—Nigel Spivey's opening narration
Dr. Spive begins his investigation by travelling to Willendorf, where in 1908 3 Austrian archaeologists discovered the Venus of Willendorf, an xi cm (4.3 in) loftier 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's grotesquely exaggerated breasts and belly, also as its lack of arms and face, which shows the desire to exaggerate dates back to the very showtime images of the homo torso created by our ancestors. Spivey speculates that, The people who made this statue lived in a harsh ice-age environment where features of fatness and fertility would have been highly desirable, and several similar statuettes collectively referred to as Venus figurines show that this exaggerated body image continued for millennia.[6]
Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran speculates that the reason for this lies in a neurological principle known equally the supernormal stimulus, which Spivey demonstrates by replicating Nikolaas Tinbergen's experiment with Herring dupe chicks. When the chicks are shown a yellowish stick with a single red line made to represent their mother's bill, they tap on it as they are programmed to exercise to need food. However, when they are presented with a stick with 3 red lines they tap on it with increased enthusiasm even in comparison to the original beak. Ramachandran concludes, "I retrieve there'south an analogy here in that what'south 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 red stripes is for the chick's encephalon."[seven]
Spivey next travels to Egypt to find if the gross exaggerations of hard-wired herring gull instincts of the nomadic artisans survived into the era of civilization. The Egyptian images of the human trunk, 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 3'due south vizier Ramose he discovers the grid which dictated the precise proportions and composition of these images for three thou years. The Egyptians created images of the body this way, Spivy concludes, non because of how their brains were difficult-wired but because of their culture. [8]
Spivey finally travels to Italy, where Stefano Mariottini relates his extraordinary discovery off the coast of Riace, near Reggio Calabria. Equally revealed in an antique copy of Herodotus in St John's College Old Library, Greek sculptors learned the Egyptians' techniques and initially created truly realistic depictions of the human body, like Kritian Male child at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece. However, according to Ramachandran, the problem with the Kritian Boy is it was also realistic, that makes it dull, and the way was soon abased. Spivey states that, the Greeks discovered they had to do interesting things with the human form, such as distorting it in lawful ways, and examines the pioneering work of a sculptor and mathematician called Polyclitus, as exemplified in the Riace bronzes at the Museo Nazionale della Magna Grecia. Spivey concludes that the get-go civilisation capable of realism had used exaggeration to go further, and information technology'due south that instinct which still dominates our globe today. [9]
This is the answer to our mystery. This is why the bodies in our modern world look the way they exercise. The reality is nosotros humans don't like reality. The shared biological instinct to prefer carefully exaggerated images links us inexorably with our ancient ancestors, and yet what we choose to exaggerate is where scientific discipline gets left behind. That's where the magic comes in.
—Nigel Spivey's closing narration
Episode two: The Day Pictures Were Born [edit]
The second episode asks how the very first pictures ever made were created and reveals how images may accept triggered the greatest alter in human history.[four] [10]
I could draw nearly anything in the globe and you'd probably judge what it was, But in that location must have been some bespeak in our human story when we outset got this ability, some moment in fourth dimension when nosotros began to create pictures and to empathise what they meant. So what happened back then? How did we first get this ability to create images? To discover the answer, we demand to become way back in time.
—Nigel Spivey's opening narration
Dr. Spivey begins his investigation past travelling to the Cavern of Altamira almost the boondocks of Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, Spain, where in 1879 a young girl's assertion of Papa. Look, oxen. to her male parent, local amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, is explained to have meant that Maria had just become the showtime modernistic human being to set eyes on the kickoff gallery of prehistoric paintings e'er to be discovered. The notice 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 hither and at other sites such equally the Pech Merle in France, too visited by Spivey, did not lucifer the bones discovered and abstruse patterns revealed the artists weren't merely copying from real life.
Spivey next travels to the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa, where stone painting made 200 years agone past the San people and similarly dismissed as hunting scenes, are revealed by anthropologist David Lewis-Williams to comprise many of the aforementioned unusual features. 19th century interviews with the San by German language linguist Wilhelm Bleek reveal the importance of trance within their civilisation, an ascertainment confirmed by Spivey afterward watching a shamanistic ritual performed by their nowadays-day descendants in a village near Tsumkwe, Namibia far from the mountains. Lewis-Williams theorises that, the paintings were not only pictures of everyday life, simply they were virtually spiritual experiences in a trance state.
Media information [edit]
DVD release [edit]
Released on Region two DVD past BBC DVD on 30 May 2005.[11]
Companion book [edit]
The 2005 companion volume to the series was written by presenter Nigel Spivey.[12]
Selected editions [edit]
- Spivey, Nigel (28 Apr 2005). How Art Made the Earth: A Journey to the Origins of Art. BBC Books (hardcover). ISBN978-0563522058.
- Spivey, Nigel (viii 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 Journey to the Origins of Art. Bones Books (paperback). ISBN978-0465081820.
References [edit]
- ^ "How Art Made the World". BBC Science & Nature. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "How Fine art Fabricated The World – part of a rich summer of arts on BBC Television". BBC Press Function. 31 March 2005. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "How Art Made the Globe: Virtually the Series". PBS. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ a b "How Fine art Made the Earth: Programmes". BBC Science & Nature. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "How Fine art Fabricated 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 Examination". PBS. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "Egypt: Obsessive Guild". PBS. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "Ancient Hellenic republic: Naked Perfection". PBS. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "How Art Made the World: The Day Pictures Were Built-in". PBS. Retrieved 16 June 2012.
- ^ "How Art Made the World". BBC Shop. Retrieved 16 June 2012.
- ^ "How Art Made the Globe: A Journey to the Origins of Art". BBC Shop. Retrieved 16 June 2012.
External links [edit]
- How Art Made the Globe at BBC Online
- How Art Fabricated the World at IMDb
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