Sculpture By Neanderthals? This Stunning Exhibit Will Make You Rethink Everything You Know About Art

FEB 28, 2018 @ 07:01 AM






Jonathon Keats , CONTRIBUTOR
Critic-at-Large
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

One day approximately 500,000 years ago, a group of hominids abandoned an encampment at Boxgrove in West Sussex, England. They'd occupied the site for a brief span of several decades, during which time they knapped flint handaxes and butchered animals in abundance. Excavated since the early 1980s, the stone tools are now kept by the British Museum. Recently some scientists and artists had the bold idea of trying to identify who made them.

Their goal wasn't to determine the species, which was already well studied, but to see whether they could ascribe authorship of specific handaxes to individual makers by grouping tools stylistically. That wasn't going to be easy, since all of the handaxes were formally similar, designed to serve the same basic purpose. Nevertheless the archaeo-connoisseurs frequently agreed that two or three implements were knapped by the same hand, the earliest attribution ever attempted for artifacts of any kind.

Several of the Boxgrove groupings are now on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center as part of an exhibition that presents handaxes as the first art form, more than a million years in the making, created by species as diverse as Homo erectus, Neanderthals and prehistoric humans. Like the Boxgrove attribution, the premise of the exhibition is provocative in the extreme. Given how little is known about the makers – let alone their psychological proclivities and motivations – it's a far stretch to connect their work with modern human concepts such as authorship and aesthetics.

And that is why First Sculpture is likely to be one of the most important shows of 2018, a landmark exhibition that will be discussed and debated for decades. Taking a premise that might have resonated with Victorian aesthetes, curators Thomas Wynn and Tony Berlant have turned it into a visual investigation of the origins of beauty, the meaning of art and the nature of Homo sapiens.

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