Spivey How Art Made the World More Human Than Human Episode
| How Art Fabricated the Globe | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Documentary |
| Presented by | Nigel Spivey |
| State of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language | English |
| No. of series | ane |
| No. of episodes | 5 |
| Production | |
| Executive producer | Kim Thomas |
| Producer | Mark Hedgecoe |
| Running time | lx minutes |
| Distributor | BBC |
| Release | |
| Original network | BBC One |
| Original release | 26 June (2005-06-26) – 24 July 2005 (2005-07-24) |
How Fine art Fabricated the World is a 2005 5-part BBC One documentary series, with each episode looking at the influence of art on the current solar day situation of our social club.[one] [2]
"The essential premise of the show," co-ordinate to Nigel Spivey, "is that of all the defining characteristics of humanity as a species, none is more basic than the inclination to make art. Great apes volition smear paint on sail if they are given brushes and shown how, but they do not instinctively produce art any more than parrots produce chat. Nosotros humans are alone in developing the chapters for symbolic imagery."[iii]
Episodes [edit]
Images dominate our lives. They tell us how to conduct, even how to feel. They mould and ascertain us. Simply why do these images, the pictures, symbols and the fine art we see around us every 24-hour interval, have such a powerful hold on us? The answer lies not here in our time but thousands of years agone. Because when our ancient ancestors first created the images that fabricated sense of their world, they produced a visual legacy which has helped to shape our own.
In this series nosotros'll be travelling effectually the globe, discovering the world's most stunning treasures. We'll encounter how the struggles of early artists led to the triumphs of the world'south peachy civilisations. Our journey will take us through a hundred one thousand years of history. Nosotros'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 fine art, We'll be hearing from the people who made these discoveries. And we'll exist using scientific discipline to uncover how thousands of years ago the human heed collection us to create astonishing images, Yous'll never wait at our world the same way once again, for this is the epic story of how we humans fabricated art and how art fabricated us human.
—Nigel Spivey'due south opening narration
Episode one: More Human being Than Man... [edit]
The first episode asks why humans surround themselves with images of the body that are and so unrealistic.[four] [five]
The fact is people rarely create images of the torso that are realistic. What's going on? Why is our globe so dominated by images of the body that are so unrealistic?
—Nigel Spivey'southward opening narration
Dr. Spive begins his investigation by travelling to Willendorf, where in 1908 three Austrian archaeologists discovered the Venus of Willendorf, an 11 cm (4.3 in) high statuette of a female figure, estimated to accept been made between 24,000 and 22,000 BCE. Spivey travels to the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna to examine the Venus's grotesquely exaggerated breasts and abdomen, as well as its lack of artillery and face, which shows the desire to exaggerate dates dorsum to the very get-go images of the human body 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 accept been highly desirable, and several similar statuettes collectively referred to as Venus figurines testify that this exaggerated body image continued for millennia.[vi]
Neuroscientist Vilayanur Southward. 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 yellow stick with a single red line made to represent their mother's beak, they tap on information technology as they are programmed to do to demand food. Yet, when they are presented with a stick with iii red lines they tap on it with increased enthusiasm fifty-fifty in comparing to the original beak. Ramachandran concludes, "I think there's an analogy 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 encephalon of what the stick with the iii red stripes is for the chick's brain."[7]
Spivey next travels to Egypt to detect if the gross exaggerations of hard-wired herring dupe instincts of the nomadic artisans survived into the era of civilisation. The Egyptian images of the human trunk, which he discovers at the Tomb of Pharaoh Rameses 6 and the Karnak Temple Complex, were regular and repeated, and nix virtually 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 chiliad years. The Egyptians created images of the torso this way, Spivy concludes, not because of how their brains were hard-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. As revealed in an antiquarian re-create of Herodotus in St John'due south Higher 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 as well realistic, that makes it boring, and the style was soon abased. Spivey states that, the Greeks discovered they had to do interesting things with the man form, such as distorting information technology in lawful ways, and examines the pioneering piece of 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 showtime civilisation capable of realism had used exaggeration to go further, and it'south that instinct which still dominates our earth today. [9]
This is the answer to our mystery. This is why the bodies in our modern globe wait the way they practise. The reality is we humans don't like reality. The shared biological instinct to prefer carefully exaggerated images links united states inexorably with our ancient ancestors, and withal what we choose to exaggerate is where science gets left behind. That's where the magic comes in.
—Nigel Spivey'southward closing narration
Episode 2: The Day Pictures Were Born [edit]
The second episode asks how the very first pictures ever made were created and reveals how images may have triggered the greatest alter in human history.[4] [10]
I could depict well-nigh annihilation in the world and you'd probably guess what it was, But at that place must have been some point in our man story when we first got this ability, some moment in time when nosotros began to create pictures and to understand what they meant. And so what happened back so? How did we first go this power to create images? To find the answer, we need to go way back in time.
—Nigel Spivey's opening narration
Dr. Spivey begins his investigation by travelling to the Cave of Altamira almost 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 apprentice archeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, is explained to have meant that Maria had just become the beginning mod human being to prepare optics on the offset gallery of prehistoric paintings ever to be discovered. The find revealed that, About 35,000 years ago, we began to create pictures and to understand what they meant. French priest Henri Breuil believed that, prehistoric artists painted animals to increase their chances of a successful chase, but the animals painted here and at other sites such as the Pech Merle in French republic, also visited by Spivey, did not match the bones discovered and abstract patterns revealed the artists weren't simply copying from real life.
Spivey next travels to the Drakensberg Mountains of 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 contain many of the same unusual features. 19th century interviews with the San by German linguist Wilhelm Bleek reveal the importance of trance inside their culture, an observation confirmed by Spivey after watching a shamanistic ritual performed by their present-solar day descendants in a village most Tsumkwe, Namibia far from the mountains. Lewis-Williams theorises that, the paintings were not just pictures of everyday life, just they were about spiritual experiences in a trance state.
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 Fabricated the Globe: A Journeying to the Origins of Fine art. BBC Books (hardcover). ISBN978-0563522058.
- Spivey, Nigel (8 November 2005). How Fine art Made the World: A Journey to the Origins of Art. Basic Books (hardcover). ISBN978-0465081813.
- Spivey, Nigel (7 November 2006). How Fine art Fabricated the World: A Journey to the Origins of Art. Basic Books (paperback). ISBN978-0465081820.
References [edit]
- ^ "How Art Made the World". BBC Science & Nature. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "How Art Made The World – role of a rich summer of arts on BBC Television receiver". BBC Press Function. 31 March 2005. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "How Art Made the World: About the Series". PBS. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ a b "How Art Made the World: Programmes". BBC Science & Nature. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "How Art Made the Earth: More Man Than Human". PBS. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "The Venus of Willendorf: Exaggerated Beauty". PBS. Retrieved 12 June 2012.
- ^ "5.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 Fabricated the World: The Twenty-four hour period Pictures Were Born". PBS. Retrieved sixteen June 2012.
- ^ "How Fine art Made the World". BBC Shop. Retrieved 16 June 2012.
- ^ "How Art Fabricated the World: A Journey to the Origins of Art". BBC Store. Retrieved sixteen June 2012.
External links [edit]
- How 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
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