Book: Figuring It Out
Author: Colin Renfrew
Price: Thames & Hudson, ?32
Many scientists like to show that they appreciate art; some may even think of themselves as artists. But they rarely admit that a work of art could have anything to teach them about their field of study. Colin Renfrew is different. In his book "Figuring it Out", he claims that looking at contemporary art is similar to looking at a newly dug-up artefact, and that the processes that lie behind the creation and interpretation of contemporary art can illuminate the interpretation of ancient artefacts and our understanding of the human mind. Visitors at a modern art gallery, he says, face the same challenge as archaeologists-what does it mean? In what context could it make sense? What was the person who made this thinking?
The book offers an engaging tour of ideas and images from the Renfrew oeuvre, ranging from his early work on prehistoric Greek Cycladic figures to his current concern with looting from archaeological sites. Along the way, he admires work from many prominent artists, including Antony Gormley, Richard Long and William Turnbull, whose works were exhibited by Jesus College, Cambridge, while Renfrew was Master.
In the process of exploring art as archaeology, he creates a compelling defence of modern art practice. Instead of criticising its alienation from craft skills, from wide audiences, or its deliberate obscurity, he revels in these qualities. To Renfrew they offer new insights and information on the potential meanings of material objects-insights and information useful to the archaeologist, and not readily available in other ways. The very inaccessibility that can leave so many viewers cold is, for him, a challenge. The book is inspiring in this way. One can imagine new, Renfrew-esque guides to exhibitions: "Consider yourself an archaeologist, crawling into a tomb unopened for thousands of years, and discovering a shark in a tank of formaldehyde-what would you make of it?" Once you remove the expectation of comprehension, obscurity is not a curse.
Renfrew has long been interested in processes of cultural change, in our journey from "hunter-gatherer to urban dweller." He argues that the shift at the time of the "human revolution" 10,000 years ago wasn't a shift in hardware-a genetic mutation that led to enhanced language and symbolic skills-but a shift in "software," or what he calls, "how we learn to do things." And material culture, he insists, played an important part in this shift. Without artefacts and material goods, "many forms of thought simply could not have developed," including concepts of value, exchange, and many religions. While many scholars have emphasised the importance of literacy on cognitive development, Renfrew argues for the significance of symbolic material culture.
In "Figuring It Out", he returns to this argument. The work of contemporary artists such as Christo, Cornelia Parker and Tracey Emin is similar to the work of archaeologists because it doesn't take the status of an object for granted. And objects, along with the relationships and ideas that they can create, form an important part of human experience and ancient human cognitive development. Art and archaeology, he insists, are considering the same questions.
This is a stimulating juxtaposition, but at times perilously over-romanticised. He talks about "being alert with mind and senses," speaks of objects with "a sense of presence," and creates a category that he calls "involuntary art" for products of human activity that were not intended as art, but that "have a visual and emotional impact that almost sends a shiver up your spine." Yet one person's shiver may be another's shudder of boredom, and aesthetic sensitivity is socially constructed. Context is crucial.
There is an odd disparity between the very social life of things, which Renfrew attributes to prehistory, and the very individual and often asocial lives of contemporary artists and artworks. Renfrew discusses how prehistoric artefacts and monuments may have contributed to the preservation of collective memory, the creation and maintenance of a sense of community and social order. Yet most contemporary artists are unconcerned with the accessibility of their work, and uncertain of its social significance.
When Renfrew compares a gallery-goer with an archaeologist encountering an assemblage of artefacts, he seems to suppose a moment of phenomenological purity, the simple, unmediated experience of a form. But this presumes a quiet, textless gallery, without placards, catalogues, or commentary. Most art exhibitions bristle with information and interpretation, and are quiet only because everyone is listening to commentary over headsets. Our experience of contemporary art is multiply mediated-by text, by our prior knowledge of the artist and his or her previous work, and also by our own visual archives, made up of the many, many things that we have seen in the past. The very openness of the category "art," and the lack of widespread agreement about what it is and what is should look like, leaves most viewers dependent on mediators-the curators, critics, and art historians.
In fact, archaeologists are less like artists and more like curators, gathering together various bits of material culture, and then making an argument about how and why their chosen assemblage is meaningful. Like curators, they can be accused of arbitrarily assigning meanings to objects; unlike artists, they cannot create a new artefact to make their point.
