The Entrapment of Art: Rock-Art, Order, Subversion, Creativity, Meaning, and the Appeal of Illusive Imagery

Abstract

Bringing together apparently opposing modern and post-modern approaches to interpretation is one of the challenges that lie ahead for rock-art studies. This endeavour may help to surmount ‘no interpretation is possible’ stances (see Bednarik, 2014) and to value rock-art as a diverse and complex phenomenon where precise significance is concealed within multiple meaning-carrying conveyors. The idea that different rock-art traditions (as with any other art form) made use of a given set of symbols (also) aiming to enforce an ‘imagined’ order is instrumental to the present paper. Ancient imagery, despite precise production contexts, materializes the need to resort to visual symbols in order to help maintain social concord, regardless of exact meaning. However, this is a dynamic process; whenever there is an effort to uphold a certain set of moral and social complying principles, there are also nonconformist and subversive attempts to challenge and mutate that same collection of rules.

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“…Icarusan emotional trajectory showing a rise followed by a fall. Cinderellaan emotional trajectory showing a rise-fall-rise pattern Oedipusan emotional trajectory showing a fallrise-fall pattern Recently, the importance of emotional arcs has also been emphasized not only for storytelling (Fernandes, 2018;Ferraz de Arruda, Nascimento Silva, Queiroz Marinho, Amancio, & da Fontoura Costa, 2018;Green, Grorud-Colvert, Mannix, & Shanahan, 2018;Grubert & Algee-Hewitt, 2017) but also for the audio-visual content design (Chu & Roy, 2017). As award-winning scriptwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce once put it while talking about a recipe for a perfect motion picture story: "All the manuals insist on a three-act structure.…”

Honing Tools of the Mind: A Dynamic Framework for the Study of Symbolic Behavior in Early Human Evolution

“…As these illustrate, as more zoomorphic motifs are added, the visual field becomes dense and more complex and as such more visually salient as a whole but possibly at the expense of motif discriminability and memorability. As previous research has highlighted (Fernandes, 2018), ambiguity is probably an emergent design feature of these panels and they promote multiperspectivism and pareidolia. This may suggest that the cognitive role of this figurative art changed over time and that human practices evolved to support specific affordances and not others.…”

Emmanuel Guy. Ce que l'art préhistorique dit de nos origines (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 2017, 340pp., 23 colour illustr., pbk, ISBN 978-2-0814-1245-3)

“…Both have been instrumental in the development of the species. Thus, rock-art production might ‘be best understood if seen as having played a relevant part in continuous networked processes of political conciliation, authority sharing and/or transference’ (Fernandes, 2018: 295).…”

“…Guy presents an engaging and well-defended case, particularly when arguing for practices of food conservation, the resulting resource storage, and semi-sedentarization, or when emphasizing rock-art's political dimension. This reviewer—working from the particular case of Gravettian-Solutrean rock-art in the Côa Valley, Portugal and its affinities with Western Europe's Ice Age art from the same period—has proposed a similar argument, based on style, thematic recurrence, and superposition, to suggest strong ties between art and political compromise-making (Fernandes, 2018). These same attributes—figures obeying stereotyped canons scattered in clusters ranging across vast areas of Europe and reaching eastern North Africa in Qurta, Egypt (Ch.…”