Julian Cope presents Head Heritage | The Modern Antiquarian Forum

jacksprat

284 posts

Why would they look?

Mar 07, 2006, 13:03

I agree with Hob in that we're pre-programmed to recognise facial patterns. It's something that Salvador Dali picked up upon and what makes some of his art so effective - the hint of a face in many of his paintings.

What I'm not sure about is how far back in time this 'hardwiring' occurred. I think the main reason we see things comes from modern faith, If you look hard enough for something, you'll invariably see it. Jesus in a potato, the virgin Mary on a stale slice of bread. Littlestone's point about our infactuation of our image is a valid one - we are much more aware of faces in the modern image - probably since we started recording portraits (I don't know when, I'm no art historian)!

I met Jane and Moth on Sunday and we visited the Hawk Stone at Dean. We had this conversation and if we looked hard enough we could all see numerous faces in the rock pattern. I'm not sure if our prehistoric cousins would have had that inclination to look hard enough though.

Having said that, even if our ancestors could recognise facial patterns in random objects around them, I don't know if they would have painted them. My view is that early rock art is the recording of events that would have been important to them at the time. Hunting, etcetera.

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Re: Hardwired (PeterH)

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