Pueblo Abroad: Journal Entry #4

Part 4: The Oldest Piece of Art

While in Tübingen, Germany visiting Kayla, I had an opportunity to wander up to the town’s castle (every town in Germany has a resident castle, it seems) and see the outside of the archaeological museum up there, which houses the oldest piece of recovered human art, dated at 32,000 years old. I didn’t see the artifact itself, but saw a much larger rendition set up outside the museum entrance. The piece—a horse missing its legs—isn’t striking so much for its aesthetics or its design as the giant leap in thought it must have taken in order to make it in the first place.

Imagine: a world in which food and shelter are not entirely dependable and craftsmanship like metallurgy would probably have best been served to forging hunting weapons and other tools. But rather than spend time creating those precious commodities, a craftsperson sat down and created an essentially ‘useless’ object.

A larger representation of the earliest recovered piece of artwork; photo by Taylor Coe

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to read up on this artifact, but I like to imagine that the object itself was not of spiritual or religious importance. If made for the purpose of worship or ritual, then the object is shaded with something other than the title of ‘art.’ That’s not to say that ‘religious art’ is not properly art; I mean to object to the notion that the first piece of art was intrinsically tied to religious purpose. I like to think about the practice of ‘art’ as something engaged in by an individual for that individual. Unlike, making a tool, for instance, which an individual does for the broader community.

But it’s not simply the object that the individual is after; it’s something in the experience of the craft. For this particular craftsperson, I tried to imagine that feeling—that transitory sense of moving past the practical into the impractical, from necessity into art (which I, of course, would argue is also a necessity—though a necessity of a different order).

I tried to imagine their thoughts: “Today I will begin a fruitless and painstaking crafting process. I will make something that is not a tool. It is not useful. It barely begins to serve as a representation of a real horse. Its function is to satisfy something that we have not even named yet: a desire beyond the body, beyond the scope of the everyday world, beyond mere existence.”