Art and Shamanism: From cave painting to the White Cube
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-04-27

Art and shamanism are often represented as timeless, universal features of human experience, with an apparently immutable relationship. Shamanism is frequently held to represent the origin of religion and shamans are characterized as the first artists, leaving their infamous mark in the cave art of Upper Palaeolithic Europe. Despite a disconnect of several millennia, modern artists too, from Wassily Kandinsky and Vincent van Gogh, to Joseph Beuys and Marcus Coates, have been labelled as inspired visionaries who access the trance-like states of shamans, and these artists of the 'white cube' or gallery setting are cited as the inheritors of an enduring tradition of shamanic art. Recent scholarship on rock art contributes to this discourse in rational-materialist ‘neurotheological’ terms, locating image production and visionary experience as universal brain events. But the history of thinking on art and shamanism shows these concepts are not unchanging, timeless universals; they are constructed, historically situated, and contentious. I examine how art and shamanism have been conceived and their relationship entangled from the Renaissance to the present, focussing on the interpretation of Upper Palaeolithic cave art in the first half of the twentieth century – a key moment in this trajectory – to illustrate my case. 

Robert J. Wallis (Richmond University, The American International University in London)