The term prehistory has a double meaning. On the one hand it refers to a period before the existence of written histories, chronicles or other records. But it also implies, more profoundly, a period in which human culture is not yet characterised by the kind of change and development we see in what we consider historical periods, or in which such change happens with glacier-like and virtually imperceptible slowness.
In hunter-gatherer cultures, for practical purposes, nothing changes. Each generation repeats the actions, the rituals, the habits of its predecessors for thousands of years without significant alteration. Such stability is necessary when most of life is spent in finding enough to eat, and the overwhelming preoccupations are with the survival of the tribal community. Everything depends on the fertility of the earth and of women, and both boys and girls are raised to play rigidly defined roles in ensuring survival.
If anything unexpected does happen, apart from skirmishes with other tribes, it is because of weather events or disease, although communities were too small for modern epidemic diseases to take hold. But since there was no understanding of why any of these things happened, they only served to reinforce the belief in magic and in the power of nature spirits, ghosts and malevolent forces that needed to be placated by ceremonies.
Homo sapiens are believed to have existed for something like 200,000 years. These ancestors of ours, in other words, had more or less exactly the same kind of brain and therefore potential intellectual ability that we have today, and yet for countless generations they lived and died without ever having what we would recognise as a thought in their heads – that is, a self-critical, reflexive or questioning moment of awareness.
Hegel, who believed history was governed by the dialectical sequence of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, thought the motor of such a sequence was the mind’s capacity for negation. It is when we say no to what is that we initiate a contest that eventually leads to resolution as synthesis; and that synthesis can subsequently become the thesis in a second sequence.
Tribal societies, of necessity, live in a cultural world without antithesis: the young are instructed by the elders in the myths and rituals and customs of the community, which must be adhered to without question in order to ensure survival, even if to our eyes many of them may appear to be nonsense, oppressive or even evil. And if it is literally unthinkable to question the rules, there is, strictly speaking, no thinking at all.
This is how we all lived until, in the great sweep of time, very recently indeed. It was only after the conclusion of the last Ice Age around 12,000 years ago that humans began, in a few happy environments, to domesticate cereal crops. Even this took a few thousand years to perfect, but once the initial steps had been taken, everything was possible. The dramatic change in the relation of humanity to nature is symbolically expressed in the myths of the end of the golden age, and the first ploughing of the earth by Cadmus.
Mastery of the food supply meant larger communities, the division of labour since a fraction of the population could provide food for the whole community, and the explosion of crafts and technology, from building to ceramics and metallurgy. In this environment of expansion and innovation, cleverness, curiosity and originality as well as personal energy and initiative are increasingly valued. We can see the conclusion of such an evolution in Homer’s characterisation of great figures like Achilles and Odysseus, each of whom represents different aspects of the spirit of antithesis, from personal ambition to the desire for knowledge. These new communities built cities, which have given us the word by which they are known; civilisations. Today, when we study the remains of past civilisations, it is the ruins of their cities that we explore, with their roads and marketplaces, temples, palaces and public baths.
On the frontiers of empire, cities were built to anchor but also to represent the new way of life, as Alexander founded cities in Afghanistan, or the Romans built Timgad in Algeria, with its roads and fountains and baths, as a kind of soft diplomacy to advertise the superiority of the civilised way of life to the desert Touareg.
For many more centuries, however, until as recently as the Industrial Revolution, the majority of the population lived in rural areas and only a minority in cities. This contributed effectively to a two-speed development of culture that is attested from antiquity to the 18th century: historical and cultural evolution largely took place in the dynamic urban environment, where institutions like law courts, universities, city councils, guilds, cathedral chapters and even markets fostered a life of debate and argument; a culture of dialectic in which the strong, the bold and the brilliant prospered.
In the country, especially among the peasantry, who unlike the nobility and clergy had little contact with the city, life continued to follow the same cycle of seasonal work, almost entirely undisturbed by the intellectual and cultural life of the cities. Blackadder’s observation, “for you, Baldrick, the Renaissance is essentially something that happened to other people”, more or less sums up the situation of a peasantry whose lives had barely changed from the later Middle Ages to the Baroque period.
From the Industrial Revolution onwards, however, people began to leave the country for the cities in search of new opportunities, and that movement has only accelerated in the past couple of generations, aggravated by the catastrophic explosion in world population over the past century.
In the long run, urbanisation and a higher level of education should lead to a reduction in the birth rate, but for the time being, and for the foreseeable future, the result has been the creation of monstrous megacities with ever more cramped and inhumane living conditions. In producing these megacities, we have not brought all these people into a vibrant urban world, we have rather turned the city, or most of it, into a mechanical environment, like a human production line, in which the masses have if anything less autonomy than they had in their earlier lives as peasants. Since the 18th century, the anonymity of the city has been associated in literature both with freedom and with loneliness, but the modern city combines loneliness with constraint.
The world of the modern city is the subject of this remarkable exhibition, accompanied by a catalogue that includes even more pictures than in the show itself. The works are by a large number of contemporary photographers, but all are concerned either with the physical form or the psychological experience of the modern city, or with both.
A number of pictures evoke the crowding of residential tower blocks, where workers live in homes so small, so featureless and so identical that it must be hard to maintain any sense of being a unique individual, and where at the same time boxed-in isolation is incompatible with the life of a community.
Social media narcissism is a natural outgrowth of this world, for it is a technology designed for the lonely and the disconnected. The book, but not the exhibition, includes a series of pathetic images of teenage girls taking selfies in their underwear.
All these people require not only housing but means of transport to and from work, and there are many pictures of roads and expressways and overpasses, as well as airports. There is one series in which the artist has visited Hilton hotels all over the world and photographed both the room in which he has stayed and the view from the window. The sameness of the hotel environment, with its token attempts at local colour, contrasts predictably with the environments visible outside.
Factories, offices and other workplaces are evoked, not all poor by any means, but impersonal because of their very scale or because their design reflects policies, rules and corporate branding rather than human preference and individual taste or even idiosyncrasy. Many environments are photographed from aircraft or drones revealing the shocking extent of the sterile and alienating environments in which more and more people are forced to live.
Most sobering, though, are a number of images that reveal the reality of consumption on a mass scale. There are shops and markets, malls in the Middle East and even one of a street in Tokyo lined with hundreds of establishments selling various erotic services. But the most unforgettable is of a factory the size of an aircraft hangar, in China of course, in which thousands of masked workers in plastic gowns, caps and gloves are packaging chicken carcasses in plastic trays for supermarket shelves.
What do mass populations do when they are not living in soulless towers, travelling to work, eating battery-hen chicken and filling the ocean with plastic waste? Sometimes they are moved by mass forms of religious belief, as we see in Christian, Islamic and Hindu versions, sometimes they drill and march in armies, and sometimes the social fabric breaks down and they riot or are seized with an instinctive urge to migrate to other lands.
There are images that remind us of the extraordinary scientific achievements of modern civilisation too, shots of scientific establishments, laboratories, astronomical facilities, a massive telescope dish — testimony either to the power of capital or the will of centralised governments. But they are all characterised by a scale that dwarfs men and women and leaves our intimate human experience implicitly devalued, if not disqualified.
When art makes an appearance, it too has been assimilated into the maelstrom of money, spectacle and overbearing scale. There is a memorable picture by Andy Freeberg from Art Basel in Miami — one of those contemporary art fairs that are much more about money than art. Two men are seen at a table, presumably their stand, beneath a massive work of photographic realism. The work is by Kehinde Wiley, who boasts on his website that he is “a contemporary descendant of … Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres among others”. This is as plausible a claim as a mafioso boss presenting himself as the heir to St Francis of Assisi. Wiley is an entrepreneur with studios and teams of assistants making a slick product; and yet if you Google his name you will find no shortage of sycophants who promote him as a genius.
The man sitting with his head in his hands as though exhausted is Sean Kelly, one of the biggest dealers in the contemporary market. Perhaps he is worn out from a long day of spruiking mendacious art; but lying is not the same thing as Hegelian negation. This kind of art is not the antithesis to a world of alienation; it is an expression of compliance and collaboration.
Diverse portrait of key moments in time
This latest exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, named for Cezanne and Giacometti, highlights the unbreakable bond between art and history.
How to fail spectacularly at unboxing
It was four boxes, not one; the ASMR was dire; and completion took more than four hours: a shambolic unboxing.
Civilisation: The Way We Live Now
National Gallery of Victoria, until February 2