Eiszeitwesen. The Materials of Art Over the Past 40 000 Years.

40 000 Years of Art

The production of artificial objects has been known for hundreds of thousands of years and, especially in the Swabian Jura, we value the finely crafted mammoth ivory artefacts that are known all around the world as unique. Among these are the oldest figurine of a human, the so-called Venus of the Hohle Fels, several animal figurines like the Little Mammoth, the Waterbird, and the Wild Horse, the Adorant, as well as the Lion Man. Besides these magnificent objects, flutes made of bird bones and mammoth ivory as well as jewellery of the same material are also included on the list of Ice Age art.

Every single item is beautifully crafted and displays the high amount of skill and ambition of cultural improvement of the Homo sapiens 40 000 years ago. They also show their curiosity about new materials as well as their relation to nature to some amount. However, nobody knows the actual mindset of modern humans back then. So, nobody can tell the reasons behind the production of the flutes, the animal figurines, or the woman statuette, whereas it could be rituals, a connection to some animism, fertility, medical use, a calendar, character strengthening and so forth.

Even younger art like the French and Spanish cave paintings, the dotted stones of the Swabian Jura, or engraved bones do not show the actual purpose that was behind their production. All of this is left either to our present-day imagination or to the motivation for processing that scientists find in cultures from not so long ago.

Modern Perspectives on Ice Age Art  

There are a lot of artists in modern times who use Ice Age art as a source of inspiration: whether it is due to the materials of the past or the objects themselves, it leads to a wide range of different results with an even wider range of materials and forms. But the ideas behind these modern objects did not just come by looking at these two things, materials and the Ice Age art, they are also the result of the artists` imagination, beliefs, academic interests and scientific theories, artistic possibilities, philosophical and socio-critical understandings of the past as well as the present. So, among this present-day art, there is a lot about the biographical-psychological approach, where art and its production process are explained by the time, the basic social, political, cultural, and aesthetic conditions and influences in which an artist lives.

These influences and conditions are for some part even more visible when the art is placed in the context of the Ice Age like the Little Horse by Otto Baum which is placed next to the former Horse’s Head and a replica of the Wild Horse made by the first modern humans here on the Swabian Jura 40 000 years ago, or the painting Xaver by Willi Baumeister. The former is about pointing out the similarities in the design language, which some may call simplistic, but in the end, just shows that one can say a lot with simple means and forms. The latter is an example of the materials used because Baumeister used the same mixture of pigments that were used tens of thousands of years ago - in this case, ochre and charcoal stand out.

The concept of putting Ice Age art in the same showcase as modern art was invented to the Museum of Prehistory in Blaubeuren in 2002 when the Gallery 40thousand Years of Art was annexed especially to the display rooms that are nowadays known as treasure chambers.

And besides showing some of the oldest art of humankind, this is also a reason why the museum was selected as the exhibition place where modern artists present their art in a special exhibition with the title Eiszeitwesen. Modern Perspectives on Ice Age Art.

Originally it started as a seminar at the Institute for Prehistory and Quaternary Archaeology at the University of Tuebingen, where students aimed for the meaning of Ice Age art to nowadays artists. By studying the different aspects of making art influenced by the Ice Age, a curiosity among the students arose to design an exhibition based on this content. Following that, artists were invited for a weekend of inspiration to Blaubeuren: to get inspired by the landscape and the objects in the museum and, eventually, to decide whether they wanted to participate in this exhibition or not.

Ceramic artist Ule Ewelt is intrigued by the relationship between humans and animals of the Ice Age and is inspired by the mammoth ivory figurines. She forms animals like bison, mammoths, and rhinoceros; but also, a pair of bears is part of her oeuvre. These bears are especially interesting because they represent on the one hand the bear as a threat to humans and on the other hand the bear as a source of food and raw material that can be easily killed during hibernation.

Next to her is Abi Shek, who also puts his focus on predators and prey. With simple forms he builds metal statuettes and designs paintings to show the importance of animals not just as a necessity to survive but also as a source for Ice Age people to produce art.  

A third artist is Lisa Moll, who uses music, performance, and painting to explore the motifs that may have been the reason for the initial art production. In a playful, postmodern way, she wants to confront the audience with the origins of human creativity and illustrate how relevant it still is today. One installation that was directly inspired by parts of the Museum of Prehistory contains the objects incubator, supervisum, and abfell. It is a three-piece object that shows the different stations of an animal used as a resource for food and raw material and is placed around the display case Komplettverwertung (the complete utilisation of animals). The artist intends to develop a dialogue between the past and the present while using the way of life of Ice Age people to impact her art.

Jürgen Mack also looks at the past life and the hardships people might have endured. His purpose is for the viewer to think about the harmonious relationship between humans and nature and to remember and keep old practices and skills. This is also a reason why he uses experimental archaeology as a source of inspiration, e. g. in The Spear Thrower. For the presentation, he chose cave paintings as models. With etching and drawing a few lines, he tries to show issues with just the most necessary. In that way, he wants to get rid of any misunderstanding that might arise either within him or the observer when they are confronted with the biological as well as the cultural evolution of humans. Another field of interest is female figurines of which he has produced several different kinds himself.  

Bertram Bartl also gets inspired by female figurines. But especially situated in the museum, Bartl found new inspiration while getting engaged with questions on gender identity. For him, it is clear that

So, by producing three paintings on bisexual Idols, he asks for a possible completeness that can only be reached by putting the genders together, or it could simply be a remark that both genders - male and female - are needed for reproduction. In the museum, he chose to be in the room where The Phallus of the Hohle Fels and the anthropomorphous - sexual ambiguous objects that might show some kind of interplay between the genders - are discussed.

Fabian Vogler brings another material to the museum: bronze. The plump, massive busts that flank the Venus of the Hohle Fels like guardians were also inspired by her and fit perfectly into Vogler's oeuvre of sexual variance. Opposite them stands the Peacock, a 1.60-metre-tall bronze statue resembling a phallus, which, like Bartel's paintings, is one of his idol figures. With those ‘superforms’, he wants to make essential aspects of human existence tangible. He tries to express this, as well as his interest in the damage and fragmentation of Ice Age objects, with a wide variety of surfaces.

Even though Friedrich Palmer himself is an archaeo-technician, when creating art he opposes the archaeologists' endeavours to decipher the past. He aims to depict the world of thoughts and feelings such as fears, jealousy, happiness, and love, which for some people today cannot even be understood by their counterparts - let alone the feelings of people thousands of years ago. With his charcoal drawings, he wants to make the emotional and cultural dimensions of the Ice Age tangible, orientating himself on clear forms of expression and an obvious necessity with which the art of the past was created.

Another art form is film. The duo VestAndPage, who combine performance art, artistic practice, theoretical research and curatorial projects, made a film about the Ice Age caves, exploring the question of what today's society can learn from the testimonies of Ice Age art about gender concepts, life phases and spiritual integration. In the caves of the Swabian Jura, they see themselves in symbiotic areas where embodiment and research, the invisible and the unspoken meet. With their film STRATA, they want to break away from romantically distorted images of nature and naturalness; they see human bodies and societies in continuity with the geological. For their work, they came together with a wide variety of people: archaeologists, philosophers, a vertical dancer, musicians and many more.

The last to take part in this project is tattoo artist Rhoda, who combines prehistoric art with contemporary tattoos. She uses stone carvings and cave paintings, motifs on ceramics and jewellery as models. With needle and colour, she satisfies the urge of those who want to decorate their skin or express themselves through it. An urge that is presumably as old as art itself, and which Ötzi demonstrably possessed due to the number of tattoos he had. Rhoda not only wants to create a permanent memory with each work but also connect those tattooed people with their history.

Materials of Art

Over the millennia, the materials used in art have become more and more extensive - from ivory to ‘artless’ materials. Moreover, it did not always have the same status in society as it did for the artist in question: today's artists use frozen blood, glue seeping into the earth or even rubbish to express their innermost feelings. Whatever the material is, it has a special meaning for them. This contrasts with ivory, jet, and bone, which were used to make figurines, jewellery and decorated tools in the Ice Age. Even though figurines - as far as we can tell - were in some cases made for the first time and solely from these materials, we do not know today how important they were to the Ice Age people. It is only from today's perspective that we can speak of the special nature of some of these raw materials, such as ivory, which became a forbidden material due to the overhunting of elephants precisely because of its special nature.

Whether it is the materials of which we can only guess the meaning such as ivory, materials that were supposed to stand the test of time such as marble and bronze in the Bronze Age and Antiquity, or anything that the world has to offer today up to materials that come close to a fetishism… This is what makes art so fascinating and unfathomable, poignant and aggressive, misleading and absurd.