How Art Made the World - Episode 1: More Human Than Human

How Art Made the World - Episode 1: More Human Than Human

  Is a BBC One documentary series, which combines art history, science, archeology, human evolution and anthropology. The episode looks at the influence of art on the current day situation of our society. It questions‪ why humans surround themselves with images of the body that are so unrealistic. The episode also shows human need for and ability to create a representation of oneself. It explains why humans create certain kinds of images and why certain kinds of representations seem to produce heightened pleasure amongst them.

  The episode begins with how the nomads, hunters and gatherers of north east Austria created a figure of an unrealistic woman. She is a 25,000 year old statue and is known as Venus of Willendorf. Her breast, stomach, thighs and sexual organs are exaggerated and prominent. This symbolized fertility and motherhood during that period probably because these features were desirable and ideal for women in this period and it symbolized warmth, light and love. The other parts of the body like the head and arms were given no importance. Dr. S. Ramachandran did an experiment with sea gulls to show what was going on in the brain of our ancestors when they created Venus with exaggerated body parts.

  In Egypt images of the human body weren’t exaggerated but regular, symmetrical and repeated. They valued consistency and order in their society, abandoned the exaggerations of their ancestors and chose to use a mathematical approach to creating images of the body. Each part of the body is depicted from its best angle clearly, consistently and in order. The paintings were rigid and the figures were all in profile. All the images of this period had precise proportions and compositions and were schematic. These type of images carried on for around 3000 years. It may have symbolized how they looked for order, as they were a very orderly civilization.

  The Greeks learnt from the Egyptians and then modified the human body into its realistic form. They made nude sculptures of the human body. Greek sculpture went through a brief period where it created realistic images of young men (kritian boy), standing statically upright, and accurately proportionate. After a while this got boring for them and they abandoned this style and took up very athletic forms of the body what we now think of as “classical” Greek bodies were born. What is so fascinating about the statues is that they aren’t proportioned naturally; rather, they are exaggerated They believed that Gods and Goddesses took the human form thus they exaggerated it. This is why even people in todays world exaggerate it as humans are never satisfied with reality and always strive to be more than they already are. Thus justifying the title and trying to make themselves more human than human!