Cresswel Crags

I think the long tradition of art making back to pre- history is a good thing to sit in.  Creswell Crags near Worksop is the home of the oldest Cave art in Britain - I think around 12,000 years.  I don't know much about Cave art but I have read a few things which seem to be the same as todays discussions around the art and instrumentalism.  Was Ugg just enjoying himself scribbling an image of a reindeer on his cave wall? Or was it part of a map to mark the migration routes? Or some kind of religious simulcra to summon more of the beasties to eat.  I think it was a way to pass the time even cave men got bored and wanted to do something different.

So in my history of Art "Mark" with his black pen and "Ugg" with his flint tool were both doing the same thing- inscribing themselves and their views on the world.

I wonder if I could now introduce my new theory of art history which is I am sure not new but probably a good thing to talk about in terms of some of our recent field trips. Which include a Francois Matarasso talk at Lincoln University  about "Art in the time of Austerity."  "Dangerous ground:framing cultural value." At Castlefield Gallery.  And Mondays up coming "Artist alternatives to Universities seminar " At Chesterfield College.

I was thinking that instead of seeing art history as a series of historical progressions we should see it as a series of collapses.  As our great friend David Gilbert would say we have now entered a world of Post-historical art and as such art is unable to collapse in on itself - so post modernist relevatism has taken the sting out of it's tail.

Unlike science the arts are not looking for a "complete theory of everything" we are perhaps more inclined to look for an incomplete theory of nothing.  So my idea of art for today is the same as Ugg and Mark and the importance of the doodle and the ability to rub things out.