LookingBackwards

(I know some academics have mixed feelings about wikipedia… but I really do think this a good article)

Stencilled on the walls of a cave in Argentina are human hands. Still visible today, the artwork, created in splattered reds, whites, and blacks, was completed between in the 8000 year span between 7800bc and 700ad; at its newest well over a thousand years old.

The wall of hands in Cueva de los Manos is personally fascinating and academically relevant because of the way in which the artists accurately captured themselves. The prehistoric paintings which I’ve seen, including those in the cave, don’t seem particularly interested in trying to capture the face or a form which distinguishes an individual. If we think about the time and skill it takes to acquire this skill (as well as the difficulty of painting on rough rock) it makes sense. But one might argue even skilled paintings and carvings in the past interject an artist’s hand, and place some emotional distance between us and the long dead subject.

I think these hands fascinate me because long before the advent of photography, these artists were capturing the human body in a way which mimics the objectivity I feel looking the the human face in a photograph. Indeed, to me they create an even closer feeling, offering up the hands of those long gone to compare my own same shaped hand to… stripped of the cultural trappings of difference in language, clothing, or time.