Representations of the Human Condition, Making Representations is Human Nature

| LESSONS IN LOOKING |

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HUMAN CONDITION

MAKING REPRESENTATIONS IS HUMAN NATURE

By Craig McDaniel

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The Montréal Review, January 2026

1. Home sweet home

Humans love to leave visual records of their existence. Consider the image that launches this essay. [Fig. 1] Created by digital photography, the scene contains a profusion and precision of visual detail. My nephew (John Ellis) and his family (wife Courtney, two sons, two dogs) are hamming things up amidst the detritus of days leading to end-of-the-year holidays. Mythologizing, attention-grabbing, preening, mocking hyper-indulgent consumption . . . describe the picture as you will, here’s a slice of life recognizable as early 21st century middle-class Americana. The place, Fort Collins, Colorado.

What is the key theme of the image, and how is it presented? Could it be Courtney’s posture, head thrown back, right hand raised in a mock gesture of joyful exhaustion? The gesture isn’t totally ‘mock,’ however – the young woman’s effervescence rings true. It’s the combination of artificial consumables with a sincere zest for the zeitgeist and high-octane non-stop activities that define my relatives’ lifestyle.

What else is key? I’ll begin by summarizing: a second key theme of the image is its connection to the long (long) line of visual images created in the history and pre-history of our species.

Art aficionados may recognize that this staged selfie – a family portrait made as a holiday greeting – resembles the British pop culture pioneer Richard Hamilton’s iconic 1956 collage, “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?”. (Readily available to peruse on the internet.) If we rephrase Hamilton’s question a half turn, we circle back to the picture’s connection to the span of human ancestry. In poring through recorded visual culture, scholars approach a two-pronged puzzle: Just what is it that makes us human? And, when did we become so human? Scouring for hints in the picture at hand, there’s oodles of possibilities – use of tools, bipedalism, bodily markings, a gendered division of labor, emphasis on the family nuclear unit, domestication of wolf-like creatures, luminous symbols of spirituality, teaching social values to offspring, rites of ritualistic significance, size differential of male and female adults (dimorphism), body language. . . Of course, to settle the matter, more refinement would be necessary; some of these traits describe other species too.

Look again at Courtney’s pose. The right arm, as noted, is raised in her gesture of mock exhaustion/true joy. What about the left arm? Ah ha: Courtney’s left arm appears to extend on a diagonal, straight to where the arm reaches out to touch one son (Felix), who is managing to climb a ladder (like his Dad!). Is Courtney extending her arm to secure the safety of a young boy? No! Not really. Examine closely, and you’ll realize that the physical connection of mother and son is illusionary, a trick of perspective. Her position on the sofa places her a few feet deeper in the background from where the child clambers up the ladder (its red color spelling danger). In truth, the kid is on his own. If he started to fall, instead of protecting him, the ladder would be an impediment, thwarting his father’s efforts to reach over to save him. The edgy precariousness of the scene is an integral element in the overall merriment.

While the connection of Courtney and son Felix is visibly present in the image, their bond is less material than metaphorical; in the actual here & now of the drama taking place in the family’s living room, the connection isn’t happening. What takes shape is a pictorial event made possible through a result of representation. As we discuss below, this makes a world of difference.

2. The Human Condition

Belgian surrealist René Magritte (1897–1968) painted a series of images that explore the human condition. Specifically, Magritte composed images that explore new ways of looking at the world by reordering the world, doing so he aids our own process of discovery: what we didn’t know (or didn’t know we knew) about reality. With inventive pairings of objects and figures, his art produces fresh, startling insights. The primary topic of Magritte’s art: the mysteriousness in which we humans find ourselves. A key aspect of his approach is the assertion that our (ontological) knowledge is based on representations. Representation. We don’t possess the world directly; we encounter visual and verbal symbolic referents, images and words that offer tantalizing, but incomplete, renditions. The result is a revelation – Magritte shows us that our ideas, culture, and art encompass, and are encompassed by, a hall of mirrors. We see ourselves seeing. What we see are elusive illusions constructed through the lens of representation. Representation is never more than (or less than) a conglomerate of semiotic signs, sometimes singular, sometimes composed in layers. (Magritte encapsulates this thunderbolt of awareness in his iconic painting The Treachery of Images (1929). The pipe in the painting is not a real pipe, you can’t smoke it. It won’t cause a cough. (Or produce a high.) It is a painted image of a pipe; just as the caption, Ceci n’est pas une pipe [This is not a pipe] painted on the canvas, below the image, are words, semantic abstractions, not tangible objects.)

Another potent (and potent because it is so simple) of Magritte’s paintings presents a view of a curtained window. The subject manifests the classic condition of representational art – a picture functions as a window opening onto the subject of the picture. Presumably, the more transparently the picture serves this function, the better. Worth noting: This paradigm of refined representational art reigned in the Western world for four centuries, from the end of the Medieval period to the onset of Modernism. How does the painting resonate with the focus of this essay? For starters, Magritte titled the 1933 painting, The Human Condition I. [Fig. 2] Below, I illustrate the painting at two sizes; doing so, I think, restages a bit of the uncanny, dizzying, hall-of-mirrors aesthetic experience that Magritte’s actual artwork offers the viewer. The effect, standing before the actual canvas, creates a deepening sense of vertigo. Geared to knock the viewer out of complacency, designed to call into question our habitual sense of perspective.

Fig. 2. Magritte, The Human Condition I, La condition humaine I, 1933, National Gallery of Art, Fair Use.

Pay special attention to how Magritte’s painting contains a conceit – a conceit which symbolizes the central paradox of all representational painting. Within the complete composition, a painted canvas rests on an easel. The identity of an easel painting doubles down on the visual conundrum: the complete, larger artwork that Magritte created is also an easel painting. That complete painting contains the same medium of visual expression as the smaller painting-inside-the-painting. Both are pure paintings. There is nothing on the canvas more (or less) real than any other part of the imagery; the entire artwork contains representational signage. Magritte’s careful positioning of the smaller painting is calibrated so that its subject matter (a landscape view) aligns perfectly with the subject matter contained in the window scene depicted in the complete painting. A landscape, tree, and patch of sky flow seamlessly across both paintings (the nested one and the complete one). That is the human condition, according to Magritte’s philosophy of art and life, and, in turn, his philosophy of philosophy. Furthermore, the image points to the context of our general existential condition: we are immersed in a reality (a landscape) we did not create, which contains the reality we did create (the room, the view, the semiotic artwork). Such a complex density of gnostic wisdom comes packed into what, at first glance, appears to be a rather humdrum, generic Sunday painting. There is no reality (no reachable reality) – for we humans – beyond representation, beyond the human condition of compulsive symbolization. No perception without conception. As Magritte explains,

…the tree represented in the picture hid the tree standing behind it, outside the room. For the spectator the tree was at one and the same time in the room – in the picture – and, by inference, outside the room – in the real landscape. This is how we see the world; we see it outside ourselves and yet we have only a representation of it within us... So time and space are freed from the crude meaning which is the only one allowed to them in everyday experience. [Magritte quoted in Louis Scutenaire, René Magritte, Brussels, Librairie Selection, 1947, p. 75.]

I wrote that the smaller painting’s subject matter aligns perfectly with the larger painting’s window view; I can refine that statement to point out the exception of the minute sliver of the left edge of the smaller painting, which gently overlaps the window curtain, and the equally thin sliver of the side edge of the canvas, that shows on the right of the smaller canvas. These telltale signs function as hints, the way a magician may offer the audience a clue as to how a card trick is constructed – in the end, however, the effect remains confounding.

Did you recognize that nephew John’s scene of seasonal merriment also contains an artwork-within-the-artwork? What we always see is a world viewed through the prism of representation. The world we know is based on the inner, mental model of reality we hold inside. (This condition holds true for all living creatures. All animals align their sensory perceptions to their own mental map, and act accordingly.) Magritte, in other paintings, points to this realization – that perception is bonded with conception – with imagery in which a figure, often a bowler-hatted figure, has his face pressed against a hovering object; the object (an apple, a bird) obstructs the view, shuts off any other sighting, or understanding, of the wider reality. There is nothing for the man to see, except for the paradox of the human condition. (“…and nothing is, but what is not.” Macbeth 1.3.144)

3. What makes us human?

An answer depends on who you ask. Some scientists and social scientists tend to lean heavily into the behavior of people (and pre-people). Indicators of self-consciousness, culture, and creativity comprise three dimensions that may define the actions of humanity. But, for paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, the physical structure of our bodies matters first and most; our evolving shape allowed us, literally, to stand apart. Our ancestors’ switch to an upright stance did more than provide for two-legged locomotion; balancing on our hind legs freed our front legs (a.k.a. our arms and hands) for other tasks (carrying and using tools, hunting, gesturing, farming, etcetera),and this condition made possible (and, arguably, made necessary) the development and deployment of larger brains, an increasingly complex social structure, more tool making, a more diverse diet, and an extended period of child rearing. The characteristics and functionalities of our earliest hominid forebears became possible as the result of bipedalism, of walking upright, not clambering along with front knuckles to the ground, like our genetic cousins, gorillas and chimpanzees). Why was this change rewarded in evolutionary terms? A gait on two feet became more effective as a means of locomotion when traveling long distances on the ground (our ancestors’ tree-climbing days were growing shorter due to vast environmental changes), plus, as noted, there’s the distinct advantage of picking things up and carrying them around. Stone tools, wood for fire, foodstuff, babies. And, ultimately, creating the need for larger brains becomes a feedback loop: larger brains allow for complex communities, social organization, higher degrees of cooperation.

The fossil record shows our ancestors switching to bipedalism with the arrival of homo erectus, roughly 2 million years ago. At this stage, where we are on the gradient of social and cultural development is difficult to pin down. When did we start to speak and, speaking, invent and communicate complex creative concepts?When did we start to think in ways that are recognizably human-like?When did we become identifiably the precursors of modern humans, when did we turn into us? This essay aims to point to where one partial, but pertinent, answer lies studying prehistoric art as a record of the thought patterns of our earliest ancestors. What we’re looking for is in the equivalent of the fossil record of culture, not from a few millions of years ago, but from a few ten thousand years back. We’re looking for evidence of a shift – an inflection point that ushers in a new paradigm. We’re trying to pinpoint an answer to a very specific question. Not, what makes us minimally human? But, what makes us so very human? (Rich with a semiotic capacity to represent, and, by representing, to foster a culture of change. Ultimately: to behave like a Magritte. To become a John and Courtney.)

As art historian Bartlett H. Hayes, Jr. observed: “Of all creatures, [Man] alone has discovered how to document what he finds around him and to formulate an image of his inward vision.”

4. Danger enhances awe

Do elements of danger enhance our appreciation for beauty? With our good friends Colleen and Thomas, Jean and I planned a once-in-a-lifetime bucket list adventure to Canyon Lands in southwest Utah. Each day offered experiences and views amid a challenging, breathtaking (pun intended) terrain. Our travel itinerary got underway with a hot air balloon ride. The collective poetic reverie we shared aloft was punctured by the balloon-captain’s warning: “you need to know the landing won’t be soft, so listen up: I’m going to explain how to brace yourselves properly as we prepare for a ‘controlled crash landing’ . . . when we touch down on the earth we’ll be going well over 20 miles per hour. I can’t really guide this thing. There are no brakes. You’re going to need to brace yourself. The basket is going to tip over.” Let it be said: laughter is the release of tension (Freud).

We followed the balloon ride with a day’s van journey through Arches National Park; and followed that adventure with a four-day rafting trip down the Colorado River through Cataract Canyon, coursing through some of the most scenic white-water rapids in the country. We rode in boat #4. Boat #2 lost two people thrown overboard in Big Drop 1, Boat #3 capsized entirely, losing all 8 people in Big Drop 2 . . . Surprised, they all survived, a few with rock scrapes along their arms as they body surfed through Big Drop 3. Everyone laughed uproariously (more tension released) around the campsite, eating dinner.

Heat, lack of shade, and a giant arc lamp for a sun (now we understand – the sun is an actual nearby star) shining onto every inch of bare skin: these ‘ingredients’ made daylight views shimmer. Shimmying out of the tent at night to pee, nighttime views of the galaxies offered a different look at a magical, sparkling universe. The next morning, we continued our descent of the river. Are we the first peopleto sleep and eat on these riverbanks? No: small tribes of prehistoric people came by boats several thousand years before us. Their granaries, camouflaged above the water line, remain as evidence of their resourcefulness to provide for the storage of food in harsh surroundings. They marked their passage with visual messages. Petroglyphs marked their spot, literally, on the canyon’s rock walls.

Fig. 3. Petroglyphs, New Mexico. To the point, in a most curious manner: This photograph, taken on our river trip, shows simulated petroglyphs created by contemporary people. Representations of representation.

The earliest petroglyphs in Cataract Canyon, several thousand years old, show handprints of the people who made them. The message is as clear, succinct and undeniable as fossils – handprints are like finding the bones of ancient fingers. They are signs that ‘read’ I was here. They also signify: my hands were free to make this sign.

5. Art as a form of knowledge, art forms knowledge

Rocks, clouds, rivers, wolves, stars, and flowers – why they appear appears beyond rational explanation. We are born into a reality that, below the surface of the transitory, we did not create. The pure fact of being-ness is the bedrock condition. What religion, what mythology, what philosophy, is more powerful than the behavior of animals, at night, on the move? Staring into the void, into the nothing that is not, and the nothing that is (Wallace Stevens), we confront dimensions of the human condition.

Walking upright put us on the path to our humanity. Rivaling this behavior in significance – in terms of setting our species (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) apart from all other species – is our language. (Other species utilize their own languages, but the sheer complexity and inventive capacity of human language (with verbs with tenses, adverbs, prepositions, nested clauses and parenthetical expressions!) is unrivaled.) More forcefully than any other painter of the 20th century, Magritte explored how, and to what effect, words and images operate in different realms, but they share their status as signifiers of the human condition. When and how they might overlap or meld create unexpected dynamics of paradox. Magritte’s art remains open to ambiguity. Keats’ concept of negative capability (in which an author, such as Shakespeare, inhabits fully his fictional characters, without attempting or needing to control his characters’ actions and ideas with preconceived or received notions) relates, I think, to Magritte’s capability of producing imagery that floats on currents of thought, of imaginative contemplation, free of final answers.

6. Refining representation – inventing the language of visual art

The petroglyphs that we saw in Utah – prehistoric handprints, maybe 6,000 years old, on rock walls bordering the Colorado River – resemble similar handprints created by primitive people across the globe. The repetition of the same formula leads us to assess them: though beautiful, though mysterious, these handprints are not works of startling originality. They aren’t the product of genius (if I can employ what has become a contested term, now that we all recognize no one’s achievement develops in a vacuum, as society supports success for some while thwarting others). As exemplary manifestations of visual culture – handprints’ rarity stems more from the difficulty of finding them; most such prints have been lost, ground into dust along the grindstone of time.

For more complex prehistoric visual images, we can turn the hands of the clock back further – to 18,000 years ago. (Which means, of course, that time is not a continuous measure of culture. Progress is not in a straight line. And, arguably, there really is no progress. Only change.) Working by torchlight on the interior rock walls of Lascaux caves in what is now France, some of our Paleolithic predecessors painted representations of the animal life that surrounded them.

Fig. 4. Photography by James Robertson, at Lascaux IV, 2025. Note: This photograph is a record of a portion of a copy, to scale, of the actual cave. It was created to allow contemporary visitors to experience what the caves contain, without going in (and disturbing) the actual fragile environment. Which means: here we see a contemporary representation of prehistoric representations. In the discussion below, I analyze the actual prehistoric imagery; of which the photographic illustrations simulate with painstaking accuracy.

We see two animals (prehistoric oxen). [Fig. 4] Where are they? Although they exist in the same place (on the rock wall in an underground cave), they are, as representations not conceptually connected to each other. They do not overlap in the sense of sharing a coherent space at different fictive depths. They do not merge. They function independent of one another. The artist of one picture of an ox does not (appear to) pay attention to the earlier picture of the ox (the reddish ox appears to have been painted later). The two pictures of animals are independent of each other, as independent as two photographs (taken at different times) lying together on a tabletop.

What is the purpose of such depictions? Scholars speculate that the picture of an animal was created to procure totemic magic – to assure success in a hunt, perhaps; or, sympathetic magic – maybe to gain the strength and fecundity of animals; or, to record a past event of importance; or, to draw on the cave wall the appearance of animals that were significant to the people that produced the images. What we can be certain of: the pictures these prehistoric peoples produced achieve a likeness of real beasts; these are not figments of pure fantasy. The fossil record verifies the coincidence of these people and those animal species.

The imagery demonstrates that these prehistoric ancestors were creating representations, and, simultaneously, these people were exploring representationalism (although they (probably) had no term for that!) In a nutshell, a representational image is an image that looks like something. Not so for all representations. An image of an abstract pattern of diagonal lines, for example, is, arguably, a representation too. What we witness is the image-makers at Lascaux exploring the representational possibilities of their pictures.

The images depict known animals (many bison, more than a few horses, but never a deer, which is surprising since deer were these Paleolithic peoples’ main source of meat). Were the animals in the cave paintings known by names? Their language capabilities are not (yet, and perhaps never will be) determined. I, for instance, can take my painting supplies into my wife’s garden where I can paint flowers I don’t know by name; Jean can identify them, but I don’t know whether what I see are begonias, or hyacinths, or nasturtiums . . . Knowing a name is not a prerequisite for discerning differences. Wolves, of course, can recognize another wolf without having a pronounceable vocabulary with the word ‘wolf’. (Maybe, we fail to recognize the full extent of what constitutes a wolf’s vocabulary.)

Now, consider this example (a replica of prehistoric cave art):

Fig. 5, Photography by James Robertson, 2025.

In this work of undeniable graphic facility, the artist(s) seems to depict animals that do exist simultaneously together; they exist in spatial relationship to one another. The smaller animals appear to be deeper in the fictive space; their bodies are overlapped by the nearer, larger body of the central ox, which looks to our right. A representation of forms (animals) at different distances from the viewer has been created.

7. My nomination for one of the earliest strokes of artistic genius

Below is an example of cave art (produced roughly 18,000 years ago) located in Lascaux Cave. The image is frequently reproduced. The Bradshaw Foundation, for example, summarizes this image: “A painting referred to as ‘The Crossed Bison’, found in the chamber called the Nave, is often held as an example of the skill of the Paleolithic cave painters. The crossed hind legs show the ability to use perspective”. While this analysis is accurate, it fails to recognize the full significance of the imagery.

Fig. 6. Photograph by James Robertson, 2025

The depiction of two bison, mouths open, show the animals in motion. Are they running away from each other? Are they stampeding towards us (viewers)? – witness how the artist attempts to foreshorten the forms of the beasts, so their hind quarters are relatively smaller than their heads. Notice how the four crossed hind legs intersect, forming the highly refined artifice of a perfect symmetrical image. See: the legs seem to shift identities; the leftmost leg (reading from left to right) is one of the left bison’s; the next two legs, however, trade places ambiguously. Does the 3rd from left leg belong with the right bison? (This interpretation gains credibility as we observe that the 3rd and 4th left legs are parallel.) However, looking more closely, we realize the left belongs to the left bison.

The maker of this image has moved the needle a quantum leap: now, instead of offering another iconic side view of an animal – a conceptual mapping – this artwork presents a decisively increased naturalistic rendering. The two creatures are illustrated from a specific angle of view. Perspective has come into greater focus. Additionally, this artist has created a pictorial concoction. One of the world’s earliest.

What is a pictorial concoction? A pictorial concoction is created by the collapse of forms separated by depth onto the picture plane; this produces a fresh, holistic perception, made possible by the plasticity of formal elements in service of representation, and that process produces a new conception, with a new psychological charge.

The full significance of the artistic achievement is overlooked by paleoanthropologists if they fail to compare examples of cave art with the later pageant of the global art historical record. This seminal cave image pinpoints an inflection point in the evolution of visual culture: here is a moment when our precursors produced the branching forth into a new cultural paradigm. The overlapping legs combine forms at different depths into a singular fusion of form that exists on the pictorial surface. Furthermore, the artist has created a representation – four crossed legs of bison – that do not exist without the visuality of the imagery.

T.S. Eliot warns us to acknowledge: “art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. . . change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare or Homer or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. [my emphasis] . . . the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.” The cave painting of the bison with crossed legs – did anyone who lived then, including the artist himself/herself, understand how powerfully this image pioneered an entirely new way of thinking?

The painting points the way to limitless creative pictorial invention.

The two bison appear in a hypothetical relationship to each other that endows the whole image with the holistic impact of the metaphorical. Are they dancing? Scattering in fear? Whichever they do, and are, they occupy a fictive spatial and emotive relationship that is unprecedented, as far as I know, in the annals of image making. The image fills an essential link on the great chain of culture: from the simple handprints of petroglyphs (many of these being much younger in chronological time than the paintings at Lascaux, but less advanced, by degrees of magnitude, in cultural development) to the Surrealism of Magritte. The prehistoric depiction of two bison, legs intertwining forms a beautiful, rhythmic pattern, a pattern that enhances and, at the same time, subverts the aim of mimesis. Here we are witness to a pictorial event, a brilliant precursor to the permutations of the postmodern. In analyzing René Magritte and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s collaboration in the graphic hyper-modern novel La Belle Captive, Ben Stoltzfus explains “From Aristotle to the present, the fundamental aesthetic system has been based on the imitation of nature.” [in Robbe-Grillet and Magritte, La Belle Captive: a novel. Transl. by Ben Stoltzfus] With Magritte (in painting) and Robbe-Grillet (in literature), the arbitrariness of the signifier takes center stage. “They dramatize the artistic process at the expense of mimetic value. . . their art encourages a new artistic consciousness that allows for the commingling of the visible and the invisible, or, if you will, their art renders the invisible visible.” When 18,000 years ago, a singular prehistoric ancestor of ours concocted the image of two bison as a single visual and conceptual unit – thus giving birth to (to my knowledge) the planet’s first ever pictorial concoction – a new era was being ushered in.

There are, to be sure, other prehistoric images that give evidence of great originality, and demonstrate a mind (or minds) exploring how representational functionality can record and even give birth to new conceptions of the world(s) we discover together as a species. In the illustration below [Fig. 7], for example, is an image of four horses’ heads stacked one above the other, located in the Panel of the Horses, Chauvet Cave, in modern-day France. The intent of the image is difficult to decipher, although an arrangement that seeks to represent the everyday seems most probable. As archeologist Bruno David asks, “Do they [the 4 horses’ heads] represent a herd, or the movement of a single animal?” [Bruno David, Cave Art, 150] Having composed this highly unusual arrangement of stacked heads, however, did the creator of the image recognize another compelling, alternative possible interpretation? That the beast is a 4-headed beast?

Fig. 7. Photograph by James Robertson, 2025

The artist/s who created this image, what did he/she/they mean? Our contemporary name for prehistoric horses that lived alongside cave dwellers is Przewalski, but what name did people 18,000 years ago call horses? In the image, we encounter an unusual combination of four heads shown together – what do they, what does this, mean? (Note: 18th-century philosopher David Hume instructed: to forge a “combination” is a gateway to creativity)1 Notice the all-important switch from the plural to the singular. The meaning of the four heads, taken together, becomes a whole, becomes holistic, becomes a different entity than each separate, or all together but still separate. Now the image shows four prehistoric horses stacked in space, each one farther away than the next. The image depicts four horses in space, or a fresh insight: the image creates a four-headed beast. A forerunner of Cerberus, the multi-headed watchdog of Greek mythology – the dog who guards Hades. The combinatorial visual imagery may very well have preceded the transposition into language. The imagery may have been the seed that produced insight; insight created a need for new names, new sounds to enlarge their vocabulary.

Finale

Art is a form of knowledge. Furthermore, art forms knowledge. Knowledge of the world, and knowledge of art. How forms can operate as art. The crossed legs of the animals would pass almost instantaneously, in the blink of an eye, in the world outside the cave. Only in the cave, where the artist stops time – stops time in the manner of a prehistoric Edward Muybridge (who invented the forerunner of the film camera in order to prove, once and for all, that all four hooves of a racing horse leave the ground, hover momentarily in midair) – does the visual fact of the crossed legs form a perfect fresh symmetry. A pictorial concoction: maybe the world’s first? The cave painting opens a window not only into the real, but, simultaneously, into a new visual reality. Visual imagination extends further in a process of invention – the performance of pictorial events takes on an unprecedented fecundity. The technique of painting transposes a subset of the previously unimaginable condition into an imagined artistic reality. With the singular image of the crossed legs of two prehistoric bison in a cave the meaning of being human takes a giant leap forward.

Craig McDaniel is co-author of Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980 (Oxford University Press, 5th edition, 2022) with translations into Korean and Chinese. His essays, art and experimental writing have appeared widely in journals, including New England Review, Art Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, On the Seawall, and DIAGRAM. Upcoming: his visual art will be featured in a forthcoming exhibition being organized by the Southern Ohio Museum.

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1 I am indebted to my friend Anne Keener for pointing me to the 4 attributes of the creative power of the mind according to David Hume - compounding, transposing, augmenting and diminishing. If Hume is correct – and these are the four key attributes of human creativity, then our prehistoric ancestors would have utilized these as well. Here is the fascinating, relevant context in which the discussion appears in Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748): “Nothing, at first view, may seem more unbounded than the thought of man, which not only escapes all human power and authority, but is not even restrained within the limits of nature and reality. To form monsters, and join incongruous shapes and appearances, costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects. And while the body is confined to one planet, along which it creeps with pain and difficulty; the thought can in an instant transport us into the most distant regions of the universe; or even beyond the universe, into the unbounded chaos, where nature is supposed to lie in total confusion. What never was seen, or heard of, may yet be conceived; nor is anything beyond the power of thought, except what implies an absolute contradiction. But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.”

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