Chauvet Cave rhino 

Visual Art That Imagines God: The Imagination that gave us the Chauvet Caves Paintings and Christian Art. 

((tags:dmingml))  #dmingml  #dyrness  #chauvet cave art

Imagine viewing visual art perhaps produced 30,000- to 33,000 years ago.  The Chauvet Cave paintings in southern France are palaeolethic and may be the earliest visual art yet discovered. Paintings of animals - bears, horses, owls, lions, rhinos – predominate painted upon the stone walls.  Why are they there?  Are these paintings representation of meaning that go beyond the aesthetic of beauty?  Did the painters interpret these animals and their depictions as having merely practical meaning, for example sources of danger, were these paintings used to teach the young as a type of pictorial dictionary, or were they representing some spiritual meanings.  Perhaps all of these or none of these, yet these paintings give contemporary peoples a glimpse of a world long gone.  These paintings meant something to the people who painted and viewed them.  The Chauvet Cave paintings have a contemporary relevance in that they remind us that humanity have used visual arts to represent meaning from ancient time – and often this meaning have religious and spiritual meaning.  This is seen in the Christian tradition in which visual art have been used to represent  theological truth about God, the world and humanity. 

William Dyrness in his book, visual faith: art & theology and worship in dialogue, provides a brief survey and discussion of the interaction of visual art, theology, and faith [9, 12]. His concern is primarily tracing the loss of imagination and use of visual art within the Protestant evangelical church post Reformation, particularly for use in worship and direct representation of Christian themes.  Dyrness acknowledges that there has not been a total dearth of Christian art and of artists who were Christian during this time, and that there has been a renaissance of visual art used within churches during the latter part of the 20^th c. Yet he believes that visual art, and the beauty and goodness that it can represent, remains estranged from the evangelical church with its attendant contribution for worship and witness [22].  Dyrness suggests this is a loss opportunity for the church for two reasons: visual art can be powerful representation of theological ideas, and that ‘the contemporary generation has been raised and nourished by images’ and as such it has an image driven imagination [22].  In other words, the church in recovering an imagination that values, creates and uses visual art [‘a new vision for the arts’, 155] may be able to engage in a renewal of its worship life and practise, and its witness to an image driven generation that finds meaning, religious and other, in the images that are produced and viewed [20].  

Dyrness speaks of reclaiming an imagination that, among other things, values visual art as a significant carrier of theological and biblical meaning for the Christian church.  This imagination would be explicitly Christian, a way that Christians perceive and understand God, the world and their relationship to both [adapted from Charles Taylor’s idea of social imaginaries].  If visual art carries religious meaning for Christians would it also do the same for palaeolithic peoples; might the paintings in the Chauvet Caves be ‘loaded with symbolic possibilities’ [85] including religious and spiritual meanings particularly relevant in a pre-written word culture?  Do the Chauvet Cave paintings represent symbolic meaning that were the product of a cultural imagination, an imagination informed by a world full of mystery and forces neither understood nor controllable by the Chauvet people? Were they used as artefacts for some sort of worship or religious reflection?  If so this would suggest that the use of visual art for religious purposes has antecedents that go back thousands of centuries.  This may not be appreciated by many contemporary evangelicals [and emerging church people] attempting to use visual art in worship and witness, but it does highlight that what they are doing is not new or unique.  And it brings a much deeper meaning to ‘ancient-future’!