Fake or Facsimile: Part 2: “Faux Chauvet”
- Tom Curran
- Jun 5, 2017
- 9 min read
France is home to two of the world’s most famous pre-historic sites. The Lascaux cave complex was discovered in September 1940; the Chauvet Cave was discovered in December 1994.
Obviously, I am completely governed by expert consensus, so these may be only rough figures: but there is a general suggestion that the famous Lascaux cave paintings (two sample images directly below) date from around 15,000 years BCE, which is to say 17,000 years before the present (BP).
The Chauvet drawings, (images below) discovered half a century later, are nonetheless estimated to be very nearly double the antiquity of the Lascaux decorations: so their production is assessed as having a provenance somewhere around a monumental 32,000 years BP.
Neither site is accessible to the public; the Lascaux site was closed in 1963; and essentially the Chauvet cave has never been open to the public at all.
The environment in the caves cannot sustain the effects of tourism (and human breath), and because of the fragility of the artwork, there is now virtually no access to the caves, hardly even for researchers.
What to do? A replica facility known as Lascaux II (200 metres from the actual site) was opened for tourists and admirers in 1983, and reproduces the famous sections of the complex for closer inspection. The more elegantly identified Caverne du Pont-d’Arc, the “Faux Chauvet” half-sibling to “Faux Lascaux”, is located at 2 kilometres distance from the authentic site[i]—but what is lost in proximity is made up for in scale. The grand opening in April 2015 was at a cost of 55 million Euros (more than $60 Million USD today); it is ten times the size of the original Lascaux replica and therefore, apparently, the world’s largest reproduction, in any forum, of this kind.[ii] Even so, it is only 1/3 (as a virtual reality) of the size of the cave itself.[iii]
Obviously, these are compromises, emergency measures in order to preserve these staggeringly antique expressions of our human ancestry for posterity. A particularly irritating (and often cited) article about this resourceful solution to an intractable problem was published in England by The Guardian newspaper[iv] to coincide with the opening of this “world wonder” in April 2015.
I see the advantages of opportune critique and controversial copy, but this rant is stupefylingly “off-point”. The “clever” photo caption for The Guardian piece says it all: “Can you smell the paint drying?” Just to add a bit of ballast to ensure that the author’s passionate views are provocatively enough presented, here are a few quotations from the art critic in question (Jonathan Jones). The Chauvet “life-size replica” is:
· “patronising nonsense” & “a mock cave”
· [which] “short-changes the art lovers [who are] treated like fools …”
· There “is no reason to fob us off with a replica”
· Lascaux II proved to be “a tantalising farce”[v]
The key words and tags in the article include: fake, pastiche, replica, second-hand; simulacr[um]; simulation; substitute…
First to highlight the positive in the article: Jones alerts his readers to the fact that there are still two French caves of astonishing antiquity which remain open for visitors in SW France: near the town of Cahors.[vi] This is a fantastic public service, and I owe the author a true debt for these invaluable tips. His article also incorporates a serious point: “You need to smell the dank, hear the drip-drip of water, sense the massive darkness just beyond the lit pathways” in order truly to appreciate the colossal originality of this millennial achievement.
I absolutely agree that seeing the greatest expressions of human art and architecture in context belongs to the complete appreciation of their overwhelming, awe-inspiring effect. Something like this is still available for the famous bronze statue of a mounted Emperor Marcus Aurelius (1981 replica outdoors;[vii] original indoors for preservation in a museum); or Ghiberti’s “Gates of Paradise” gilded bronze doors for the Cathedral Baptistry in Florence (finished in 1452); and replaced by a replica in 1990. This probably is “the best of both worlds” since we can, at one and the same time, preserve the original in a controlled environment, and see the replica in situ.
Obviously, this is not an option for the Chauvet encounter; but I suppose one could further enhance the experience for “augmented reality” by creating an artificial atmosphere which reproduces the dank, and one could also accompany the punters with the (well-hidden) recordings of dripping water. But it is unclear how much more authentic such an enhancement might prove, since you will still be surrounded by well-dressed visitors, all carrying their mobile devices; and you will be supported every step of the way by electrical lighting, which does not adequately reproduce the “authentic experience” of early mankind, which can only be had by the firelight—the “context” in which these decorations first appear.
While critic Jonathan Jones makes a valid argument, it is still my opinion that he has “over-egged the pudding”, as they say in the UK. So in this Fake or Facsimile series I want to oppose three of his article’s assertions:
The fabrication of Caverne du Pont-d’Arc exhibits “an underlying prejudice” (really a contempt) towards “primitive art”.
“…no one would be very happy to visit a substitute Sistine Chapel.”
“Similarly, no art lover wants to see a replica Rembrandt.”[viii]
Points 2 & 3 will be addressed repeatedly in all the discussion that follows, but the 1st assertion seems, to me, completely misplaced. Surely it is enough to say, that it is our admiration for, and our marvelling at these masterpieces, that moves us to preserve them for the generations to come. But this does not mean that we simply want to seal the cave forever, without any relation to an immense treasure to which we only gained access some 20 years ago.
Nor, I am arguing, is this a rehearsal of the principles of the “knock-off”: there is no intent here either to deceive or counterfeit. We go to the “Faux Chauvet” site both to celebrate and to venerate, and it is for that purpose that the site was required to offer such a faithful and awesome replica. This massively painstaking and precise reproduction is actually the way in which we can most devotedly express our appreciation, because, within the establishment of the one structure, we are able both to enhance and to preserve.
Jonathan Jones urges us to enjoy the inaccessible Chauvet by two vital forms of modern technology: photography and cinema. And that is also not precisely enough expressed: it is not just collected high-definition (HD) photographs that Jones celebrates, but the 3D exploration of Chauvet undertaken in Werner Herzog’s film Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010).
We are being encouraged to have a profound relation to this inaccessible ancient art by means of HD digital photography, and not just any old film, but a movie shot in 3D—which, as the Director Herzog explained, is not a “gimmick”, but an opportunity to allow the viewer to have a concrete visual relation to the way in which the surface of the walls of the cave motivated the prehistoric ancestors to use the contours of the cave walls as their “canvas”: this inspiration managed to enliven the drawings themselves. Having taken technology thus far, it is very difficult to understand why the same technology should not move us one step further, beyond 2D HD photographs, and past 3D motion pictures towards “life-like”, complete and convincing reproductions of the works in their actual context. In what way is this meticulous, profoundly reverential, and completely contextual enterprise contributing to the “the rise of the fake attraction”?[ix] Apparently some digitally-enhanced reproduction is appropriate and honourable, but as technology advances it seems we lose sight of the “original” and make our way towards the counterfeit, the fake, and the second-hand, a fate we could ostensibly be spared by only looking at photographs and watching documentaries.
I want to conclude by making four points:
1. Because of the erection of the Aswan Dam, the famous temples of Pharaoh Ramesses II and his Queen Nefertari were deconstructed piece by piece, and preserved from disappearing under water by being reassembled on higher ground, now on the shores of the artificially created Lake Nasser. The temples have clearly been rescued, but only by being entirely removed from their “original” dramatic setting—which was deliberately chosen, for effect, on the banks of the Nile. To this untrained eye, the temples (now saved for posterity) seem entirely “out of context”, indeed as if they had been “dropped” conveniently for their preservation on a desert floor. The winding Nile has been replaced by a man-made lake, and something of the drama, in my opinion, has thereby been lost.
2. While we celebrate the authority, the complexity and the originality of the Lascaux paintings, these paintings have, in fact, been subject to their own more recent restoration since the closing of the cave; the paintings, we are told, have been “restored to their original condition”[x]—whatever that may mean in this context.
3. One of the most extraordinary features of the Chauvet decoration—as is made abundantly clear in Herzog’s lovingly filmed homage—is that some of the enhanced decoration (elaboration?)[xi] occurred after a hiatus of 5,000 years, which is to say, between the original and their then “overlapping images”, there is a stretch of five millennia, essentially as long as the whole of our recorded history, from ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt[xii] up to the very written language which enables this blog.
4. In 1965, the Egyptian government decided to recognize the role the United States played in helping to preserve its antiquities (from the Aswan flooding) by presenting the disassembled Temple of Dendur (completed in 10 BCE under the authority of Caesar Augustus) to the American people. In 1967, President Johnson handed over this gift to the New York Metropolitan Museum for installation and display. In 1978, the Met’s Sackler Wing was ready to offer the spectacle of this Egyptian Temple to patrons of this great Metropolitan Museum.[xiii] Without the intervention of the United States (and many other countries) the Temple of Dendur would have suffered the same fate as the Temples at Abu Simbel, and the justly famous Philae Temple at Aswan.
Are we to understand that the disassembling of an Egyptian Temple of the Roman period—and its reassembling in an indoor arena in New York City—is somehow more authentic and reverential, than building an exact, detailed (and sheltered) replica to represent wholly inaccessible, underground decorations? Even when this replica is intended to provide an experience of the “context” in which these drawings were conceived? In what, to me, unknown world can this be described as treating millennial art “callously”?[xiv] Certainly it has been “ripped” out of its context, and encased inside another artificial structure, but every feature of this exercise was undertaken with loving attention to detail and a complete commitment to preservation.
Apparently dissembling the Temple of Dendur as an example of Egyptian/Roman artisanship—and reassembling the same Temple (indoors) in Manhattan—is not treating the ancient Egyptian world with contempt, but, rather, with appropriate tribute. Is it reasonable to set this positive against the negative of allowing visitors to have a “virtual” relation to something to which they can never have any other access? In what way can this experience be labelled as prejudicial and contemptuous? Were I lucky enough to get to Chauvet, I would not, as is suggested, be “fall[ing] for a fake”; instead I would be celebrating 30 millennia of the magnificent accomplishments of the human spirit: ancient and modern.
Next Time: “King Tut’s Golden Mask”
[i] Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25th April, 2015 (Ulf von Rauchhaupt): “Steinzeitkunst”
[ii] TRACCE (Online Rock Art Bulletin), 7th February, 2015 (Andrea Arcà): “Chauvet-Pont d’Arc”
[iii] Smithsonian.com, 14th April 2015 (Joshua Hammer): “Only a handful of people can enter the Chauvet Cave each year…”
[iv] The Guardian, 15th April 2015 (Jonathan Jones): “Don’t fall for a fake”
[v] In all fairness: Lascaux IV (which cost 57 Million Euros to construct, and might have allayed some of Jonathan Jones’ concerns) did not open until December 2016, so some 18 months after the original Guardian article; see The Guardian, 15th December 2016 (Jon Bryant)
[vi] Pech-Merle (ca 33 km E of Cahors; decorations between 27,000 BP and 18,000 BP); and Cougnac (ca 45 km N of Cahors; decorations between 25,000 BP and 14,000 BP)
[vii] Even though the (Imperial) equestrian Marcus Aurelius was removed from his place in Rome in 1981, this was not, in fact, his original location. Sometimes the context can be changed for “the sake of art”, not in order to lessen art.
[viii] I would have preferred to use the article’s “shout-out”, viz. “…you wouldn’t pay to see a Rembrandt copy—why is ancient art treated so callously?” But while this may express Jonathan Jones’ view quite precisely, I cannot be sure that Jones himself was the author of this summary.
[ix] The Telegraph, September 15th, 2015 (Chris Leadbeater): “Lascaux Cave and the rise of the fake attraction”
[x] Vintage News, April 25th, 2017: “Visitors to the Lascaux caves do not see the genuine…”
[xi] Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 2011 (directed by Werner Herzog): “after carbon-dating there are strong indications (here) that some overlapping figures were drawn almost 5,000 years apart...”
[xii] The traditional date for the “invention of writing” is approximately 3,000 BCE, although there is evidence of something that we might recognize as writing from about 3,200 BCE at Abydos in Upper Egypt.
[xiii] The (NY) Metropolitan Museum of Art Website: “A Monumental Gift to the Met”
[xiv] As indicated above, this may not be Jonathan Jones’ exact word, but it has been used (provocatively) to draw the reader into Jones’ article in the attached “shout-out”.
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