In the piece Dead Man with Buffalo, found on a cave wall in France, we can easily see how the pre-historic artist has anticipated the post-modern artist.  The pre and the post.  Before and after.  I think it fruitful to reflect a moment on such dia-relations.  Pre-historical, post-doctoral.  The sun and the moon.  The hunt and the after-hunt celebration.  The Spear.  

Moment complete.

What we see is the marriage (traditional or non-traditional?  I’ll let you be the judge) of a de-emphasis on form and representation with the widening of content ascription to include materials and context in which art is placed.  The history of western art is one of moving from clear representation on canvas and in stone, trying to mirror reality, to the knowing acknowledgement of the impossibility of transparent, transcendent reflection on things in themselves.  The postmodern artist and critic meta-interprets, acknowledging and embracing the role the wider context of materials and framework (in short the local Kuhnian paradigm) has on the interpretation of art.  The Neanderthal slyly winks a knowing wink at us, seeing, anticipating and encompassing this shift before it happened, bazillions of years ago.

The artist of the above piece was clearly a master of the subtle elucidation of meaning, while still leaving enough ambiguousness to keep viewers spellbound for a million years.  Many possible situations are suggested by the figures.  Is the depicted man inebriated after having ingested a few too many sacks of mead or some such?¹  Did he then stumble out of his wife’s hut, thinking her a buffalo?  Did he then pass out in front of the Yule-log to the amusement of all?  In any case it was definitely an event deserving enshrinement for posterior generations, as today bachelorette's friends pull aside drunk strangers to photograph the shooting of the ritual jell-o shot.

Or was the man killed by said buffalo, his wife, after a tussle over gender roles?  And what is that thingy on the left side of the painting?  Who knows?

The interpretive possibilities are as endless as the rustle of the prairie grass against your legs and the smooth feel of the spear in your hand as you watch the heard of elk and know they have not seen you.  I speak from experience, the cave-man’s experience.

And what are we to make of the materials?  Surely not a coincidence that the choice of okra and granite were chosen.  We must consider carefully the meaning the materials bestow on the whole of the painting.  Okra and granite, which are easily found in anyone’s backyard, are as natural as concrete or sky.  What we can safely say is unconsciously the artist-hunter-gatherer foresaw our current ‘back to nature’ movement, with its veggie patties and Birkenstocks, as a response to the cultural and environmental ‘hunt’ of capitalism.  This painting is both a message and a warning for the future, a ‘cave message in a bottle’ if you will.  Perhaps, in a dim way, as the artist felt their frontal lobe evolving, he or she comprehended that all dialectics start over in the end.  They left a message in okra and granite reminding us of the timelessness of the pre and the post, the bison and the spear, life and death, and of course, Marx.  The artist clearly may be saying to us “Give me not the mono-hegemony of globalism; give me in its stead my sling-shot and mead-sack!”

This reminds me of a story.  A student once asked me, “How do you deduce the mighty truths of art you write about?”  My response: “My dear, you must let go of your perspective, just as we can trace through his paintings Picasso letting go of his.  Meditate upon that.”  She swooned and later became the reason I was pushed out of academia.

Let us move down to the center of the painting, to the ‘bird-on-a-stick,’ motif in the center of the piece.  What are we to make of it?  

One moment…one moment…OK, I am back.  

Just as Foucault (perhaps, being from France, distantly related to the artist hmm?) lamented the finely woven chains of oppression that chain us to our oppressors, ourselves, so too the cave-man must have felt confinement within the webs of economic, cultural and geo-political relationships of the time.  Think of life back then.  Think(!): the poor conversation skills of other clan members, the boredom of picking berries, the discomfort of having no toilet paper and knowing it would not be invented for 200 more years, the terror of dinosaur attacks, the absurdity of the chief’s pep talks before the big dodge-rock game against the rival clan from ‘across town.’  It is for this reason that the artist put the ‘bird-on-a-stick’ in the very center of this masterpiece.  For ultimately aren’t we all nothing but ‘birds-on-sticks’ unable to fly to and fro?  Whether we are human, buffalo or that other thingy on the left, we all are really ‘birds-on-a-stick.’

Meditate upon that.

Heidegger said “language is the house of being.”  Contra-distinctively, the structure that holds art provides its context and meaning.  Our modern museums ‘frame’ art, ‘and’ provide ‘a’ space for it ‘to’ breathe.  Also, museums keep out art-harmful elements such as rain, leaves and poor people.  So we must be mindful of the structure that holds this cave painting, the cave!  What a choice!  Our museums provide a safe and controlled atmosphere with good lighting to display our cultural products.  The cave problematizes this notion.  This piece boldly proclaims, ‘Art is for the everyday, art is life, life is art.  Therefore, our art should not be protected from life, but it should be set in the midst of life’s troubles and triumphs!’  Yes!  I echo…echo…echo (as in a cave ha ha).  The cave was probably not a safe place to put a museum, what with cave-ins, constant attacks from bears and bats, and the threat of impalement by those pointy things.  The cave is a place that keeps us in a constant state of terror, all the better for contemplating the good, the true, and the beautiful.  We have grown soft in our time and could not handle the problems associated with cave-museums.  Is your average art-hipster today working for the corner modern art museum able to fend off a swarm of antediluvian zombie rats while simultaneously giving directions to the lavatory?  Pish-posh.  They would drop their walky-talkies and run faster than you can say ‘Yoko Ono.’  In fact, they not only cannot do the former, but they often fail at the latter as well, to the regret of my best pair of slacks.

Also caves are dark; the artist’s contemporaries viewing the Dead Man with Buffalo could not see it.  Necessarily, the artist was also a master oratorician, telling museum guests what they were not seeing.  Sadly, we light this piece, having lost the story telling prowess of other pre-historic storytellers such as Homer and Zeus.  We take visual art too literally nowadays, as something to be looked upon.  One, being you and me, cannot help but think the cave-man artist would cry a cave-man tear if they knew this piece could be seen.  

Overall, I give it 110% out of 10.


Dead Man with Buffalo is showing all the time in some cave in France.


 (1).  We know the figure in the center is a male, for no breasts were indicated.  It is a timeless meta-cultural truth that when using stick figures gender differentiation is accomplished with the inclusion or exclusion of breasts represented by circles with dots in the center.  Also the male figure seems to have, how shall we say, died a happy man.