Head of Sinbad, Pictograph in San Rafael Swell, Utah (1998)
The pictograph was captured using a long time exposure with moonlight as its source of illumination, and, because it was film, having to account for reciprocity, the shot required one hour. Set completely still on a tripod, staring, the camera and lens is a great concentrator. The camera can be made to lie, fantasize, distort and document in any blend and in any degree, including the purely real. Look to the operator who chooses, frames and puts their mark invisibly on the image. The operator decides what the machine does.
Like most ancient rock art, all the important information and specifics about this site are unknown. While the pigment obviously has iron, in its mixture, the nature of the permanent binder used is a complete mystery. This is phenomenal. Modern color photography should have such archival characteristics – the Head of Sinbad pictograph, named for the rock formation it is painted on, is “at least 3,000 years old” and no one knows a thing about it. I guess it wasn’t so much a throw-away culture back in those days. My color negatives of 40 years passing, fade, as does most everything not protected, but after thousands of years the power of this imagery lives on, and is from a time and people that we know little about, let alone, their ending or blending into the landscape.
Part of my artist statement is, i’m not one. Perhaps because my realism, call it social, critical, caustic, sarcastic or aesthetic, is lived. But ancient art on stone and rock is something to see, and without written or verbal statement there is no documentation of the source.
It’s safe to say, this image was made well before the relative short time that art has been such a big investment commodity or that the role of artist, is so tied to that, and the entertainment industry that is our standard form.
Meaning, with little self-consciousness, certainly not schooled or trained, and the production and appreciation of artifacts, is naturally occurring, especially during the unrecorded time of artifacts, well before writing, that date back, at least 250,000 years – the age of the oldest known physical art object, particularly rock art and sculpture, and perhaps it goes back 700,000 years, as some say.
RealStill’s value is entirely intrinsic, built-in, paid for upfront exclusively with physical labor and is unattached to name and brand. It’s blue-collar photography in the sense it’s usually dirty, sometimes dangerous, always physical, not ideological, and forgotten in both author and subject. It’s relative to the world, and, if art, i could care less. It’s for good reason, RealStill has something to compare things to. The pictures come from the experience of actual things, which used to be valued, because of its impact and indisputabilty. It’s the aesthetics of experience in the world.
In The Nerja Caves are painted images of seals by Neanderthals 25,000 years ago, in Afghanistan the Taliban blow up two 1,700 year old Buddhist statues, within the Bhimbetka Caves, in India, and elsewhere, cup-marks were pocked into the walls 290,000 years ago. Individuation, for a long time, wasn’t considered, i guess, and it’s up to us to speculate, but never be sure about anything. Unlike today where it’s hyper-documented, that is, within those in the name game and art specialists.
Culture comes naturally, and to more living things than humans, and, technically, requires no training. We’re born with it. The mating dances of birds, and birds that form single life-long relationships, are one of millions of examples where training is not necessary to mate for life, to fly or be creative. Of course with more leisure time and wealth, the endeavor becomes a profession.
With regards to the timeless, while i didn’t set up shop there, i been there. There is something to be said a about the lost art of timelessness.
Temple Mountain Pictographs
People sometimes have added to American rock art sites over the years. In this sense an ancient art work, whose exact origin and age is unknown, will bear reliable and exact documentation of the period in which it was vandalized. In the San Rafael Swell at Temple Mountain someone has used a rifle from below, while others have crawled up the cliff to leave graffiti etched into the stone. To the Park Service’s credit they never repair the damage and it becomes both a sign of ancient times and our time, and is a self-documentation, and, as much as it is an expression from thousands of years ago.
Rock art is American art.