As I stand inside an entirely mustard yellow room, filled with oversized bulbous shapes covered in polka dots the size of dinner plates, several thoughts dart through my mind. The first is that I shouldn’t find this so deeply soothing, but I do. Unnervingly so.
Something deep inside my mind is ringing alarm bells. Maybe it’s because black and yellow are one of nature’s danger signals, like the colouration of that wasp that stung me so painfully when I was a child. But the soft round shapes, the mirrors that show them receding into infinity, and the illusion of depth afforded by the different sizes of the polka dots also leaves me floating in contentedness, and I don’t want to leave.
But I’m not here to float. I’m here to look and to think. And thinking about my responses to this space, I already notice a pattern.
First, there’s my immediate reaction to the room: my feelings of alarm and contentedness. Then there’s speculation on the mechanisms that produce these feelings: the instinctive reaction to threat signals and the perceptual heuristics that respond to shape, contour and depth. Then there’s reflection on why these mechanisms even exist: they lent some adaptive advantage to my distant ancestors by helping them navigate their environment and avoid threats.
Because, ultimately, it all comes down to biology. And, as the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously put it, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”.
So, standing in this pleasantly dissonant room, I arrive at the core motivating concept behind this exhibition, On the Origin of Art, held at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) outside Hobart, Tasmania, in early 2017. One might see it as subverting Dobzhansky and saying “nothing in art makes sense except in the light of evolution”.
It’s an unconventional exhibition, not least because it’s separated into four self-contained sections, each curated by a different academic working in a field heavily informed by evolutionary biology. In each they lay out their theory on why art exists using the works as clauses in their argument.
The exhibition itself was dreamed up by the equally unconventional David Walsh, the gambler, art collector, evolution aficionado, enthusiastic shit-stirrer and owner of MONA.
Walsh once stated that all art is about sex and death. And both of these themes are on display in this exhibition, from prehistoric fertility figurines and a lifesize statue of a masturbating manga hero swirling his copious ejaculate as a lasso, to the tragic triptych depicting a pile of thylacines scrambling to survive on their diminishing island.
Again, it’s all about biology. Or more precisely, as psychology professor Geoffrey Miller asserts, it’s all about sex. Art, he argues, is just a way of showing off and attracting a mate. In this sense, he draws parity between the works of the great Renaissance masters and the elaborate nests bower birds use to lure females into copulation.
Both “artists” have to overcome a core problem in life: how to signal one’s value to a prospective partner. In the animal kingdom, as in our world, there are many pretenders. The problem is that it’s cheap to say you have good genes or a rich earning potential, but it’s harder to prove it to a prospective mate.
That’s why the male bower bird goes through such an elaborate display of building and decorating his bower, expending so much precious energy that might otherwise be spent on fulfilling more immediate needs. He’s signalling that he is so effective at this survival business that he has abundant energy to spare to build an embellished bower.
This is also why a bachelor is more likely to buy a Porsche than a Toyota, why engagement rings cost so much, and why many people have raised brush to canvas in anticipation of the admiration they’ll receive from the opposite sex, so says Miller.
But, I can’t help but to think art can’t all be about reproduction. Perhaps it’s because evolution hasn’t endowed us with an urge to reproduce, per se. When the lights dim and the Barry White is spinning, our minds become focused, but not on thoughts of differential reproductive success. Evolution endowed us with heuristics and processes, and they produce manifold outcomes, only some of which are the ones that lent us an adaptive advantage millennia ago.
So it’s somewhat of a relief to be standing in one of the rooms curated by cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. Here I find myself looking at the crisp clear lines and contrasting colours in one of Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, or the biophilia button pushing landscapes of William Sonntag and John Glover.
Pinker’s thesis is that art has no adaptive benefit. Instead, art is a pure byproduct of other features of our evolved psychology. It takes our evolved cognitive proclivities and pushes them beyond what nature can normally afford. It’s “cheesecake” for the eyes.
But while we didn’t create art to help us survive and reproduce, we can only explain the content of art with reference to the cognitive mechanisms that did evolve to help us survive and reproduce. That’s why we like landscapes, flowers, symmetrical faces, crisp colour and contrast.
Pinker also leans on one of the most underrated features of evolutionary theory: it’s ability to explain not only similarity, but also diversity. Sometimes variation looks like noise. Sometimes similarity looks like coincidence. It was only with evolution that these two forces were seen to emerge from the one process.
So, too, the vast array of human art — from the 30,000 year-old ochre cave paintings in Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in France, to the 3,000 year-old golden coffins of the pharaohs, to the grandeur of the Sistine Chapel, to Jeff Koonz’s gaudy Hanging Heart — emerges from the pleasure we take in appealing to our many evolved psychological predilections.
Which brings me back to the yellow polkadot room, Dots Obsession, by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, which greets you as you enter the realm curated by literature professor Brian Boyd.
Boyd’s argument is that art is “cognitive play with pattern”. We have evolved to be pattern-seeking machines, so we’re naturally drawn to forms that are both informationally rich yet cognitively pliant, such as Ogata Kōrin’s Red and White Plum Blossoms, circa 1700.
The swirls in the water are exaggerated but they register immediately for what they are. The dark branches twist and lunge, dotted by bright blossoms set in relief against the mottled amber background. It’s transfixing, unreal yet familiar and elicits deep pleasure on its viewing.
Boyd also finds similarity where we might highlight difference, such as with Ko wai Koe (Who Are You?) by New Zealand artist Marian Maguire. Here a tattooed Maori faces off against a Corinthian helmeted Greek hoplite. Their artistic styles couldn’t be in greater contrast, but the eye is drawn to the spirals and curves, and the unwavering stare they share.
There is an adaptive benefit to art, says Boyd. It’s not sexual selection, but social selection. Those who failed to appreciate art, and who missed out on the social dimension of participating in its creation or consumption, would have been “shunned as unresponsive and dull”, he says.
In a way, Boyd expands on Pinker’s thesis. He expands on the dimensions of our evolved perceptual faculties, and how the creation and consumption of art have co-evolved to explain not only why it exists, but why it takes the forms it does.
Then I find myself transfixed, staring abjectly at a corpulent creature resting proudly on a pedestal. Its fleshy rolls and creases, and the hint of pale hair on its squashed limbs give it an uncanny familiarity, which makes its bulbous nightmare form all the more disturbing. Sphinx, by Australian artist Patricia Piccinini, compels and repels in equal measure, which is precisely what evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi had in mind when he included it in his section.
His thesis is not just that art harnesses and mimics nature, but that nature constrains art. Art can’t just be anything. It is necessarily informed by nature and our experience of it. And the most salient feature of nature, at least for us, is other people. That’s why Sphinx works. If it was made of marble, or shaped as a cube, it wouldn’t transfix me the way it does.
As I step out of the last room, images, ideas and theories swirl around my head. On the Origin of Art can be overwhelming at times, bemusing at others. Origin bombards you with a dazzling array of eras, cultures and media. It can feel disjointed, especially if you eschew the accompanying audio commentary. That could be perceived as a weakness, but if you’re there to engage with the contrasting theories on art, it hangs together in the end. It’s a potent conversation starter, not a stopper.
As I recline on the ferry back to Hobart, resting my weary mind and feet, I can’t help but to wonder if there are other dimensions to art that have been overlooked by the four curators of Origins.
One feature of our evolved psychology that has particular salience for me is our search for meaning. We’re unique in that we can not only perceive, react and think about the world directly, but we can think about the way we perceive, react and think about the world. Our self-awareness has given us insight and foresight, and enabled us to develop far more sophisticated responses to a complex world.
But this meta level of cognition has also enabled (or cursed) us to ask curly questions of what all of this thinking and acting means. Arguably, many of the great cultural developments over the past several millennia, from ritual, to religion, to nationalism, to mass media, have been fuelled by a search for meaning. Perhaps so too art.
After all, we could make our tools and bowls unadorned by decoration, we could leave our cave (or gallery) walls clear and we could attract mates with conspicuous displays of wealth or power. But we almost can’t help but to make art, and much of that art either asks or attempts to answer the ultimate question of what it all means.
Still, if this is my takeaway from On the Origin of Art, then the exhibition has been a resounding success. When I spoke with Jane Clark, one of the MONA co-curators of Origin, she remarked that at the end of the multi-year process of collaborating with the researchers and assembling this vast exhibition, it ultimately left her with more questions about the origins of art, not fewer.
When reflecting on something so pervasive, so powerful, mysterious and nebulous as art, and attempting to connect it to a theory as complex as evolution, that’s probably the best result one could hope for. Thankfully, I’ll also be left with a new happy place, where mustard yellow walls and black polkadots gently tap the evolved cognitive buttons that leave me drifting peacefully, as only great art can.
On the Origin of Art was on display at the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Tasmania from November 2016 to April 2017. The author received complementary entry to the exhibition. All images here used with permission of MONA.
