Between schematic and representation

            Examples of Syrian "bird head" Goddess terracotta figures from early dates around the late neolithic to early bronze age bridge, so from between polished stone and early ages of metal and a wide date range of 5200 to 3500 ybp seems safe (as indicated in this display behind glass from the Museum of Agen).

When 3D images are created, there can be limitations that can effect the final lines, for example, when making a mask from tree-cork, the mask has a chunky feel, and when making a doll from woven grass, the result is soft edged. With clay, there is no limitation as both hard and soft, broad-stroke and detailed effects are available for impression. Little in the medium of clay can get in the way of an artist's imagination. These 'bird idols' results look to be neither realist depiction or schematic abstraction, and it is perhaps the case that these clay models reproduced cultural decorations that appeared outside of the artist. I shall call these "indirect gestation images".

Every year there are harvest festivals where the very best decorative breads are assembled aside bowls of fruit and garlands and other detailed weaves of natural expression. Often the individual elements are brought together into a display, and often the display can include strange but joyfully understandable human forms (see varied deep rural traditions), not the forms of small portable corn-dollies, but large Arcimboldoesque centre displays that include best fruits (and thus seeds), best food transformation skills (for example breads) and best craft skills (baskets, woven garland and pots) - in effect an assembled personification of a fecund community, mixing nature's talents with human talents. The anthropomorphic form is assembled from bowls, garlands and shapes in a way that would phase up into our historical hierarchy via some of our kitch rococos. Perhaps these small portable terracotta idols replicated important ancient harvest personifications, or, as mentioned in an associated post (below), perhaps they describe in miniature the assembled ornamental scene around an urn field or sepulture that is active during the period of a funeral. So diverse are the idols, that perhaps some were for ancestors and funerals and others for harvest and fecundity, and that today we mix them all together like a car-boot box with its mix of classical music and 'Top of the Pops'. With this hypothesis none of the idols would be bird inspired and the pyramidal central shapes would be measured aside other essential abstracted forms that held focus of a face - perhaps each identifying the shapes specific to ancient clans or speciality groups within new sedentary 'urban' conglomorates: pyramids, curves and points. 

Despite cultural norms for snowmen there are several repeated conventions. Snowmen are defined by how balls of snow compact together. Now, today's snowmen are ephemeral asides to a year's chapters - a little bit of carnavalesque for children and families during blankets of snow. Were the snowmen to have been highly important icons of harvest fertility or remembrance ancestors  then perhaps we may have created smaller terracotta icons that resembled their temporal apex. Obviously this is a thought-experiment and snow could not easily adapt for such an important cultural role, but as a thought-experiment it may help visualise the idea.

Similarities can be seen here with a hypothesis I put forward to explain the language of lines found in the Rouergat group of statue menhirs. Although there are over 3000km between the two areas (Syria and Aveyron/Tarn) they are both from a similar sheer of chronology - in through sedentary agriculture and out to reproduced metals. I proposed that many 'naked' blank standing stones had been decorated with a mix of garland, rope and ceramic additions to procure vivid images of ancestral giants (Cham des Bondons) and that the statue menhirs 'memorised' these forms and lines, remembering this 'craft designated visual style' in carved stone, once again producing 'indirect gestation images' that are neither pure schematic or natural description (as the natural description is of a semi abstract original). With both examples we may be seeing a desire to make a record of strong and yet inherently ephemeral cultural artefacts, and in so doing recording past traditions with new techniques. If this is the case, then the 'bird idols and the Rouergat statue menhirs both offer a glimpse into a deeper past, as much as a fixed chronological episode, and some of the slightly barren megalithic reproductions afforded in many of today's visualisations may lack expression, idiosyncrasy and local structure and ornament.

As might be expected there is some evidence of refinement of these idol forms over time, with the original jumbly 'bird Goddesses' perfecting and even 'humanising' or "schematizing'  into, for example, potential 'Astarte' forms - still retaining some of the original language, but easing it from its enthusiastically pastoral past of assembly into an indubitable deity for more urban hierarchical descriptions of the later ages of metal.

AJM 22.05.20

Taken on: December 27, 2019

Tags:

Agen

Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Agen

Bronze age

terracotta

Neolithic

prehistoric

Goddess

figurine

idol

Indirect line « less

Sets appears in: • Small details of prehistory

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