America’s Most Wanted (dishwasher size), Komar and Melamid (1994)

This book tackles the relation between current art practices and drives (‘instincts’) established in the Pleistocene era, when humans as we currently know them first appeared. It argues that these drives originally had an evolutionary purpose, including sexual selection and other factors affecting ‘survival of the fittest’. But just what is this ‘fitness’?

Evidently it refers to successful competition for a mate, and to other attributes that helped our ancestors to survive the trials of prehistoric life. But it can also explain apparent anomalies, like the male peacock’s cumbersome tail, which requires great resources to produce, and led to a ‘fitter’ individual. Not only did such factors have ‘survival value’ in demonstrating superior fitness, but, according to Dutton, also benefited the group through enhanced communication and the ability to enter into other people’s minds. Dutton’s thesis is that these needs or impulses connect to our experience of art, both as creators and spectators, and provide evidence for what he calls a ‘Darwinian aesthetics’. This links modern art experiences to the formative period of human nature, and so attempts to justify art at its root. Ellen Dissanayake’s ‘Homo Aestheticus’ follows a similar line but with a less pronounced evolutionary slant. However, Dutton’s book is robustly argued and would provide an excellent introduction for anyone not yet familiar with the field.

Early in the book, Dutton deals with the issue of our collective preferences for certain types of landscape (wittily condensed in a reproduced Komar & Melamid painting ‘America’s Most Wanted’ (1994)). Let’s take for granted the plausible hypothesis that our Pleistocene ancestors found certain types of savannah landscape attractive, mainly for reasons of survival. There is, however, what could be called a gradient of causality between Palaeolithic preferences for certain landscapes, our current and actual enjoyment of these, and the liking for fairly literal representations of them in art. At what point does what began as ‘evolutionary adaptation’ translate into something so far removed from its origin that the term has questionable explanatory value? The ‘survival’ here might be less to do with the evolutionary pressures once applied to humans and more to do with something that has become an irrelevant atavism.

David MacLagan http://www.escapeintolife.com/essays/the-art-instinct/