Last week archaeologists discovered the oldest yet cave painting in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Dating from more than 51 000 years ago, it pictures a pig surrounded by three figures.

While the article that discussed the discovery lamented the “poor condition” of the painting because much of the pigment had chipped away, that conclusion assumes that art works are fast frozen in time and not material objects which bear the traces of the forces of natural and social history. If we treat artworks as what they really are, material interventions into the natural order of things still subject to the forces that erode mountain ranges and carve canyons, there is no reason to lament its state. The erosion is part of the painting as it is right now. Just as the cracks in the varnish of Albert Pinkham Ryder’s paintings have ceased to be mistakes and become integral to their aesthetic power:

or the faded and chipped appearance of the frescoes in Tatlarin constitute rather than detract from their beauty

so too the effect of natural forces on our ancestor’s creation. Whatever the painting looked like when it was completed 51 000 years ago, today it looks precociously abstract: the art work continues to develop and evolve long after the artist(s) and their original intentions have died.

Something similar must be said about the content of the work. The anthropologists who have been studying it have been concerned to decode the story that the painting is telling. Perhaps it served some ritual function: did it celebrate a successful hunt? try to summon spirits that would ensure a successful hunt? Those are legitimate questions, but the answers to them are quite beside the point when it comes to appreciating the picture as a painting. I am sure that it tells a story and it probably had some ritual function, but paintings are not stories or religious rites: they are the visible irruption of the activity of human imagination into natural space.

What we think of as art today— the studied creation of pieces by a distinct class of producers whose products are intended for a consumable performance, sale, or display in a museum– had its origins in the Renaissance. But art work at the deepest level is the reconfiguration of the material content of the human sensorium by its imaginative organization. The surface of the cave is just rock…. until someone thinks of its as an empty space on which something which exists as yet no where in the universe save the imagination of the painter could be inscribed. As soon as that surface appeared to them as a possibility-space for a potential painting, it ceased to be limestone (or whatever) of such and such dimensions. Its being as a possibility-space for possible inscription confronts the painter with a new set of problems. Not: what is the chemistry of limestone, but: how will this pigment appear when it is applied to this substance? Not: what is the surface area of this stretch of cave, but: how can I distribute the figures that I imagine in the most pleasing way? Not: will anthropologists 51 000 years from now be able to see that I (we) am (are) painting a pig and three figures? but: how can I transcribe my idea into material markings that have effects on those who will see it?

The art work consists in imagining how that possibility-space can be filled. Where should the representation of the pig be placed relative to the figures? How should the activity of the figures be depicted? What colours should be used, and how much of the space should be painted and how much left blank? Whatever else the painter(s) thought about, the re-organization of the possibility-space of the painting surface had to be the fundamental problem. Maybe they were invoking spirits or giving thanks (or maybe they were just having fun at the expense of future anthropologists who will attribute all sorts of meanings to these marks which for them had none). Whatever else they thought that they were doing, they had to relate to material and space as it was given by geological forces and geometry as a set of constraints within which whatever they imagined in mind could be brought to life.

Art is not first and foremost story-telling or ritual, it is the doubling of physical reality in imagination. Art operates in the possibility-space that arises in and from natural space when artists relate to its giveness as an invitation to make something out of it. Even when paintings are made to look “just like” real objects, they are not the same (as Rene Magritte’s “ceci ce n’est pas une pipe,” painted beneath his panting of a pipe reminds everyone who sees it).

A flute played so as to sound like a bird call is not a bird call, and– as beautiful as some bird calls might be– they are not songs, properly speaking, because they were not conceived in imagination first by the bird. Although some birds may mimic other birds and there might be individuality in the expression of their songs, they cannot decide to break with tradition and invent a new mode of singing beyond their instinctual repertoire.

But I do not come to criticize birds, but to celebrate human creativity …

which goes all the way back to when we first became human beings. We carry music in our chests, in the rhythmic life-beat of our hearts. We carry painting and sculpture and poetry in our eyes, which are pleased by shape, texture, colour, and resemblance, and world-making power in our minds, which are free to re-arrange everything that can appear in a visual field or as a meaningful thought according to a formal order it alone can imagine.

When budgetary pushes come to shoves, as they inevitably do, art is usually classified as a luxury that can be cut without causing real damage to those who are deprived of the fruits of works that will not be created or shared. But this magnificent gift of our ancestors should remind us that art-making is as human a need and practice as hunting or growing food. Who knows how the painter(s) fellow cave-dwellers thought about the piece, but its existence tells us that they did not stop them from painting it. They did not say “get off your arse and go out and hunt pigs rather than waste your time painting them.” Even if some of them thought that, the thought was not translated into practice. Happily, “Pig with Circling Figures” now speaks to us beyond the grave of the creator(s).

Art and science should not be counterposed and set in competition with each other. Both have the same root: the human capacity to experience the world as patterned and meaningful. However, we humans suffer from a peculiar affliction of valuing ourselves too lowly. We have projected our own powers first onto the gods (as Feuerbach diagnosed) and now to our own creations. No doubt word and image assembly machines like Chat-GPT are extraordinary confirmations of the creative intelligence of human beings. But they themselves are not creative. They have never seen anything in their mind’s eye that was so compelling that they felt forced to rub pigment into a cave wall. To create is first of all to initiate action in response to an imagined possibility of such power that one feels — is moved by–the need to risk the judgements of those with whom one shares it. Chat-GPT has never felt anything, and if people ceased to prompt it, it would have nothing to say.