“The study of the remote future still seems to be as disreputable today as the study of the remote past was thirty years ago.”

— Freeman Dyson[i]

Donald Burgy’s work was included in many early museum shows of conceptual art, including “Concept Art” at the Stadtiches Museum in Leverkusen, Germany (1969); “Software” at the Jewish Museum in New York City (1970); and “Information” (MoMA, 1970). In the 1970s he was represented by the Sonnabend Galleries (New York/Paris) and I wrote about him for Artforum (“Participating in the Universe,” September 1974 issue). A highpoint of that period was the Addison Gallery of American Art’s 1970 publication of Art Ideas for the Year 4000 – a catalog and exhibition rolled into one, since all the pieces were short texts with a few simple diagrams. In his introduction, Jack Burnham noted the similarity of Burgy’s vision of art’s far future to the Glass Bead Game described by Herman Hesse in Magister Ludi, where “the facets of previous ‘high culture’ [become] an infinite variety of strategies and structures, permitting the use of 6^th Century BC Chinese temple plans as well as the harmonies of late-Beethoven quartets.”[ii] In this still-inspiring collection, Burgy tries to stretch our imaginations as far as possible without becoming unintelligible:

Art Idea for the Year 4000 #2

“Design a system which processes light laughter and dinner conversation through the evolving structure of a monitored weather front so that the output, which will be eaten as a sweet dessert, simultaneously corresponds in its organic properties to the weather structure as it occurs overhead. A ‘cookbook’ of favorite natural phenomena interface recordings may be played back for the dinner itself…”

Art Idea for the Year 4000 #5

“The artist causes information to occur in a system. Information is that content, form or process which is previously unknown and statistically unexpected.  The artist may use anything to transmit, carry and/or receive the information.  Examples:

[…]

C. “The artist designs a perception process which eliminates all of someone’s means of perceiving the world and self, and then provides immediate self-perception of his involuntary mental and physical functions, and thereafter, supports his new learning of experience and perception.

D. “The artist raises the level of information input to destroy a system that must reproduce itself by transmission and retention of its cultural accumulation. The information is in the form of continued increases of invention, variation, mutation, adaptation, alternatives, disobedience, novelty, as well as inhibitions of retention, reproduction, completion, perfection, internal compatibility, habit, custom, until the system is destroyed.

E. “The artist propagates billions of pairs of human reproductive cells to drift throughout the intergalactic space of the entire universe. Those cells which enter life-supporting heavenly bodies, in randomly-encountered galaxies, will grow into independently existing worlds.”

But international attention faded as Burgy focussed on working in and for his local context (Boston), in formats that were more or less uncollectable. After 1974 most of his energy went into social actions, performance events, lectures and teaching. His primary venue became the Studio for Interrelated Media at the Massachusetts College of Art until he retired from teaching in 2001. So although his work is essential for understanding the origins of Conceptualism – and he still makes groundbreaking pieces – he is only dimly remembered outside Boston.

Burgy studied with Allan Kaprow, Geoff Hendricks, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Watts at Rutgers University (MFA, 1963) and attended many early-60s art events in Manhattan. Fluxus showed him that experiences that are sufficiently startling or memorable do not need to be validated by traditions or institutions. But he rejected Fluxus’ anything-goes attitude and set off instead on a lifelong quest to find the most worthy purposes – and thus the deepest and most profound content – for art-making today.  In the 1960s he was particularly taken by the beginnings of space exploration and the effort to send men to the moon. He began pondering what kinds of art might be carried into the cosmos on long duration (perhaps permanent) migrations: ideally, something as weightless as an idea but gripping enough to be unforgettable, and “future-proof” so it never becomes obsolete. This reshaped his thinking about making art on Earth.

In 1966 Douglas Huebler hired Burgy to teach with him in the Bradford College art department, where their complementary personalities and friendly rivalry pushed both to innovate: they catalysed each another. But while Huebler’s interests remained sculptural, documentary and photographic, with a growing sense of irony about content, Burgy focused on content of increasing scope and generality, reducing his engagement with formal issues. Both realised that language made it possible to create artworks whose form and scale transcended observability and physical limits, but they took that opportunity in different directions.

Except for some photographic works and his return to representational painting in the 1980s, Huebler’s work rarely strayed far from the concerns of geometric sculpture (points, lines, measurements and siting). Like Ed Ruscha, he often chose mundane subjects (a group of geese photographed at one-minute intervals, icicles melting, etc.) to foreground his documentation scheme. The scheme itself often was subverted – made blatantly arbitrary or disfunctional – so the viewer could see that his purpose was not scientific:

Figure 1 – Douglas Huebler, Location Piece #2 (July 1969), collection Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Burgy, on the other hand, stopped differentiating art from science. He presented his medical file as a self-portrait in Burnham’s Software show[iii], chronicled his wife’s pregnancy (1969) and published “documentation of selected physical aspects of a rock” in Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: the Dematerialisation of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972… Many of his early pieces were collaborations with Robert Enzmann, a Raytheon scientist who started developing designs for interstellar vehicles (starships) in 1964.[iv]

In the 1970s Burgy said that he wanted to penetrate the future so forcefully that light reflected from his body would be blue-shifted off the end of the visible spectrum. So it may be surprising that his current work aims to penetrate the past so forcefully that it red-shifts off the other end of the spectrum. This could be why his attempts to decode paleolithic pictograms have not attracted much notice, even though it can be argued that he is following the same trajectory as before, with the same high ambitions, but in the opposite direction.

Burgy’s courses at Mass Art always included lectures on prehistory because he thought every art student should be aware of the importance of visual representation in humanity’s development. From hand signals during hunts, to map-scratching on the ground in support of travel route discussions, the ability to communicate visually has been as essential to our success as a species as the spoken word. So in the 1980s, to support his class lectures and growing personal interest in the subject, Burgy started collecting photographs and articles about the earliest images and artifacts made by hominids. This collection, which includes thousands of file cards and stacks of books and photocopies, now fills the basement of his home. It overlaps but is more inclusive than the EU-funded EuroPreArt Database.[v]

Thus he was well-equipped for the 1990s, that “improbably rich decade for the study of Paleolithic art,” as Archeology magazine put it,[vi] when spectacular new finds like the Chauvet cave in France revealed the extraordinary level of skill and sophistication attained by our predecessors – and how early this mastery was achieved. The impact of these prehistoric discoveries on Burgy was as great as the space programs of the 1960s.[vii]

Figure 2 – Animals represented in powdered minerals & charcoal on stone in France’s Chauvet cave. These are among the oldest, best preserved & most vivid of all known prehistoric cave paintings.

Chauvet has over 400 well-preserved pictures of animals made at least 31,000 years ago. Werner Herzog featured them in his 3D documentary film “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” (2010). However, like most people, Herzog focused on the animals rather than the puzzling signs and glyphs that accompany the pictures. Most of the known caves with animal paintings have similar glyphs on their walls – hand stencils, dots, geometric shapes, zig-zags and groups of lines that seem symbolic but whose meaning and purpose are unknown.

The animal depictions are obviously based on careful observation and are so well-rendered that they must arouse curiosity about their purpose, even though there is no way to know which explanation is correct. None of the authors is around to tell us what they mean.

André Leroi-Gourhan, on the other hand, considered the drawn symbols accompanying the animals “the most fascinating area of Paleolithic art.”  His book, translated into English as Treasures of Prehistoric Art (Abrams, 1967), was the first serious attempt to apply social scientific and structuralist techniques to their analysis. Five years later he dismissed his own analysis as too simplistic.[viii]

Figure 3 – Examples of paired/grouped signs found with cave paintings, from Leroi-Gourhan, Treasures of Prehistoric Art.

More recently, Genevieve von Petzinger and April Nowell compiled a database of the most common glyphs and symbols found in caves with animal depictions that date back more than 15,000 years. Their study of 200+ sites in France and Spain revealed that “these markings are no mere abstract scribbles but appear to be a code… 26 specific signs are used repeatedly in these caves, created in the millennia when Europe descended into – and emerged from – the last great Ice Age… [Many are] arranged in specific clusters repeated over and over again in different caves,”[ix] hinting at a system on the way to becoming writing. Since no sign appears everywhere and 70% of the sign types were used for longer than 25,000 years, conscious selection must have determined which signs were used in specific contexts.

Von Petzinger and Nowell’s work has since been extended to other continents and the same signs have been found as far away as Australia, India, Africa, North and South America, along with a few new ones.[x] In the following image, the most common signs frame a map of the world. The online version of this graphic is clickable: click on a symbol and the map shows where it has been found:

Figure 4 – From G. von Petzinger, “Geometric Signs and Symbols in Rock Art: A New Understanding,” Bradshaw Foundation, http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/geometric_signs/geometric_signs.php

The markings identified by Leroi-Gourhan and von Petzinger/Nowell certainly seem symbolic – but of what? Global distribution poses further problems: how did these symbols spread so widely? Were their meanings the same everywhere? Is there a Rosetta Stone that might be found someday, to help us figure out the code? And if there is, would we recognise it?

That era also left many marks engraved into hard surfaces, from mere scratches to bas reliefs. Some seem decorative, others the byproduct of a different activity (making needles, for example). But some seem representational, like this small bone plaque from Abri Blanchard in France, dated as 31,000 years old. In the right half, a meandering sequence of tiny incised pits appears to record shapes shifting from a full circle to a crescent and back again several  times. Alexander Marshack argues that it represents phases of the moon observed over half a year, since microscopic examination of the pits suggests that 24 different points were used in a series of work sessions:[xi]

Figure 5 – Marshack’s schematic of the marks engraved on the Abri Blanchard bone plaque (shown in the photograph above the diagram).  The shapes of individual marks are highlighted in colors that indicate tool changes. Courtesy of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum.[xii]

 Marshack believed ancient humans were as obsessed with “time-factoring” celestial events as the “scientists who were planning the lunar and planetary shots of the space program.”[xiii] Our early ancestors probably monitored changes in the night sky as closely as they watched nearby animals, but Marshack has been criticised for finding lunar calendars in any artifact that looks like a notation.

Skepticism is an appropriate response to any interpretation of the earliest signs. So even though speculation about meanings is a popular pastime among archeologists, they are strongly discouraged from publicising their conjectures or claiming their interpretations are scientific:

“Palaeoarts can be studied scientifically, but this is not served by striving to determine a quality that cannot be determined, such as meaning. We can either find out what else science can do, and can do properly – or we can abandon the rigour of science and take a shortcut to ‘meaning’…

“Rock art interpretation is highly stimulating, it enriches our experience and it can enrich our own art, culture and existence. It can help us create more myths about the past… Provided that in the process we do not belittle any other culture or inflict any damage on the rock art, there can be no objection to such quests – as long as we make no attempt of presenting them as science.”[xiv]

The authenticity and importance of these ancient artifacts are now widely appreciated. That we have records at all from so far back in time is almost a miracle. However, it is fair to say that the products of that era raise as many questions as they answer about who we are and how we came to be. Evidence to support or refute particular claims about prehistoric pictures or signs should come from scientific research. But deciphering their meanings is a task clearly beyond today’s science. However, the effort is worthwhile nonetheless, and not beyond the limits of art. Indeed, speculation is art’s strong suit. Even if the interpretations can never be verified, they can still be culturally useful, thought provoking or valuable as exercises of imagination – not unlike scenario constructions for businesses or Armand Schwerner’s Tablets.[xv] Some of Burgy’s early pieces (Self, the Rock series, etc.) emulated science.  His current work celebrates art’s greater freedom to interpret, speculate and imagine.

What might have initially seemed unpromising territory – groups of short lines that cross and converge – configurations that might be just accidental, not representing anything – proved to be fertile ground for speculation. Burgy came to believe that some deliberately engraved lines represent fibers. The process of twisting fibers to make ropes and twines might thus be represented by “twist signs,” where lines merge or one line is splayed out, as if to make a snare. Groups of such lines might represent pouches, nets or weavings – or they might be a reference to the people who made them:  women, most likely. If a line represents a woman, meaningful stories can be distilled from virtually any configuration of lines.  If a line’s length and curvature show the woman’s age or importance, inter-relationships among the lines become archetypal female narratives – mother and daughter, spinster and maiden, etc. In some of his recent narratives, Burgy proposes that the myth of the Three Fates –

“presiding over past, present and future by spinning the substance of time into becoming, being and what has been. They spin birth, measure life’s span and cut the thread at death. They are outside time while overseeing it…”[xvi]

–  he suggests even that myth can be read in the lines because it is primordial, predating and giving rise to the Germanic myth of the Three Norns, the Greek myth of the Three Moirai and Roman myth of the Three Parcae.

Several of his scratch interpretations – including those presented here – have been published in anthropological journals, where they proved highly controversial.[xvii] Although internally consistent and based on plausible, even insightful assumptions, they still tread “where angels fear to tread” – into a domain that most people think belongs to science but that most scientists think is inappropriate or futile. Meanwhile, the paleolithic era remains a crucial chapter in our history and we must try to make sense of it, even if we can only speculate about purposes and meanings.

The following illustrated text – “Reading Europe’s Paleolithic Writing” – was exhibited in 2008 as a set of panels at the Axiom Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a group show called “Collision 13.”

Burgy’s recent work complements and balances the extreme futurism and science-love of his early work, and revives a temporal orientation that most artists seem to have forgotten – not nostalgic, or timely, or self-consciously avant-garde, but timeless, like the Fates.[xviii]

Figure 6 – Douglas Huebler, Robert Horvitz and Donald Burgy in 1976 (photo by Gus Kayafas)

…………………………………..

[i] Freeman Dyson, “Time Without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe,” Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol. 51, No. 3 (July 1979), http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Global/Omega/dyson.txt

[ii] Jack Burnham, introduction to Art Ideas for the Year 4000 by Donald Burgy, Addison Gallery of American Art, 1970.

[iii] Originally titled “Self: Documentation of Mental and Physical Characteristics of Donald Burgy (January 1969),” this piece was published as “Check-up” in Art in America (March-April 1970).

[iv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enzmann_starship

[v] http://www.europreart.net/

[vi] Malin Banyasz, Jarrett A. Lobell, and Eric A. Powell, “60 Years of Discovery,” Archeology, Volume 61 Number 3 (May/June 2008) – http://archive.archaeology.org/0805/abstracts/60years.html

[vii] Jerry Salz expresses a similar feeling in “The Most Powerful Artwork I Have Ever Seen,” Vulture (January 2015), http://www.vulture.com/2015/01/most-powerful-artwork-i-have-ever-seen.html

[viii] André  Leroi-Gourhan, “Considérations sur l’organization spatiale des figures animales dans l’art pariétal paléolithique,” in Martín Almagro Basch y Miguel Ángel García Guinea (eds.), Simposium internacional de arte rupestre, Santander-Asturias, 1970  (Ministerio de Cultura, Madrid, 1973), pages 281-308.

[ix] Robin McKie, “Did Stone Age cavemen talk to each other in symbols?” The Guardian, 11 March 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/mar/11/cave-painting-symbols-language-evolution

[x] The online Encyclopedia of Stone Age Art has much more information about each symbol’s occurrence pattern – http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/prehistoric/abstract-signs.htm

[xi] Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man’s First Art, Symbol and Notation, McGraw-Hill (1972), page 45

[xii] This schematic and the accompanying photograph are from Daniel Rosenberg, “Marking Time,” Cabinet 28 (winter 2007-8), http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/28/rosenberg.php

[xiii] Op. cit., page 24.  Marshack’s first published book was The World in Space: The Story of the International Geophysical Year, T. Nelson (1958). His interest in paleology came a few years later when NASA asked him to research the historical roots of the Apollo moon mission.

[xiv] Robert Bednarik, “Creating futile iconographic meanings,” International Federation of Rock Art Organisations (2001), http://www.ifrao.com/creating-futile-iconographic-meanings/

[xv] http://www.amazon.com/The-Tablets-Armand-Schwerner/dp/0943373565

[xvi] Donald Burgy, “A Homo Erectus Clam Shell Engraving” (December 9, 2015)

[xvii] Three were published under the title “Reading Europe’s Paleolithic Writing” in the Comparative Civilizations Review, issue number 51 (fall 2004), https://ojs.lib.byu.edu/spc/index.php/CCR/article/view/12880/12744;  issue number 53 ( fall 2005), https://ojs.lib.byu.edu/spc/index.php/CCR/article/view/12905/12769, and the one reprinted here from issue number 56 (spring 2007), https://ojs.lib.byu.edu/spc/index.php/CCR/article/view/13072/12933.

[xviii] Bruce Sterling, “Atemporality for the Creative Artist,” Wired (February 2010), http://www.wired.com/2010/02/atemporality-for-the-creative-artist/

Art, Creativity, Culture, Drawing, Nature