Venus by Hope Ezcurra
THE VENUS - written by Hope Ezcurra
Art is arguably the central expression of our humanity. Different cultures and time periods are often defined by the art that they produce. Yet for such a crucial aspect of civilization, it is a fairly young concept. Modern human beings have been on this planet for perhaps 200,000 years (1).
The earliest archeological evidence of human depiction in prehistoric sculptural art is perhaps 38,000-33,000 years old. She is a pneumatic, palm sized, female figurine. Without any written history to accompany her, one cannot say if she was made for ‘art for art’s sake’, ritual object or something else.
But no matter her utility, there is very obvious artistry involved in her creation. Her tiny head and feet are aesthetic anchors to the vertical momentum created by her corporeal midsection. She possesses a savage raw beauty. The Venus of Hohle Fels, as modern scholars have named her, is only the first in a cadre of similar statuettes from this time period. Over 200 other Venus figurines from the upper paleolithic, the last part of the early stone age, echo her appearance with almost memantic repetition. They all have exaggerated feminine features, are portably small (potentially a side effect of their owners’ nomadic lifestyles), and were made from extremely durable materials.
The moniker comes from the original interpretation of them as prehistoric fertility goddesses. Sadly, without a time machine, there really is no way to know what they represented. This has not stopped scholars from speculating though; It has been postulated that they were “goddess figures, religious or shamanistic objects, or symbols of a matriarchal social organization”(2). The only thing that we can be certain of, based on their numbers, the repetitive imagery, and their long lasting construction, is that they were important to these people.
My favorite of these so-called Venus figurines, is probably the most iconic of them, the Venus of Willendorf. She was found in present day Austria; now she is part of the permanent collection of the Viennese Natural History Museum. At 25,000 years old, she is one of the youngest prehistoric venuses. She and her Hohle Fels counterpart are separated by almost the same amount of time as we, in 2020, are to the invention of the wheel. Although there are obvious visual parallels between the two, the Venus of Willendorf shows a greater symmetry and a much gentler slope. My favorite design element though is that her face is blank. The fine detail work on her head covering shows me that whomever made her was capable of creating facial features, yet they did not. I can imagine two reasons for this choice. Either they did not want to pull attention away from the vertical flow they had created by tapering her at head and feet and/or they wanted the sculpture’s identity to be malleable to the needs of its beholder. So unless they left her face blank because they ran out of time, I find her blank face to be a great compliment to the visual intelligence of her maker. It's incredible to me that the artisan and I are separated by millenia yet we share similar inclinations. While we can not call her art with any accuracy, it would be subversive to the artistic intelligence that went into making her. I see reverberations of it throughout the history of art.
Garber, Megan. “Confirmed: The Oldest Known Art in the World Is Spray-Painted Graffiti.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 8 Oct. 2014, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/10/humanitys-earliest-art-was-spray-painted-graffiti/381259/.
Gotthardt, Alexxa. “Why Prehistoric Venus Figurines Still Mystify Experts.” Artsy Editorial, Artsy.net, 3 July 2019, www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-prehistoric-venus-figurines-mystify-experts.