HOW ART MADE THE WORLD : EPISODE 1, MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN

The main theme of this episode is about how people have rarely created images of the body that are realistic. Through the ages artists have been obsessed with the human form. The range of bodies they have created is breathtaking, but yet they share one thing in common... none of these images resembles a real human being.

“More Human than Human” begins with the Venus of Willendorf and asks why human artists seem to have an inexplicable tendency, cross culturally, to create images of the human body that are exaggerated in proportions. The sculpture is a small Venus figure that have exaggerated breasts, hips and sexual organs. These exaggerations are clear symbols of fertility, however what is interesting is how the artist ignored other parts of the body, such as her face and arms. 

Moving forward several thousand years. The Egyptians, who valued consistency and order in their society, abandoned the exaggerations of their ancestors and chose to use a mathematical approach to creating images of the body. They chose to show each part of the body from its clearest angle, becoming their recognizable style and preserved this style for thousands of years.

When the Ancient Greek’s culture came into contact with the Egyptians, this ignited an artistic revolution across the Greek city states. The Greek culture wanted a more realistic representation of the figure of young men (kore), standing statistically upright, and was accurately proportionate. But it wasn’t long before the sculptors began to produce what we now think of as “classical” Greek bodies. What is so fascinating about the statues is that they aren’t proportioned naturally; rather, they are exaggerated proportionally (i.e., real human beings don’t look like that!). They abandoned this ultra-realism preferring exaggerated representations of the body based on the aesthetic theories created by Polycleitus such as the Riace Bronzes.

Anyway, in comes neurologist V.S. Ramachandran to explain how our brains respond to certain stimuli with pleasure. Spivey illustrates with a species of seagull from the west coast of Spain, whose chicks respond to a red stripe on their mother’s bill during feeding. The chicks respond more vigorously if presented with a dummy-head with three red stripes! In other words, it seems that our brains respond to certain aspects of our bodies, and they REALLY respond to those same aspects when exaggerated. It is a neurological principle known as the peak shift. In essence our brain is hard-wired to focus upon parts of objects with pleasing associations. So if you were an artist, the tendency would be to reproduce human figures with parts that mattered the most to you.

Prehistoric artists were clearly caught up in peak shift tendencies, creating exaggerated statues like the famed Venus of Willendorf. For their part, the Egyptians preferred a more stylized, order-obsessed human figure, only to have the Greeks break out and create fantastically heroic — but totally unrealistic — images like the Riace Bronzes.

The programme concludes by saying what we choose to exaggerate “is where the magic comes in” and the choice of what to exaggerate has changed over the centuries to match changing human values. 

I finally came to the realization that in reality, we humans don't really like reality - we prefer exaggerated, more human than human, images of the body. This is a shared biological instinct that appears to link us inexorably with our ancient ancestors. And so around the world, human beings produce art that is “more human than human.” Cool.