When Art is not Art: Deer Skulls, Making Special and Neuroarchaeology

I have these creative urges, every so often I feel the need to carve wood or similar. But I have shied away from conventional art; you know the sort of thing – sitting down with brushes and a canvas for the sole purpose to frame it and put it on a wall.

What I do is solely for the creative process rather than the end result, mainly whittling, but also finding wood and other materials to work with. I admit I do put the finished article on Instagram @walkaboutandwhittles so I suppose, in a way it does become an art-form which is viewed, and that egocentric need for "likes". But, that aside, the motivation behind the creative act is not to make money, or to put the finished piece in a gallery, but to allow the image that was once in my mind to become a physical thing; or in some cases to simply create with no idea of what the finished product will look like. 

I am currently working on some deer skulls that I have collected over the last year. I decided one day to paint them, in part inspired by Mexican skulls, but mainly as I felt inspired to augment the skulls or as Ellen Dissanayake* says, “make special”. 

As I began to paint the skulls, I found that my ego started to lesson its hold on the process, and as I started to explore the undulations of the skulls that the notion of art had disappeared and I was left with this higher purpose, almost as if I was honouring the spirit of the Deer that once inhabited the skull. 

In that instant I started to see art and “making special” in a more prehistoric format, in which anything remotely intellectual or sophisticated disappeared. “Art” or whatever I was doing had, suddenly, a different purpose, related to a different sense of consciousness, to connect with nature, with the spirit of the deer, perhaps even with something more mysterious and undefinable, something shamanic...

At that point I considered how I would display this “art”, and first of all I was going to hang it on my front gate so I could give the impression of voodoo, but soon concluded this idea was foolish;  then I thought of putting it in a local wood which gets lots of footfall so people would see the skulls, and it would be like an “art installation” and people would wonder who did this and to what purpose, I might even trend on Instagram and Twitter. But I felt this was again not right, it felt disrespectful to the deer and disingenuous to the process which I had engaged with.

So, I decided that, when the skulls were finished, I would simply take them back to the woods from whence they came, hanging them in the trees. There is some precedence for this in the Native American culture which I saw in a Ray Mears TV program, they would attach skulls to the trees of the animals they hunted to show others so that further hunting would not deplete the local population. 

As for my deer skulls, I was sure that no one would ever see them again, but that was now unimportant; the whole “value” of the act, was in the specific sense of ritual, or ceremony – I had taken from the forest and I had made the skulls “special” and now I was going to replace them back in the forest, deep in the woods, where no one would ever see them again.

It reminded me very much of the mystery of Chauvet Cave (France) when a prehistoric person created a tremendous display of animal representations, then left them. The case wasn't a gallery, it wasn't a prehistoric cinema, it wasn’t a place of continual ritual purpose, and the artist wasn't even an artist...the “art” wasn’t created to be seen and studied or admired. It was a one-off act of creation. It was an “act” rather than “art”.

Although substantially less skilled that the painter of Chauvet Cave, I was nevertheless starting to feel the same way in my own whittling and collecting things from the woods (and painting skulls). I concluded that, in exploring my own need to be creative (as I had done previously in my barefoot running) I had inadvertently conducted an experiment in “neuroarchaeology”, aligning my own thought processes, however temporarily, to those of prehistoric man.

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*see Ellen Dissanayake (1995) Homo astheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why