Whitney Davis
(University of California, Berkeley)
A Thin Red Line: The Presence of Prehistoric Pictoriality

The magnificent cave paintings at Chauvet, Altamira, and elsewhere depict great animals - bison, lions, and so on. But do they make them 'present' beyond depiction - as virtual beings in the immersive visual space of the caves? With reference to these challenging prehistoric examples, the lecture examines the relationship - the tension - between the 'presence' of things depicted and the 'presence' of the depictive process itself, engaging a fundamental question in the anthropology of images and the iconology of depiction.