Drawing the Global
Marcelo Guimarães Lima
Art and Globalization: the context of art in the early 21st century, paper on the Global Drawing project at Crossing The Line Conference, 2015, SACI, Florence, Italy
Considering the oldest documents of parietal art, around 30.000 years BCE in Europe, we can state that drawing, that is, the inscription of lines and other graphic marks on surfaces as a meaning-making activity, as a way of communication, as a way for the creation of aesthetic forms (and these aspects are certainly not isolated but integrated in specific ways in the early activity of drawing and its products) is as old as humanity. Or, as old as that stage of humanity in which the need arose for more structured, stable forms of communication among humans, and also of communication between humans and other domains of reality with their beings or entities, domains that have been retrospectively called “sacred” or “religious”. According to some specialists, the notion of contacts with a supersensible reality describes a possible context for the understanding of Pre-historic cave art.
And that stage of more complex communicative demands is related to the development of language and tool making, that is, to the interrelated developments of verbal communication (in the context of a previous, more or less stabilized language of gestures) and of early technology. This is the first or original instance to characterize the “universality” of drawing historically distributed in time and space.
Like language itself that once developed became the means by which humans are defined and define themselves, the conscious forms of graphic creations serving different and related needs contribute to the organization of human beings’ relationship to human beings, that is to both self and other, and their relationship to the world, to the development of human time and the creation of both ideal and material human spaces.
One of the important characteristics of early parietal art, as well as later artworks in rocks and caves, such as the art of Australian aborigines, is that of mapping reality, instituting boundaries and outlining territories, defining group identities by organizing space, providing coordinates that relate the local and the universal, connecting everyday spaces, specialized spaces of identity and survival, to nature, to the cosmos, to the universal structures that sustain and provide directions and also meanings to human life.
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