MR. PEARCE’S CABINET OF
CONTEMPORARY NEOLITHIC WONDERS
An Exhibit at the
Kwan Fong Gallery of Art and Culture
California Lutheran University
Thousand Oaks, California
August 5-August 28, 2006
A Review by Ernst F. Tonsing, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus, California Lutheran University
From Asia to Central and South America, and Scandinavia to the tip of Africa, our ancestors discovered language, relationships and fire, and set up wood trunks or stones for festivals and built corballed vaults covered by huge mounds of earth for their dead. Preoccupied as we are by our autos and iPods, blackberries and web blogs, it is almost impossible to encounter that realm so vastly different from ours that was once common to us all. Few of us, too, are able to observe the solstice at Stonehenge or join a noisy procession around the some 700 stones of Avebury Circle to experience ancient lives and ponder ancient minds.
Bridging ten thousand years to explore the Neolithic (“New Stone”) Age mind cannot be left just to archaeologists or scientists. This is where we need shamans, we call them artists, who conduct their investigations by intuition and evoke prehistoric existence through their art.
Michael Pearce, Assistant Professor of Art at California Lutheran University, formerly of Westmont College in Montecito, is one such visionary. He has traveled to most of the ancient Stone Age sites in the British Isles and Europe, and has long studied its cultures. In his current exhibit, “Mr. Pearce’s Cabinet of Contemporary Neolithic Wonders,” he invites us into a culture that is at once ancient and contemporary, and entices us to enter into a realm at once very strange, and very familiar.
Between Overton Hall and the Soiland Humanities Building on the campus of California Lutheran University, he has built a cross of thirty-three upright timbers, aligned to the points of the solstice. As they mount upwards, they evoke the stone or wood structures that once dotted the landscape of Europe that perhaps had celestial references. Entering double doors that hold the image of a stone disk with a central hole, it is as if one is diving through that hole into an archaic scene, inhabited by what, at first, seems to be a miscellany of works. But, a line on the floor unites opposite articles, and one begins to see correspondences of certain objects across the room.
Our Neolithic ancestors, suggests Pearce, were preoccupied by life itself. A beeswax mask of the artist looks out to other, intense faces that inhabit distant surfaces, and a desiccated deer’s tail, suggesting a male member, finds its feminine antithesis suspended on the far wall. A bucket filled with holed pebbles churned smooth by the movements of the sea hangs by a primitive chord woven of stinging nettle fibers. Below it, a square container containing partially perforated stones represents a separation in time, past from present. Hooked beneath photographs of artifacts are the objects themselves. (Under these hang tassels of paper listing phone numbers. An answering machine invites you to leave your wishes, dreams and responses.) Cabinets of stone, wood and yarn objects that look like they could have been held by the ancient peoples, leave one puzzling over their utility, or even their uselessness.
By means of these objects and by Pearce’s witty texts, one is invited to enter the mind of the peoples of the Stone Age culture, to reflect on movement. A stone suspended over a large disk of small stones, swirls in an ever minute spirals toward the center. The impression of a coiled, half decomposed snake evokes the spirals pecked in the wall slabs of menhirs and the stones set up like giant dining tables found from the Golan Heights in the Galilee to Jutland, Denmark, the Shetlands and the Orkneys. (Look carefully, and, facing down under it is the body of the snake itself above ashes.) Pearce tries to tease out of our subconscious the emotions of our Neolithic ancestors.
The ancient Neolithic people no doubt appreciated the beauty of nature about them, but they also contemplated death. Once alive, now dead, seahorses seemingly dance on a bar suspended in invisible water over the white salt of a sea bottom. A lonely moth flutters haplessly in a vast, copper sky, and a box of ashes and bones (we are assured that they are not human) is topped by a shard far more ancient than the bones, exactly like the archaeologists discovered it in a prehistoric grave. Ten mummified forms rest in plaster within pine boxes stacked one upon the other, like a vertical chambered tomb. Barely visible in the spaces between the boxes are what seem like age-old remains waiting for some resurrection into a Neolithic paradise. And, in a distant corner, a mound of wax-filled, cupped stones (here, white clay), presumably covers a chambered grave.
Neo, as in “new,” and Neolithic, as in “ancient,” this exhibit entices us, through the agency of artist Michael Pearce, to become, ourselves, a bridge over ten thousand years, and to be enriched and more human in our world.
