Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Georges Bataille’s encounter with the Lascaux caves in 1953-54 was an important influence on his late-career thought. Rather than regarding the Upper Paleolithic cave artists as evolutionarily inferior to modern humans, as was the dominant interpretive mode of the era, Bataille looked upon them as utterly unfamiliar beings whose metaphysical footings could not be understood in post-Enlightenment rationalist terms. He was particularly curious about the artists’ animal-centered cosmic universe and believed that the ‘shock’ of confronting this through the experience of the caves could act as a corrective to contemporary humanity’s marginalization and instrumentalization of nature. Bataille also believed that the transformative potential of the caves would decrease over time as they became popular tourist destinations. The following paper analyzes Bataille’s musings on a 1940 group photograph, taken at the entrance of Lascaux, commemorating its discovery. The experience captured in the photograph would never return: the power of first discovery was only available once, with the photograph the only tangible trace of its existence and meaning..