Seven artworks
Unknown Artists (Crow, Hopewell, Mississippian, Ojibwe, Plains Archaic, Plains Village, Woodland)
Unknown Artists (Crow), Unknown Artists (Plains Archaic), Unknown Artists (Plains Village), Unknown Artists (Woodland). Pictograph Cave. 1st-18th century (50%)
Billings, MT: Pictograph Cave State Park
It’s difficult if not impossible to appraise this site for its actual pictographs, as these are mostly, sadly, faded beyond visibility. (Something like 80% of the images that were here in the thirties, when the cave was first excavated, are now gone completely.) What can be judged — which is a crucial aspect of the actual form of any in situ artwork like this — is the site itself, which both frames and is framed by the pictures. The cave cuts into the side of a light tan cliff that sits above a dry field (opposite which are more cliffs), but it’s tucked away slightly due to the shape of the hills and is quite shrouded by vegetation (which may or may not have been present throughout the artistic life of the site). You therefore enter into the image’s field from a distinct, demarcated outside, which nevertheless remains open and potentially visible at your back. The elevation of the caves is insubstantial but aesthetically significant: situated just above an expanse that’s below them, the pictures invite broad speculation of the world beyond, yet refuse completely to be of this world. The site therefore makes the pictographs seem to be both inside and outside of reality; such liminality is something like a prerequisite for the aesthetic success of any image. However, we’re left to conjecture about (and certainly not to experience) any particular formal relationships between this artwork and where it’s located, as the images themselves are destroyed.
Unknown Artists (Hopewell). Great Circle Earthwork. 100 BCE-400 CE (95%)
Heath, OH: 455 Hebron Road
This is far and away the greatest prehistoric earthwork in North America, more significant aesthetically than any of the Woodland effigies that dot Ohio and Iowa and Wisconsin, more magnificent than even the Mississippian mounds at Cahokia. Its greatness resides partly in its size, partly in the rare state of its preservation. It is an enormous circle — you could play several games of football inside it — enclosed by a bump and a ditch, with an entryway at one end and a squat eagle sculpted in relief at its center. Between the outsides of this eagle and any edge of the enclosing circle lie 100 feet of flat ground or more. To experience the earthwork is to feel both placeless and precisely located at once. The walls of the circle and the bird at its core articulate a site — obviously a sacral site — that’s distinct from the world outside it, but then when you’re inside you’re put at a remove from these very forms that have created your “inness”: the ditch around the interior of the circle makes the arcing wall beyond it into something of a figment, literally out of reach; the expanse of grass in all directions swallows the animal and the moat and the wall altogether, and you along with them. It may be that there was more going on in the circle’s center — structures, ceremony — when it was in living use some millennia ago, but that’s lost to us. What remains is a place that alienates as it ensconces and even soothes us, that bares all the bigness and latency of existence while making us feel dwarved before it, but also involved. There’s religion to this, though absent (stripped, perhaps, by the years) of any pretence to theology — it’s a deep humanity.
Unknown Artists (Mississippian). Aztalan Mounds. 11th-12th century (48%)
Jefferson, WI: Aztalan State Park
Aztalan is like the Cahokia site’s scrawny little brother. It’s lesser aesthetically in part because of the smaller size both of its major features and of its total footprint, and in part because its mounds are less distinct in themselves as sculptural forms in addition to appearing less precisely located in their relation to each other. The result is that one does not get the same intuitive sense of these ancient people’s relationship with space and the land as one gets at Cahokia. This could have something to do as well with the poor landscaping at Aztalan, which when I saw it was overgrown in a way that made the site, to its detriment, seem less like an urban plan and more like a corn maze.
Unknown Artists (Ojibwe). Agawa Pictographs. 17th-18th century (60%)
Algoma, Ontario: Lake Superior Provincial Park
As with many North American pictograph sites, the drawings at Agawa are quite deteriorated, though you can still make out a handful of forms, notably a striking Mishpesu (mythical water lynx) figure. In its heyday the rock wall was likely a teeming palimpsest of pictures in ochre, but today it’s barely a few disconnected tableaus of limited pictorial interest. (Each figure, firmly limned, has some serious graphic power, but there are way too few of them for the amount of wall they take up; they’re swimming in space.) What remains aesthetically significant, however, is the location itself: the cliff overlooks Lake Superior, a little archipelago and an inlet to one side of the drawings and nothing but water stretching out towards the horizon on the other. The presence of the pictographs turns this vista into something picture-like itself. It becomes a component of your experience of the drawings in what ultimately seems to have been a futile attempt by the artists to bridle — to make legible or safe — the awful enormity of nature. If what survives of the Agawa Pictographs is not itself great art, they carry the residue of a gesture that is fundamentally artistic.
Unknown Artists (Woodland). High Cliff Effigy Mounds. 6th-10th century (64%)
Sherwood, WI: High Cliff State Park
There’s a mystical feel to this site that may or may not have anything to do with the mounds themselves as works of art. These earthworks are in a thin, spacious forest, the canopy of which lets in thin beams of light that dapple the shadowed ground, giving all the sculpted bison and cougars a spectral, motile appearance, as if they’re midway through some sort of other-dimensional transit. But evidence suggests that moundbuilders kept their sites clear of much growth, so the interesting arboreal light effects are actually an imposition on the mounds by their current stewards. What isn’t an imposition is the deliberate hypertrophy of their forms, which makes them more satisfying to circumambulate. A cougar might have little nubs for legs and a head, but a tail that stretches some 100 feet or more, forcing you to experience its physical presence long after you’ve adequately conceptualized and incorporated its representational content.
Unknown Artists (Woodland). Koshkonong Mounds. 7th-11th century (59%)
Fort Atkinson, WI: Indian Mounds Park
Over the years (mostly due to white settlement), this site has been reduced from some two or three hundred earthworks ringing a small lake to a crop of about a dozen on a hill up above the water. The destruction of the other hundred or two mounds, many of which were likely effigies, is a tragedy, as the remnants barely hint at what the full circumference of relief sculptures might have been like to experience some thousand years ago. What does remain, however, makes it clear that each mound, while being an enclosed sculptural form, is not a whole and discrete aesthetic unit (that is, an artwork) but rather a component of the total work which is (or would have been) the entire Koshkonong Mounds site. To speak about one’s experience of this site, then, is to deal with the impossibility of experiencing anything more substantial than a scrap of the old Woodland makers’ original intent — not just because so many of the mounds have been lost, but because it’s impossible to know whether the artists would have preferred the grass around their sculptures to be high or trimmed, the trees removed from or growing up out of their squat cougars and turtles and cones. The author of the site as it is today, then, is almost as much the landscapists of the Wisconsin State Parks system as it is the ancient people who piled up this dirt into figures. Still, the vague, ghostly presence which the existing mounds have — their selective attenuations and exaggerations of forms; the difficulty of actually seeing them in any meaningful way since they’re so big yet so low to the ground — is undeniable.
Unknown Artists (Woodland). Peterborough Petroglyphs. 10th-14th century (84%)
Woodview, Ontario: Petroglyphs Provincial Park
This is among the rare prehistoric sites in North America that are not merely of historical interest, but that offer up the possibility of significant aesthetic experience. It’s a slightly inclined bed of stone that has been incised with hundreds of petroglyphs, the oldest of which date from the 9th century CE and many of which overlap or otherwise interact. (I don’t include an image of the site itself because present-day Anishanaabeg people in the region claim the petroglyphs as sacred and prohibit photography.) To be sure, a portion of the site’s effect derives from the way it’s been “framed” — figuratively but also literally — as an object for aesthetic contemplation by the Ontario Provincial Parks system: around the petroglyphs has been built a large glass protective structure with, inside, an elevated walkway that allows visitors to circumambulate the images at a safe distance. The building turns the profusion of symbols into something of a “picture,” with distinct edges, planarity, and an aspect of separation from its environment. This would be a greater detriment to the work were there not a significant pictorial element to the limestone outcropping itself which these ancient people chose to incise, which is clearly if irregularly rimmed by foliage and thus serves as a delimited surface for the composition to unfold. I say “unfold” because the presently existing glyphs were created over many generations of continual addition and transformation, and I say “composition” because it is clear that these additions, despite their remove from each other in time, were executed with an evident sense for the interactions between the various discrete images, and for the overall unity of their combination. This unity manifests especially in the way larger, more deeply cut pictograms clump and cluster to give way to layered passages of smaller, denser, staccato forms. Too, the incorporation of the rock substrate into the design is extraordinary: figures crawl from and are swallowed by cracks and holes in the stone; the predominant elongation and sinuosity of forms seems derived from the way the rock breaks and flows.
Call me crazy but I don’t think the Great Circle Earthwork deserves a 95%!
Something rotten in the state of Denmark