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Handprints in a cave in Gargas, France. Beginnings Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00363/1754506/octo_a_00363.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021

ROSALIND KRAUSS

If this starts a bit like a travelogue, it is in fact a tribute to Annette’s indefati - gable curiosity and voracious appetite for new realms of experience. Her discovery of André Leroi-Gourhan’s structural paleontology was one of these, leading to Annette’s translation of two chapters of his magisterial book Prehistory of Western Art, for publication in issue 37 of our ten-year-old magazine, October— an issue overseen by our brilliant managing editor at the time, Douglas Crimp . Founding the magazine together was the gift Annette and I gave each other. It was her trans - lation that opened the paleontological world of the caves to me, and she naturally suggested that we visit them together, in the summer of 1986. We planned our trip around the itinerary suggested by Leroi-Gourhan, and our base of operations was Les Eyzies, in the Dordogne, because of its proximity to the unapproachable Lascaux. Fittingly enough, we chose as home base the Hotel Cro Magnon—named after the first humanoids and close to Ruffignac, Les Combarelles, and, a short drive away, Cahors and Pech Merle. I’ve been calling Leroi-Gourhan a structuralist, and I’d like to telegraph to you what made him so. The common-sense explanation of the cave paintings turned on sympathetic magic—a way of luring animals into the reach of these tribes of hunters. Leroi-Gourhan did not believe a bit of this. His examination of the caves assured him of the invariable grouping of the animals in pairs. Sorting the animals themselves into male and female, he designated the relatively bloated bison as female, the elongated bodies of horses and reindeer or elk as male. The consistency of this pairing could not, he thought, be accidental; his conclusion, therefore, was that the paintings were conceived as a site of species reproduction, making the cave itself a kind of giant, darkened womb. Pech Merle and Les Combarelles reveal another dispute between Leroi- Gourhan and the traditionalists. The peculiar feature of the frequent palm prints stenciled onto the cave walls by blowing powdered pigment over the out - stretched palm is that many of the fingers are missing one digit. The traditional explanation was that the prints recorded the result of a form of tribal circumci - sion. Leroi-Gourhan dismissed this as fatuous nonsense. No population depen - dent on hunting would maim one of its members, he insisted. Survival was his clue. Success in hunting depends on silence; so the theory he developed was that

OCTOBER 169, Summer 2019, pp. 164 –166. © 2019 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00363 166 OCTOBER

the shorter fingers were merely folded back as if to mimic the sign language the hunters had to use. I deeply regret that I have no pictures of Annette from this trip, but the dark - ness of the caves and the prohibition of flashes discouraged me from bringing a camera. What I did bring, however, was a pair of French canvas summer hiking

boots, in anticipation of the uneven, rocky floors of the caves. In this I had not Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00363/1754506/octo_a_00363.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 counted on the French Ministry of Culture, which, in its allergy to liability suits, had built boardwalks throughout the grottoes’ chambers. One could have tra - versed the entire cave in stiletto heels! Annette also prepared for the terrain and was dressed in the goofiest pair of sneakers I had ever seen. Gargas—in Spain—was too far for us to go, so we had to be content with Niaux, located in Auche. As it happened, Georges Bataille signed his pornograph - ic novel L’histoire de l’oeil “Lord Auch.” At dinner, Annette and I concluded our journey by toasting Bataille. Our journey together celebrated our ten-year-long assembly of the greatest creative minds of our generation and a journal of surpass - ing interest for a large and growing audience. I can only raise my glass to that and thank Annette from my heart.