See the attachment for the work

In the homework for this week, you guys read about Paleolithic art. For this part of the assignment, you are going to zoom in and focus on one particular piece of Paleolithic art: a small figurine made about 30,000 years ago called the Venus of Wilendorf. To get a bit more info on the figure, watch the below video: 

https://youtu.be/d0xAmbjE6Us

After watching the video, you are going to complete the worksheet in this module called "Venus of Wildendorf Worksheet". On the worksheet you are going to read four short excerpts from scholars who have theorized the purpose and function of the Venus figure. After you read each theory you are going summarize what you thought each scholar was saying. You will turn the worksheet into the dropbox.

The second part of this project is where the potato comes in handy! 

To carve any material, the artist/artisan subtracts (or removes by subtracting) the material (stone, wood, etc.) to create the final work.  Subtractive sculpting is an unforgiving technique because the artist cannot afford to make any mistakes—once the material is subtracted, it cannot be re-adhered.  To carve a sculpture, the artist must use a harder material than the one they are attempting to carve.  For instance, the Woman of Willendorf was carved out of limestone. The Venus is also a sculpture in the round.  Sculpture in the round is any sculpture that is completely three-dimensional and free-standing, or, not attached to any kind of a background.  

You get to practice the art of subtractive sculpting using a potato! From this potato, you are going to carve the Venus of Wilendorf. The best tools to use are small, sharp knives and potato peelers. You will turn in a picture of your carved Venus potato to the dropbox for this week with your worksheet.

2.

Completing this worksheet is part of your participation points for the day!

Interpretation 1: George Grant MacCurdy—Recent discoveries bearing on the antiquity of man in Europe, 1910.

The most important piece of all was a female statuette of stone—the so-classed Venus of Willendorf…The figure is 11 centimeters high and complete in every respect. It is carved from fine porous oölitic limestone. Some of the red color with which it was painted still adheres to it. It represents a fat pregnant woman with large pendent mammæ and large hips, but no real steatopygy. It corresponds closely in form to the Venus of Brassempouy, an ivory figurine… The hair is kinky (negroid), the face is left unchiseled. The arms are much reduced, the lower arms and hands being represented only in slight relief. The knees are well formed, but below the knees the legs are much shortened, although provided with calves. The entire figurine is proof that the artist was a master at representing the human form and that here he intended to emphasize those parts most closely associated with fecundity. The only suggestion of apparel or ornament is a bracelet on each wrist. The fauna of this horizon includes the mammoth, horse, reindeer, stag, and fox… It was my good fortune to be in Vienna the week the Venus of Willendorf arrived, and, after the museum staff, to be the first archeologist to examine the specimen.  

Interpretation 2: Marilyn Stokstad and Michael Cothren—Art History, 2014

The most famous of these, the Woman From Willendorf, Austria, dates from about 24,000 BCE. Carved from limestone and originally colored with red ocher, the statuette’s swelling, rounded forms make it seem much larger than its actual 4 3/8-inch height. The sculptor exaggerated the figure’s female attributes by giving it pendulous breasts, a big belly with a deep navel (a natural indentation in the stone), wide hips, dimpled knees and buttocks, and solid thighs. By carving a woman with a well-nourished body, the artist may have been expressing health and fertility, which could ensure the ability to produce strong children, thus guaranteeing the survival of the clan.

Interpretation 3: William Fleming—Art & Ideas, 1986

All across Ice Age Europe and Asia female images have been found. The featureless face of the figure known as the Woman of Willendorf exudes pride and contentment. She bends over her breasts and clasps them with tiny arms. In this and other such sculptures, the voluptuous contours, fleshy hips, huge bosoms, and exaggerate sex characteristics suggest mother goddesses of some fertility cult.

Interpretation 4: LeRoy McDermott—Self-Representation in Upper Paleolithic Female Figurines, 1996

This study explores the logical possibility that the first images of the human figure were made from the point of view of self rather than other and concludes that Upper Paleolithic “Venus” figurines represent ordinary women’s views of their own bodies. Using photographic simulations of what a modern female sees of herself, it demonstrates that the anatomical omissions and proportional distortions found in Pavlovian, Kostenkian, and Gravettian female figurines occur naturally in autogenous, or self-generated, information. Thus the size, shape, and articulation of their body parts in early figurines appear to be determined by their relationship to the eyes and relative effects of foreshortening, distance, and occlusion rather than by symbolic distortion. …As self portraits of women at different stages of life, these early figurines embodied obstetrical and gynecological information and probably signified an advance in women’s self-conscious control over the material conditions of their reproductive lives.

Included on this worksheet are four contextual analyses of the “Venus of Willendorf”. What was the main argument that each author makes? What formal analysis led to their interpretation?

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Interpretation 4: ____________________________________________________________

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