Thomas McEvilley on Art and Joseph Campbell (385 words)

A college course that changed me

Aurignacian Lunar Calendar, c. 32,000 B.C.

In the early 1990s, I was lucky enough to take a course titled “Art and the Mind” from the art historian Thomas McEvilley (1939-2013). We started with the earliest prehistoric artifacts manipulated by humans—at the time, it was a 34,000-year-old bone etched with markings by the Aurignacian people in modern-day Europe, although far older examples have since been found elsewhere in the world. And we ended the semester looking at the latest art currently on view in New York galleries. Our textbooks were Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces, books that trace how the same stories and themes appear throughout world mythologies and religions. Dr. McEvilley believed in Campbell’s idea of the collective unconscious—that the same ideas appear over and over in human culture because we all tap into a shared, universal wellspring of meaning.

I vividly remember one lecture in which Dr. McEvilley traced the development of tiered structures that point at the sky— Egyptian pyramids, Japanese pagodas, Mayan temples, Mesopotamian ziggurats—structures that were built by people who would have had little or no knowledge of each other. All these people on different continents, all building sacred structures that pointed toward the heavens: that yearning had to be fundamental to our human experience of this world. In another lecture, Dr. McEvilley showed various postmodern artists (Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph Beuys, among others) who made wall pieces with “tails” or other elements that dragged on the floor. The artists all tethered their work to the ground, perhaps in a shared wish to humanize the art object, to touch the viewer, amidst the cold preciousness of the white cube gallery.

Robert Rauschenberg combine "Dylaby," 1962.

Dr. McEvilley commuted to Houston every week to teach the class, which was funded by the local collector Dominique de Menil. The one time I had the opportunity to meet Mrs. de Menil, she was very elderly and seemed tired, shaking hands at an event at the Menil Collection. I used my brief moment with her to tell her how much Dr. McEvilley’s class had meant to me and thanked her for bringing him to Houston. Her face lit up, and she said, “You learned something there.” I told her that yes, I did. I learned, I’m still learning, that we are all in this together.

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Further reading: NASA has a beautifully written entry about the etched bone, an early lunar calendar: https://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/oldest-lunar-calendars/