James Fulton -- Blog Response #9+#10

At the beginning of the semester, we discussed the caves at Lascaux. We spoke of them in terms of their significance with regards to the origins of the human spirit and man's cosmic foundation, and we also briefly touched upon a similar site in Cheveux that Herzog has recently made a documentary about. Having had the pleasure of seeing the Herzog film at a press screening over the Summer, I had learned that the nation of France had decided to close off the caves in Cheveux to all but a small and selected group of scientists and researchers.

The part about these cave sites that really interests me, architecturally, is not the original site but the hyperreal recreations that have been or are being made by France in order to draw in tourists. Lascaux II, as it is known, is a replica of two of the famous caves from Lascaux that was opened in 1983 after the "real" cave was closed in the 60's. At the point of filming, the caves in Cheveux had been digitally mapped to an almost molecular level of detail -- with plans to reconstruct the cave with excruciating care in an adjacent site.

While namedropping Baudrillard may not win merits with some people, I think his ideas concerning reality become extremely important in this instance. Are these replica sites capable of becoming hierophanies? If yes, is it an acceptable condition for them to embody, or should this opening of replica sites be disallowed? The arguments certainly have parallels in the old arguments that came about when the ability to quickly copy and mass produce poster-quality replicas of famous art works came about, but the discussion is not entirely the same.

Having visited neither site, my gut opinion is that, regardless of the quality of the copy, the temporal nature of the original caves is so overwhelmingly important that its absence must completely overshadow all of the makeup applied to the replica caves in an attempt to fool you into a false spiritual connection with our history as a species. So, while they are probably not worth the money, I do not think they are actively detrimental to the integrity of our spiritual history.