Abstract artistic mediation predates language, writing, and ritual burial.

Evidence

Artistic mediation—representation in excess of messaging, creativity in excess of use, giving sensuous form to the unexpressed—has always been a fundamental human activity. The oldest archeological evidence of artwork, an ochre crayon drawing of seven lines, dates from 70,000 years ago. When Homo erectus was capable of speech but not yet writing, before humans began ritual burial of dead or to create clothing from animal hides, before what is now called “behavioral modernity,” there was already abstract mediation—underlining that art is not epiphenomenal to life. Immediacy’s evacuation of mediation eclipses this essential dimension of human being—an extinguishing hard not to interpret as a response to the imminent threat of human extinction. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 36

The petrodepression hell-scape is quashing creativity; the novelist and critic Amitav Ghosh’s observation of literary narrative that “the climate crisis is also a crisis of the imagination” might be extrapolated to encompass aesthetic inspiration as such. … Artistic mediation—representation in excess of messaging, creativity in excess of use, giving sensuous form to the unexpressed—has always been a fundamental human activity. The oldest archeological evidence of artwork, an ochre crayon drawing of seven lines, dates from 70,000 years ago. When Homo erectus was capable of speech but not yet writing, before humans began ritual burial of dead or to create clothing from animal hides, before what is now called “behavioral modernity,” there was already abstract mediation—underlining that art is not epiphenomenal to life. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 36

Categorization

• DEFINE: Her operative definition of artistic mediation — ‘representation in excess of messaging’ — is the positive content behind her whole defense of mediation, worth extracting for the reader’s argument.
• CANDY: The 70,000-year-old ochre drawing of seven lines preceding speech, burial, and clothing is a striking, shareable datum about the primacy of abstract art.
• QUESTION: The claim that the 70,000-year-old ochre crayon drawing is the ‘oldest archaeological evidence of artwork’ is contestable given older shell-bead and rock-art claims — worth checking current dating literature.
• ADDENDUM: Her definition of artistic mediation as ‘representation in excess of messaging, creativity in excess of use’ is exactly the kind of positive definition of form that could ground a mediation-defense piece.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 36