Searching for the cutting tool; The Cutting Edge (2009), GCGCA(i)

The Cutting Edge

The British Museum, London

20 Mar - 20 Jun 2009

Made nearly two million years ago, the Lower Palaeolithic Olduvai Stone Chopping Tool is the first known technological invention - the first example of the fashioning and use of a tool. Found in an early human campsite in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, it is scientifically dated to be 1.8 million years old. A harder stone was used to knock flakes off both sides of this piece of dark volcanic lava, intersecting and causing a sharp cutting edge. The tool was then used to chop trees and cut meat from animals, or smash bones for marrow fat - an essential element of early human diet.

‘Picking it up, your first reaction is it’s very heavy… it fits into the palm of the hand… I could perfectly effectively cut meat with this.’

‘Holding this, I can feel what it was like… needing to cut flesh… needing to cut into a carcass, in order to get a meal.’

In the Arcades Project, it is this recognition of a past moment’s ephemerality, its passing away in the present, that constitutes what Benjamin defines as the ‘now of legibility’ pertaining to the ‘historical index’ of the dialectical image. The critical construction of dialectical images is compared to the technique of montage in film, as an art whose significance lies in the sudden juxtaposition of the past and the present.

A History of the World in the Olduvai Gorge; The Cutting Edge (2009), GCGCA(i) 

In the 1980s, when people started to feel uncomfortable with the word ‘avant-garde’, they adopted the euphemism ‘cutting-edge’.