Art and negative deviant practices are equivalently old and vital. They can be registered both in the past and today. Cave paintings are an expression of a dynamic social environment in which opposition between individuals, groups and generations is not alien. To denigrate the work of one’s “colleague” was not unknown to prehistoric artists. It is also commensurate with authors throughout the history of art from Antiquity to Modern times. Prehistoric drawings give us insufficient information, but ultimately this appears as a necessary prerequisite for the emergence of writing. Drawing or ancient graphic representation provided the basis for the development of writing systems.
The documented history of art is only about four thousand years old-almost ten times less than the earliest attested human drawings. One of the few ways to fill in the missing cultural horizon of that distant “our” past is by attempting, by analogy, to fill in the missing pieces by way of reverse chronological reconstruction, through various studies and comparisons. In this sense, the hypothetically obscure prehistoric artist, the Renaissance classical master, and the contemporary visual artist, share a common problem that has outlived and outlasted the pursuit of artistic creativity: the crossing that, in one form or another, always slips from the hands of its author.
The present study is at an early stage of development, but it is clear from the examples given that studying graffiti and comparing it with prehistoric rock art can help to ask a series of questions whose answers will contribute to a better understanding of early manifestations of human art. Although tentative at present, the comparisons rest on a number of parallels. Both cave and street artists expressed something specific through their art; used different techniques; painted in a variety of locations; and complemented their contemporaries in style, quality, and composition.
In the spirit of analytical psychology, the achievements of modern “rational” civilization are seen not as a confrontation with primal instinctive human nature, but as an attempt to determine the “human price” we have paid for this civilizational development and the corresponding balance between losses and gains.
As a consequence of the analysis carried out, it can be argued that by examining graffiti art on different levels: semiotic, social-existential (taken as descriptive levels) and deepening the problematic clarificatory searches in contemporary theories of depth psychology and neuroscience, it can be argued that the specificity of the modern graffiti creative act corresponds to the dynamics of primary psychic systems, which is key to understanding and insight into the state of prehistory, and at the same time setting a parallel between graffiti and prehistoric art.