ART&RESEARCH


A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods

Volume 1. No. 2. Summer 2007
ISSN 1752-6388

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir/Mark Wilson

In conversation with Steve Baker and Ross Birrell (04/05/07) (Continued)

RB: I wasn’t at Spike Island but there seems to me, as an outsider, that that would be one of the most enigmatic experiences of the project, and that would be the bit that I would really want to see that - in the word that was used in the publication - that ‘community’ or, to pick up on Agamben, the community to come. So that might have a physical impact beyond the photographic or the textual, and the physical and the real are again vital and pertinent to that experience so that would be perhaps why for you it would be the fulcrum around which the rest of the project unfolds. I completely agree that you know that a chair is not just a chair and that it’s a baseline retreat from the transparency of communication. But I still would think that there’s maybe an important distinction between Kosuth’s chair and the variations of the nanoq project, in that Kosuth is dealing in the present tense of representation and doesn’t necessarily invite narratives, cultural narratives, about the differences between how a chair is used whether it’s the chair that Glenn Gould sat on that his father made for his performances or whether it’s a throne that somebody sat on that was then beheaded, etc., the narrative is not necessarily at stake, whereas I think the narrative in history of each of these objects as it moves through time and I think what’s also interesting is that these things go back to their museums and that the book is where these things actually are all held in suspension and that I think it’s the importance of narrative which then leads you into the more politicised engagements with the real if you like, which still enable us to question the role of photography or the role of the object or the role of text. The narrative of how you as artists undertake the research project to bring all the material together, the narratives which you encountered, the photographic images of the bears being captured I think all that material is, to me, significantly different from Kosuth.

SB: If I can add one element to it, I think that at a certain level the issue here is not language, but attention to form in both cases. I mean Kosuth’s chair has been quite carefully chosen insofar as the chair can be neutral, I mean it’s not a chair that through over-ornamentation or whatever…

MW: It’s not a Baroque chair…

SB: … It’s not a Baroque chair, so it’s really only readable as chair. And one of the things about the whole nanoq project and the bringing together either photographically or physically of the different bears is that whereas in many other contexts we are kind of invited to read polar bear as polar bear…

MW: Generic…

SB: … With the nanoq project you can’t do that because there they all are, either they’re photographs or bears themselves in a taxidermy form, and their difference and their variety is one of the things that’s immediately presented to the viewer.

MW: One of the things that actually happened when we were able to show either all or almost all of the photographs in various institutions we showed them, was that you you could read it in the way that we’ve been invited to read it, in that this might be the same polar bear in each of these photographs and that was the first reading, but then the history absolutely nailed that idea on the head and, of course, it’s an absurd idea anyway. But, nevertheless, if you stood back and looked at these things, you could almost see this sort of character appearing in a way that we’re trained to do seeing cartoons or something. So it was cropping up and it looked similar just enough for a moment, and then that’s reaffirmed and then contradicted.

BS: But is it not also saying something about the way we read images and about how you read the specimens differently when standing in front of them to how you would read images. When I made the reference to Kosuth it’s in the strategy or methodology. I also think there’s something else in there that in all the projects that we’ve been doing we are not really changing anything, well we change things by removing things in and out of place, but we’re not actually changing the polar bear. It is what it is – we just highlight what is already there.

RB: I think the reference to Kosuth is illuminating, it really opens up the work, but there was a sense that Kosuth is indifferent, be it this chair or that chair as the work changes and shifts, you know it’s a different chair or a different installation or whatever. But the definition doesn’t change and the kind of process doesn’t change, but there’s a kind of sense where he’s indifferent to difference within language and within the different strategies of representation.

MW: That’s interesting, I’d see that completely differently, I’d say that he was actually acknowledging that and inviting the viewer either to acknowledge or not acknowledge it, to get it or not get it. The definition didn’t change but the chair was mutable. It could have been replaced with another chair and, and almost invites that.  Do you not think?

RB: But I think there remains a relationship of indifference to the viewer. But the animal victim that’s held in a photographic image is not interchangeable with any other and there’s something that really asks questions about us as individuals in multitudes. The question maybe is about that strategy of indifference; I was suggesting that Kosuth is almost right to be indifferent because we’re kind of suspended within these different processes of representation, but I don’t get the sense that you know one bear can be interchanged with another bear as you move through geography or where they were captured, because each of those different fragments of narratives that can ricochet when you find the object in a museum, the narratives that open up speak to other conflicts: class, colonialism, etc. Even though the process of how we experience it might be one that has an air of indifference, in that it’s not emotive or politicised in its representation, nonetheless I don’t think we can see them as expendable or erasable ultimately. Even though it seems to mirror a strategy of indifference, I don’t necessarily read it as indifferent to the history at stake.

MW: It talks about our habit to do that.


Echidna BM

On Animal History

RB: Something you said earlier about animals and history struck me in relation to what Bataille says, because he something different about it. Bataille says:

Profane life is easy to distinguish from mere animal life; it is very different from the latter. Taking it as a whole, animal life is nonetheless the model of life without history.[1]

And I suppose one of the ways that people or philosophers have thought about the difference between animals and humans is that animals have no history.

Top of next column

SB: That’s what Hegel said about the east as opposed to the west of course, that it has no history.

RB: Well this brings us back to colonialism as well but I think that nanoq suggests animals do have a history but not maybe in the sense that Bataille is thinking about it.

BS: No they don’t have a history as such because what we have termed as history is something that is a documentation and, you know, documentation that we normally accept as a historical document is not something animals could carry with them in a sense. I mean we haven’t found the way to understand animals’ history, we can’t say that they don’t have a history because they might. It’s just that in our understanding of what history is they, in a sense, don’t have it, they only have it at the moment of an encounter with a human being. In the nanoq project they do have a history and it begins when they meet man and either die or are captured.

SB: In a different way, much of the work that the historian Erica Fudge is doing on animals is explicitly about this issue of ‘do animals have a history?’ and how one deals with that issue. Her point is to devise forms of practice, whether that practice be the writing of history or the making of art, that don’t effectively erase animals from the human perception of history.

MW: In a way, really relatively recently, the colonial settlers in Australia simply asked the Aboriginals to produce proof that they owned the land and, of course, that was erased, their right to land was erased because they had no conveniently measurable or understandable form, they had no documented history. And in some senses that is just the juggernaut of a very fixed way of looking at the world, and under those circumstances, in the face of that kind of juggernaut approach, all sorts of histories are erased, daily I guess. How does Erica Fudge redress that?

SB: It’s in the essay called ‘A Left Handed Blow’.

BS: Doesn’t she talk about that it’s the history with animals? She talks about the history of our relationship with animals as the beginning of a construction of a possible history of animals.


Kolli (a)fly

Framing and Un-Framing: (a) fly / flug(a)

SB: Could I go back for a minute to something that Ross was saying about chairs and differentiation as a way perhaps of bridging the nanoq project across to the Fly project? Because I think one of the things that the photographs of domestic animal habitats in the Fly project does, I think what’s so telling about those far from empty photographs - but photographs in which the animal happens to be absent at the moment of the photograph - is that our sense of there being something missing in those images is interestingly different from how we would often read photographs of rooms, whether we were seeing them in furniture catalogues or whether we were seeing them in design history books where you usually focus on the piece of furniture or the interior arrangement itself. And what’s weird, very often I used to think when I was more actively involved with design history, in seeing all those photographs of modernist chairs and so on, is you never actually got a photograph of somebody sitting in Rietveld’s Red Blue Chair or whatever and that was what was really kind of amazing. And I was thinking about this in relation to the Fly photographs and the sense of there being something missing, and I couldn’t quite figure out why it was that we wanted the animal to be there in a way that we didn’t necessarily need a human to be in other interior photographs. And I haven’t got this resolved in my mind at all, but I think it does have something to do with questions about whether any animal there would do and us not knowing in some of those instances at least even what the animal would be, whether it would be a dog or a cat - it’s by no means always clear - or in one place what kind of bird, I take it, should have been on a particular perch in one photograph. And so there is a kind of a curiosity for this that seemed distinct from the curiosity we would have as to what kind of person would be sitting in it.

BS: Don’t you think this is something also to do with the way the medium is applied when taking these images, the fact that the point of eye contact, basically where the camera is placed, is ‘not quite right’. And because we see so many images we have a certain way of reading them. Most of the time when I see images of interiors where there is really nothing else going on, I read them in a certain way which is purely about the interiors themselves. This is because they’ve been taken in a way which is quite clinical, quite kind of design-y, but these images don’t have that, they have a certain awkwardness about them. And I think that’s also maybe possibly where this notion that we discussed, and that came up in Penn State, of the haunted thing in the image and it comes in through the awkwardness I think.


Mosi (a)fly


[1] Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volumes II & III, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 94.

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