ART&RESEARCH

Belfast; Peter stands by the door, a bemused, half-blind expression upon his face.

Edinburgh; Jim sits on the floor; arms flung back with head reared, mouth open in a plaintive howl.

Bristol; Nina looks exhausted, her tongue lolling as she seems to be dragging her heavy paws forward as she stands mid-stride.

Sheffield; Queenie stands poised on a small rock-like promontory, curiously looking off to one side as the ice floes behind her seem to stand still.

In this way we encounter the stuffed polar bears in photographs taken by artists Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson in the recent publication of their research project nanoq: flat out and bluesome. This was a two-part project, undertaken over five years, that consisted of photographing as many stuffed polar bears that could be found in British collections followed by the exhibition of some of the bears at Spike Island.

In a recent article for The Observer, Simon Garfield looked at how the image of the polar bear has been used in recent times to further the cause of disparate groups such as Greenpeace and Coca-Cola. This sleek, cute-looking yet formidable and dangerous predator benefits from a strong and positive public image; ‘There is no such thing as an ugly polar bear, and even the less handsome ones appear to have learnt to conceal their claws as they leap the ice floes. Like panting Labradors, they always appear to be smiling.’[1]

The high recognition factor associated with these bears has enabled them to become more than just another mammal that populates the more northerly parts of the earth. They stand as signifiers of the north, of icy desolation and more recently the identifiable victims of an increase in global temperature. Occupying such a place in the popular imagination means that the polar bear can stand for more than itself and engage a wide variety of people on many levels.

In this way, the choice of the polar bear as the focus of study by Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson was not a haphazard one[2] as the resulting artwork could readily be expanded to include a wide variety of topics all from the simple premise of finding, photographing and exhibiting the stuffed exemplars of this iconic mammal present in British collections.

These different yet essentially linked processes provide an illuminating example of how artists can engage with a subject and the specialities that surround it, use and potentially transcend them in order to address issues that are inherent to those areas in a novel and enlightening manner.

Research in any field is often reduced to a series of questions rather than providing any specific answers and the ways in which the artists have presented the outcomes of this five-year project allow the viewer to freely engage with all manner of questions that the exhibitions and publication pose.

Whilst the pertinent issues of collection, hunting, death and the photograph are addressed in the essays contained within the publication (written in response to the conference that took place alongside the Spike Island exhibition), there is the wider question of the milieu in which the study took place.

The museum is the ultimate manifestation of mankind’s desire to collect, organise, display and interpret artefacts, thus supposedly increasing our knowledge of the world in which we live. Within the walls of this hallowed institution, the narrative of history is presented to us, departmentalised and neatly classified in glass cases with dates and descriptions of the objects that have been sourced from all over the world.

Parodied by Flaubert through his titular protagonists Bouvard and Pécuchet, the project established by museums in the Nineteenth Century and maintained until the present day was ‘to give by the ordered display of selected artefacts a total representation of human reality and history.’[3] Whilst Flaubert’s clerks failed in their attempt to master every subject of human knowledge and resorted to amassing everything and anything, the heterogeneous nature of their collection resulted in little more than chaos.

In his study of Bouvard and Pécuchet, Eugenio Donato argues ‘museums are taken to exist only inasmuch as they can erase the heterogeneity of the objects contained within their cases, and it is only the hypothesis of the possibility of homogenizing [sic] the diversity of various artefacts which makes them possible in the first place.’[4]

This homogenisation occurs on two levels in nanoq; there is the cataloguing and display of the museum, whose efficacy is revealed by the bric-a-brac and curios nature of the photographs taken of bears in storage or in private hands; and there is the use of the photograph itself. The latter device is one most notably used by André Malraux in his Museum Without Walls[5] in which he champions the potential of photographic reproduction to contain the entirety of art and its history as freed from the physical confines of the museum building.

In using photographs to document the situation of the stuffed polar bear, the context of the museum also becomes the subject of the study. In this way, the display of the images in a gallery or within the publication homogenises the individual museums and reduces them to signifiers of the museum in a manner similar to the way that Garry Marvin has identified the polar bears as mere suggestions of their species.

‘... it is difficult to respond to the animals on exhibition in a museum in any other way than scientific natural history. Each animal becomes a type, a token, rather than a unique individual.’[6]

The combination of photographs and the provenances of the bears recall the images and text by Louise Lawler that accompany Douglas Crimp’s essay ‘On the Museum’s Ruins’.[7] In photographing artworks in private homes, galleries and museums (including works in transit and storage), Lawler also reduces the artworks and the contexts in which they were found to simple signifiers of collection and display.

Top of next column