Late Harvest - Sagehen Creek Field Station

Transcription

LATE HARVEST
2014 ART + ENVIRONMENT
CONFERENCE
Contributors
CLAUDE D’ANTHENAISE
WILLIAM L. FOX
ADAM DUNCAN HARRIS
JOANNE NORTHRUP
SNÆBJÖRNSDÓTTIR/WILSON
BRUCE STERLING
DAVID B. WALKER
Design
Donald W. Reynolds Center for the Visual Arts
BRAD BARTLETT
E. L. Wiegand Gallery
2
Late Harvest was organized by the Nevada
Museum of Art in consultation with the
National Museum of Wildlife Art. The exhibition
was curated by JoAnne Northrup, Director
of Contemporary Art Initiatives, together
with consulting curator Adam Duncan Harris,
Petersen Curator of Art & Research, National
Museum of Wildlife Art.
LATE HARVEST
A+E FIELD GUIDE
00 → 151
153 → 192
Executive Director’s Message
Conference Welcome
ARTISTS
Richard Ansdell
David Brooks
George Browne
Berlinde De Bruyckere
Petah Coyne
Ray Ching
Kate Clark
Wim Delvoye
Mark Dion
Elmgreen & Dragset
Carlee Fernandez
Richard Friese
François Furet
Nicholas Galanin
George Bouverie Goddard
Damien Hirst
William Hollywood
Idiots:
Afke Golsteijn
& Floris Bakker
Alfred Kowalski
Robert Kuhn
Wilhelm Kuhnert
Bruno Liljefors
Polly Morgan
John Newsom
Tim Noble and Sue Webster
Walter Robinson
George Rotig
Carl Rungius
Yinka Shonibare MBE
David Shrigley
Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson
Amy Stein
Archibald Thorburn
Mary Tsiongas
Joseph Wolf
Brigitte Zieger
Andrew Zuckerman
DAVID B. WALKER
WILLIAM L. FOX
→ 07
→ 165
Late Harvest
JOANNE NORTHRUP
A+E Conference Program
→ 166
→ 101
Season of A+E Exhibitions
Painting Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw:
Highlights in the Evolution of Wildlife Art
→ 175
A+E Conference Presenters
ADAM DUNCAN HARRIS
→ 115
→ 182
The We of ‘We’—Re-thinking Back to the Garden
→ 125
Le musée de la Chasse et de la Nature
The Museum of Nature and the Hunt
→ 131
Nevada Anthropocene
BRUCE STERLING
→ 143
5
LATE HARVEST SPONSORS
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE
DAVID B. WALKER
Executive Director | CEO, Nevada Museum of Art
→ LEAD SPONSOR
Louise A. Tarble Foundation
→ MAJOR SPONSORS
Barrick Gold
Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller
National Museum of Wildlife Art
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
→ SUPPORTING SPONSORS
Anne Brockinton Lee and Robert M. Lee
Nion McEvoy
Deborah and Andy Rappaport
Meg and Earl Tarble
To fulfill our mission as a museum of ideas, the Nevada
Museum of Art seeks to generate new knowledge and
relationships through collections, exhibitions, scholarship—and, every three years, through an extraordinary meeting of minds we call the Art + Environment
Conference.
The Conference is the flagship program of the Museum’s
internationally recognized Center for Art + Environment,
a unique research institute that continues to garner
regional, national, and global support. The Center hosts
scholars, artists, and designers from around the world
who seek to engage with the largest collection of art and
environment archives to be found in any cultural institution. (In fact, the Nevada Museum of Art is the only art
museum in the world to claim this thematic focus).
Late Harvest, the feature exhibition for the 2014
Conference, juxtaposes historically significant wildlife
painting with contemporary art that employs taxidermy.
Organized by our own JoAnne Northrup, the Museum’s
Director of Contemporary Art Initiatives, this groundbreaking effort provokes viewers to consider our complex
relationships with animals, and surveys a theme gaining increasing significance in contemporary art. We are
extremely grateful to the National Museum of Wildlife
Art in Jackson, Wyoming—specifically, President and
CEO James C. McNutt, and Petersen Curator of Art and
Research Adam Duncan Harris—for their collaboration;
also to Hirmer Verlag of Munich, publishers of this Field
Guide and book; and to Brad Bartlett for the unique
and beautiful design, including the “furry font” created
exclusively for this publication.
7
Publishing activity at the Museum has been busy, to say
the least! This year also marks publication of the first
major book highlighting one of the Center’s archives: Lita
Albuquerque: Stellar Axis, copublished by Skira Rizzoli.
The Museum and the Center have a number of other
important publications planned, including the first monograph devoted to eco-artists (and 2014 Conference speakers) Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison; the first
major survey of art and architecture about the Lake Tahoe
region; a retrospective look at the contributions of artist
and architect Maya Lin; a volume on the contemporary
Aboriginal Art collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl; and
a presentation of photographer David Taylor’s decade-long
project about the Mexico-U.S. border.
We are privileged to work with the many creative individuals whose participation in each Conference inspires us in
our efforts to organize innovative exhibitions, collect the
key artworks and archives, originate the publications, and
present the challenging public programs that profoundly
enrich our institution. Of course, like all great gatherings,
the Art + Environment Conference requires more than the
presenters—it also depends on the many accomplished
attendees who make these three days special.
Finally, the Conference, Field Guide and catalogue, and all
the associated exhibitions would not be possible without the
generous support of the individuals, foundations and corporations we have highlighted on page 164.
On behalf of the Museum’s Board of Trustees, staff, and
volunteers, it is my pleasure to present Late Harvest, and
to welcome you to the 2014 Art + Environment Conference.
8
9
Every creature in the world is like a book
and a picture to us, and a mirror.
— ALAIN DE LILLE
← previous pages
Brigitte Zieger
Shooting Wallpaper
2006
↘ Carl Rungius
Red Fox 1933
13
↘ Archibald Thorburn
Shadowed 1906
14
15
↓ Carl Rungius
During the Rut
circa 1925
→ Carl Rungius
Caribou in the Mountains
circa 1920
16
17
↘ Richard Friese
Pascha (Deer in a Forest Glade)
1912
→ next page
George Frederic Rotig
Fighting Stags by Moonlight
1900
18
19
20
21
22
23
← previous page
British Wildlife
2000
↘ Kate Clark
Licking the Plate
2014
24
25
26
27
← previous page
Carlee Fernandez
Bear Study Diptych
2004
→ Carlee Fernandez
Bear Study Diptych
2004
28
29
↘ Andrew Zuckerman
Grizzly Bear 26
2009
30
31
↘ Elmgreen & Dragset
Perception, Fig 2 (detail)
2010
→ Next page
Daniel Firman
Nasutamanus
2012
32
33
34
35
↙ Andrew Zuckerman
↓ Carlee Fernandez
Asian Elephant 123
2005
36
Abstraction in Green
2010
37
↓ Bruno Liljefors
Swans 1917
→ Ray Harris Ching
End to the Squandering of Beauty
2011
38
↓ George Browne
The Farm Marsh—Mallards
no date
→ George Browne
Canvasbacks 1953
40
41
↓ William Hollywood
Mallards in Flight
No date
→ Petah Coyne
Untitled #1240 (Black Cloud) (detail)
2007-2008
42
43
↘ Petah Coyne
Untitled #1205 (Virgil)
1997-2008
44
45
↓ Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and Floris Bakker)
Geological Discovery II (Geologische Vondst II)
2012
→ Robert F. Kuhn
Post Prandial Wash
2000
46
47
↓ Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and Floris Bakker)
Ophelia
2005
48
49
↙ Andrew Zuckerman
African Lion 141
2006
↓ Robert F. Kuhn
Ahmed 1973
50
51
↙ Wilhelm Kuhnert
African Lions
Circa 1911
↓ Robert F. Kuhn
Rear Guard 1977
52
53
↘ Wilhelm Kuhnert
A Herd of Zebras 1908 54
55
↘ Berlinde De Bruyckere
P XII
2004
56
57
↓ Richard Ansdell
Ptarmigans on a Ledge
1865 → David Shrigley
Ostrich
2009
58
59
← Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and Floris Bakker)
Corpse Bride (Vulture with Victim)
2006
↘ Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and Floris Bakker)
Vanity Comes to Fall
2014
60
61
↘ Polly Morgan
Systemic Inflammation
2010
62
63
↓ Tim Noble and Sue Webster
The Masterpiece
2014
64
65
↓ François Furet,
Weasel on Watch (Un Dangereux Voisinage)
circa 1890
→ Carlee Fernandez
Gift for Xavier
2010
66
67
↘ Bruno Liljefors
Leaping Hare (Skuttande Hare)
1928
68
69
70
71
← previous page
Alfred Wiersz Kowalski
A Pack of Wolves Circa 1900
↘ Nicholas Galanin
Inert Wolf
2009
72
73
↓ Andrew Zuckerman
Beira Antelope 19
2009
→ Amy Stein
Predator
2005
74
75
↓ Robert F. Kuhn
↓ Amy Stein
Threat
Hill Country Herd 1978
2005
76
77
↓ Amy Stein
Struggle
2005
→ Amy Stein
Watering Hole
2005
78
79
↓ Carl Rungius
On Grizzly Pass
circa 1930
80
81
↘ Robert F. Kuhn
Message on the Wind
1986
82
83
↓ David Brooks
↘Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson
Imbroglios (a phylogenetic tree, from Homo sapiens
Peterhead from the series,
to Megalops atlanticus)
2012
nanoq: flat out and bluesome
2002-04
↓Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson
Bristol (Nina) from the series,
2002-04
84
85
↓ Mary Tsiongas
Vanish #1
2009
→Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson
Somerset from the series,
nanoq: flat out and bluesome,
2002-04
86
87
↘ Mark Dion
Concrete Jungle (Mammalia)
1992
88
89
↘ John Newsom
Flowering Feathers
2008
90
91
↘ Damien Hirst
The Kingdom of the Father
2007
92
93
→ Walter Robinson
Exodus
2014
↓ Wim Delvoye
Untitled (Toile de Jouy)
2006
94
95
→ Yinka Shonibare MBE
Revolution Kid (Fox)
2012
96
97
We are both human and human animal;
we love that which we kill; we are imbued
with godlike impulses to create, and also
subject to the laws of Mother Nature;
the world was made for us, and the world
was made by us.
98
99
How can art help to shed
light on the commonalities
between seemingly
irreconcilable viewpoints
on human-animal
relations?
LATE HARVEST
Director of
JOANNE NORTHRUP
Contemporary
Art Initiatives,
Nevada Museum
of Art
The notion of “harvesting” nature for our use is an ancient one, and implies that the
natural world was made expressly for humankind:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have
dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and
over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth(1)
1. Genesis 1:26, Authorized
(King James) Version.
2. Derrida continues: “God destines the animals to an experience of
the power of man, in order to see the power of man in action, in order to see the power of man at work, in order to see man take power over all the other living beings.” Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 16. (Emphasis in original.)
3. For a comprehensive ongoing bibliography, see Linda Kalof, Seven Mattes, and Amy Fitzgerald, Animal Studies Bibliography, Animal Studies Program, Michigan State University, animalstudies.
msu.edu/bibliography.php.
4. The term animal others comes from the academic field of ecofeminism, which developed in the 1980s out of the animal liberation movement; see, for example, Hypatia Special Issue: 100
Animal Others, 27, no. 3
(Summer 2012).
Granting humans dominion over all animals puts us at the top of a living hierarchy.
Philosopher Jacques Derrida adds, “[God] has created man in his likeness so that man
will subject, tame, dominate, train, or domesticate the animals born before him and
assert his authority over them.”(2) Since the founding in nineteenth-century England
of the movement to prevent cruelty to (nonhuman) animals, we have begun to develop
alternative ways of framing our relationships with them. An entire body of literature
has emerged around the subject, and numerous Animal Studies programs have arisen in
universities, indicating a broad interest in redefining those relationships.(3) Late Harvest
brings together radically different modes of artistic production—traditional wildlife
painting and contemporary art made with taxidermy—that share a common focus on
“animal others.”(4) Many publications, artworks, and expressions of popular culture
informed the research for the exhibition, during which I discovered the cultural divide
between those who consider hunting an integral part of living in concert with the natural
world, and those who find it repugnant. Public discourse reveals passionately held beliefs
about animals: as property, aids to medical research, or raw materials for factory
farming industries. The aim of Late Harvest is to harness the strength of these passions,
using the visual languages of art to provoke inquiry and raise a series of questions: How
can art shed light on the commonalities between seemingly irreconcilable viewpoints on
human-animal relations? How are such shared values and differences conveyed through
divergent aesthetic modalities? Can combining two dissimilar aesthetic approaches in the
same context reveal a deeper meaning behind artists’ representations of animal others?
How do animals in these artworks function as agents of nature or symbols of culture,
and where do we place ourselves in this network of meaning?
An early inspiration for Late Harvest was an encounter several years ago with the
extraordinary Museum of Nature and the Hunt in Paris, and its honest embrace of
aesthetic contrast as the impetus to better understanding of human-animal relations.
Situated on the rue des Archives in the Marais, in an elegant seventeenth-century townhouse, the Museum of Hunting and Nature was founded by François Sommer—a wealthy
101
Can combining two dissimilar
aesthetic approaches in the same
context reveal a deeper meaning
behind artists’ representations of
animal others?
← fig. 1
Daniel Firman
Nasutamanus
2012
↙ fig. 2
Robert F. Kuhn
Rear Guard 1977
↙ fig. 3
Alfred Wiersz Kowalski
A Pack of Wolves circa 1900
↓ fig. 4
Nicholas Galanin
Inert Wolf
2009
French industrialist and author—and his wife Jacqueline, ardent believers in the principles of humanistic ecology, conservation, and the mindful practice of hunting in balance
with nature. The Sommers collected art related to animals and hunting, from ancient
artifacts to present-day objects: paintings, sculptures, tapestries, decorative art, and
taxidermy. Since a renovation in 2007 under the leadership of Claude d’Anthenaise, the
elegantly decorated historic house holds surprises around every corner: Instead of the
customary silk rope to keep a visitor from sitting on an antique chair in the dining room,
a small stuffed fox curls up on the cushion as though sleeping; other chairs employ
a prickly thistle that would be equally unwelcoming to a potential sitter. An exquisite
cabinet in a room dedicated to hunting dogs features a collection of nineteenth-century
silver collars—nearby a white porcelain Jeff Koons puppy adorns the top of a marble
console. In the “room of trophies” firearms with royal pedigrees are arrayed in cases,
and dozens of taxidermy trophy heads populate the walls—among them an (animatronic) albino boar by Nicolas Darrot, which startles the viewer when it begins to speak
in French. A small salon by Jan Fabre features The Night of Diana, a feathered ceiling
installation referring to the goddess of the hunt—a parliament of owls keenly observing visitors from above. This museum’s greatest innovation is the imaginative contextualization of taxidermy outside the traditional natural history museum diorama or
hunting lodge, inside an historic mansion, in dialogue with contemporary art interventions. Providing an intellectually rigorous experience, it highlights the beauty of what
could be called the “fruits of the harvest,” while acknowledging, without hesitation, the
reality of death within the circle of life. The sophisticated exhibits ask as many questions as they purport to answer; they offer new ways of thinking about animal representations and the divergent views that contemporary artists bring to the subject of
animal–human interactions.
In a 2008 New York Times article devoted to the National Museum of Wildlife Art in
Jackson, Wyoming—which boasts the most impressive collection of wildlife art in
the country—cultural critic Edward Rothstein, while complimentary, suggested that
there was “an impulse other than the purely aesthetic at work.”(5) Rothstein observed
representational art that, in sum, conveyed a hierarchical, idealized vision of man’s
relationship with the natural world. Several years later, as the keynote speaker at an
international museum conference, Rothstein highlighted the National Museum of Wildlife
Art as an example of the way in which museums with a carefully defined mission, distinctive architecture, and singular collecting focus can help to define a region’s geographic
identity—an identity that reaches beyond the local (human) cultural strata. When I
approached Rothstein and described my curatorial project, a gathering of contemporary
art made with taxidermy, he suggested that I include wildlife art in the exhibition. At
first I was taken aback: Could such radically different visual representations share the
same space? A contemporary art exhibition would be the proper context for an artwork
such as Daniel Firman’s levitated elephant Nasutamanus (2012); a traditional painting
of an elephant, however, like Robert Kuhn’s Rear Guard (1977), might mislead contemporary art audiences who would be likely to assume a covert irony in the work (figs. 1-2).
Likewise, Alfred Wierusz Kowalski’s A Pack of Wolves (c. 1900) could hang comfortably
in the nineteenth-century European art galleries of an encyclopedic museum in Europe
or the United States, but the same couldn’t be said about Nicholas Galanin’s Inert Wolf
(2009), which would be categorically out of place (if not shocking) in the same context
(figs. 3–4). Wildlife artists are classically trained; they acknowledge and build upon
art-historical traditions, often observing their subjects at close hand in nature. Wildlife
art celebrates animals in a seemingly straightforward manner. Contemporary artists,
on the other hand, often consider taxidermy “just another material.” Soon I became
interested in bringing together these two disparate forms of expression—to challenge
curatorial conventions, and to foster new knowledge and different ways of thinking.
5. Edward Rothstein, “The Prowess
of the Painter in a Hunter’s Paradise,” New York Times, July 102
14, 2008, Art & Design section.
Real animal skins, which retain a resemblance to the creatures they once were, bring
an eerie power to contemporary art: the hides are simultaneously the husks of formerly
living things, and what might in art-historical parlance be termed “readymades.” Our
reactions to the remnants range from pity to disgust to distress, depending on the
103
Real animal skins, which retain a
resemblance to the creatures they
once were, bring an eerie power to
contemporary art: the hides are
simultaneously the husks of formerly
living things, and what might in
art-historical parlance be termed
“readymades.” Our reactions range
from pity to disgust to distress,
depending on the social and personal
significance we assign to the animals.
← fig. 5
Robert Rauschenberg
Monogram1955–59
↙ fig. 6
Damien Hirst
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living
1991
6. Melissa Milgrom, Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 124.
7. Alastair Sooke, “Damien Hirst: ‘We’re here for a good time, not a long time,’” Telegraph, January 8, 2011. Perhaps Hirst means to reference a traditional painting featuring a shark, such as John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778).
8. International Union for Conserva
tion of Nature, “IUCN Red List version 2013.2, Table 3a: Status category summary by major taxonomic group (animals),” IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, November 21, 2013, www.
iucnredlist.org.
104
social and personal significance we assign to the animals. The inclusion of taxidermy in
contemporary art is an extension of the flattening of the values assigned to art-making
materials that began with the Dada movement after World War I; traditionally privileged sculptural materials such as bronze and marble gave way to found objects scavenged in the urban environment. A more recent example is Robert Rauschenberg’s 1959
Monogram, which includes a taxidermy angora goat wearing a car tire and standing on a
painted board. Using diverse and commonplace materials, Rauschenberg demonstrated
his conviction that anything could be used to make art—that a taxidermy animal was
just another material (fig. 5). Damien Hirst pares down Rauschenberg’s modus operandi
in his 1991 The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which
features a thirteen-foot tiger shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde, its open jaw
revealing rows of razor-sharp teeth (fig. 6). Describing other preserved works by Hirst
(which feature “sectioned cows and bisected sheep”), Melissa Milgrom writes, “Encased
in glass, they are the opposite of a diorama and yet convey the same powerful clashing of beauty and death.”(6) Rather than the traditional and often idealized wildlife art
representation of living animals in nature, which provides a “window on the world,” many
contemporary artists have used real animals as a different sort of conceptual tool—
bypassing the brain’s neocortex, for example, to communicate directly to the limbic
system that controls the “fight or flight” response. “I wanted to make it so that you
walk into a gallery and are confronted by something that would tap into your real fears,
genuine things that you’re afraid of. A painting of a shark would never have done it for
me,” Hirst explains in a 2011 interview.(7)
Contemporary artists increasingly use real (and mostly dead) animals as art-making
material and cultural touchstone—and as a way of grappling with environmental challenges, which grow with every year that passes. The International Union for Conservation
of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species identifies 1,143 mammal species—about
one in five—threatened with extinction.(8) As the numbers and varieties of animals
decline, their symbolic power increases. Carlee Fernandez’s provocative “dead animals
as objects of utility” include Lola Isern (2001), a goat fashioned into a laundry basket;
Hugo Parlier (2001), a rhinoceros/stepladder; and Courtney Payne (2001), a deer/ice
cube tray (figs. 7–9). These sculptures may shock viewers who see the work as disrespectful to the animal—as though the artist were gleefully flaunting the hegemonic
relationship between hunter and hunted. Fernandez does not participate in the demise
of these animals (instead using unclaimed or damaged taxidermy), yet she implicates
herself as an accessory after the fact. There is a push/pull sensation as the viewer
105
← fig. 7
Carlee Fernandez
Hugo Parlier
2001
↘ fig. 8
Carlee Fernandez
Lola Isern
2001
↓ fig. 9
106
Carlee Fernandez
Courtney Payne
2001
107
Humans have a longstanding
symbiotic relationship with these
animals that have functioned not
only as sources of transportation,
beasts of burden, and world-class
athletes in sports and recreation,
but also as charismatic symbols
of grace and freedom.
← fig. 10
Berlinde De Bruyckere
P XII
2004
↙ fig. 11
Wim Delvoye
Untitled (Toile de Jouy)
simultaneously recognizes the authentic creature and regards its skin transformed
into something profoundly incongruous. As Rachel Poliquin writes, “This is the strange,
unsettling power of taxidermy: it offers—or forces—intimacies between you and an
animal-thing that is no longer quite an animal but could not be mistaken for anything other than an animal.”(9) Contemporary art made with taxidermy introduces yet
another layer of complexity: rather than creating a simulacrum of living creatures,
these animal-thing-artworks function as celebrations of life, or illustrations of the
circle of life, and serve as metaphors for human foibles.
2006
A disarmingly somber sight, Berlinde De Bruyckere’s horse lying on the ground evokes
a direct emotional response through its abject presence (fig. 10). Both De Bruyckere’s
religious education (as a girl she lived in a Catholic boarding school run by nuns) and
her veiled art-historical references inform her dramatic sculptures. Her works address
human concerns through forms that are clearly equine yet possess hints of human
characteristics, while disturbingly lacking features such as eyes, mouth, and sex (and,
therefore, individual identity). She began working with horses in 1999 when a Belgian
museum dedicated to the study of World War I invited her to reflect on the war:
I was working more than one year in their archives and did a lot of research on
this matter. The most important images for me were the abandoned city and the
dead bodies of the horses. These images were staying with me. I took the motif
of the dead horse as a symbol of loss in war, wherever it happens. Because if we
address war, it’s about losing people … some years afterwards when people were
asking about other animals in my work, I said ‘no.’ I need the horse because of its
beauty and its importance to us. It has a mind, a character and a soul. It is closest to us human beings.(10)
9. Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 39.
10.Berlinde De Bruyckere, interview by Kathleen Bühler, Kunstmuseum Bern, October 17, 2011, www.
kunstmuseumbern.ch.
11. Another instance of live pigs as art may be found in Chinese artist Xu Bing’s 1994 performance A Case of Transference; Xu Bing’s pigs were printed, not tattooed. See Britta Erickson, On the Edge: Contemporary Chinese Artists Encounter the West (Stanford, CA: Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, 2005), 86. (Exhibition catalogue.)
12.Gianni Degryse, Studio Wim Delvoye, e-mail message to the author, March 24, 2014. Andrea Pappas of Santa Clara University offers another perspective: “I think
108
there is a creepy dimension to
this—recall the tattooing of
persecuted peoples by the Nazis.
Those were individual numbers but
they were also part of an attempt
to eject some people from our
species. And of course the tattoos
aren’t chosen by the pigs so whose
‘individuality’ is being represented
here is an issue—is this an
invitation to see them as
individuals or a re-inscription of
their status as objects to be
manipulated?” E-mail message to
the author, May 27, 2014.
Humans have a longstanding symbiotic relationship with these animals that have
functioned not only as sources of transportation, beasts of burden, and world-class
athletes in sports and recreation, but also as charismatic symbols of grace and freedom. De Bruyckere obtains carcasses of horses that have died from natural causes
from the veterinary hospital at the university near her studio in Ghent; the resulting
sculptures evoke a sense of pathos and identification with the viewer. In contrast, Wim
Delvoye’s tattooed taxidermy pigs (fig. 11) might seem ridiculous—yet both artists
concern themselves with animals as signifiers of meaning and reflections of the human
condition.
Delvoye’s pigs wryly subvert the norms of the natural history style of taxidermy, yet
they are true to the Greek roots of the term, taxis (arrangement) and derma (skin).
The choice of a domesticated animal that is primarily raised for food (and therefore
may be seen as a commodity) provides an important insight into the function and
purpose of the project, which the artist has mounted in his native Belgium as well as
in China, Russia, and the United States. (Another reason for the choice of species is
that the skins of humans and pigs are similar; tattoo artists often practice on pigskin before attempting their work on people.) Through being tattooed, live pigs are
transformed into four-legged artworks and thus saved from enduring lives as mere
commodities subject to slaughter and butchering.(11) The pigs are sedated while being
tattooed; then, as living artworks, they are indulged with comfortable, heated indoor–
outdoor pigsties, and plentiful food; they live out their lives fully before succumbing
to natural causes—at which point they are treated to taxidermy. An implicit commentary on the art world is embedded in the work—these “piggy banks” will be purchased
by collectors as an investment, and may yield a substantial profit. There is also an
implied contrast between the commodification of the pig’s body, eventually rendered
as generic consumer products, and the individualization that a tattoo can represent.
(12) Both De Bruyckere and Delvoye choose specific species for manipulations that
intervene in our usual relationships with animals, drawing on our capacity for empathy
and our tendency to anthropomorphize, while displacing the animals from one market
(sport, food, leather) to another (art).
109
→ next page
fig. 12
British Wildlife
2000
← fig. 13
Giuseppe Arcimboldo
Earth
1570
Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s British Wildlife (2000) is a complex shadow sculpture
that includes eighty-eight taxidermy animals: forty-six birds (thirty-five species), forty
mammals (eighteen species), and two fish, all of which together create a compelling
visual illusion when lit with a projector (fig. 12). This gesamtkunstwerk was intended
as an homage to Noble’s father, a retired art professor who amassed a collection of
taxidermy specimens to serve as models for his students’ drawings. (They were borrowed from the local museum in Gloucestershire, but never returned.) After the death
of Noble’s father, the artists created this memorial dedicated to the life of a man who
loved nature, expressed through the skins and feathers of dead animals. In daylight,
the sculpture bears a striking resemblance to Earth, a painting composed of heads
nd bodies of mammals by sixteenth-century Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo
(fig. 13). But when illuminated by the projector, the piece casts a silhouette onto the
wall of two nude human torsos, seated back to back. The female’s profile is ambiguous,
her lips parted in a display of carnal pleasure or agony; the male seems to close his
eyes, allowing his head to fall back heavily on his companion’s, as if seeking support.
“The work is a tribute to Tim’s father,” explains Jeffrey Deitch, “but it is also a tribute
to wildlife as a subject in British art and an evocation of the special affection in British
culture for the animals associated with bird-watching and hunting.”(13) British Wildlife
is also a self-portrait of Tim Noble and Sue Webster in mourning, and thus resonates
with a peculiar power. In it can be found a summation of the ideas that underlie Late
Harvest, encompassing fundamental dyads: light and shadow, form and anti-form,
nature and culture, predator and prey, male and female, life and death.
It makes perfect sense that Late Harvest should be mounted at the Nevada Museum
of Art. Nevada is home to half the world’s population of wild horses, and their welfare
as well as their impact on rangelands is a subject of hot debate. Elko, Nevada, is home
to the Western Folklife Center, an organization dedicated to preserving the traditional
expressive culture of the American West, and the host of the annual Cowboy Poetry
Gathering. In 2014 Temple Grandin—renowned animal welfare advocate, professor,
and designer of humane livestock handling systems—gave the Gathering’s keynote
speech to an audience ranging from ranchers and horse trainers to cowboy poets and
animal rights advocates. This exhibition seeks to harness the strength of such divergent
viewpoints, using art to provoke investigation and dialogue. The central irony of using
taxidermy to grapple with ideas that are critical to our time—preservation or extinction, husbandry or exploitation, resilience and sustainability or environmental catastrophe—drives home the point that we are in the midst of a paradigmatic shift in the way
that humans relate to animals.(14)
13.Jeffrey Deitch, “Black Magic,” Tim
Noble & Sue Webster: Wasted
Youth (New York: Rizzoli, 2006).
14.See, for example, Charles Siebert,
“The Rights of Man … and Beast,”
New York Times Magazine,
April 27, 2014.
15.Paul Shepard, The Others: How 110
Animals Made Us Human (Washington, D.C.: Island
Press, 1996), 12.
The author would like to thank
Dr. Andrea Pappas of Santa Clara University for her thoughtful reading of this essay, and for her insightful comments.
Environmentalist Paul Shepard writes, “A better vision of the animals is that we
are one among them. … If [the goal of] our relationship to animals as true counterplayers is to break out of the banal stereotypes of ‘kindness’ on the one hand and that
of animals as mere automatons on the other, then radical ways of revisioning, at once
unromantic and free of the old logic of hierarchy, are necessary.”(15) Divorced from the
educational and taxonomic function of the natural history museum, and neither utilitarian nor decorative, much contemporary art incorporating taxidermy evokes disquiet and
a sense of displacement. Perhaps the ambiguity inherent in such work constitutes one
mode of the “radical revisioning” proposed by Shepard. Contemporary artists have not
only claimed but internalized the shifting dynamics of human-animal relationships, distilling the most compelling aspects as they propose surprising new ways of extracting
meaning from these associations. This practice has taken on an increased urgency in the
twenty-first century, as industrialization, climate change, and other human effects take
their toll, reducing the potential depth and variety of these relationships.
Finally, contradictions form the fabric of who we are as human beings. We are both
human and human animal; we love that which we kill; we are imbued with godlike
impulses to create, and also subject to the laws of Mother Nature; the world was made
for us, and the world was made by us. And our representations of animals—whether
avant-garde or traditional—are actually representations of ourselves.
111
Environmentalist Paul Shepard
writes, “A better vision of the animals is that we are one among
them. … If our relationship to animals
as true counterplayers is to break
out of the banal stereotypes of
‘kindness’ on the one hand and that
of animals as mere automatons
on the other, then radical ways of
revisioning, at once unromantic and
free of the old logic of hierarchy,
are necessary.”
112
113
To sketch the historical
development of the wildlife
art that Late Harvest
brings into dialogue with
contemporary art, we
begin in the late eighteenth
century.
PAINTING NATURE, RED IN TOOTH AND
CLAW: HIGHLIGHTS IN THE EVOLUTION
OF WILDLIFE ART
Petersen Curator
ADAM DUNCAN HARRIS, PH.D.
of Art and Research
National Museum
of Wildlife Art
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, first published in 1859, exerted tremendous
impact on the way humans conceptualize and portray the creatures with whom we
share the planet. The reverberations of that impact are still being felt today, as
artists continue to wrestle with how to depict the human-animal relationship. By presenting intriguing combinations of classic and contemporary artworks, Late Harvest
furthers the conversation, with the hope of deepening an appreciation for animals and
nature while prompting further thought on the struggle to define what it means to
be human and/or animal in an era when the separation between human and beast is
increasingly contested.
To sketch the historical development of the wildlife art that Late Harvest brings into
dialogue with contemporary art, we begin in the late eighteenth century.
BEFORE DARWIN
1. Louise Lippincott and Andreas
In the century prior to Darwin’s advent, two strains of animal portrayal came into
prominence: Enlightenment-influenced scientific illustration, and Romantically charged
painting and sculpture.
Blühm, Fierce Friends: Artists
and Animals, 1750–1900
(New York: Merrell, 2005), 17.
2. This type of illustration is directly
related to the dominant artistic
style of the era, Neoclassicism,
which was similarly precise and
valued clarity of line, pose,
and narrative.
3. George-Louis Leclerc, Compte de
Buffon, Histoire naturelle,
générale et particulière (36 vols.,
1749–88). Buffon’s Histoire
Naturelle is infamous in America
114
for its disparagement of North
American wildlife as inferior,
degenerate versions of
European wildlife.
Emanating directly from aristocratic collections of natural history materials,
Enlightenment science began the project to classify and catalogue the natural world.
During the 1750s, Carolus Linnaeus developed his Systema Naturae, the binomial
system still used to describe a creature’s genus and species. The artwork produced
to illustrate early natural histories valued “clear outline, pure coloring, firm modeling, order and regularity, and precision,” according to curators Louise Lippincott and
Andreas Blühm.(1) Artists generally created images of specimens in static profile,
depicting an animal’s most characteristic attributes for ease in identification and to
aid in comparison(2) (The quality and the age of specimens in aristocratic collections
varied greatly, however, so that an artist might be creating a very precise rendering of
a seriously compromised specimen).
One of the most talented avian artists working in the pre-Darwin era was François
Nicolas Martinet (fig. 1). His work stands out from the purely diagrammatic style of his
eighteenth-century colleagues for its emphasis on lifelike poses and modeling. Even so,
it was created to illustrate scientific texts, most notably the volumes devoted to birds
in Buffon’s encyclopedic Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière.(3) The appearance
115
Romanticism’s reaction to the
Enlightenment’s emphasis on
reason and rationality stressed
the importance of the imagination
and intuition as tools for living in
greater harmony with nature, or
at least for tapping into the power
of the natural world.
← fig. 1
François Nicolas Martinet
Le Faucon
18th century
↙ fig. 2
George Stubbs
A Horse Attacked by a Lion
1927
Romanticism’s reaction to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason and rationality
stressed the importance of the imagination and intuition as tools for living in greater
harmony with nature, or at least for tapping into the power of the natural world. This
ideology resulted in powerful, emotional-laden works (by such artists as George Stubbs,
Edwin Landseer, and Eugene Delacroix) that elicited emotional responses from viewers
by using animal actors (fig. 2).
↙ fig. 3
Antoine-Louis Barye
Panther Attacking a Stag
1857
↓ fig. 4
John James Audubon
Virginia Partridge
(Bob White Quail)
circa 1825/2006
4. Diana Donald and Jane Munro,
eds., Endless Forms: Charles
Darwin, Natural Science, and
the Visual Arts (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009), 90.
5. For further discussion, see Adam
Duncan Harris, Wildlife in
American Art (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 2009).
6. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In
Memoriam (1842), canto 56,
line 15.
7. Working shortly after Audubon,
in the 1830s, George Catlin
journeyed into the west to record
the lives of Native American tribes
and the animals upon which they
relied for food, shelter, and
clothing, in what can be seen as
another example of the drive to
study a subject in situ, relying on
firsthand observation.
8. Donald & Munro, Endless Forms, 6.
9. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of
Species (1859), Joseph Carroll,
116
of Martinet’s work was driven by its purpose, which was to provide a clear sense of the
anatomy and characteristic coloring of specific species, with little emphasis placed on
natural habitat or behavior.
ed. (Peterborough, Ontario:
Broadview Press, 2003), 97.
According to Darwin, animals or
plants best suited to their environ-
ment are more likely to survive
and reproduce.
Romantic artists relied, for the most part, on animals in menageries or zoos as models,
and conducted little if any fieldwork. Nonetheless, as Diana Donald points out, Darwin’s
description of the ferocity and struggle inherent in nature likely grew from the popularity of Romantic renderings of animals in deathly struggles by fellow Englishmen
Stubbs and Landseer, and other popular artists of the era.(4) French sculptor AntoineLouis Barye—one of the best-known Romantic artists, whose bronzes are prominently
displayed at museums such as the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Metropolitan
Museum of Art—broke new ground in the Paris Salon of 1831 with his sculpture, Tiger
Devouring a Gavial. Prior to that, animals had not been considered suitable subjects for
serious works of art of the type favored by the conservative French Academy. Based on
close study of animals in Paris’s Jardin des Plantes, coupled with cues from his own fertile imagination, Barye’s beautifully muscled animals wrestling in battle, like Panther
Attacking a Stag, proved immensely popular in Europe and America during and after
his lifetime (fig. 3). (In fact, his success gave rise to a legion of animal sculptors, who
became known as animaliers.) Barye’s work epitomized a vision of nature as an epic
struggle between species, part of a cultural trend that clearly influenced Darwin as he
formulated his theory of natural selection.(5) This worldview is memorably captured by
the poet Tennyson in his oft-quoted phrase, “Nature, red in tooth and claw.”(6)
In addition to bronze statuary by the likes of Barye, the middle of the 1800s saw a
proliferation of animal prints, available as black and white or hand-colored engravings. As depictions became more readily available, artists and patrons began to realize
that observing animals in their natural habitats was at least as important as studying
properly preserved specimens. John James Audubon is a shining example of this dual
strategy. Audubon spent countless hours in the field, observing as well as hunting; he
shot, dissected, and mounted his own specimens, gaining a thorough knowledge of the
subjects he portrayed in his magnum opus, Birds of America (1827–38).(7) Audubon’s
determination to depict each bird as close to life-size as possible, and in the performance of some natural behavior (sometimes dramatic, as in Virginia Partridge), set a
new standard for the portrayal of animals—of which Darwin was very much aware
(fig. 4). While a medical student in Edinburgh, Darwin met Audubon, saw some of the
artist’s action studies, and was reportedly fascinated by his tales of American avian
behavior(8) Darwin later quoted Audubon in On the Origin of Species, The Variation of
Animals and Plants, and The Descent of Man.
CHARLES DARWIN AND JOSEPH WOLF
As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and
as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follow
that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of
surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance,
any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.
— Charles Darwin(9)
Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. A product of his time, Darwin
took part in the era’s growing penchant for exploration of foreign locales and direct
117
In addition to the fully developed
foliage and vegetation, we see a rabbit
darting quickly away as the birds come
crashing to the ground. A narrative
that might easily be attributed to this
painting is that humans have sent the
falcons to kill the kite in order to save
the rabbits, later to be harvested by
humans for their own uses.
↘ fig. 5
Joseph Wolf
Gyr Falcons Striking a Kite
1856
observation of nature; his famous voyage on the Beagle (to the Galapagos Islands)
gave him the opportunity to observe animals in the wild. The experience and the information he gleaned on that trip helped him develop his revolutionary ideas about
evolution, behavior, and natural selection. Darwin’s vision of life on earth drastically
changed human perception of our relationship to our animal brethren, calling into
question the widely held belief that humans were divinely placed on earth, with the
animals and land as our dominion. The theory of evolution stressed struggle, the
interconnectedness of life, and the fecundity of nature, and resituated our role in
the context of that system, with animals as our kin. In 1864, philosopher Herbert
Spencer coined the term “survival of the fittest” to describe Darwin’s theory of
natural selection; Darwin included it in later editions of his book, and it became a
popular catchphrase, as well as the subject of innumerable works of art.
One of the first artists to be directly influenced by Darwin was the painter Joseph
Wolf. In his massive and dynamic canvases, Wolf helped collapse the divide between
science and art, between collections-based, anatomical renderings and romantic
visions of epic battles. Donald writes that Wolf’s depiction of animals was transformed by Darwin, “producing the first truly ecological vision of life in the wild.”(10)
Wolf’s work melded a keen naturalist’s knowledge (borne of many hours studying
skins and specimens in collections like London’s Museum of Natural History), with
a post-Darwin prerogative to observe and depict animals in their natural habitats,
showing how animals might actually exist, somewhere out there in the wilderness.
Describing this penchant, Wolf said, “The great thing I always aimed at was the
expression of Life. … Life! Life! Life!”(11)
10.Donald and Munro, Endless
Wolf consciously differentiated his work from that of artists such as Martinet, saying,
“The scientific work consists merely of portraits of single figures. I was never satisfied
with this, but tried to express action and life—to make the animals do something by
which you could give the picture a name. … I make a distinction between a picture in
which there is an idea, and the mere representation of a bird.”(12) Wolf’s Gyr Falcons
Attacking a Kite exemplifies his point (fig. 5). Gyr Falcons is not only full of the dynamism and emotion characteristic of the best Romantic renderings, but also contains
the latest scientific knowledge of anatomy and behavior, adding a layer of meaning
and content to the composition. The narrative of Wolf’s masterwork adds yet another
element, a human one: Two trained falcons—note the tresses on their legs—attack
the larger kite. All are depicted in the final stages of falling out of the sky. In addition
118
Forms, 94.
11.Quoted in Alfred Herbert Palmer,
The Life of Joseph Wolf: Animal
Painter (London: Longmans, Green
& Company, 1895), 99.
12.Quoted in Karl Schulze-Hagen and Armin Geus, eds., Joseph
Wolf (1820–1899)
Tiermaler-Animal Painter
(Marburg: Basilisken-Presse,
2000), 219–20.
119
Artists depicting wildlife were
by then hard-pressed to rely on
taxidermy mounts or zoo animals
alone; field experience was
required to more fully know an
animal and faithfully record it
in painting or sculpture.
← fig. 6
Richard Friese
Pascha (Deer in a Forest Glade)
1912
↙ fig. 7
Wilhelm Kuhnert
African Lions
circa 1911
↓ fig. 8
Carl Rungius
During the Rut
circa 1925
13.Terry Wieland, “Preface,” in
Charles Wechsler, ed., The
Animal Art of Wilhelm Kuhnert
(Columbia, SC: LiveOak Press,
1995), xvi-xvii.
14.Karen Wonders, “Big Game
Hunting and the Birth of Wildlife
Art,” in Carl Rungius: Artist
and Sportsman (Toronto: Warwick
Publishing, 2001), 26.
15.See Walter Putnam, “The Colonial
Animal,” in Margo DeMello,
Animals and Society: An
Introduction to Human-Animal
Studies (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2012), 81. As
Putnam makes clear in his brief
but cogent essay, a force parallel
in effect with the developments in
art and science discussed here
was the reach of both European
and Euro-American explorers into
territories previously uncharted
(by them, at least), and the
subsequent colonization of
wilderness areas that had once
been safe haven to both native
peoples and animals. The interior
of the American and Canadian Rockies would not have been
available to Carl Rungius were it
not for the Union Pacific and
Canadian Pacific railways, rolling
steadfastly and reliably from
New York to Wyoming or Alberta.
16.Donald and Munro, Endless
Forms, 97.
120
to the fully developed foliage and vegetation, we see (in the lower left corner of the
canvas) a rabbit darting quickly away as the birds come crashing to the ground. Wolf
became skilled at going beyond the surface level (that of battling creatures) to tell
a broader story, often based on Darwin’s notions of the fecundity of life. A narrative
that might easily be attributed to this painting is that humans have sent the falcons
to kill the kite in order to save the rabbits, later to be harvested by humans for their
own uses.
THE BIG FOUR
In the late 1800s, Paul Meyerheim, instructor at the Academy of Art in Berlin and a
noted painter in his own right, told his students, “Do like I do. Place pieces of hard
coal on the board, sprinkle sand in between, and you have the perfect desert.”(13)
In the post-Darwin era, this cavalier attitude toward animal habitat would soon expire.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a new school of artists—Richard
Friese, Wilhelm Kuhnert, Carl Rungius, and Bruno Liljefors among them—took the
lessons they had learned in European art academies out into the field. Artists depicting wildlife were by then hard-pressed to rely on taxidermy mounts or zoo animals
alone; field experience was required to more fully know an animal and faithfully
record it in painting or sculpture. At the same time, dramatic scenes of animals in
combat gave way to often quieter depictions of animals in nature.
As a mature artist, Friese was known for paintings of red deer, moose, and bison—
animals he was privileged to see on royal hunting preserves in Germany. In Deer in a
Forest Glade, Friese depicted Pascha, a large stag shot by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1910
(fig. 6). Wilhelm commissioned Friese to paint Pascha as the Kaiser had last observed
him, pawing at the ground, preparing a bed for the night. The emphasis on recording the stag in its habitat, performing a natural behavior, has clear ties to Darwin’s
theories and shows how deeply ingrained his vision of nature had become by the early
1900s. (Friese also voyaged to the arctic regions of Norway, and painted polar bears
from Spitsbergen with a mastery that remains difficult to rival).
Wilhelm Kuhnert and Carl Rungius took instruction from Meyerheim and Friese in
Berlin, before forging careers and specializations of their own. Kuhnert was the first
academically trained artist to specialize in African wildlife, taking safaris to Africa in
1891, 1905, and 1911–12. In 1906, he toured India and Ceylon and added tigers to
his repertoire. European colonial expansion (into Africa in particular) made Kuhnert’s
journeys possible, and his experiences seeing animals in the wild added an unprecedented measure of veracity to his paintings. He studied and sketched his subjects
in the field, and then returned to Germany to create massive canvases like African
Lions, based on his first-hand experiences (fig. 7). Kuhnert’s lions were among his
most highly regarded works, and he became known as “Lion” Kuhnert. Karen Wonders
notes that in Kuhnert’s day “imperial expansion into Africa resulted in exotic animals
being hunted and represented as symbols of power.”(14) The king of the jungle was
the top prize for any aspiring hunter, and to include a representation of the stately
creature amidst a display of trophies attributed even greater power to its owner.(15)
Carl Rungius, slightly younger than Kuhnert, came to specialize in the wildlife of
North America—thanks to an invitation from his uncle to come for a Maine moose
hunt in 1894. Unsuccessful during the first season, he decided to stay for an additional year. Rungius quickly established his home base and studio in New York City,
traveling to the American and then the Canadian Rockies almost every summer and
fall for the rest of his life, to hunt and sketch wildlife. Rungius became known for his
portrayals of moose, often depicting them in the fall during the rut when the animals were in their prime (fig. 8). His early paintings of moose mating rituals tended
towards Romantic, survival-of-the-fittest narratives, with images of male moose
battling for the prized female; later, after having spent so much time in nature with
121
Defying categories, and combining
elements often considered to belong
to separate domains, artists directly
address, sometimes confrontationally,
a range of cultural concerns that
expand the notion of human-animal
relations to include genetically
modified organisms, cloning, factory
farming, endangered species, and
environmental change.
↘ fig. 9
Bruno Liljefors
Leaping Hare (Skuttande Hare)
1928
animals, his depictions became gentler and perhaps more genuinely representative of
what he encountered while out in the field.
While the drama inherent in Darwin’s writings on the struggle for existence provided
vivid and enduring subject matter for wildlife artists, his theories on the coloration
of animals (and on how it helps or hinders them within their natural habitats) opened
up a whole other world of subjects. Donald writes that the “effect on painters was
profound, generating an art that was at once more lyrical and more suggestive of
nature’s totality than … histrionic images of struggle.”(16) Bruno Liljefors painted
striking scenes of struggle, but he was also profoundly interested in the animal and
its habitat. A painting of a hare skittering across the forest floor shows a keen interest in the coloration not only of the animal, but also of its habitat (fig. 9). Liljefors,
more than his contemporaries, focused on the smaller creatures and birdlife that
inhabited the wilder regions of Sweden.
Friese, Kuhnert, Rungius, and Liljefors moved animal art out of the zoo and into the
field. Their success can be gauged in part by noting that when contemporary wildlife
artists are asked about their influences, one or more of the Big Four invariably is
named. By stressing the importance of observing wildlife in the field and depicting
animals in their natural habitats, Friese, Kuhnert, Rungius, and Liljefors laid the
foundation upon which artists working in the naturalist tradition continue to build.
LATE HARVEST
In our quick tour through the development of classic wildlife art in the EuropeanAmerican tradition—an art movement that remains vital in the early twenty-first
century—we’ve noted its emphasis on wild species in wild habitats enacting natural
behaviors. In contrast, much contemporary art that takes the animal as its subject
is clearly influenced by posthumanist thinking that questions the very separation
between man and beast. Defying categories, and combining elements often considered to belong to separate domains, artists directly address, sometimes confrontationally, a range of cultural concerns that expand the notion of human-animal
relations to include genetically modified organisms, cloning, factory farming, endangered species, and environmental change.
By juxtaposing classic wildlife paintings with contemporary art, Late Harvest brings
together disparate realms with surprising and intriguing results. Though beyond the
scope of this essay, a series of art-historical highlights could link, for example, the
naturalist wonder of Rungius’s best work with the fecundity of nature found in Petah
Coyne’s sculptures. The work of such artists serves as evidence of humanity’s ongoing
struggle to enunciate in word and depict in image our relationship to the other creatures with whom we share the planet. Thanks in large part to Darwin’s evolutionary
thinking, we live in an era in which the boundaries between human and animal are
constantly blurred. Late Harvest takes part in a similar blurring of lines, becoming
an exemplar of our time and our zeitgeist.
122
123
If accounting for human
action is to have any
credence in the future,
it must embody a new
way of thinking beyond
the anthropocentric and
the absolute.
THE WE OF “WE”—
RETHINKING BACK TO THE GARDEN
When we belatedly attempt to steward, care for, or “repair” environments—and when
we transform animals considered “endangered” from individual beings and societies into
data—what of consequence is really captured? and, more importantly, what is lost?
For fourteen years, through our art practice, we have examined historical and contemporary human-animal interfaces. We have given critical scrutiny to cultural constructs
such as pests, pets, the wild, and the domestic, and to the colonial appropriation, representation, and strategic elimination of entire species. Our research has focused upon the
engagement and exchange by which those relationships are constituted, attempting to
put emphasis on neither the anthropocentric nor zoocentric perspective, but instead on
their flux and interplay. Pointing ever more insistently to environmental viewpoints, and
embracing the inclusive dynamics of distributive agency, such relationships themselves
are continually subject to reflex and change.(1) This has become particularly telling in
light of our increasing willingness to allow the consideration of animal consciousness
and zoocentric positions into our fields of vision and affect.
In the context of a growing awareness of environmental decline and degradation stemming from human activity, much air time and column width is given to environmental
issues. It is striking, however, that in interviews about environmental change—with
experts such as climatologists and conservationists, not to mention less specialized
commentators—there is a palpable reluctance to use the term “we” to signify anything
other than the human species. In the anthropocentric view (which we in the West are conditioned to espouse), it is as though to acknowledge the environmental crisis by invoking
its catastrophic effects upon a multitude of other species would be to destabilize or
divert an otherwise rational argument. Human need is an anthropocentric given, and as
such beyond contest—as a consequence, the human “we” remains culturally blind to the
needs of an environmental constituency comprising myriad other species and their/our
co-relation/coproduction.
1. See Jane Bennett, Vibrant 124
Matter: A Political Ecology
of Things (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2010).
We believe that no significant change in exploitative habits and capitalist consumption
will ever satisfactorily or effectively occur unless there is a collective acknowledgment,
accommodation, and mobilization to use the term “we” to mean not only humans, but all
the organisms that live on planet Earth.
Conscious of the necessarily misrepresentative effects of generalization, we have always
been at pains strategically to ground our work by means of the specific within the
125
It has become common practice to
generate data as a means of tracking
and understanding the world, turning
populations of beings into sets of
tables that reflect broad tendencies
and effects.
↙ Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson
2004
context of the general.(2) We take this general context to be informed and constituted
by accepted cultural constructs. An environment not mediated by humans is nothing
more than an ecology, or site of ecology. Thinking about “environment” and accepting
the concept of interconnectivity, human beings must at some point acknowledge a global
ecology, and all the chemistry, microorganisms, and species of flora and fauna that
exist within it and by which it is constituted. Rosi Braidotti neatly summons the paradox
of complexity and specificity:
A location is a materialist temporal and spatial site of coproduction of subjects
in their diversity. Accounting for this is anything but an instance of relativism.(3)
If accounting for human action is to have any credence in the future, it must embody a
new way of thinking beyond the anthropocentric and the absolute. In this short text we
point to some of our own preoccupations as artists challenging routine thought patterns
by destabilizing what Western-thinking humans think they know.
2.Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson,
nanoq: flat out and bluesome.
A Cultural Life of Polar Bears (London: Black Dog Publishing,
2006), the catalogue for a
2004 exhibition at Spike Island
in Bristol, which included ten
taxidermic polar bears.
Issues that we have recurrently addressed in our projects—for instance, in a 2009
installation, between you and me—include the power and consequences of naming,
and of representation more broadly.(4) In our 2004 project Big Mouth, we examined
the extirpation of the Tasmanian Tiger (or Thylacine) from the island of Tasmania, which
signaled the extinction of the species. We examined the power of “naming” to affect—
and, in the latter case, to seal the fate of—an entire species.(5) A name is a signifying
skin assigned to stand for something. That skin, like all representations, serves unwittingly (or not) to occlude the thing it is supposed to represent—in this case, an animal
that exists within and as part of an environment, and for which that environment is an
extension (the overall constitution of which informs and contributes to its being). The
name, and our human reliance upon it as a handle of convenience, supplants the real.
It appears to denote, but in fact simply directs our understanding toward an illusion of
finite and unchanging difference. This results in an unintentional disregard arising from
an idea of fixity, in that a name by which something is referenced necessarily must be
dependable and remain consistent. The name cuts off our ability to recognize (or, more
importantly, to expect and be alert to) difference or deviation within the thing or being
that is observed, witnessed, or experienced. When we examine a nonhuman animal, the
repeated application of a name reduces our capacity to grasp the idea that it might be
something other than a construct that human beings have the faculties to register. In
this act of naming, the appreciation of the individual animal itself, and of its particular
ecological conditions, is thereby suppressed or extinguished entirely.
3. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Theory:
The Portable Rosi Braidotti
(New York: Columbia University
Press, 2011), 171–72.
4. The exhibition between you
and me, on view at the Kalmar
Museum in Kalmar, Sweden,
August–October, 2009, included
the video works the naming of
things and Three Attempts.
5.Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, Big Mouth (Glasgow: Tramway &
Cumbria Institute of the Arts, 2004). Exhibition catalogue.
6. An alternative approach might
be additive rather than
reductive—recognizing capacity
rather than tendency, and
soliciting and embracing
complexity rather than peddling
caricature.
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Startlingly, the effect of this process is that when difference is encountered, beyond that
conjured by the behavior-set of the representational image, it is dismissed as idiosyncratic. In effect, the name serves to neutralize the nonhuman animal and replace it with
a set of recognizable, familiar, and repeating behaviors. Newly observed traits, rather
than extending the ontology of the species (and human knowledge), are thought probably
to be aberrant and not worthy of attention.(6)
This is the notoriously reductive process by which science is seen to function in the world:
repeatability, and the ability to predict behavior and conditions, are qualities necessary for any scientific endeavor to be recognized as such. Curiously, the ideology of the
repeatable so often fails to take into account (and even precludes) the recognition of
conditional differences—differences very often signified by, or arising from, changed
contexts and circumstances. In short, when the behaviors of elements, minerals, environmental growth patterns, biological systems, or species are considered, those conditions that mediate and potentially challenge the repeatable (and thus render it more
mutable and unstable) are eradicated. For taxonomic purposes, it is almost a tautology
that the rational mind is conditioned to seek static and reliable models.
We believe that it is a cultural—that is, Western—rather than innate human tendency
to look first for “things,” in order subsequently to scrutinize them in isolation, and then
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to use their assigned characteristics as maps and models by which to proceed. Paradoxically, this taxonomy that strips away the conditional is antithetical to ideas of flux and
change, and thus to the idea of evolution. Taxonomy sits in opposition to what has been
fundamentally accepted as an ever-changing world—one that is intrinsically responsive to specific and local deviations that, when concentrated and sustained at sufficient
intensities, will assimilate and reflect, profoundly and irrevocably, such changes.
In this fragile context the sustainability of conservation strategies is as much under
threat as are their respective subjects. In the short term, programs may be sustained
and individual species conserved, but when funding dries up or is redirected, strategies
will be curtailed and the survival of species put in jeopardy, because the complex factors
threatening the species have not been holistically addressed. Though conservation is a
costly and temporary life-support system, it is also an admirable practice predicated on
sweet hope. Its most promising prospect is that cultural approaches to the environment
will become more joined up; in this context, conservation’s holding strategy is a bid to
stay the hour of what seems like inevitable execution. Rebecca Solnit observes:
It has become common practice to generate data as a means of tracking and understanding the world, turning populations of beings into sets of tables that reflect broad
tendencies and effects. As a kind of “boiling down” process, the figures are used as a
basis from which to deduce hypotheses and draw conclusions, which in turn drive the
mobilization of particular actions. Such data and actions rarely privilege or acknowledge
animal individuation; through accumulation they simply constitute a generalized body of
information from which action can rationally be promoted.
It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise … It is as though we make
the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. We should be able to find our way back again by the objects we dropped,
like Hansel and Gretel in the forest, the object reeling us back in time, undoing each
loss, a road back from lost eyeglasses to lost toys and baby teeth. …
The reluctance to corral a consciousness of the human species into a shared frame
with others stems from a long-established tendency to consider the human as, literally,
exceptional. Popular knowledge and all manner of data now support the idea that we
are biologically very close to plants, never mind our animal cousins. As Donna Haraway
points out,
The story of extincting species, especially now, is the story of the failure to love.
It is a letter of affection never sent.(8)
And so it will remain, until some as-yet unseen epiphany reveals the mutuality of our
shared predicament, and human selfishness at last provides the necessary consensus
and spur to action.
I love the fact that human genomes can be found in only 10 percent of all the cells
that occupy my body; the other 90 percent of the cells are filled with the genomes
of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such, some of which play in a symphony necessary
to my being alive at all, and some of which are hitching a ride and doing the rest of
me, of us, no harm. I am vastly outnumbered by my tiny companions … To be one is
always to become one with many.(7)
Humans are heavy animals—we move through the landscape crushing and pounding
the ground, damaging myriad small organisms beneath our feet without knowing what
it is we destroy. As a knowing species, however, humans have extensively mapped the
metaphorical footprint we apply to the organisms of the earth. The ever-growing human
population weighs more and more heavily on the planet, while simultaneously commanding comprehensive and precise data by which to register and record its impact.
If the case is to be made regarding the term “we,” and its potential as an ecological
tool for improving our perceptual grasp of our place within the world, then this understanding is key. We have to reimagine our human selves as existing alongside and in
some way equal to all other flora, fauna, bacteria, fungi, protozoa—but this reimagining is made simpler because we are in fact constituted in large part by these other
species. “We” all carry each other around; “we” replenish each other and continually
move in and out of “us.” We are part of—and, collectively, the entirety of—the flux of
an interspecific “us.”
Given that artists are not obliged to “tell the truth,” there may be nothing of consequence here. This is particularly true given that the authors are equally complicit in
matters environmental—we aspire and fall short. Everything uttered regarding the we
of the “we” is open to ethical critique and charges of duplicity; indeed, our wavering in
the world mirrors precisely the human inertia to which we point and flap in this text.
Being asked to act as intermediaries or facilitators between science and the general
public presents a curious paradox for artists. From our perspective, there’s no doubt
that science commands more passive trust than does art. The general public opinion
regarding art is largely one of disinterest, arising from the perception of art’s irrelevance. A smaller segment of the public is undoubtedly interested in palatable and
“attractive” art that offers little or no threat to a populist status quo. To a tiny proportion of the public, interest in art coalesces around challenge and critique—even
philosophical radicalism. Given that what we are likely to produce from our research
addresses the third audience directly, and may tempt the second through strategies
of aesthetics and spectacle, the question remains: How can art effectively—or in any
way—tax the consciousness of an environmentally aloof and unconcerned majority?
What I do to the world, therefore, I do to myself.
Part of the perceptual inadequacy that obstructs this view arises from an inability to
conceive of the timescales involved in evolutionary change. The human lifespan is simply
not long enough to take seriously (or even recognize) signs of significant, large-scale
environmental change. What awareness there may be of the proliferation of storms,
flash floods, and heat waves is typically qualified and countered by the reassuring delusion that such extremes have always existed and, therefore, signal no change of any
lasting consequence. Science tells us otherwise, but the tendency is to take uncomfortable science with a pinch of salt, an attitude that runs counter to the more general
acceptance and passive reliance.
Implicit in this reluctance is a bleak message about human nature—more specifically, about the impossibility of the distance we have traveled as a global society, from
understanding a world that we knew previously as hunter-gatherers. Whereas once the
relations between place, denizens, and seasons were ontologically implicit, now humans
depend on specialist services, skill sets, and technologies, supported by intermediary
currencies and languages, that extend the perceptual gap and our inability to engage
with the reality of the planet. Irrationally, there seems to be an unbreakable relationship between what is seen as rational thought and its foundation in the imperative
of human need.
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7. Donna J. Haraway, When
Species Meet (Minneapolis:
8. Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to
University of Minnesota Press,
Getting Lost (Edinburgh:
2008), 3–4.
Canongate Books, 2006), 186.
In light of the global inability to respond imaginatively and ecologically to obvious
environmental need, the ambition to recalibrate our thinking toward constructive ecological uncertainty and deference is unlikely to be realized across the board any time
soon. The imperative therefore must be to introduce incremental shifts in our cultural
approach. As artists, we see our work, in its project-based and serial manifestations, as
a way toward that end. The formulation and implementation of the work as critique and
discourse, both short term and longer term, quite naturally sits as a component of, and
extension to, the work itself, functioning as a tool to increase the visibility and impact
of embedded ideas, to extend the resonance of the work across multiple fields, and to
serve as a means by which to test its effects.
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Visiting the museum is like
discovering a dark forest, a
territory that does not belong
to humanity, a place where
wildlife hides around every
corner. The typical hunting
experience is reversed—
that intensity one feels when
one is alert for danger …
LE MUSÉE DE LA CHASSE ET DE LA NATURE
(THE MUSEUM OF NATURE AND THE HUNT)
Director,
Museum of Nature
and the Hunt,
Paris, France
In the midst of high tensions between hunters and animal rights activists in
France today, the Museum of Nature and the Hunt seeks to bring the two sides
together. It strives to provide a clear and unbiased portrait of the challenges
hunting represents, the difficulties in understanding and managing its place
within the larger ecosystem. Both the museum’s design and curatorial program,
replete with contemporary art, make the museum a destination for more than
just hunters.
Visitors to the Museum of Nature and the Hunt, having just bought a ticket, find
themselves face to face with something rather singular: a rough wooden plank, with
an arrow pointing the way, a sign you would be more likely to find at a crossroads
in the woods than on the grand staircase of an eighteenth-century mansion. Paradoxically, this sign is not so much intended to inform visitors as to disconcert them,
by encouraging them to wander off the expected or conventional paths of the museum.
Visiting this strange territory is like starting off on a treasure hunt. Of course, the
very name of this museum is odd. Is it curious that this museum is dedicated to both
Hunting and Nature, when some people today see these terms as antithetical?
Two hunters and ardent defenders of wildlife, François Sommer (1904–1973) and his
wife Jacqueline (1913–1993), are the patrons behind this unusual museum. Throughout their lives they collected antiquarian books, hunting weapons, wildlife-themed
paintings, and objets d’art. With no direct descendants, the couple decided to create a foundation dedicated to the understanding and protection of the environment
as well as to the promotion of hunting practices that respect natural systems. This
foundation gave rise to the museum that would house their collections. By encouraging the close observation of wildlife and by inspiring artists, the Sommers wanted the
museum to stand as a testament to what hunting had brought to numerous civilizations. In an old mansion, in the heart of historic Paris, they found a space adequate
to house their collections. Since its inauguration in 1967, they’d dreamt of a larger
space where they could further develop the themes presented in the museum; this
became possible in 2003 with the acquisition of an adjoining building.
The foundation’s board wanted the renovation of the museum to respect and maintain the original spirit of the mansion while opening it to a new public. To increase the
museum’s appeal, the new wing was designed for educational purposes and to have
a strong emotional impact. In effect, the museum was designed as a “playing field,”
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Like the flow of a conversation,
these themes are integrated into
a greater story—the story of the
evolving relationship between human
and animal in Western society. This
anthropological theme unifies one’s
visit and gives it a chronological
progression from prehistory through
modern times.
→ Trophy Gallery
(view from entry)
systematically combining many layers of interpretations. This playful educational aspect
reinforces the serious scientific nature of the museum; the rigorous science makes the
game effective.
A tour through the new museum follows subjects: naturalistic (French wildlife), artistic
(European wildlife paintings), and technical (hunting weapons). Like the flow of a conversation, these themes are integrated into a greater story—the story of the evolving
relationship between human and animal in Western society. This anthropological theme
unifies one’s visit and gives it a chronological progression from prehistory through
modern times. It highlights the constant evolution of how we view wildlife. Is not the wild
animal, once a threat, now viewed as being threatened? The classification of the animal
world—alternatively defined as being profitable or harmful to humanity, or as species
that must be protected or destroyed—is constantly being questioned. From room to
room, this story is illustrated by symbolic animals: wild boar, stag, wolf, unicorn, fox,
owl, hare, bird of prey, horse, and dog. The contrast between their representations in
different eras brings to light their changing status. It is, if you will, a summary of the
history of humankind’s opinions about animals.
Given this intellectual foundation, the museum yields unique experiences counter to the
traditional museum experience; the goal is to challenge visitors, to take them out of their
comfort zone. We invite visitors to explore the unknown, to follow a path where nothing
limits the perspective or the imagination. Visiting the museum is like discovering a dark
forest, a territory that does not belong to humanity, a place where wildlife hides around
every corner. As observers, visitors sense that they are being watched by animals that
they never see, but who have left traces of their presence. The typical hunting experience
is reversed—that intensity one feels when one is alert for danger, tense, and aware of
the hidden presence of the animal.
Museum architects Catherine Rouland and Frédérique Paoletti proved invaluable to the
creation of this unique ambiance. The museum design is the result of enthusiastic collaboration between the foundation and the architectural team; the project grew richer
and more complex throughout its execution. The foundation that supports the Museum
of Nature and the Hunt was very flexible, and encouraged the experimental nature of the
design, allowing multiple revisions to the original plan. Aesthetic choices did not have to
be approved by committees of experts or ratified by administrators, and therefore an
exceptional freedom made it possible to construct the odd nature of the museum.
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133
The design of the Museum of Nature
and the Hunt seeks to undermine
the inherent institutional nature
of museums … this design is
heterogeneous—it evokes the gentle
chaos of a family home in which each
generation has left its mark.
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135
In places, the signs and tracks
overflow their containers and creep
into the rooms. They stretch across
the walls of the staircase, decorated
with bas-reliefs designed by the artist
Saint Clair Cemin; on the ground, paw
prints mark old terracotta tiles.
← previous pages
Hall of the Dogs (details)
→ Salon of the Deer and the Wolf, with taxidermy deer (detail).
The design of the Museum of Nature and the Hunt seeks to undermine the inherent institutional nature of museums. Unlike most recent museum designs, defined by the style of the
museum architect, this design is heterogeneous—it evokes the gentle chaos of a family
home in which each generation has left its mark. The museum design follows many decorative themes. The atmosphere changes from room to room: a collector’s house with modern
furniture; an exhibit of an eighteenth-century hunting enthusiast, where a profusion of
trophies extends from floor to ceiling; a natural history museum, with its strict displays of
taxidermy specimens; a scientific exhibit; and so on.
Among the various exhibition elements is an explicit reference to the tradition of hunting
museums, whose exhibits often juxtapose naturalia and artificialia. For example, in some
hunting-related collections, “dahus,” “jackalopes,” and other chimeras frequently creep in
among the genuine animal trophies to support old legends or trip up the credulous hunter.
In addition, the museum commissioned contemporary artworks, not just to complete specific aspects of the collections, but to fine-tune the emotional atmosphere of the gallery
environment. Each commission was accompanied by very detailed requirements intended
to define its integration into the architectural whole and its incorporation into the given
theme. For many visitors, the most striking feature is undoubtedly the physical presence
of animals that, from room to room, seem to welcome visitors as though the animals
themselves are the masters of the house. Taxidermy animals sit and stand directly on the
ground without the artifice of a pedestal, a diorama, or a barrier distancing them from
human visitors.
Pedagogical tools and interpretive media contribute to the playful nature of the museum.
Of course the works are well documented, and visitors who are so inclined can find all
the standard didactic information, but this information is not overbearing. It is itself an
excuse to play, to hunt—a quest that begins anew in each room. To encourage visitors to
look at the artworks, didactic information is reproduced in drawings; in other words, it is
integrated into room signs, or in the margins of a text. To gather this knowledge, visitors
might have to look for the similarities between a black and white sketch and a painted
canvas hanging on the wall. In other rooms, the labels describing weapons are themselves
true works of art. The signage complements the museum’s atmosphere: signs may be
hand-lettered with calligraphy in the style of curio exhibits, or typed on a typewriter from
the 1960s. Throughout the rooms, file cabinets or handwritten registers add to the disorienting anthology of informative instruments. These variations in the signage are probably the most notable aspect of the visitor’s metaphorical treasure hunt. If one accepts
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At the end of this perilous treasure
hunt, visitors may feel off balance.
What have they seen and what
does the collection mean? In place
of the question often asked about
contemporary art: “What is art?”
we substitute a new question:
“What is a museum?”
↙ Jan Fabre
La Nuit de Diane (detail)
the challenge, one can follow and interpret the various clues scattered throughout the
museum, starting with a metaphorical game of “animal tracking.”
2006
→ next page
The Armory
In a museum dedicated to representing nature, animal tracking allows visitors to develop
their own views—part of the naturalistic plan that is carried out through the entirety of
the museum visit. The taxidermy mammals and birds that inhabit the museum’s galleries
are accompanied by factual information on their morphology, their territory, and their
behavior. This pedagogical approach is best embodied in a series of cabinet displays that
allow visitors to explore various animal signs and tracks, as well as texts. Thus, opening
a drawer reveals the bronze cast of animal tracks; nearby, another drawer holds animal
feces (“anthropometric files”) that serves to reveal the gender, age, and health of each
animal. In these exhibits olfactory signs are also essential. For example, a very particular “odorama” (or scent exhibit) was commissioned from poet Jean Ristat who recreated,
in verse, the scent of each animal. An exact replica would be impossible, and the display
accepts this impossibility, acknowledging the inevitable distance between human and animal, between nature and the image of nature. The museum also operates metaphorically
as a hunting blind, in this case allowing visitors to observe wild animals in a psychological
landscape, an imaginary belvedere.
In places, the signs and tracks overflow their containers and creep into the rooms. They
stretch across the walls of the staircase, decorated with bas-reliefs designed by the artist
Saint Clair Cemin; on the ground, paw prints mark old terracotta tiles. Gathering the signs
of the mythical unicorn involved many artists: Sophie Lecomte gathered its feces, Maïder
Fortuné filmed its disappearance, and Joan Fontcuberta documented its hypothetical reappearance among African wildlife. One exhibit displays the glass eyes that taxidermists use
for wolves next to artist Françoise Petrovitch’s ceramics that evoke bloody shoes—perhaps
the last traces of Little Red Riding Hood?—effectively summarizing the age-old fears of
this dreaded and misunderstood species.
Following the signs and tracks also leads to traces of the founders. In a gallery staged by
artist Mark Dion, visitors find a hypothetical hunting cabin with a jumble of sundry items:
reverent relics of François and Jacqueline Sommer evoking various aspects of their personalities and their career. In another exhibit, an anonymous stuffed rabbit belonging to one
of the museum curators testifies to the close ties between the animal and childhood.
In, a more radical way, perhaps, the tracks apply to the collection itself. In an exhibit
with porcelain birds, some vitrines remain purposefully empty—evidence of an impossible flight? In the Armory, empty cases designed by the artist Gianni Burattoni bear the
engraved traces of fictional weapons such as Apollo’s Arrow and Lord Byron’s rifle. Works
loaned out for exhibitions or sent away for restoration are marked by “phantoms” designed
for the museum by various artists.
The playful educational nature of the museum design does not obscure the serious fundamental theme: the relationship between human and animal, and the violence that it can
bring forth, especially during the hunt. The program of temporary exhibitions endeavors to
develop this theme by showing how the hunt inspires artists today. Overflowing the framework of the temporary exhibition gallery, these exhibitions playfully infiltrate the permanent collections, creating the effect of a dialogue, of discord, and of resonance.
Translated by
Anne Goff/AEG Translations
138
In short, visitors to the museum are presented with a challenging game complete with
false signs and tracks: false specimens of nature study, such as the albino boar that
quietly follows visitors with its eyes (Nicolas Darrot’s Sus scrofa albinos), or a series of
decoys—Jean-Luc Bichaud’s Souffler n’est pas jouer (Huffing Isn’t a Real Move)—displayed
with the serious presentation of an authentic ethnological collection, which forms a trap
particularly effective at catching distracted visitors. At the end of this perilous treasure
hunt, visitors may feel off balance. What have they seen and what does the collection
mean? In place of the question often asked about contemporary art: “What is art?” we
substitute a new question: “What is a museum?”
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141
NEVADA ANTHROPOCENE
BRUCE STERLING
When Fernandez awoke within his steel coffin, he knew that his trouble
was on an epic, planetary scale. Apocalyptic trouble: The-End-Of-TheWorld-As-We-Know-It.
Fernandez breathed warm steam until his heart stopped skipping beats.
A faint chemical glow lit the museum chamber. He rose from his crypt. His
naked arms, legs, even his ears and eyeballs stung with pins
and needles.
His go-bag of survival gear was still icy from the liquid nitrogen. The
bulletproof ballistic nylon of the bag was flaking away. His cargo pants and
trail shirt had the stiff feel of antique newspapers. His bootlaces shed tiny
clouds of dust.
Fernandez munched on the frozen nugget of a granola bar as he climbed
the museum’s evacuation stairs. The last time he’d seen these stairs, they’d
been a magnificent underground balustrade, every step sliced laser-clean
through hard Nevada bedrock. In the faint light of his glowstick, the naked
rock had a thick rime of caked and crunchy dust.
The exit of the Museum was buried deep under a vast heap of urban
garbage, it being the wise opinion of the Museum trustees that no one would
ever search for land art under a dump. In this sly way, the Museum’s
precious cultural holdings would remain safe from the inevitable hordes
of starving marauders, a demographic considered incumbent on the
abject collapse of a world civilization.
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The world had ended from the Greenhouse Effect. Everyone had seen that
coming—some had lied about it—but then an Apocalypse really came, and
that was just how things were.
Some had taken foresightful action to preserve humanity’s heritage. After
remaining deep-frozen in their underground Ark for a couple of Dark Age
centuries, the Trustees would be back. They would jump-start civilization, in
a grand scheme quite like the plot of an Isaac Asimov novel.
Fernandez opened the counterweighted stone lid at the end of the exit
stairs. Gusts of wind tore his hair. His eyes shrank in the daylight.
The Museum’s blastproof, underground exit tunnel had become a sturdy
turret in midair. Fernandez was overlooking a sylvan, bucolic, future
Nevada—flowery arroyos with thick patches of grass under scurrying clouds.
The arroyo’s sump held a small freshwater pond, with cat-tailed reeds of an
odd purplish hue. No roads, no chain-link, no contrails in the sky … nothing but
a big beaten cowpath across the arroyo, and one distant pencil of campfire
smoke.
Fernandez was unsurprised that the world after the End of the World looked
like this: so peaceful. He himself was the only part of the world that looked or
felt post-Apocalyptic. His ears rang, and his knees and ankles were buckling
like cheap tin hinges, but he had a rifle, a knife, clothing, a water-filter
canteen, packs of food, matches, and strong binoculars.
He set out for the rising smoke of the campfire.
Up at the fireside, perched on a stony crag with a fine view of the landscape,
a battered old man was dozing. He lay on his side on a handwoven straw mat,
wearing a ragged loincloth, a cape of rabbit skins, and some handstitched
moccasins. As Fernandez approached, he sat up.
“Charlie,” he said, “it’s me. I set your timer, and I thawed you out. I’m glad
you made it here. Welcome to the distant future.”
Fernandez remembered the Museum’s Curator as a plump, jolly, erudite guy
with excellent taste in landscape photography. This bony, eldritch, near-naked
savage was obviously still the Curator, despite his freezer-burned skin and
gaunt, bony limbs. The Curator still had his carefully chosen art-critic’s
vocabulary, and that abstracted, comprehensive look in his eyes.
“You must have many questions to ask me,” said the Curator, moving off his
mat hospitably.
Fernandez leaned his rifle against a chunk of granite, and sat. “I suppose
I should ask something,” he said. “But I just don’t know what to say.”
The Curator prodded his campfire. He produced a fire-blackened shish-kebab stick with the skinned and skewered carcass of a small mammal. He
propped the stick between two rocks, then took a swig of water from an
ancient plastic canteen.
Fernandez struggled to comprehend the situation. He’d known that the world
was ending in a catastrophe, and that he would escape ruin, and persist, deep
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in the Nevada desert, rather like a Dead Sea Scroll in a jar. He’d also known,
vaguely, that coming back to life would be an emotional challenge.
But now that this abstract future had really taken place, and he was sitting
by a campfire listening to the crickets chirp, he was struggling with the very
nature of being alive.
He could feel that his long fossilization had taken some metabolic toll on
him. Obscure internal organs were bloating, tingling, and backfiring, like
components of a car up on blocks far too long. A chemical brittleness haunted
the marrow of his bones. He had become a museum relic.
The Curator quietly turned the meat on the spit. He seemed used to long
silences.
Fernandez examined his well-chosen survival gear. It was all chipping,
flaking and crumbling. “Why does my compass point south?”
“Well, that was the reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field,” said the Curator,
adjusting the roasting flesh of his unclassifiable monkey, squirrel, jerboa, or
marmot. “We had a good museum seminar on that subject once.”
“That must have been a major disaster,” said Fernandez. “No magnetism up
in the sky? That means big mutation rates from cosmic radiation.”
“Oh yes, exactly, I’m glad you remember the show. It’s surprising how many
cosmic disasters occur,” said the Curator. “Besides the disaster we called
‘civilization,’ I mean. There hasn’t been a civilization here in Nevada for two
million years.”
“You mean two hundred years, don’t you, sir?” said Fernandez.
“That’s not how the story turned out,” said the Curator, cracking a flea
from his armpit. “After two hundred years, I thawed out right on time, but
Nevada was a hell on Earth. Nothing but black, howling winds. The simoom,
the harmatan, the haboob, the khamsin, Charlie. The winds of planetary
apocalypse.”
“You should have thawed me out to help you then, sir.”
“You’re a good security man, Charlie, but you can’t breathe poison. It took
time to destroy this planet, but time was all it took.”
Fernandez rubbed his panging stomach and belched up a primeval smell.
“You want a granola bar sir? I’ve got plenty in my go-bag here.”
The Curator mumbled happily over the peeled and naked snack bar. “My
teeth are killing me,” he said. “Nerve damage from the ice, you see. I’ve had
to thaw myself out nineteen times during these geologic eons of the
Anthropocene. All those times, in and out of my vitrine. That repeated handling
has damaged me as a specimen. I’ve had to thaw you out as my backup man.
I’m not fit for public display anymore.”
“What happened to all your clothes?” said Fernandez.
“It’s my nature to live off the land,” the Curator shrugged, hitching his
loincloth. “I’m forced to admit that our museum’s grand strategy has not
reached its projected fulfillment plan! Here in two million AD, the time has
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come for me to retire my curatorship and go into private life.”
Fernandez scratched his unshaven chin. The freeze-dried stubble there
broke off like dust. “Why don’t we thaw out the trustees, the corporate
backers, and all the staff, and have a discussion?”
“I thought of that, too, but why?” said the Curator. “They’re a civilized elite
in their nuclear storage-room down there. They’re not like us rugged, can-do,
outdoor, land-art experts! My plan was to thaw them out once civilization
returns, so that they could resume their customary, laudable cultural activities. I can’t expose them to this! Nevada doesn’t have a single casino or
shopping-mall.”
A coarse shrieking came from overhead. Fernandez grabbed for his rifle. A
flock of a dozen enormous bats sculled by, leathery, shrieking monsters in
broad daylight. They settled into the pond and began to bathe themselves,
cackling and jabbering.
“They’re harmless,” said the Curator. “Also, that ammo you have is two
million years old. So forget the gun, it’s useless.”
Fernandez found that his glass binoculars still worked properly. The jostling
bats much resembled the flying monkeys from the Judy Garland Wizard of Oz,
but without the Technicolor costumes. They had big, lambent, movie-star eyes,
and they were by far the clumsiest flying animals he’d ever seen. They flew like
small kids jumping off a roof with cardboard wings.
“Not one bird left alive on Earth,” sighed the Curator. “The birds outlived
that dinosaur mass-extinction, because they were lucky. But the Anthropocene
Disaster finally did ’em in. I went bird-watching, Charlie, I searched for birds
for hundreds of kilometers … I get around by bicycle mostly—because I can
keep it in repair … But everything that flies in the skies these days is human.”
“Bats are mammalian, you mean.”
“No, Charlie, those beasts are human. This is the Anthropocene. So all the
wildlife is human. Some insects, fish, and mollusks also survived, and a pretty
good variety of plant life, but all the major livestock is directly descended
from Homo sapiens.”
The Curator scratched at a rock with a charcoaled bit of tinder. “The way I
figure it, somebody else survived the Apocalypse, besides us. Maybe some Long
Now people, or Mormons, or somebody’s national government, in a bomb
shelter. Mankind survived the mass extinction. But after that, well, evolution
did what it always does. Humanity gave up on the intelligence debacle, that
didn’t work out. Humanity found new relations to the landscape.”
The bats flew off, cackling and gossiping. A trio of fat, tusked, root-grubbing
things came to the water hole. They grunted at length, and smeared mud on
one another in a companionable fashion, with their rudimentary fingers.
“Wait till you see the herds of human bison,” said the Curator, tending his
fire. “North America’s gigantic, native ruminants. They pour down right across
that flat over there, and through the fjord, in a cloud of yellow dust. Millions
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of them. Grazers big as Volkswagens, and trailed by human wolves and human
buzzards. A magnificent spectacle.”
Fernandez said nothing.
“They talk to each other, you know,” said the Curator. “The vast herds of
bison, I mean. You can hear them shouting at each other from way over the
horizon. All our descendants talk. They lost their brains, but they never lost
the gift of speech. We don’t have to think, but we always have something
to say.”
Fernandez tugged at his loose bootlace. It snapped within his fingers.
“Once I thought that this epoch of our world was an utter nightmare,” said
the Curator, peaceably rotating his skewered creature over the low blue
flames. “As if this were some punishment for mankind, for our failed stewardship of the Earth … But, well, the Anthropocene is still a young era. It takes ten
million years to fully restore species diversity after a Great Extinction. Mother
Nature works with whatever she’s got! It’s a credit to the elasticity of our germ
plasma that the human species has radiated so successfully. We’re in the
seas, the skies, the plains, the mountains, forests, jungles. We’re everywhere.”
“You’re not afraid of them?” said Fernandez. “They’re monsters.”
“They’re all afraid of my fire,” shrugged the Curator. “I’m the only one of
them who still has the knack for fire. You see, Charlie, when you’ve persisted
for two million years—like I have—you get used to a long view. I’m a living
fossil—I know that—but truly, I wish that I could see twenty million years. The
relationship of humankind to the landscape is just getting interesting now. In
twenty million years, we’ll have achieved every possible physical relationship in
every ecological niche! We’ll be anteaters, porcupines, otters. Everything that
we once killed and stuffed, we’ll replace with our own living flesh.”
“What do you want me to do, sir?” said Fernandez at last.
“Well, you’re the museum guard,” said the Curator. “So I thought, well, you
should guard the museum. As for me, I’m going out to California. I want to
spot some whales.”
“Why do I guard the museum?”
“Something will turn up! Where there’s life, there’s hope. We’re fossil life
now, but there must be fossil hope of some kind! We shouldn’t make snap
judgments.”
“But what am I doing it for?” said Fernandez. “Where are the guests, where
are the members? Where’s the museum’s community? A museum exists for the
people, it’s not just dead things stuffed in a cabinet.”
“I used to think that myself,” said the Curator, sniffing at his lunch. “But in
Nevada—in this long relation between us and the land we love—we’re just not
the center of that story.”
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The Art + Environment Conference
Nevada Museum of Art / October 9 through 11, 2014
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periphery
beauty
contemporary
memories
becomes
becomes
becomes
tell the
the center
risk
conservative
future
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For three days the periphery becomes the
center during the 2014 Art + Environment
Conference at the Nevada Museum of Art.
Since 2008 the Conference has gathered
together the premiere makers of “art that
walks in the world.”
We reverse the field as beauty becomes risk,
the contemporary becomes conservative,
and memories tell the future. In October
2014 help us shape a dialogue that creates
new knowledge on a global scale.
Three subject threads will inform the
presentations and thematic exhibitions
of this year’s Conference.
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Animals will define humans in the
groundbreaking Late Harvest exhibition,
raising questions about posthumanism.
Traditional wildlife paintings face
off with taxidermy in major works by
artists such as Petah Coyne and Damien
Hirst, and in talks by Snæbjörnsdóttir/
Wilson, and Claude d’Anthenaise of
the Museum of Nature and the Hunt
in Paris. Science fiction writer Bruce
Sterling remixes the conversation in
his concluding monologue.
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The Earth’s systems and human
relationships to them are made visible in
presentations related to geoaesthetics.
Maya Lin’s sculptures manifest invisible
lines that connect people through
cartography and bathymmetry, while
her digital memorial What Is Missing?
asks what the world has already lost.
Ugo Rondinone’s Seven Magic Mountains,
a new polychrome large-scale artwork
proposed for the Las Vegas desert and
commissioned by the Art Production
Fund and the Nevada Museum of
Art reveals how interventions in the
landscape have evolved since the 1970s
along with the increasingly complex
environmental restrictions required to
undertake them.
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Multidisciplinary, interventionist, and
social practice are terms artists use
to describe how they create Fieldworks
projects that often encompass Posthumanism and Geoaesthetics themes,
but also incorporate ideas about social
justice and sustainability. Reports
by photographer Terry Evans and
journalist/writer Elizabeth Farnsworth
from the North Dakota oil fields join
Helen and Newton Harrison’s ongoing
environmental work, the Canary
Project’s conversation on climate
change, and contemporary Australian
Aboriginal paintings that merge art
and science in Western Australia—
all projects that illustrate how artists
working in the field have the ability to
make change.
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2014 ART + ENVIRONMENT
CONFERENCE WELCOME
CONFERENCE SPONSORS
Director,
WILLIAM L. FOX
Center for Art +
Environment,
Nevada Museum of Art
Welcome to the third Art + Environment Conference at the Nevada Museum of Art.
When I greeted conference participants last, in 2011, I noted how the first conference
in 2008 had launched the Center for Art + Environment, and I reported that the CA+E
had acquired materials from more than four hundred artists working around the world.
This time I’m happy to share that the CA+E now holds materials from more than six
hundred artists, and that we’re close to exceeding our storage capacity. (This is a good
problem to have!)
→ LEAD SPONSORS
Louise A. Tarble Foundation
ARIA Resort & Casino
→ MAJOR SPONSORS
Daniel Greenberg, Susan Steinhauser
and the Greenberg Foundation
Sally Searle
McDonald Carano Wilson
The CA+E Archive Collections are used by scholars and artists from around the world,
who come to study how humans (and animals) creatively inhabit the natural world, the
built environment, and—increasingly—virtual spaces. These archive materials, which
range from correspondence, maps, journals, and sketchbooks to fully realized artworks, are often related to the Museum’s exhibitions, publications, and public programs. During this Conference season, you’ll see exhibitions drawn from the archives
of the Paruku Project in Western Australia, Lita Albuquerque’s large-scale Stellar
Axis installation in the Antarctic, a nationwide pop-up studio expedition called Venue,
and a two-year artistic and literary investigation into North Dakota’s Oil Boom.
→ SPONSORS
Lannan Foundation
Phil and Jennifer Satre Family Charitable Fund
at the Community Foundation of Western Nevada
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
→ SUPPORTING SPONSORS
Carole Anderson
Compton Foundation
William G. McGowan Charitable Trust
Debra and Dennis Scholl
Seed Fund
The CA+E has been called an activist archive because we sometimes commission
work by artists specifically to collect materials that teach us how “art walks in the
world.” The three conversation threads of the conference this year—Posthumanism,
Geoaesthetics, and Fieldworks—reveal how artists are more than just observers, but
also participants. The conference this year will inform and shape our future programs
as we continue to investigate art that changes both the world and our relationship to it.
→ ADDITIONAL SPONSORS
Lance and Karyn Tendler
Nevada Museum of Art Volunteers in Art
We are pleased to greet you and to welcome you into this ongoing conversation.
→ MEDIA SPONSORS
Whitney Peak Hotel
Metropolis Magazine
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2014 ART + ENVIRONMENT CONFERENCE PROGRAM
↙ Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and Floris Bakker)
Prometheus
2014
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 9
6:00 to 8:00 pm
Members’ Premiere
Art + Environment Season
Conference guests are invited to join the Nevada Museum of Art for the Member’s
Premiere of the exhibitions for the Art + Environment season. Curators and artists
are available for informal conversation in the galleries.
Hosted by NV Energy and Barrick Gold
6:00 to 7:00 pm
BOOK SIGNING
LITA ALBUQUERQUE: STELLAR AXIS
Donald W. Reynolds Grand Hall
6:30 pm
WELCOME
David B. Walker, Executive Director/CEO, Nevada Museum of Art
Nightingale Sky Room
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10
8:00 to 9:00 am
WELCOME BREAKFAST
Continental breakfast with coffee and tea
9:00 to 9:15 am
CONFERENCE WELCOME
David B. Walker and William L. Fox
JoAnne Northrup
FRIEND OR FAUX? ANIMALS AND CONTEMPORARY ART
9:15 to 9:30 am
Two worlds collide in Late Harvest, an exhibition that juxtaposes contemporary artworks including taxidermy with historical wildlife paintings. JoAnne Northrup, Director
of Contemporary Art Initiatives at the Nevada Museum of Art, discusses the genesis
of the exhibition, and artists’ deep consideration of the animal within the broader
spectrum of species.
9:30 to 9:50 am
Adam Duncan Harris
SEEING ANIMALS THROUGH THE BRUSH
The National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson, Wyoming, houses one of the most
impressive collections of canonical wildlife painting in the world. Adam Duncan Harris
discusses how Charles Darwin’s work effected shifts in visual representations of animals in the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries.
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9:50 to 10:20 am
Claude d’Anthenaise
GAME CHANGER: TROPHY HUNTING AND TAXIDERMY
2:55 to 3:30 pm
Animal mounts, firearms, and wildlife paintings take center stage at le musée de la Chasse
et de la Nature in Paris. Once a traditional private hunting club—now led by Claude
d’Anthenaise—the recent reinstallation of the musée’s permanent collection interrogates
modes of natural and cultural history displays and the very nature of a museum.
10:20 to 10:45 am
BREAK
10:45 to 11:15 am
Petah Coyne
SCULPTING MYTH AND METAPHOR
The work of artist David Brooks questions how humans use, consume, and perceive the
natural world. Deeply influenced by the discourse and practices engaged with environmental issues, Brooks challenges scientific, philosophical, and consumerist dualities
that traditionally separate humans and nonhumans.
3:30 to 4:00 pm
BREAK
4:00 to 4:20 pm
Kenneth Baker
DESIRE IN THE DESERT
Petah Coyne’s richly-surfaced sculptures explore the darkness and beauty of human difficulties and triumphs. Her lecture will lead the viewer through thirty years of work. While
her career and her imagery have remained tied to literature, film, and travel, her work has
embraced an ever-wider range of innovative and disparate materials.
11:15 to 11:45 am
Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson
NANOQ: FLAT OUT AND BLUESOME
Author of an influential book about Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field, longtime San
Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker introduces contemporary Swiss artist Ugo
Rondinone. After Rondinone’s talk, Baker leads a conversation with the artist about his
Seven Magic Mountains project in the context of contemporary site-specific art practice.
4:20 to 4:40 pm
Bryndis Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson present their project nanoq—a research-driven
practice exploring the provenance of taxidermic polar bears in the United Kingdom. The
project challenged ideas about wild and domesticated nature, creating an exhibition about
agency and extinction that moved audiences internationally.
11:45 am to 12:30 pm
Bruce Sterling
FUR, FIGMENT, AND ANIMAL FUTURES
Synthesizing ideas about art and animals raised in the morning’s sessions, futurist and
science fiction writer Bruce Sterling speculates about the nature of the human-animal
interface in the twenty-first century and beyond.
David Brooks
A FIELD REPORT: 6 RIVERS, 5 BIOLOGISTS, 4 COUNTRIES, 3 EXPEDITIONS,
2 CONTINENTS, 1 ARTIST
Ugo Rondinone
THE SPECTRUM AS SPECTACLE
Ugo Rondinone discusses Seven Magic Mountains, his proposed large-scale installation
located outside Las Vegas. The work challenges viewers to consider new ideas about
contemporary art, artifice, and authenticity, and the phenomenology of experience in
the desert environment.
4:40 to 5:00 pm
KENNETH BAKER IN CONVERSATION WITH UGO RONDINONE
5:15 to 7:00 pm
RECEPTION
Join fellow attendees, artists, and presenters for cocktails and heavy hors d’oeuvres.
12:30 to 2:00 pm
LUNCH
12:45 to 1:45 pm
Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley
BROWN BAG LUNCH | VENUE: A LITTLE FURTHER DOWN THE LINE
Founders’ Room | Third Floor
Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley present Venue, a creative and artistic riff on the government-sponsored survey expeditions of the nineteenth century. Their sixteen-month expedition—describing sites and happenings as wide-ranging as New Mexico’s Very Large Array
and New York’s Manhattanhenge—resulted in a media-rich archive, akin to a “core sample”
of the greater North American landscape. Bring your lunch. Space is limited and seating is
available on a first-come, first served basis.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 11
8:00 to 9:00 am
WELCOME BREAKFAST
Continental breakfast with coffee and tea
9:00 to 9:15 am
John Giorno
LOSE THE ILLUSION
The second day of the Art + Environment Conference begins with a benediction and
poetry reading by legendary New York poet and artist John Giorno.
Presented by Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF)
2:00 to 2:55 pm
Elmgreen & Dragset
Introduced by JoAnne Northrup
DISRUPTING SPACE
9:15 to 9:25 am
Scandinavian artists Elmgreen & Dragset mine the relationship between art, architecture,
and design. They work in interior and exterior settings, ranging from institutions to public spaces, sometimes with a twist—such as Prada Marfa a Prada boutique replica in the
Texan desert—to staged domestic interiors with open-ended narratives.
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William L. Fox
ACTIVATING THE FIELD
No longer simply observers and documenters of the natural world, new groups of
contemporary artists and interdisciplinary practitioners now engage critically with
environmental and social issues in the field. William L. Fox, Director of the Center for
Art + Environment, discusses how these projects, which effect change through activist
practice, can be thought of as Fieldworks.
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9:25 to 9:35 am
Mandy Martin
PAINTING FOR PROTECTION
12:30 to 1:30 pm
Australian painter Mandy Martin’s ongoing art and social practice in Paruku (an
Indigenous Protected Area in Western Australia) brings awareness to challenges facing
Aboriginal peoples, and simultaneously informs positive environmental and cultural
change in the area surrounding Lake Gregory—a terminal desert lake that has been a
source of food and site of Aboriginal cultural production for fifty thousand years.
9:35 to 9:45 am
In their work over several decades, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison propose a
series of long-term ecological responses to mitigate the effects of global climate change.
In 2012 they founded the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at the University of
California, Santa Cruz. They will discuss Sierra Nevada: An Adaptation, an ongoing project
commissioned by the Center for Art + Environment, and the proposed Intermountain West
work. Bring your lunch. Seating is available on a first-come, first served basis.
Dennis Scholl
CONNECTING THE DOTS
1:45 to 2:05 pm
Collectors Debra and Dennis Scholl have acquired hundreds of works in recent years
centering on the place-based cosmologies of Aboriginal Australians. Dennis Scholl
discusses the scope and criteria shaping this important collection.
9:45 to 10:30 am
Panelist: Jamie Brown, John Carty, Guy Fitzhardinge, Mandy Martin,
Dennis Scholl, and Henry Skerritt
Moderated by William L. Fox
FINDING HEARTSEASE
BREAK
10:55 to 11:30 am
Edward Morris and Susannah Sayler
THE CANARY’S STILL SINGING
2:05 to 2:30 pm
2:30 to 3:00 pm
Lauren Bon and the Harrisons
THE INTERMOUNTAIN WEST
12:00 to 12:15 pm
Lauren Bon, Edward Morris, and Susannah Sayler
PANEL DISCUSSION
12:15 to 1:45 pm
LUNCH
Terry Evans and Elizabeth Farnsworth
FRACTURED:NORTH DAKOTA OIL BOOM
In Fractured, photographer Terry Evans and journalist Elizabeth Farnsworth assemble
a portrait of environmental change wrought by North Dakota’s oil and gas extraction.
Through interviews and photographs, the pair reveal the complicated story of an industry
that is reordering one of America’s most subtle and storied landscapes.
Evans and Farnsworth are Research Fellows with the Center for Art + Environment.
3:00 to 4:00 pm
Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison of the Center for the Study of the Force
Majeure and Lauren Bon of the Metabolic Studio are beginning a collaboration that will
deploy paleogeographic, contemporary, and prophetic mapping of the Intermountain
West to research what might be the best outcomes for the region in light of global
warming and resource extraction. Their collective question for this “work at scale” is
how to intervene to meet survival needs of the Intermountain West during rapid catabolic descent.
Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg
GALE FORCE BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND
Artists and technologists Viégas and Wattenberg invent new ways for people to look at
and talk about data. Their 2012 Wind Map uses national weather data to reveal the delicate tracery of wind flowing over the United States, visualizing the power of an invisible
source of renewable energy.
Since 2006, the Canary Project has brought together the work of more than one hundred artists, activists, scientists, and thinkers who—like twenty-first century sentinels
—have worked to raise awareness about ecological threats facing the global community’s future.
11:30 to 12 pm
Ken Goldberg
BREAKING THE WAVES: THE EARTH AS PERFORMANCE ARTIST
Artist and UC Berkeley Professor of Engineering Ken Goldberg, working with collaborators Sanjay Krishnan, Fernanda Viégas, and Martin Wattenberg, created what has been
called the first internet-based Earthwork. Goldberg discusses the geoaesthetics of information design and seismic data.
Solastalgia—a word describing a sense of powerlessness in the face of environmental
change, coined by Glenn Albrecht—informs the dialogue of this session. Anthropologist
and curator Carty, conservationist Fitzhardinge, and agriculturalist Brown—all of
Australia—join Martin, Skerritt, and Scholl to discuss how art responds to and mitigates solastalgia.
10:30 to 10:55 am
Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison
BROWN BAG LUNCH | HEATING THINGS UP
Founders’ Room
Maya Lin
Introduced by William L. Fox
WHAT IS MISSING?
Maya Lin invites our engagement with urgent environmental issues through her memorial project What Is Missing? An elegiac commemoration of habitat loss and ecological
collapse, her digital artwork harnesses the power of the internet to spread awareness of
imminent threats to global biodiversity.
4:00 to 4:15 pm
William L. Fox
CLOSING REMARKS
4:45 to 6:00 pm
WRAP PARTY
Nightingale Sky Room
The Conference closes with a cocktail celebration for all speakers, sponsors,
and attendees.
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← previous page
Brad Bartlett
Horizon Photocomposite
2014 SEASON OF ART + ENVIRONMENT EXHIBITIONS
↙ Lita Albuquerque
Stellar Axis
2006
LATE HARVEST
September 27, 2014 through January 18, 2015
Late Harvest juxtaposes canonical wildlife paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with contemporary art (namely sculpture and photography) that
incorporates taxidermy. Radically different modes of artistic production, which share
a common focus on the “animal others,” are united in the same gallery space.
The authors of wildlife paintings are classically trained artists who have spent time
in nature observing wildlife at close hand, and their works celebrate animals in a
seemingly straightforward manner. Close observation, however, reveals a subtext
of anthropocentrism grounded in humanism—a philosophy that posits humanity at
the center of all creation, with nature in our service. Many wildlife painters are also
hunters, whose knowledge and understanding of equilibrium in nature leads them to
support conservationist agendas.
Contemporary artists approach “animal others” with a complex and splintered set of
agendas, united by a commonly held posthumanist perspective. Informed by this philosophy, artists challenge hierarchies that place humans at the center of the natural
world. Humans are redefined as one species among the continuum of animals.
These different philosophies and artistic modes have in common the celebration of
the beauty of animals (even as we are the agents of their demise); an elusive longing
to become one with nature, to rejoin our simpler and more honest animal natures;
and an assertion of the importance of our encounters with the “animal others” as a
way of understanding our place in the universe.
LITA ALBUQUERQUE: STELLAR AXIS
September 13, 2014 through January 4, 2015
Lita Albuquerque’s Stellar Axis installation is the first large-scale artwork created
in Antarctica. The recipient of international acclaim, this milestone of contemporary land art is widely acknowledged to be both a visually stunning and an ecologically sensitive intervention on the continent. Originally funded by the National
Science Foundation, Albuquerque’s Stellar Axis was installed on the Ross Ice Shelf on
December 22, 2006—concurrent with the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere. The exhibition, which features original objects and archive materials from the
2006 project, is accompanied by a book copublished by SKIRA Rizzoli and the Nevada
Museum of Art.
Lead sponsorship by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
Major sponsorship by the Volunteers in Art of the Nevada Museum of Art
Original project support by the National Science Foundation
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↙ Maya Lin
Disappearing Bodies of Water: Arctic Ice
2013
→ Ken Goldberg, Sanjay Krishnan, Fernanda Viégas,
and Martin Wattenberg
Bloom
2013
↘ Andrea Zittel
Wall Sprawl #4 (Las Vegas,
Next to Nellis Air Force Base)
2011/2014
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MAYA LIN: WHAT IS MISSING?
July 19, 2014 through January 4, 2015
↘ Elmgreen & Dragset
Untitled (Prada Marfa)
2007
Maya Lin is inevitably cast as an architectonic artist, but over the past decade she
has engaged the vocabulary of a cartographer, making artworks that help viewers to
visualize complex natural and cultural systems operating in the world. This exhibition
unites sculptural objects with what Lin considers to be her final memorial project,
What Is Missing? An interactive mapping website, What Is Missing? relies upon triaxial
dimensions of space, as well as of time—past, present, and future—to engage us with
species and habitats that have disappeared or may soon vanish. Using both memory
and projection, objective numbers and subjective narrative, What is Missing? asks us to
reconsider our relationship to nature at a time when it is critical to do so.
BLOOM: KEN GOLDBERG, SANJAY KRISHNAN, FERNANDA VIÉGAS,
& MARTIN WATTENBERG
October 4 through December 14, 2014
Bloom is an internet-based earthwork that transforms cold, hard data into an experience of playfulness and unpredictability. A seismograph measures the Hayward Fault’s
movements and transmits this information by way of the internet; with special permission from the UC Berkeley Seismological Lab, these data sets are captured and run
through a computer program designed by the artists. The result is a field of colorful,
circular blooms, which changes constantly in response to the live movements of the
earth. The size and position of each bloom is based on real-time changes in the earth’s
motion, measured by the seismometer: large movements of the earth create large
blooms, and small jitters create tiny buds. In short, Bloom represents when, how long,
and how large are the earth’s movements along the Hayward Fault. With Bloom, the
artists explore the contrast between virtual and natural environments; the project also
references the work of Kenneth Noland and other Color Field painters of the 1960s.
The artists give special thanks to Richard Allen, Doug Neuhouser, and Peggy Hellweg
of the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory for the live data feed from the Hayward
Fault seismometer station; to David Nachum, Vijay Vasudevan, and Woj Matusek for
work on earlier versions; and to Anne Wagner for insights.
ANDREA ZITTEL: WALLSPRAWL
Summer 2014 through Summer 2017
Andrea Zittel’s Wallsprawl #4 (Las Vegas, Next to Nellis Air Force Base) is based on an
aerial photograph of a fringe area in which wide-open desert meets large-scale urban
development. Zittel grew up in the West, in an isolated rural area that in the span of
sixteen years became a fully developed suburban matrix, complete with a shopping
mall. Witnessing this rapid takeover of the natural led the artist to see human progress as a parasitic expansion; based on this theory, and similar to biological growth,
the Wallsprawls can repeat infinitely.
ELMGREEN & DRAGSET: PRADA MARFA
Fall 2014
Prada Marfa is a permanent sculpture by the Scandinavian artists Michael Elmgreen
and Ingar Dragset. Located on a desolate strip of US 90 in Valentine, West Texas (about
twenty-six miles outside Marfa, a town of 2,400 that has become a magnet for artists
and art lovers), the work is meant to look like a Prada store, with minimalist white
stucco walls and a window display that houses Prada shoes and handbags from the fall
2005 collection—but with no working door. The project was produced by Yvonne Force
Villareal and Doreen Remen of Art Production Fund, with support from Ballroom Marfa,
a performance and alternative-art space in Marfa, Texas.
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← David Taylor
Paruku 10
THE PARUKU PROJECT: ART & SCIENCE IN ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA
June 21 through December 7, 2014
2011
↙ Terry Evans
Oil piple right of way,
Mountrail County, North Dakota, June 6, 2011
2011
↘ Installation view of Venue
2014
The Paruku region surrounds Lake Gregory, a terminal desert lake in remote Western
Australia. The ancient shoreline of Lake Gregory contains what may be the earliest
sites of continuous human cultural production in the world (more than fifty thousand
years old). The cultural and environmental values of Paruku have led to its declaration as an Indigenous Protected Area. The Paruku Project was a two-year multiteam
effort that included scientists, artists, and writers working in one of Australia’s most
remote Aboriginal desert communities to assess environmental and cultural conditions, and then to design cross-cultural and transformational responses. The project
was conceived and led by Australian artist Mandy Martin and conservationist Guy
Fitzhardinge, and funded by Australia’s national science agency.
Support provided by the John Ben Snow Memorial Trust
VENUE: GEOFF MANAUGH & NICOLA TWILLEY
June 14 through November 30, 2014
Cultural investigators Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley took a portable media studio
around the United States for sixteen months, to discover and document overlooked
and forgotten sites through interviews with designers, artists, engineers, scientists,
and writers. Carrying both digital and analog instruments, they measured the dimensions of an unknown America.
Support provided by the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF), the Nevada Arts
Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts
TERRY EVANS & ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH
FRACTURED: NORTH DAKOTA OIL BOOM
June 21 through November 30, 2014
Photographer Terry Evans and journalist Elizabeth Farnsworth spent two years in
North Dakota assembling a nuanced portrait of the changes being wrought on the
prairie and its people during the current oil boom. This archive exhibition in the CA+E
Research Library reveals the research that underlies their work.
Support provided by the John Ben Snow Memorial Trust
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2014 CONFERENCE PRESENTERS
KENNETH BAKER
Kenneth Baker has been art critic for the San Francisco
Chronicle since 1985, and has contributed to Artforum,
Art in America, Connoisseur, and the Smithsonian
Magazine; his writing has also appeared in Modern
Painters, Art Newspaper, ArtNews, and Parkett. He is
the author of Minimalism: Art of Circumstance, and The
Lightning Field, the only substantial study of Walter
De Maria’s land-art masterpiece. Baker has taught art
history and criticism at colleges on both coasts, including Brown and Stanford Universities, the Rhode Island
School of Design, and California College of the Arts.
LAUREN BON
Lauren Bon is a graduate of Princeton University and
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, holding
degrees in architecture and the history and theory of
art. Her solo exhibitions include Bees and Meat (ACE
Gallery); Not a Cornfield, a 32-acre living sculpture on
a plot of land between Chinatown and Lincoln Heights,
Los Angeles; and Project Room: Hand Held Objects
(Santa Monica Museum of Art). Bon has also produced
large-scale urban and public works in Los Angeles,
Belfast, Hong Kong, Edinburgh, and Belgrade. Bon’s
Metabolic Studio has been involved in water issues in
Los Angeles and the Owens Valley since 2010.
DAVID BROOKS
David Brooks is a New York-based artist who has exhibited at the Miami Art Museum, Dallas Contemporary,
Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Sculpture Center
(NYC), Changwon Sculpture Biennale (South Korea),
Galerie für Landschaftskunst (Hamburg), James Cohan
(Shanghai), and MoMA/PS1. In 2011, Brooks opened
Desert Rooftops in Times Square, a five-thousandsquare-foot earthwork commissioned by Art Production
Fund. Other major commissions include the Cass
Sculpture Foundation (UK) and Storm King (NY).
JAMIE BROWN
Jamie Brown is Head Ranger for the Paruku Indigenous
Protected Area. He has been the community chairperson
and lived in Mulan for many years, and is the grandson of Walmajarri elder Bessie Doonday and son of
Traditional Owner Shirley Brown.
THE CANARY PROJECT
Edward Morris and Susannah Sayler founded the Canary
Project in 2006; through this collaboration, they have
supported many projects, including Green Patriot Posters
and Eve Mosher’s High Water Line. Sayler earned her
master’s degree in photography from New York’s School
of Visual Arts and has worked globally as a commercial
photographer. Morris is a writer and scholar with degrees
from Wesleyan and Harvard Universities, and a translator
of Asian poetry. Together they have been visiting artists
at numerous universities, and currently teach at Syracuse
University’s Department of Transmedia, where Sayler is an
assistant professor.
1995. They have held numerous solo exhibitions at venues including the Victoria and Albert Museum (London),
Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, (Rotterdam), and
ZKM Museum of Modern Art (Karlsruhe), and their work
has been included in the Liverpool, Singapore, Moscow,
Gwangju, São Paulo, Istanbul, and Berlin biennials. In
2009 they received a special mention for their exhibition
The Collectors in the Nordic and Danish Pavilions at the
fifty-third Venice Biennale.
Assessment Committee, Threatened Species Community
Program. He has chaired the Karrkand Kandji Trust
since 2010, and from 2002–10 served as a director of
Australian Bush Heritage. He and his wife, artist Mandy
Martin, run a herd of high-quality, sustainable Angus
cattle in central New South Wales on a nature reserve
that has hosted innumerable artists and writers from
around the world.
TERRY EVANS
William L. Fox, Director of the Center for Art +
Environment, has been called an art critic, science
writer, and cultural geographer. He has published
fifteen books on cognition and landscape; numerous
essays in art monographs, magazines, and journals; and
fifteen collections of poetry. A fellow of both the Royal
Geographical Society and the Explorers Club, and recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation,
National Endowment for the Humanities, and National
Science Foundation, he has been a visiting scholar at
the Getty Research Institute, Clark Art Institute, and
the Australian National University, and is currently a
guest researcher at the Oslo School of Architecture and
Design.
JOHN CARTY
WILLIAM L. FOX
Dr. John Carty was an inaugural Research Fellow of the
Center for Art + Environment. His core research interest is Australia’s Western Desert acrylic art, and most
of his projects have addressed the anthropology, art
history, and economics of this cultural production. He was
a cocurator of the exhibition Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning
Stock Route at the National Museum of Australia, and
is now working with the British Museum’s collections of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander material culture.
PETAH COYNE
Petah Coyne is a contemporary sculptor and photographer based in New York. Her work can be found in the
permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn
Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art,
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Kemper
Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City), Cincinnati
Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art
Kiasma (Finland). The Nevada Museum of Art recently
acquired Untitled #1205 (Virgil), from her series of
sculptures made in response to Dante’s Inferno.
Claude d’Anthenaise has been leading the musée de la
Chasse et de la Nature since 1998; he fully renovated its
setting and orientation, making it a compelling place for
cultural life and contemporary art in Paris. Previously,
d’Anthenaise served as a Conservateur du Patrimoine,
working for preservation and restoration of historic
buildings, and for the Cultural Service of French Foreign
Affairs, directing the Alliance Française in Singapore.
d’Anthenaise has curated various exhibitions of contemporary art that feature relationships between humans and
animals.
ELMGREEN & DRAGSET
Based in Berlin and London, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar
Dragset have worked together as an artist duo since
182
Terry Evans has extensively photographed the prairies
and plains of North America, and worked on a variety of
other locations, from the skies of Chicago to the melting
ice sheets of Greenland. Her work is noted for revealing
deep connections among people and places, through
a refined sense of pattern in the landscape discovered
by juxtaposing aerial with ground-based photography.
Evans has had one-person shows at the Chicago Art
Institute, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural
History, and the Field Museum of Natural History.
Fractured: North Dakota’s Oil Boom, a collaborative
exhibition with writer Elizabeth Farnsworth, debuted at
the Field Museum of Natural History on June 7, 2013.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH
JOHN GIORNO
Former senior correspondent with the PBS NewsHour,
Elizabeth Farnsworth is a journalist and filmmaker
whose 2008 feature-length documentary The Judge
and the General, made with coproducer/director
Patricio Lanfranco, was nominated for a Directors
Guild of America Outstanding Directorial Achievement
award, earned a 2009 Emmy award nomination
for Best Historical Documentary, and was awarded
the coveted Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University
Award. Farnsworth has an MA in history from Stanford
University, and has written articles for Foreign Policy,
World Policy Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, and
the Nation. She joined the PBS nightly news program
The MacNeil Lehrer News Hour in 1984 as a contributing correspondent, was named chief correspondent
and principal substitute anchor in 1995, and in 1999
became senior correspondent for what is now known
as the PBS NewsHour, concentrating on foreign affairs
and the arts.
John Giorno is a poet and performance artist who began
experimenting with sound pieces in 1965, inspired by
collaborators William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. He is
the founder of the not-for-profit production company
Giorno Poetry Systems, which organized a number of
early multimedia poetry experiments, and he was the
subject of Andy Warhol’s film Sleep (1963). He started
the Dial-A-Poem project in 1968, which appeared at the
Museum of Modern Art in 1970, and has released more
than fifty albums of poetry and music with collaborators
including Laurie Anderson, Gregory Corso, Patti Smith,
and Karen Finley. He had his first solo painting show in
New York in 2010.
GUY FITZHARDINGE
Australian pastoralist Guy Fitzhardinge holds a PhD
in environmental history from the Australian National
University, and is a Governor of the World Wildlife
Fund, serving for ten years as a member of its Scientific
183
KEN GOLDBERG
Ken Goldberg is an artist and a professor in the
College of Engineering and School of Information at the
University of California, Berkeley. Goldberg’s installations have been exhibited at venues such as the Whitney
Biennial, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Buenos
Aires Bienal, and the ICC in Tokyo. Goldberg is craigslist
Distinguished Professor of New Media at UC Berkeley,
cofounder of the Berkeley Center for New Media, Founding
Director of UC Berkeley’s Art, Technology, and Culture
Lecture Series, and an IEEE Fellow.
ADAM DUNCAN HARRIS
Adam Duncan Harris has been the Peterson Curator of
Art and Research at the National Museum of Wildlife
Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, since 2000. He received
a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, a master’s
from the University of Wyoming, and a doctorate in
art history from University of Minnesota. Harris is the
author of Wildlife in American Art: Masterworks from
the National Museum of Wildlife Art, and editor of the
award-winning Bob Kuhn: Drawing on Instinct. He recently
curated George Catlin’s American Buffalo, a touring
exhibit in conjunction with the Smithsonian American Art
Museum.
HELEN MAYER HARRISON
AND NEWTON HARRISON
Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison were pioneers of the eco-art movement, starting in the early
1970s. Working with biologists, ecologists, architects,
urban planners, and other artists, the Harrisons initiate
collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions
that support biodiversity and community development.
They have had numerous international solo exhibitions,
and their work is in the collections of many public institutions, including the Pompidou Center, the Museum of
Modern Art, and the Chicago Museum of Contemporary
Art. In 2013, the Harrisons became the first recipients of
the Corlis Benefideo Award for Imaginative Cartography;
they are professors emeriti at the University of California
Santa Cruz.
MAYA LIN
A recipient of the Presidential Design Award, a National
Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and the William A.
Bernoudy Resident in Architecture fellowship from the
American Academy in Rome, Maya Lin has long balanced
art and architecture with social and environmental
concerns. Using landscape as her context, Lin constructs
views of the earth from numerous technological sources,
including sonar resonance scans and aerial and satellite
mapping devices, then translates that information into
sculptures, drawings, and both interior and environmental installations. Lin received her Master of Architecture
degree from Yale University, and maintains a studio in
New York City. She is an honorary board member of the
Natural Resources Defense Council.
GEOFF MANAUGH
Geoff Manaugh is the author of one of the web’s most visited cultural sites, BLDGBLOG, as well as The BLDGBLOG
Book. He is former senior editor of Dwell magazine, a
contributing editor at Wired UK, and Editor in Chief of
Gizmodo. Along with Nicola Twilley, he organized and
cocurated Landscapes of Quarantine, a design studio and exhibition at New York’s Storefront for Art and
Architecture in 2010, and in 2011 an exhibition for
the Nevada Museum of Art titled Landscape Futures.
Manaugh has taught at design studios at Columbia
University, Pratt Institute, the University of Technology
(Sydney), and University of Southern California.
MANDY MARTIN
One of Australia’s most prominent painters, Mandy
Martin completed a Diploma of Fine Art at the South
Australian School of Art in 1975, and currently serves
as adjunct professor in the Art & Ecology program at
the Canberra School of Art at the Australian National
University. Her work is held by every major public and
university museum in Australia, and by the Guggenheim
Museum in New York. Along with her husband Guy
Fitzhardinge, she has run several art-and-science
projects in the field, including works at the Cadia Gold
Mine in New South Wales, in the Desert Channel country
of Queensland, and with the Paruku Project in Western
Australia.
collections of the New Museum of Contemporary Art
(New York), the de La Cruz Collection (Miami), and
many others.
DENNIS SCHOLL
Dennis Scholl is Vice President/Arts for the Knight
Foundation, where he oversees the foundation’s national
arts program, including the Knight Arts Challenge and
Random Acts of Culture. A collector of contemporary
art for three decades, Scholl is the founder of a series
of initiatives dedicated to building the contemporary art
collections of museums, including the Guggenheim, the
Tate Modern, and the Perez Art Museum. He has also
been a Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology Media Lab, and is currently one of the world’s
most prominent collectors of Australian Aboriginal art.
HENRY SKERRITT
Henry Skerritt is an art historian and curator from
Perth in Western Australia who has published extensively
on Aboriginal art and culture in numerous Australian
publications. He is currently undertaking graduate studies in art history at the University of Pittsburgh.
JOANNE NORTHRUP
JoAnne Northrup is dedicated to bringing artists who
use pioneering techniques and inventive materials into
the mainstream conversation about contemporary art.
In her current position at the Nevada Museum of Art,
she curated the Late Harvest exhibition, which forms the
centerpiece of the 2014 Art + Environment Season. In
2011, Northrup was named a Fulbright Senior Research
Scholar; as Chief Curator at the San Jose Museum of Art,
she curated and authored the first nationally touring
survey exhibitions and monographs on contemporary
media artists Jennifer Steinkamp and Leo Villareal.
Northrup earned her master’s degree in art history
and museum studies from the University of Southern
California.
UGO RONDINONE
Born in 1963 in Brunnen, Switzerland, and based in
New York, Ugo Rondinone is a mixed-media artist whose
works explore themes of fantasy and desire. Rondinone
studied at Hochschule für angewandte Kunst, Vienna,
from 1986–90, and has had numerous solo exhibitions
at venues including the Kunsthalle (Vienna), Museo de
Art Contemporaneo (Leon, Spain), and Sculpture Center
(New York). In 2007, he represented Switzerland in the
Venice Biennale. Rondinone’s works can be found in the
184
Icelandic and UK artists Bryndis Snæbjörnsdóttir and
Mark Wilson describe their collaborative practice, which
they have conducted since 2001, as “socially engaged
projects that explore contemporary relationships
between human and nonhuman animals in the contexts
of history, culture, and the environment.” Their installation-based work uses objects, text, photography,
and video. Snæbjörnsdóttir is a professor of fine art at
Gothenburg University’s Valand School of Art, and has
been working as an artist, lecturer, and researcher since
1995. Mark Wilson holds a PhD in art and teaches contemporary art at the University of Cumbria (UK).
BRUCE STERLING
Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling is a cultural critic
and futurist nonpareil who defines truth as a “major
consensus narrative.” He has archived dead media sites
online, writes the Beyond the Beyond blog hosted by
Wired, serves as a Professor of Internet Studies and
Science Fiction at the European Graduate School, and
in 2005 became the Visionary in Residence at the Art
Center College of Design in Pasadena. He also founded
the Viridian Design Movement, “an environmental aesthetic … of global citizenship, environmental design, and
techno-progressiveness.” He and his wife split their time
between Croatia and his birthplace of Austin, Texas.
185
NICOLA TWILLEY
Nicola Twilley is the author of the blog Edible Geography,
cofounder of the Foodprint Project, and director of
Studio-X NYC, part of the Columbia University Graduate
School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. With
the Center for Land Use Interpretation, she recently
curated an exhibition exploring North America’s spaces
of artificial refrigeration, and is currently writing a
book on the same topic. From 2011–13, Twilley was a
Research Fellow of the Center for Art + Environment,
partnering with Geoff Manaugh to launch the Venue project. Twilley was recently named one of the first annual
UC Berkeley/11th Hour Foundation Food and Farming
Fellows.
FERNANDA VIÉGAS AND MARTIN WATTENBERG
Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg explore the
visualization of culturally significant data, leading
Google’s “Big Picture” Visualization Research Group
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Before joining Google,
the two founded the studio Flowing Media, Inc., and in
previous work for IBM, they created the groundbreaking public visualization platform Many Eyes. Their
work is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern
Art, and has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of
American Art and the Boston Institute of Contemporary
Art. Wattenberg holds a PhD in mathematics from the
University of California, Berkeley, and Viégas has a PhD
from the Media Lab at MIT.
ART + ENVIRONMENT CONFERENCE
PHOTO CREDITS
Nicole Cordier; Pages 27 and 29: Carlee Fernandez, Bear Study
Diptych, 2004, C-Print, 20 x 16 x 2 inches. Courtesy of the artist
LIST OF SPEAKERS
and ACME., Los Angeles, CA; Page 31: Andrew Zuckerman, Grizzly
Bear 26, 2009, Archival pigment print, 110 x 60 inches. Photo
courtesy Andrew Zuckerman Studio, New York, NY; Page 33:
Elmgreen & Dragset, Perception, Fig 2 (detail), 2010, Lacquered
FRP sculpture, painted wooden pedestal, taxidermy albino rat,
sculpture: 79 x 43 1/3 x 43 1/3 in, plinth: 23 ½ x 47 x 47 in.
Private Collection, London. Photo courtesy Gallery Victoria Miro.
© Markus Tretter. © [2014] Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York / billedkunst.dk; Page 34: Daniel Firman, Nasutamanus,
2012, Fiberglass and polymer, 90 1/2 x 207 3/4 x 48 1/2
inches. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume Ziccarelli;
Page 36: Andrew Zuckerman, Asian Elephant 123, 2005, Archival
pigment print, 73 x 55 inches. Photo courtesy Andrew
2008
2011
2014
Zuckerman Studio; Page 37: Carlee Fernandez, Abstraction in
Green, 2010, Taxidermy parakeets, redwood, 64 x 57 x 32
inches. Courtesy of the artist and ACME., Los Angeles, CA; Page
38: Bruno Liljefors, Swans, 1917, Oil on canvas, 27 3/4 x 39 ½
inches. JKM Collection®, National Museum of Wildlife Art; Page
39: Ray Harris Ching, End to the Squandering of Beauty, 2011,
Oil on canvas, 6 x 8 feet. Courtesy of the artist and Everard
Vito Acconci
Lita Albuquerque
Will Bruder
Matt Coolidge
Lynn Fenstermaker
Chris Drury
Kianga K. Ford
William L. Fox
Cheryl Haines
Bill Gilbert
Jeff Gordinier
Fritz Haeg
Katie Holten
Michael Light
Geoff Manaugh
W. J. T. Mitchell
JoAnne Northrup
Crimson Rose
Ann M. Wolfe
Diana Al Hadid
Subhankar Banerjee
David Benjamin
Richard Black
Edward Burtynsky
Gaetano Carboni
John Carty
Pilar Cereceda
William L. Fox
Amy Franceschini
Fritz Haeg
Helen Mayer Harrison
Newton Harrison
Laura Jackson
Patricia Johanson
Chris Jordan
Thomas Kellein
Geoff Manaugh
Mandy Martin
Christie Mazuera Davis
Paul Miller
Gerald Nanson
Jorge Pardo
Rodrigo de Arce Perez
John Reid
Alexander Rose
Sean Shepherd
Mark Smout
Bruce Sterling
Nicola Twilley
Leo Villareal
Stephen G. Wells
Ann M. Wolfe
Liam Young
Kenneth Baker David Brooks
Canary Project
John Carty
Petah Coyne
Claude d’Anthenaise
William L. Fox
Elmgreen & Dragset
Terry Evans
Elizabeth Farnsworth
John Giorno Ken Goldberg
Adam Duncan Harris
Helen Mayer Harrison & Newton Harrison
Maya Lin
Geoff Manaugh & Nicola Twilley Mandy Martin & Guy Fitzhardinge
Metabolic Studio JoAnne Northrup Ugo Rondinone
Dennis Scholl Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson
Bruce Sterling Fernanda Viégas Martin Wattenberg
Cover: Kate Clark, Licking the Plate (detail), 2014, Greater Kudu
hide, antlers, foam, clay, pins, thread, rubber eyes, chicken wire,
plaster, wood, rocks, painting on canvas, 120 x 120 x 54 inches.
Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Nicole Cordier. Pages 8 through
10: Brigitte Zieger, Shooting Wallpaper, 2006, Animated film
with sound. Photo: © Brigitte Zieger. © 2014 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris; Page 13: Carl Rungius,
Red Fox, 1933, Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches. Jackson Hole
Preserve, National Museum of Wildlife Art. © Estate of Carl
Rungius; Page 14: Archibald Thorburn, Shadowed, 1906,
Watercolor on paper, 21 ½ x 29 ½ inches. JKM Collection®,
National Museum of Wildlife Art; Page 16: Carl Rungius, During
the Rut, circa 1925, Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches. The Widener
Charitable Limited Partnership, National Museum of Wildlife Art.
© Estate of Carl Rungius; Page 17: Carl Rungius, Caribou in the
Mountains, circa 1920, Oil on canvas, 32 x 46 inches. JKM
Collection. © Estate of Carl Rungius; Page 18: Richard Friese,
Pascha (Deer in a Forest Glade), 1912, Oil on canvas, 43 x 62 ½
inches. Collection of the Robert S. and Grayce B. Kerr
Foundation; Page 20: George Frederic Rotig, Fighting Stags by
Moonlight, 1900, Oil on canvas, 49 x 63 7/8 inches. JKM
Collection®, National Museum of Wildlife Art. © Georges
Frederic Rotig; Page 22: Tim Noble and Sue Webster, British
Wildlife, 2000, 88 taxidermy animals: 47 birds (36 varieties), 40
mammals (14 varieties), 2 fish, wood, polyester glass fiber filler,
fake moss, wire, light projector, 59 x 351/2 x 71 inches. Image
courtesy of the artists and Blain|Southern. Photo © 2 Shooters
Photography. ©Tim Noble and Sue Webster. All Rights Reserved,
DACS, London and ARS, NY 2014; Page 24: Kate Clark, Licking
the Plate, 2014, Greater Kudu hide, antlers, foam, clay, pins,
thread, rubber eyes, chicken wire, plaster, wood, rocks, painting
on canvas, 120 x 120 x 54 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photo:
Nicole Cordier; Page 25: Kate Clark, Licking the Plate (detail),
2014, Greater Kudu hide, antlers, foam, clay, pins, thread,
rubber eyes, chicken wire, plaster, wood, rocks, painting on
canvas, 120 x 120 x 54 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photo:
186
187
Read Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa; Page 40: George
Browne, The Farm Marsh – Mallards, no date, Oil on canvas, 24
x 36 ½ inches. Gift of Bob Bartleson. National Museum of
Wildlife Art. © Estate of George Browne; Page 41: George
Browne, Canvasbacks, 1953, Oil on canvas, 20 x 30 inches. Gift
of Lynn and Foster Friess. National Museum of Wildlife Art. ©
Estate of George Browne; Page 42: William Hollywood, Mallards
in Flight, no date, Oil on canvas, 28 x 36 inches. Joffa and Bill
Kerr, National Museum of Wildlife Art; Page 43: Petah Coyne,
Untitled #1240 (Black Cloud), 2007-2008, Mixed media, 74 x
104 x 174 inches. Private Collection. Courtesy of the Artist and
Galerie Lelong, New York. © Petah Coyne. Photo: Wit Mckay; Page
44: Petah Coyne, Untitled #1205 (Virgil), 1997-2008, Mixed
media, 68 x 97 x 115 inches. Collection of the Nevada Museum
of Art, Museum Purchase with funds provided by the Louise A.
Tarble Foundation, Dorothy Lemelson, and Marion Gruden in
memory of Shim Gruden. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York. ©
Petah Coyne. Photo: Wit Mckay; Page 45: Petah Coyne, Untitled
#1205 (Virgil) (detail), 1997-2008, Mixed media, 68 x 97 x 115
inches. Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, Museum
Purchase with funds provided by the Louise A. Tarble Foundation,
Dorothy Lemelson, and Marion Gruden in memory of Shim
Gruden. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York. © Petah Coyne.
Photo: Wit Mckay; Page 46: Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and Floris
Bakker), Geological Discovery II (Geologische Vondst II), 2012,
Lion, amethyst, forged iron. Courtesy of the artists; Page 47:
Robert F. Kuhn, Post Prandial Wash, 2000, Acrylic on board, 25 x
33 1/8 inches. JKM Collection®, National Museum of Wildlife Art.
© Estate of Robert F. Kuhn; Page 48: Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and
Floris Bakker), Ophelia, 2005, Taxidermy lion, ceramics, glass,
92 ½ x 31 ½ x 31 1/3 inches. Collection of the National Museum
of Art, Oslo Norway. Photo: Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and Floris
Bakker); Page 50: Andrew Zuckerman, African Lion 141, 2006,
Archival pigment print, 65 x 50 inches. Photo courtesy Andrew
Zuckerman Studio, New York, NY; Page 51: Robert F. Kuhn,
Ahmed, 1973, Acrylic on board, 30 x 40 inches, National
Museum of Wildlife Art Collection. © Estate of Robert F. Kuhn;
1978, Acrylic on board, 40 ¼ x 52 ¼ inches. JKM Collection®,
x 48 1/2 inches. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin. Photo: Guillaume
Robert S. and Grayce B. Kerr Foundation, National Museum of
Page 52: Wilhelm Kuhnert, African Lions, circa 1911, Oil on
National Museum of Wildlife Art. © Estate of Robert F. Kuhn;
Ziccarelli.; Robert F. Kuhn, Rear Guard, 1977, Acrylic on board,
Wildlife Art; Carl Rungius, During the Rut, circa 1925, Oil on
canvas, 64 x 50 inches. Gift of The Robert S. and Grayce B. Kerr
Page 77: Amy Stein, Threat, 2005, Digital C-print, 30 x 36
23 1/2 x 35 3/8 inches. JKM Collection®, National Museum of
canvas, 30 x 40 inches. The Widener Charitable Limited
Foundation, National Museum of Wildlife Art; Page 53: Robert F.
inches. Photo: © Amy Stein; Page 78: Amy Stein, Struggle, 2005,
Wildlife Art. © Estate of Robert F. Kuhn; Alfred Wiersz Kowalski,
Partnership, National Museum of Wildlife Art. © Estate of Carl
Kuhn, Rear Guard, 1977, Acrylic on board, 23 1/2 x 35 3/8
Digital C-print, 30 x 36 inches. Photo: © Amy Stein; Page 79:
A Pack of Wolves, circa 1900, Oil on canvas, 36 1/2 x 48 5/8
Rungius; Page 123: Bruno Liljefors, Leaping Hare (Skuttande
inches. JKM Collection®, National Museum of Wildlife Art. ©
Amy Stein, Watering Hole, 2005, Digital C-print, 30 x 36 inches.
inches. Collection of William G. Kerr. Image courtesy of
Hare), 1928, Oil on canvas, 20 ½ x 29 ½ inches. JKM Collection,
Estate of Robert F. Kuhn; Page 54: Wilhelm Kuhnert, A Herd of
Photo: © Amy Stein; Page 80: Carl Rungius, On Grizzly Pass,
Sotheby’s; Nicholas Galanin, Inert Wolf, 2009, Wolf pelts and
National Museum of Wildlife Art. © Bruno Liljefors; Page 126:
Zebras, 1908, Oil on canvas, 24 1/2 x 39 inches. JKM
1930, Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches. JKM Collection®, National
felt, 29 ¾ x 65 x 72 inches. Collection of the Burke Museum of
Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, nanoq: flat out and bluesome, 2004,
Collection®, National Museum of Wildlife Art; Page 56: Berlinde
Museum of Wildlife Art; Page 82: Robert F. Kuhn, Message on the
Natural History and Culture, Seattle, WA. Photo: © Wayne
Installation image, Spike Island, Bristol, UK. Photo: Woodley &
De Bruyckere, P XII, 2004, Resin, horse skin, PU foam, wax and
Wind, 1986, Acrylic on board, 30 x 48 inches. JKM Collection®,
Leidenfrost/Vancouver Sun; Page 104: Robert Rauschenberg,
Quick; Page 133: Trophy Gallery (view from entry), The Museum
iron, 18 7/8 x 64 1/8 x 116 ½ inches. The Marc and Livia Straus
National Museum of Wildlife Art. © Estate of Robert F. Kuhn;
Monogram, 1955-59, Mixed media, 42 x 63 1/4 x 64 1/2 inches.
of Nature and the Hunt, © Paris. Photo: Sophie Lloyd; Pages 134
Family Collection, New York. © Berlinde De Bruyckere. Photo:
Page 84; David Brooks, Imbroglios (a phylogenetic tree, from
© Estate Robert Rauschenberg/BUS 2011, Stockholm/VAGA, NY;
and 135: Hall of the Dogs (detail), The Museum of Nature and the
Mirjam Devriendt; Page 58: Richard Ansdell, Ptarmigans on a
Homo sapiens to Megalops atlanticus), 2012, Fiberglass,
Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of
Hunt, © Paris. Photo: Sophie Lloyd; Page 137: Salon of the Deer
Ledge, 1865, Oil on canvas, 34 x 44 inches. JKM Collection®,
gelcoat, MDF, pencil, hardware, 5 x 12 x 21 feet. Courtesy of the
Someone Living, 1991, Glass, painted steel, silicone, monofila-
and the Wolf, with taxidermy deer (detail), The Museum of Nature
National Museum of Wildlife Art; Page 59: David Shrigley,
artist and American Contemporary. Photo: Cathy Carver; Page
ment, shark and formaldehyde solution, 85.5 x 213.4 x 70.9
and the Hunt, © Paris. Photo: Sophie Lloyd; Page 138: House of
Ostrich, 2009, Taxidermy ostrich, 76 3/4 x 63 x 37 ½ inches.
85: Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, Peterhead from the series, nanoq:
inches. Image: Prudence Cuming Associates. © Damien Hirst and
Hunting and Nature Foundation, Jan Fabre, La Nuit de Diane
Base: 8 x 41 x 33 inches. Courtesy British Council Collection.
flat out and bluesome, 2002-04, Framed in sapeli wood with
Science Ltd. All rights reserved, DACS 2014; Page 106: Carlee
(detail), The Museum of Nature and the Hunt © Paris. Photo: Luc
Photo: © David Shrigley; Page 60: Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and
brass plated inserts, 33 54-1/3 x 46-1/2 inches. Collection of
Fernandez, Hugo Parlier, 2001, Altered taxidermy, 75 X 28 24
Boegly; Page 140: The Armory, The Museum of Nature and the
Floris Bakker), Corpse Bride (Vulture with Victim), 2006,
the Nevada Museum of Art. Purchased with funds provided by
inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Joshua White/JW Pictures.
Hunt, © Paris. Photo: Sophie Lloyd; Page 154: Carlee Fernandez,
Taxidermy vulture, forged iron, pearls, textile, 51 1/8 x 31 ½ x
Meg & Earl Tarble; Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, Bristol (Nina) from
com; Page 107: Carlee Fernandez, Courtney Payne, 2001,
Bear Head, Arm and Leg Study I, 2004, C-Print, 32 x 40 inches.
33 ½ inches. Photo: Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and Floris Bakker; Page
the series, nanoq: flat out and bluesome, 2002-04, Framed in
Altered taxidermy, 24 X 17 X 11 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Courtesy of the artist and ACME., Los Angeles, CA; Idiots (Afke
61: Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and Floris Bakker), Vanity Comes to
sapeli wood with brass plated inserts, 33 54-1/3 x 46-1/2
Photo: © Edmund Barr, 2009; Carlee Fernandez, Lola Isern,
Golsteijn and Floris Bakker), Prometheus, 2014, Vulture, forged
Fall,2014, Peacock, textiles, lace, embroidery, 71 x 55 x 43-1/3
inches. Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art. Purchased with
2001, Altered taxidermy, 27 x 30 x 18 inches. Courtesy of the
iron, 21-2/3 x 39-1/3 x 43-1/3 inches. Courtesy of the artists.
inches. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Roland Nieuwendijk; Page
funds provided by Meg & Earl Tarble; Page 86: Mary Tsiongas,
artist. Photo: Joshua White/JW Pictures.com; Page 108: Berlinde
Photo: Roland Nieuwendijk. Page 172: Brad Bartlett, Photo
62: Polly Morgan, Systemic Inflammation, 2010, Taxidermy
Vanish #1, 2009, LED 26 inch television, media player, frame, 20
De Bruyckere, P XII, 2004, Resin, horse skin, PU foam, wax and
composite of horizon lines created for the book Lita
finches and canaries, steel, leather, 51 1/8 x 44 ½ x 44 ½
x 30 inches. Courtesy of Richard Levy Gallery. Photo: © Mary
iron, 18 7/8 x 64 1/8 x 116 ½ inches. The Marc and Livia Straus
Albuquerque: Stellar Axis. Photos: Jean de Pomereu; Page 174:
inches. Private Collection. Photo: © Tessa Angus; Page 63: Polly
Tsiongas; Page 87: Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, Somerset from the
Family Collection, New York. © Berlinde De Bruyckere. Photo:
Lita Albuquerque, Stellar Axis, 2006. Photo: Jean de Pomereu;
Morgan, Systemic Inflammation, (detail), 2010, Taxidermy
series, nanoq: flat out and bluesome, 2002-04, Framed in sapeli
Mirjam Devriendt; Wim Delvoye, Untitled (Toile de Jouy),
Page 176: Maya Lin, Disappearing Bodies of Water: Arctic Ice,
finches and canaries, steel, leather, 51 1/8 x 44 ½ x 44 ½
wood with brass plated inserts, 33 54-1/3 x 46-1/2 inches.
2006,Tattooed and taxidermied pig, 45 ½ x 13 3/8 x 25 1/8
2013, Vermont Danby marble, granite base, 48 x 46 x 52
inches. Private Collection. Photo: © Tessa Angus; Page 64: Tim
Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art. Purchased with funds
inches. © studio Wim Delvoye, Belgium. © 2014 Artists Rights
inches. Edition of 3 + 1 AP. Photo: Stephen White. Courtesy Pace
Noble and Sue Webster, The Masterpiece (detail), 2014, Sterling
provided by Meg & Earl Tarble; Page 88: Mark Dion, Concrete
Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels; Page 110: Giuseppe
Gallery; Page 177: Ken Goldberg, Sanjay Krishnan, Fernanda
silver, metal stand, light projector,60.24 x 15.35 x 12.2 inches.
Jungle (Mammalia), 1992, Taxidermic animals, trash cans, trash
Arcimboldo, Earth, One of the four images in the Elements
Viégas, and Martin Wattenberg, Bloom, 2013, Custom software
Image courtesy of the artists and Blain|Southern. Photo: Peter
bags, newspapers, bottles, wood, cardboard boxes, ironing
series, 1570, 27 ½ x 19 inches. Private collection. Photo: Art
with live data feed, dimensions variable. Czuommissioned by the
Mallet, 2014. © Tim Noble and Sue Webster. All Rights Reserved,
boards, crates, umbrella, assorted trash, 59 x 165 x 51 inches.
Media/Print Collector/Getty Images; Page 113: Tim Noble and
Nevada Museum of Art and purchased with funds from deacces-
DACS, London and ARS, NY 2014; Page 65: Tim Noble and Sue
Courtesy of Hort Family Collection. Photo: Courtesy the artist
Sue Webster, British Wildlife, 2000, 88 taxidermy animals: 47
sioning. Courtesy of the Artists and Catharine Clark Gallery, San
Webster, The Masterpiece, 2014, Sterling silver, metal stand,
and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, NY; Page 90: John
birds (36 varieties), 40 mammals (14 varieties), 2 fish, wood,
Francisco. Photo: Jamie Kingham; Andrea Zittel, Wall Sprawl #4
light projector,60.24 x 15.35 x 12.2 inches. Image courtesy of
Newsom, Flowering Feathers, 2008, Oil on canvas, 84 x 108
polyester glass fiber filler, fake moss, wire, light projector, 59 x
(Las Vegas, Next to Nellis Air Force Base), 2011/2014, Inkjet on
the artists and Blain|Southern. Photo: Peter Mallet, 2014. © Tim
inches. Courtesy The Marc and Livia Straus Family Collection,
351/2 x 71 inches. Image courtesy of the artists and
J15 Blueback paper, dimensions to be determined upon
Noble and Sue Webster. All Rights Reserved, DACS, London and
New York, NY; Page 92: Damien Hirst, The Kingdom of the Father,
Blain|Southern. Photo: © 2 Shooters Photography; Page 116:
installation, Edition 2/8, AZ 280. Collection of the Nevada
ARS, NY 2014; Page 66: François Furet, Weasel on Watch (Un
2007, Butterflies and household gloss on three canvas panels,
François Nicolas Martinet, Le Faucon, 18th century, hand-col-
Museum of Art with funds from The Louise A. Tarble Foundation,
Dangereux Voisinage), circa 1890, Oil on canvas, 59 1/4 x 39 ½
Triptych: right and left panel framed: 121-3/4 x 54-3/4 x 5
ored engraving, 9 x 7 inches. Gift of Loren G. Lipson, M.D.,
Dorothy Lemelson, and funds provided by deaccessioning.
inches. National Museum of Wildlife Art Collection. Image
inches each; center panel framed: 123 x 102-3/4 x 5 inches.
National Museum of Wildlife Art; George Stubbs, A Horse
Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA. © Andrea Zittel; Page
courtesy Spanierman Gallery; Page 67: Carlee Fernandez, Gift
The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica, CA. © Damien Hirst and
Attacked by a Lion, 1927, Oil on canvas, 42 x 54 inches. Gift of
179: Elmgreen & Dragset, Untitled (Prada Marfa), 2007,
for Xavier, 2010, Taxidermy coyote, redwood, bronze, 63 x 82 x
Science Ltd. All rights reserved/DACS, London/ARS, NY. Photo: ©
the 1999 Collectors Circle, National Museum of Wildlife Art;
Photography, dibond, Plexiglas, wood, #1 AP from Edition 5 + 2
38 inches., Courtesy of the artist and ACME., Los Angeles, CA;
Randy Boverman; Page 94: Wim Delvoye, Untitled (Toile de Jouy),
Antoine-Louis Barye, Panther Attacking a Stag, 1857, Bronze,14
AP, 63 x 80.3 inches. Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art,
Page 68: Bruno Liljefors, Leaping Hare (Skuttande Hare), 1928,
2006, Tattooed and taxidermied pig, 45 ½ x 13 3/8 x 25 1/8
¾ x 21 ¾ x 9 ¼ inches. Gift of the 2001 Collectors Circle,
Museum purchase with funds provided by deaccessioning.
Oil on canvas, 20 ½ x 29 ½ inches. JKM Collection, National
inches. © studio Wim Delvoye, Belgium. © 2014 Artists Rights
National Museum of Wildlife Art; John James Audubon, Virginia
Courtesy: The Artists / Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris. Photo:
Museum of Wildlife Art. © Bruno Liljefors; Page 70: Alfred Wiersz
Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels; Page 95: Walter
Partridge (Bob White Quail), circa 1825/2006, Edition 44/200,
James Evans © [2014] Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /
Kowalski, A Pack of Wolves, circa 1900, Oil on canvas, 36 1/2 x
Robinson, Exodus, 2014, Wood, fiberglass, taxidermy, glass,
Digital print with archival ink on watercolor paper, 25 3/4 x 39
billedkunst.dk; Page 180: David Taylor, Paruku 10, 2011, Digital
48 5/8 inches. Collection of William G. Kerr. Image courtesy of
leather, sand, 75 x 63 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the artist and
1/4 inches. Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art. Purchased
print, 22 x 39 inches. Collection of Nevada Museum of Art,
Sotheby’s; Page 72: Nicholas Galanin, Inert Wolf, 2009, Wolf
Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA;; Page 97: Yinka
with funds in memory of Dana Rose Richardson; Page 119:
Center for Art + Environment. Gift of David Taylor. © 2014
pelts and felt, 29 ¾ x 65 x 72 inches. Collection of the Burke
Shonibare MBE, Revolution Kid (Fox), 2012, Mannequin, Dutch
Joseph Wolf, Gyrfalcons Striking a Kite, 1856, Oil on canvas, 71
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / BUS, Stockholm; Terry
Museum of Natural History and Culture, Seattle, WA. Photo: ©
wax printed cotton, fibreglass, leather, taxidermy fox head and
x 59 inches. Generously donated by Cornelia Guest and the
Evans, Oil pipeline right of way, Mountrail County, North Dakota,
Wayne Leidenfrost/Vancouver Sun; Page 74: Andrew Zuckerman,
24 carat gold gilded gun, 65 x 25 x 20 inches. © 2012 Yinka
Robert S. Grayce B. Kerr Foundation. National Museum of Wildlife
June 6, 2011, Inkjet print, 20x20 inches.; Page 181: Installation
Beira Antelope 19, 2009, Archival pigment print, 110 x 60
Shonibare, MBE. Courtesy of the artist and Museum Beelden aan
Art; Page 120: Richard Friese, Pascha (Deer in a Forest Glade),
image of Venue. Photo: Jamie Kingham.
inches. Photo: Andrew Zuckerman Studio, New York, NY; Page 75:
Zee, The Hague. © Yinka Shonibare MBE. All Rights Reserved,
1912, Oil on canvas, 43 x 62 ½ inches. Collection of the Robert
Amy Stein, Predator, 2005, digital C-print, 30 x 36 inches.
DACS, London and ARS, NY 2014; Page 102: Daniel Firman,
S. and Grayce B. Kerr Foundation; Wilhelm Kuhnert, African
Photo: © Amy Stein; Page 76: Robert F. Kuhn, Hill Country Herd,
Nasutamanus, 2012, Fiberglass and polymer, 90 1/2 x 207 3/4
Lions, circa 1911, Oil on canvas, 64 x 50 inches. Gift of The
188
189
BOARD OF TRUSTEES
EXECUTIVE
TRUSTEES
COMMITTEE
Nancy Fennell
John Worthington
Ron Zideck
Ronald Remington
Kathie Bartlett
Michael Hillerby
Peter Bessette
Maureen Mullarkey
Wayne L. Prim
Sari Rogoff
THE NEVADA MUSEUM OF ART
HONORARY
LIFE TRUSTEES
Be-Be Adams
Carole Anderson
Jeanne Blach
Denise Cashman
Sue Clark
Kathleen Conaboy
Stacey Crowley
John C. Deane
Craig Denney
Catherine Farahi
Ross Heppe
Jeremy Higginbotham
Mimi Ellis-Hogan
Brian Kennedy
John H. O. La Gatta
Bryan Landaburu
Anne Brockinton Lee
Charlotte McConnell
Lisa Mead
Jennifer Patterson
William Pereira
Peter Pool
Tammy M. Riggs
Leonard Remington
Emma Sepulveda
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Jean Venneman
\
Kristen A. Avansino
Raymond C. Avansino, Jr.
Bruno Benna
Edna Benna
Carol Franc Buck
Charles N. Mathewson
Wayne L. Prim
Fred W. Smith
The Nevada Museum of Art is the only art museum accredited by the American
Alliance of Museums in the state of Nevada. Designed by internationally renowned
architect Will Bruder, the new museum facility opened in 2003 and is the heart of
Reno’s downtown cultural district. The four-level, 60,000-square-foot building is
inspired by geologic formations located in northern Nevada. This reference resonates
metaphorically with the museum’s scholarly focus on art and environments.
In 2009, the museum established the Center for Art + Environment, an internationally recognized research center that supports the practice, study and awareness of
creative interactions between people and their natural, built, and virtual environments. Among the Center’s significant archive collections are documents, sketches,
and models relating to Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, the Center for Land Use
Interpretation, Burning Man and Lita Albuquerque’s Stellar Axis project.
The Nevada Museum of Art was founded in 1931. Its proximity to the San Francisco
Bay Area, the Sierra Nevada, Lake Tahoe, and the surrounding Great Basin desert
region situates it geographically at the nexus of both awe-inspiring scenery and a
rapidly changing landscape, making it an ideal place for inspiring and dynamic conversations about the ways that humans creatively interact with natural, built, and virtual environments. The permanent collection is divided into four thematic focus areas: Contemporary Art, The Altered Landscape Carol Frank Buck Collection, Robert S. and
Dorothy J. Keyser Art of the Greater West Collection, and the E. L. Wiegand Work Ethic
in American Art Collection.
MISSION
We are a museum of ideas. While building upon our founding collections and values,
we strive to offer meaningful art and cultural experiences, and foster new knowledge
in the visual arts by encouraging interdisciplinary investigation. The Nevada Museum
of Art serves as an educational resource for everyone.
190
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Hirmer Publishers
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Germany
Design and Visual Editing:
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Project Manager:
Amy Oppio, COO/Deputy Director, Nevada Museum of Art
Edited by David Abel, The Text Garage, Portland, OR
©The authors and the Nevada Museum of Art
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced in any manner without written permission.
Library of Congress Control Number:
2014950321
ISBN: 978-3-7774-2350-0
Donald W. Reynolds Center for the Visual Arts | E. L. Wiegand Gallery
160 West Liberty Street, Reno, Nevada 89501
www.nevadaart.org
192

Late Harvest - Sagehen Creek Field Station

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