Listmania.

I’d certainly have chosen different words than Christopher Foyle did for his Treasury of Unusual Words (beautiful-looking book and fantastic birthday present from M. and J.) - as anyone of us would have. But I’d definitely have included the following too,

for their meaning

to moodle - to pass time in doing nothing, to meander aimlessly

thigmophilic - touch-loving, liking or needing to be touched or to feel the touch of something

blennophobia - an abnormal fear of slime or mucous

colombophile - a pigeon-fancier

for their onomatopoetic quality

susurration - a whispering, rustling or murmuring sound

curmudgeon - a bad-tempered, mean-spirited or miserly person

to murken - to darken, to grow dark, to become overcast; to make dark, to obscure

rambunctious - exuberant, boisterous, difficult to control

and for its straightforwardness

to unnun - to expel a nun from the religious order to which she belongs.

I loved that damn museum.

Gemsbok diorama, Akeley Hall of African Mammals,
American Museum of Natural History, NY.

Water Hole diorama, Akeley Hall of African Mammals.

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.

Quoted from J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, chapter 16.

Alaska Brown Bear diorama, Hall of North American Mammals.

Australian diorama (detail: crimson rosellas), Birds of the World Hall.

All pictures from the AMNH website.

Cultural theory, inventive and hopeful.

I like French sociologist Michel de Certeau not only because his ideas and methodologies are fruitful for my research in many ways, but also and especially because he was a fascinating character.

He was a Jesuit, a traveller, someone who, instead of posing and being cocky, was hesitant and careful about the ideas he developed, someone who wrote in a tentative and searching, not in a polished and conclusive style, someone who preferred asking questions and opening pathways over claiming to establish rock-solid theories, someone who wasn’t afraid of thinking outside the box, someone who took an interdisciplinary approach without ever risking to end up a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none.

Ben Highmore, in the introduction to his study Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture, quotes a passage from a letter he received by an anonymous reviewer of one of his other pieces on de Certeau:

In a field [cultural studies] overly enamored of the contemporary, de Certeau offers the historian’s detailed appraisal of the past. In a field obsessed with the local, de Certeau offers itineraries to elsewheres. In a field where culture tends to be synonymous with the US model, de Certeau points to the other. In a field awash in the ordinary, de Certeau grasps the singular. In a field beset with nihilism, de Certeau evokes abiding faith in human history. In a field associated with celebrated stardom, de Certeau provides beguiling self-effacement.

I think that’s what attracted me to de Certeau’s writing (especially The Practice of Everyday Life and The Writing of History) from the start: he radiates attentiveness, substantiality, singularity and faith in an interdisciplinary field (and increasingly complex world) that is characterised by superficiality, randomness and arbitrariness.

Insect Poetics

Studio Ghibli’s bizarre but lovely Japanese anime Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is set in a world 1000 years after the collapse of the ecosystem. Armies of gigantic insects inhabit a toxic forest and sort of reflect how the characters treat the earth: their eyes red with rage, they attack when harm is being caused, but they immediately calm down around the gentle, peace-loving Nausicaä.

Anyway, watching the movie reminded me of recommending and linking to the following recent publications on insects in relation to visual culture and science:

• Cabinet Magazine’s special issue on insects (‘Swarming Season’ Spring 2007)
• Antennae’s two special issues on insect poetics (Autumn 2007/1 and 2)
• Insect Poetics, edited by Eric C. Brown

The articles, essays and interviews, which cover several fields and centuries, largely focus on the insect as “the other” – the monstrous, invasive, menacing, disintegrating, alienating creature that, due to its boundary-threatening and boundary-crossing nature, forces us to reconsider issues of identity and order; but they also dwell on the insect’s mysterious attraction and beauty.

It’s pretty cool.

The Wet Collection

I picked up Joni Tevis’s The Wet Collection at David Mirvish Books in Toronto, “the art book store with the Frank Stella painting,” without knowing anything about it. I was probably drawn in by the Joseph Cornell on the cover and by buzz words such as wunderkammer, nature writing and memory - and it turned out the best book I’ve read for a while. It is a W.G. Sebald-style collection of essays, part memoir part travelogue, centering on themes such as outsider art, women’s history, geology and religion. See here for two short reviews. And read it, read it soon.

I dream of a new age of curiosity.

Rosamond Purcell, Goliath beetles.
From Illuminations: A Bestiary, 1986.

Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes “care”; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental. I dream of a new age of curiosity.

Michel Foucault in an interview with Christian Delacampagne, Le Monde, 6./7. April 1980.

Scintillating leaps of the imagination.

John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester (staircase).

Citing Foucault is sort of an academic trope; reading or hearing “in a Foucauldian sense” in a study, an article or a paper never fails to make the hair on my neck stand up. Every once in a while, however, my defence mechanism is weakened and statements actually get through to me, such as Foucault’s call for a non-judgemental, creative criticism. Isn’t it being put into practice by bloggers for example, who review books or retrieve pieces of information from the daily data overload and reflect on them - amateurishly no doubt, but with passion?

I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgements but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes - all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.

Michel Foucault in an interview with Christian Delacampagne, Le Monde, 6./7. April 1980 (translated and republished as The Masked Philosopher).

Inventory (II)

Mark Dion, Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy, 2005, desk.

Inventory
by Günter Eich

This is my cap,
this is my coat,
here is my shaving set
in a linen bag.

A tin can:
my plate, my cup,
in the metal
I have scratched my name.

Scratched it with this
precious nail,
which I hide
from greedy eyes.

In my haversack are
a pair of woolen socks
and some things I don’t
tell anyone about,

it serves as a pillow
at night for my head.
The cardboard lies here
between me and the earth.

The pencil lead
I love the most:
by day it writes verses for me
that I have thought up by night.

This is my notebook,
this is my canvas,
this is my towel,
this is my thread.

From The Faber Book of 20th-Century German Poems, edited by Michael Hofmann.

Inventory (I)

Mark Dion, Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy, 2005, left rear corner.

Inventory
by Jorge Luis Borges

To reach it, a ladder has to be set up. There is no stair.
What can we be looking for in the attic
but the accumulation of disorder?
There is a smell of damp.
The late afternoon enters by way of the laundry.
The ceiling beams loom close, and the floor has rotted.
Nobody dares to put a foot on it.
A folding cot, broken.
A few useless tools,
the dead one’s wheelchair.
The base for a lamp.
A Paraguayan hammock with tassels, all frayed away.
Equipment and papers.
An engraving of Aparicio Saravia’s general staff.
An old charcoal iron.
A clock stopped in time, with a broken pendulum.
A peeling gilt frame, with no canvas.
A cardboard chessboard, and some broken chessmen.
A stove with only two legs.
A chest made of leather.
A mildewed copy of Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs,” in intricate
Gothic lettering.
A photograph which might be of anybody.
A worn skin, once a tiger’s.
A key which has lost its lock.
What can we be looking for in the attic
except the flotsam of disorder?
To forgetting, to all forgotten objects, I have just erected
this monument
(unquestionably less durable than bronze) which will be
lost among them.

From Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand.

Alien Invaders

Threats to biodiversity and causes for the extinction of ecosystems and species are often summarised with the acronym HIPPO: habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, overpopulation and overexploitation. Two recent artist’s projects are concerned with the i in HIPPO: Jacob Cartwright’s and Nick Jordan’s Alien Invaders: A Guide to Non-Native Species of the Britisher Isles and 2005 Turner Prize winner Simon Starling’s Henry Moore/Zebra Mussel project commissioned by the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto.

The former, a small artist’s book published by BookWorks, takes the form of an illustrated natural history guide listing invasive species introduced to the British Isles, such as the American Bullfrog, the Chinese Mitten Crab, the Giant Hogweed, the Grey Squirrel, the Pharaoh Ant, the Ring-necked Parakeet, the Ruddy Duck and the Wels Catfish. In the manner of a scientific guidebook, each entry gives information on the category and origins of introduction, problems caused by the introduction and efforts of control or eradication. It is only upon closer examination that one begins to doubt the scientific objectivity and reliability of the entries, which appear to be interspersed with rather obscure references and bizarre cultural anecdotes. The artists intervene by providing us with highly selective and sometimes dubious information. Thus we read under the heading ‘Origins of Introduction of the Grey Squirrel‘:

In ‘Dixieland‘, Gray Squirrels have long been desirable table fare, enriching the poor rural diet (Metzger, 1953). Skinned and simmered in broth until the meat falls off the bone, this traditional dish (called ‘limb chicken‘) was said to be a favourite of the young Elvis, and is typically served with jalapeno fritters and deep-fried grits.

(The reference ‘Metzger, 1953‘ isn’t traceable, since the book lacks both footnotes and bibliography; and do I need to mention that, quite fittingly, ‘Metzger‘ translates into ‘butcher‘…)

Simon Starling’s Toronto project involves sinking a replica of Henry Moore’s bronze statue Warrior with Shield into Lake Ontario, where it will become encrusted with Zebra Mussels, one of the most aggressive invasive species introduced to North America (for a synopsis of how English sculptor Henry Moore is linked with the city of Toronto, see here).

While Cartwright’s and Jordan’s book, sort of a cross-pollination of fact and fiction, of science and art, raises questions of authenticity and the impossibility of scientific objectivity and detachment, the Zebra Mussel project is concerned with issues of transformation and cultural colonialism. Both projects, which by far exceed instances of more ‘conservationist‘ environmental art from the 1960s onwards, are examples of how artists use processes of nature to reflect on broader cultural issues.