Future Nostalgia for Species
Multimedia Installation by Fiona Woods Temple Bar
Galleries
Essay by Hilary Orpen
Christianity deposes Mother Nature
And begets, on her prostrate body,
Science, which proceeds to destroy
Nature. (Ted Hughes)
Hares, foxes, birds, badgers, hedgehogs, native species frozen in meadow and woodland, dioramas of fanciful, rural landscapes inhabited by dead, stuffed creatures, these are among the images artist, Fiona Woods presents to her audience in her work, Future Nostalgia for Species at Temple Bar Studios. Partly kitsch, partly disturbing, the quirkiness of the work evokes memories of children’s TV from the early ‘innocent’ days, or of some native nature series made with low technology on a shoestring budget. The animals and birds are positioned for our gaze within a living landscape, but they themselves are dead, and Wood’s title for the work, Future Nostalgia for Species, suggests that in her view, this is how it is likely to be in the future; native fauna extinct and natural history museums filling us in on what once went on in the countryside. The other strand of her exhibition and the direction her new work seems to be taking, engages with concepts relating to what may be seen as the areas of commonality and difference between the realm of the human and of the animal. This aspect of her work is represented by photographs of a performance piece of the artist wearing a horse’s head and also by a sound installation of a braying donkey.
For some years Fiona Woods has been working in the world of public and community art, with a special emphasis on the rural environment. Latterly, she has moved away from the curatorial and discursive approach to concentrate more on her own art making, and the series comes from this departure. While generally remaining conceptually within the parameters of her focus, representation of the rural as a public sphere, she is also exploring ontological questions relating to animal and human categorisation. She has worked on numerous projects in the west of Ireland, an area, which although it has not benefited financially as much as other parts of the island, has been transformed economically and culturally by the effects of the Celtic Tiger. As Woods points out, rural areas throughout Europe have been changed from sites of production to sites of consumption. The once largely self-contained rural communities, which were characterised by subsistence and diversity and which adapted from within to changing circumstances through local and collaborative practices, have become instead, net consumers. This shift from a site of farming and food production towards consumerism and increasing industrialisation is, in Wood’s view, a consequence of the increasing dependence of the farming sector on agro-chemical products. Both the rural landscape and its communities are changing and so consequently is rural culture. For Woods, new constructs of what constitutes the rural sphere need to be developed. What was once pastoral has become semi industrial. What was once bog or woodland has become a site for tourism or development. Can there a satisfactory definition of the rural, she asks or, are its representations simply too diverse and contradictory to allow for any agreed definition of the term? These are the ideas which inform the current exhibition.
Another important aspect of Wood’s speculation deals with the fundamental question as to what constitutes Nature? Is there a raw state of nature or has cultural conditioning and social use made this a meaningless proposition? Donna Haraway writes, ‘the certainty of what counts as nature – a source of insight and a promise of innocence – is undermined, probably fatally.’ While the world of nature of the hunter gatherer or even of the pastoralist, might appear as a natural as opposed to a cultural domain, the fact is that all land is charged with a history of use, which relates to communities, which to a greater or lesser degree, have invested the land with sets of values relating to livelihood, tradition, religion and myth. In many non-western societies, Nature is frequently perceived as a delicate interconnection of land, flora and fauna and man, who, only at his peril, upsets its inherent balance. For the Western developer, land is a more abstract concept, a commodity with a price and a potential. In neither case, can land or Nature be defined as culture free. Nicholas Bourriaud goes so far as to say that ‘There are no forms in Nature, it is our gaze that creates them by cutting them out of the visible.’ The gaze of the developer will clearly be different to that of the aboriginal, each identifying in Nature that which is culturally and materially important to him. As cities become increasingly populous and powerful, by default, the land outside them, suburban/rural, the boundary shifts, become less so. The suburban stands in the wings, waiting to be summoned by institutional zoning, into the golden orbit of the productive city. The status of the rural is even more ambiguous. Once the society’s food producer and provider, now most of its fields lie fallow, its owners paid to keep them so, depopulated by the exodus to the cities, repopulated by the weekend urban dwellers, whose holiday homes stand as a testimony to lingering romantic notions of the world of Nature. The search for a workable definition of what now constitutes the rural is challenging, as the old cultural constructs collapse under the weight of new and emerging paradigms. Agreeing with Bourriaud, Woods insists that ‘all our ideas relating to Nature are mediated through different layers of cultural construction.’ Emphasising this Nature/culture tension, the landscapes she shows are actual landscapes, but the animals, although once alive, are dead, stuffed, objects created by man, for man’s enjoyment, visual or otherwise. What might, at first glance, be seen to be the juxtaposition of binary opposites, a woodland scene inhabited by cultural objects, posits a more problematic proposition. On one level the combination evokes nostalgia, or even a feeling of melancholy, which emotion Bourriaud associates with Modernity’s failure to deliver on the promise of emancipation, while at the same time dismantling the structures which had bound communities together. For some time now, changing and disappearing communities has been of concern to Woods, but although she continues to explore this aspect of rural life, more recently she has moved in a new but parallel direction. While still fully acknowledging the decline in autonomy that has taken place in rural communities, (much of her work to date has dealt with collaborative art projects in communal settings, particularly Ground Up, 2003 – 2007, an experimental programme of contemporary art in the rural, public sphere, which she devised for Clare County Council,) at this point she is investigating the interface and differences between the world of animal and human.
In Greek mythology Gods frequently took animal form, often in order to ravish a particularly attractive female human and from the time of Aristotle, this connection between animal and human and the animal in the human has been a constant subject of philosophic speculation. The Judeo-Christian tradition denigrated the animal instincts in man, associating the ‘lower senses’ taste, smell, touch with sin and instead, privileged sight, a tradition that has been continued and reinforced by principles of Modernism. Yet as science and psychology undermine what was once accepted as the innate differences between animal and human, language and tool use for example, the distinction becomes less clear and the need for a re-examination of the question urgent. For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘philosophy is haunted by the animal.’ They suggest that the boundary dividing human and animal is much less stable than it might seem. Through a focus on becoming, they suggest that humans and animals can interact in a new type of exchange, an exchange which disrupts the usual ontological categorisations. This leads to the possibility of cross over, at least to some extent, between being animal and being human. The animal other can be acknowledged and respected and consequently interacted with through an ethical code of conduct. This aspect of the human/animal dynamic, the compassionate treatment of animals by humans, is one of Woods concerns.
The ontological ambiguity of her horse with its human body, or human with a horse’s head challenges our preconceived notions of boundaries and genus difference. Where does animal or human begin or end? Meat is a central concept. Not only are animals and humans often carnivores, (obviously not the horse), they are themselves meaty creatures, made of flesh. ‘Meat is the common zone of man and beast’ (Deleuze) and this commonality of essence, blurs the distinction between them. Woods ponders on the experience of many animals, which is to be killed for meat, of being seen as food, of being consumed or eaten. The idea, for her is unimaginable, but it is represented in the work by the donkey’s bray, which lasts for twenty seconds, a pitiful sound, not unmixed with comedy, a cry, a scream, a protest, a hymn to suffering, animal/human.
The hollow horse’s head combines with the sound of the donkey, creating a haunting and spectral quality, embodying the viscerality of a slaughterhouse. Woods is questioning the ethics of the encounter, but at the same time exposing the raw state of both nature and culture, of man and beast. As an artist in relation to this particular piece, Woods needed to feel this sensation herself, in the body, in the flesh. She does not usually engage in performance, but in this case, it was important for her to feel that she herself was the animal presence in the work. She wears the horse’s head. She is photographed as a horse. The anguished paen of the donkey accompanies her wherever it is she is going.
The materiality of the work reflects the artist’s need for the engagement with her audience to go beyond the visual, avoiding what Martin Jay has dubbed the ‘ocularcentrism’ of the modern era, which involves trying to reduce a world, which is far too complex, to a single view. The haptic quality of the taxidermist’s models and bodily representation of the horse in human form with its aural fugue, as well as the visual material, drawings, photographs, and models, combine to create a multi-sensual encounter with the audience, which has a physicality which resonates with its subject matter. The stuffed animals remind us of Dorothy Cross’s gannets, but have about them a sense of the comic or of parody. Like Tacita Dean, Fiona Woods is drawn to obsolete technology, using photographic transparencies rather than digital imagery, harnessing what Walter Benjamin called, ‘the revolutionary power of the outmoded.’ The subject matter of her earlier tableaux, the native animal species and traditional rural communities, bring to mind the anthropological research of Susan Hiller, the freezing in time of languages, communities, cultures, an essential and valuable history that is allowed to slowly fade. There is a sense of being under threat, that the pendulum could swing either way, and that even the technology could disappear. Like David Altmejd, who represented Canada at the 2007 Venice Biennale with an installation depicting the rainforest and involving models and stuffed animals, Woods uses humour in her armoury of tools, but the humour that accompanies the earlier work is less apparent in what comes later. Still there remains the possibility of hope.
Quoting from George Bataille Woods states, ‘there is in every man an animal thus imprisoned like a galley slave, and there is a gate, and if we open the gate the animal will out, like the slave finding his way to escape. Thus man is seen as a prison of bureaucratic aspect.’ Woods suggests that in order for harmony to be achieved, the focus of western civilisation on mental and spiritual capacities at the expense of the animal, has to be reversed or at least modified. The Cartesian concept of Nature, as object and environment to be controlled and dominated by rational man, which Luce Irigaray has characterised as phallocentric, is unacceptable to Woods. She would replace it with a more collaborative and respectful model, where environment, man and animal coexist and interact within the parameters of an ever changing and developing paradigm. Her multimedia show at Temple Bar explores the rich territory of what constitutes Nature, man and animal, as well as marking the conceptual changes that have taken place in relation to each domain, historically and culturally. There is a sense that through the use of art objects, her tools in a network of communicative transactions, Fiona Woods is finding a way, which is both authentic and complex, of confronting the contemporary world, environmental, social, human and animal and developing a practice which aims to make a difference.
Hilary Orpen
