Marcus Coates

RESEARCH ON MARCUS COATES IN RESPONSE TO ASSESMENT FEEDBACK

 The first thing which struck me upon putting Marcus Coates into a google search were the shamanic animal headdresses which immediately appeared. This instantly reminded me of a project from my foundation course where I explored concepts of identity by combining ideas about totemism, Plato's tripartite theory of the soul, and animal symbology to create a series of geometrically constructed balsa-wood masks (shown right) which could be worn to extend or intervene with a person's identity, suggesting we sometimes are overtaken by our emotions and become beast-like.

As soon as I noticed he had explored similar themes in his own taxidermy headdresses this piqued my interest and encouraged me to explore further. I soon found that he was driven by many of the same creative motivations as I, yet came to realise his outcomes in a much less literal way, just as my tutor Faye had suggested I do in my feedback. Initially I had struggled to expand my perception to think of less literal interpretations of my themes yet now as I researched Coates' in depth I began to fully understand. I found a brilliant interview which summarised this;

Marcus Coates (b. 1968) is an artist who specialises in projects that involve the natural world. Graduating from the Royal Academy School in the early Nineties, by the millennium he was attracting attention for filmed art events that were both eccentric and thought-provoking. These included Goshawk (1999), wherein Coates was suspended in a pine tree so that he might view the world as a bird of prey, the self-explanatory Sparrow Hawk Bait (1999), where he ran through a wood with his head covered in dead birds, and Indigenous British Mammals (2000), which saw him partially buried in wild moorland, performing a karaoke of bird songs.

In 2004 the premier of Lower World took place, a shamanistic ritual outside a Liverpool tower block that was about to be demolished, with Coates clad in a deerskin. The latter represented Coates’ ongoing and active interest in shamanism.
Coates tendency towards the bizarre and comic mask a deeply held desire to explore humankind’s understanding of nature and the world around. He has exhibited in Canada, Finland, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the US, and brings his Dawn Chorus installation to the Brighton Festival in May.

Q: What is Dawn Chorus?
A: It’s a multi-channel video installation so when you walk in you’ll see 14 video screens hanging from the ceiling and on each will be a person singing birdsong. Collectively all these people recreate one morning in a woodland in Northumberland. The dawn chorus itself is what male birds do during springtime in the morning. They sing ferociously to defend their territory and attract mates. That’s the cacophonous sound of the natural phenomenon. My idea was to recreate that very exactly using human voices.

Q: I love the concept behind your 2000 art event and film, Out of Season. Tell us about it.
A: That came from the idea of what are birds doing when they’re singing. We hear a beautiful sound and imagine it a reflection in nature of our best parts. That’s how we use nature. But when you study birdsong there’s a lot of proxy violence. It’s like a battle of the sound systems. The males are pumping out their sound as loudly and in as complex a way as possible to tell all other males they’re the best, the strongest, almost to avoid fighting. The analogy of football supporters is perfect. I got this Chelsea supporter to sing in the forest, all his chants, which are pretty abusive, and they’re all about threatening violence which is what the bird is doing in its battle for survival.

Q: Which ecological matters are most engaging you right now?
A: The mass extinction of so many species needlessly because of our wanton destruction of their habitats and the mass increase in our population. The industrialisation of society and the destruction of indigenous societies. The clues to future living for us lie in the traditions of the past. Look at hunter-gathers, how they live and manage relationships with nature. There’s much we can learn but those societies our fast disappearing so it’s not just natural things we’re destroying but our own society as well.

One particular part that interested me from this video was the end section where Coates noted that when sped up, not only do the human sounds become near identical to real birdsong, but also their movements became more frenetic and excited, much like a small bird hopping about on a branch.  I also think the whole method of speeding up and slowing down human voices and bird song is a really really clever idea, brilliantly excecuted, which catches the audience off gaurd and makes them doubt their own ears/