Concrete Jungle - Mark Dion & Alexis Rockman

QUOTES AND ANALYSIS OF BOOK EDITED BY MARK DION AND ALEXIS ROCKMAN

The project by esteemed environmental artists Dion and Rockman was a brilliantly interesting read. An exploration of the interplay between humanity, urban life, ecosystems and organic life. It was published the year I was born, which also was a very crucial fact to how I interpreted the book, as it outcried a series of environmental and existential crisis which were unfolding at the time. It struck me how little progress we had made since then, especially as it is only now we are hearing popular figures and the breaking news about how we have "12 years to limit the climate catastrophe". Yet these are the exact same issues which this book was warning against 22 years ago?! It defies belief to an extent, that we could really have been so concisely aware of our looming demise for this long, yet the larger populus have remained naive for so long and are suddenly shocked to be confronted with this 'last chance saloon' statistic.

In terms of the book itself, I really enjoyed reading indepth accounts of unusual niche areas of interaction. Highlights included a grizzly photo of a drowned woman whos face had been eaten by turtles, the 60 years of expertise of a feral cat trapper and an extensive section of recipies on how to prepare and cook roadkill.

Both Dion and Rockman are artists I have encountered many times within my own research. Rockman's surrealist paintings and ecologically apocalyptic dioramas have provided much inspiration within my own paintings, and feature elsewhere on this blog in a focused page of research, whilst I also plan to use work from Dion in my dissertation as a case study. They are particularly fascianted by human/nature interactions and encounters, pest or 'r-selected' species and institutional museums and zoological gardens, which they call sites of the 'pedagogical production of truth'.

Introduction - Mark Dion - Alexis Rockman

"The status of animals is a fundemental part of our investigation, for while fewer and fewer people have direct contact with animals, other than pets, they remain an important part of our everyday lives. While flesh and blood experience with the animal world is diminishing, we are inundated with surrogates broadcast over every imaginable media, configured in every shape, and made out of every imaginable material from blue plastic to polyester fur and gold. What child of the West does not grow up with a crib and toy chest lined with anthropomorphic beasts? Animals do not speak back to us, either from the other side of the television screen, or from behind the bars of the zoo or through the button eyes of the teddy bear. Rather, they are often ciphers bearing our own anxieties, fantasies and assumptions about ourselves and the natural world. It is extremely difficult to chart precisely how this symbolic use of animals impacts in very real ways the ecology of the Alaskan tundra or the river front alley." 7

"For both practical as well as conceptual reasons, pests- what biologists call r-selected species, such as the cockroach, rat and pidgeon - are that dangerous class of animals, who are rarely appreciated with the sentimental eye we reserve for pets. Seen as emblems of decay and contamination, as well as potentially chaotic elements, these animals are symptomatic of our inability to control all the variables in nature. It is difficult to deny the power of their adaptability. These persistent organisms, to our great anxiety, remind us of our part in the biological contract: they remind us that we, like all animals, are part of a complex web of relations that is not always in our favour. In the same way that advance urbans societys refuses to acknowledge shit, distancce itself from production, and denies the process of ages, these animals remind us that we too are animals, and therefore, mortal." 8

A Warning - Raul R. Ehrlich - Anne H. Ehrlich - Gretchen C. Daily
The Stork and the Plow - 1995

"Biotic diversity is the most irreplaceable component of our resource capital, and the least understood and appreciated. Plants, animals, and microorganisms are organized, along with physical elements of the environment with which they interact, in ecosystems. These organisms thus help to provide indispensible, free ecosystem services, which support civilization. 12

"Yet biodiversity resources are being lost at an accelerating rate that may cause  disappearance by 2025 of one quarter of all the species now existing on Earth. Every species that disappears is a marvel gone forever - often without humanity ever knowing what potential direct economic value it might have possessed, much less its role in providing ecosystem services. Every genetically distinct population that is exterminated reduces precious living capital and potentially weakens nature's ability to support humanity. Even if the evolutionary process that creates diversity continued at rates comparable to those of the geologic past, it would take tens of millions of years for today's level of diversity, once seriously depleted, to be resetored.
We see no choice but for Americans who recognize the predicament to become heavily involved in politics, to take voting very seriously, and to pay attention to fundemental issues rather than the crime, petty politics, accidents and nonsense that pass for news in most of the media. Rising carbon dioxide in atmosphere is infinitely more important than rising prices on the stock market. The current decline of biodiversity is truly a cosmic issue, an "event" that will mark the planet for millions of years after the breakup of the former Soviet Union is totally forgotten. The changing evolutionary and ecological relationships between Homo sapiens and the viruses, bacteria and fungi that feed upon it will almost certainly affect many more human lives than the changing relationships between Israel and the PLO or between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Rapid population growth, which threatens the future of everybody in our already overpopulated nation, should be much bigger news than which politician is trying to get elected by promising tax cuts or a war on drugs." 13

Interview with Andrew Ross by Mark Dion

"AR: In this respect, environmentalism is still struggling with its puritan soul, ascetically self-denying to the core. People in this culture - and I don't mean simply consumer culture with its steady promise of increased gratification - don't respond well to the politics of self-denial. They want social fulfillment, and Green politics has to address this liberatory side of things more." 16

"As I said before, Green politics does not necessarily carry this liberatory air. By this criterion, of course, the predominantly white, middle-class stewardship of the ecology movement does not make it a great candidate for the empowerment of marginalized persons or communities, at least, not in the pastoral mode of the perceived stereotype of self-restraint. More often they favour a hermeneutic that uncovers that which is hidden. Liberating the voice of the planet doesnt count in the same way. More attention to urban ecology and environmental justice will change this view." 19 (Also features in 'Documents in Contemporary Art: Nature)  

How To Help Animals Escape From Degraded Habitats - Bill Burns

"The guide responds to the commonplace notion that ours are challenging times and that, owing to the punitive vastness of environmental destruction within the globalized economy, old rules of wildlife conservation may no longer apply. Using everyday language, the guide explains how to find, rescue, host and deliver endangered fauna and provides useful tips on how to finance such a mission." 30


The satirical illustrations depict things such as rats living in a power drill, chipmunks and skunks beneath the bonnet of a car and penguins in a refrigerator. The surreal images of animals stowed away literally within standardised images of household ojects was an unusual twist on advertising image convention with 'cutaway' visual sections which once would have advertised handy new internal product features, but now was a viewpoint in on the animal occupants. Aswell as being documented in this book, the project also culminated in an exhibition which included an artist talk, at Stride Gallery, Alberta, throughout February 1997. An extract from the gallery statement is included below:

"Part of an ongoing project that has included previous exhibitions, a field guide, website and interactive telephone system, Degraded Habitats questions the “dominant narratives about the needs and lives of animals in late capitalist economies”.

This project examines the complexities of green ideology with humour and irony and reflects the artist’s earnest desire to understand the way we express the needs of animals on the planet with decreasing space. Using the kits, Burns attempts to unravel ethnocentric and anthropomorphic representations of nature. How to Help Animals Escape from Degraded Habitats contests the common practice, in both the arts and the sciences, of projecting existing social patterns onto the animal world and interpreting them as if they originated there."

Pidgeons: The Smart Bird - Boris Palameta

"It was never a goal in the Basel campaign to completely eradicate the pidgeon population. Many people like to have some pidgeons around as long as their numbers are manageable. For the most part, the relationship between people and pidgeons can be characterizd as a kind of urban symbiosis. We see to their material needs and in return we get something indeterminate, something abstract, a kind of peace of mind. People need to see animals, to feel their presence. Maybe after living as hunter-gatherers for 99% of our history, our sense of aesthetics is linked to practical matters such as obtaining food and shelter, so that landscapes that are likely to provide both, landscapes that include free-living animals, are percieved as beautiful. Maybe the sight of pigeons strolling calmly in our midst, is the closest most of us come to reliving a time when our very survival depended upon daily intimate contact with nature." 34

Savage Paris - Art Oriente Objet - Xavier Japiot - Pascal Bonneau

"XJ&BP: Populations are high, due to a lack of predators. Food is also abundant in Paris, making it a competition-free environment. A stunning number of induviduals survive to breed. One result is an abundance of malformations such as foot atrophy. Deformed and ill pigeons stay alive and transmit non-lethal diseases indefinitely. People also tend to feed the birds they find the most attractive, which might give some birds a slight edge and affect the population coloring. Pollution, however, may become a selection factor for pidgeons." 36

A Look at the Present Extinction Spasm - Norman Myers
And What it Means for the Future Evolution of the Species

"If we say that 1 million species will disappear in the last 20 years of this century, that averages out to more than 130 species a day. But the big waves of extinction are not expeced to occur in the next two or three years, but in the late 1990s, as human populations inexorably build up and generate their enormous impact. It is realistic to suppose that by the end of the 1990s, we could be losing dozens of plant and animal species with every single hour that goes by." 38

"Apparently the maximum rate of extinction for the dinosaurs was about one species every 10,000 years - a pretty low rate when compared with the current one species per day. When we are facing in the period immediately ahead of us is a biological debacle, a gross impoverishment of our world on a scale greater than at any other time since life began. That is the size of it." 39

"During the whole of the planet's history, there has never before been such a massive eand compressed spasm of extinction. If we now precipitatea spasm of that scale, what does it mean for the process of evolution? Can the processes of evolution pick up the remaining bits over the next thousand or million years and restore genetic diversity? There have been various phases in pre-history when a large proportion of species has disappeared, sometimes as many as 1/4, 1/2 or even 2/3 of the existing species. And in due course, meaning 20 or 30 million years, the processes of evolution have been able to restore the diversity of life and generate new species. 
But this time, it may not work out like that. In the past, when an outburst of extinction has occured, the Earth has generally retained some concentrations of biological diversity, or 'pools of species', from which the rest of the planet could be colonized after the geologic catastrophe had passed." 39

"The total number of protected areas now amounts to about 2% of the earth's land surface. Two percent is a pretty good average when you consider that in the US, the figure is 1.6%, a figure that includes all the big parks in Alaska. Some countries, such as Kenya, have as much as 6% of their land surface set aside as parks and reserves. Tanzania, one of the most impoverished countries on Earth, with a total national budget that is less than New York spends on ice cream each year, but has set aside 15% of its total land area for parks and reserves. In Zambia, farther south, the figure is about 25%. Worldwide however, the average figure is only about 2%. Scientists seem to believe, estimating as best they can in an uncertain situation, that we would need 10% of the Earth's land surface before we could do even a basic job of safegaurding sufficient natural environments to keep species alive.

What are the costs? Roughly, the bill to set up these parks and reserves would be about $1 million. Another $20 million would be needed anually to maintain them. That might sound like a lot, but consder that $100 million is the amount by which the total armaments bill increases worldwide from one day to another!

How should we safegaurd the tropical forests, the areas that need the most urgent attention? If we want to safegaur a sufficient area of tropical forest, it might have to be as much as 20% or even 25% and not the 10% global fraction mentioned above. We might need to think in terms of 1 billion dollars a year.

Dr. Ira Rubinoff, director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, has just written a very interesting and visionary paper suggesting that, according to his arithmetic, we may need 3 billion dollars a year to sufficiently safegaurd tropical forests, a preliminary but informed reckoning. Is 3 billion dollars such a big sum? If we were to divide that figure up among citizens of developed countries (never mind the developing ones), it would amount to less than one martini per month per adult." 41

"Consider the smallpox virus, which has now been backed into a corner in a flask, so to speak, in one or two laboratories. It is being maintained at the cost of only a few thousand dollars a year, but some people would say that the smallpox virus has caused so much harm, so much misery and suffering, that we should pull the plug on the thing and eliminate it by deliberate choice. Yet it turns out that medical people are now surmising that we may, one day quite soon, establish that the smallpox virus can assist us with some of our medical research. So there is no specific species that on scientific, economic, ethical or aesthetic grounds should be put over the side of the boat." 43

The Language of Pests - Shireen R.K. Patell

"The ubiquity of r-selected species makes them excellent vectors for a variety of diseases. Thus, it might be said that humans' fear and loathing of pests have legitimate scientific reasons: the threat they pose to our health as a species, and the threat they pose to the health of the planet as they undermine the biodiversity of nature. And yet, the notion of the pest is not as simple as all that. Pests cannot merely be regarded as a threat to humans and nature, as they are not conveniently located outside of us or nature. In fact, the success of the r-selected species testifies to the very persistence and adaptability of life. Their proliferation may be thought of as a kind of ecological scar tissue, marking both a past trauma and a healing.
 
In some ways, human beings may be the most pernicious pests of all. We invade, colonize and occupy, exploiting resources, both natural and human, for our own benefit; when an area becomes too degraded, we move on, often without picking up behind ourselves. Ironically, these behaviours may have actually contributed to the proliferation of various pests." 62

Dog Jobs - Gerald Heffernon

"Pick up any encyclopedia of dogs and read the various breed descriptions, especially the "uses". You may notice that the majority of purebred dogs have been, so to speak, reassigned to desk jobs. They are museum pieces.
For instance, no breed formerly employed to hunt other large predators is relevant today. Nearly all large predatrors except man have become rare or extinct. These anachronistic dog breeds survive ina  sort of zoo-at-large in which they are trotted out by lumbering handlers so a kennel club judge can determine their cosmetic fitness for an ersatz job." 79

"Somehow, a few breeds did become "extinct" when they became obsolete. The dog called a turnspit once ran a treadmill that turned a roasting-spit, but the cruel practice and the breed both disappeared in the 19th century." 79

"What follows, then, is a brief survey of directions the breedings of useful, specialized dogs should take. First of all we must face reality: in 50 years, vegeterianism will be essentially mandatory. A moral society, not to mention the Earth, simply cannot support beef ranches, hog barns and chicken farms that was grain and cropland, destroy rainforests, erode top-soil and consume and pollute water." 80

Urban Animal Adaptation: Killing with Kindness - Alan M. Beck

"The urban environment is the natural climax community of developed humans. It most resembles a "detritus community" with little primary production and most of the indigenous animals surviving on dead or decaying life. The dominant primates, humans and even their domestic, carnivorous house companions, dogs, live almost exclusively on proteins brought in dead from other communities. Dogs now depend on humans for their survival and not on the predatory adeptness inherited from their wolf ancestors. Indeed, their most crucial adaptation has been from their sociality. The selection of all our domesticated species was not based on the skills of their adult ancestral species, but rather on the retention of the ancestors juvenile qualities, particularly tameness, small stature an social tolerance of others. Even the retention of juvenile features has served our domestic species particularly well by increasing human nurturing behaviours." 82

"Our all-too human traits to see the value of the induvidual, instead of the whole population, has given people little sympathy for the apparent cruelties of natural selection. Therefore, there is a war against the apparent over-population of dogs for 40 years, certain groups have condemned animal breeding and made animal sterilization (spray/neuter) almost a "battle-cry" to action." 82

Feral Dogs - Michael Crewdson

"Thomas Daniels: As far as dogs go, we need to take a selfish or anthropometric view. We need to focus our attention on the fact that this is an animal we put here, one that has to exist, and one were constantly abusing. When we abandon an animal at a dump, we are not setting it free. We're giving it a death sentence. We have an obligation to these animals as much as we have an obligation to endangered rhinos. While dogs are cheap animals to dispose of, the moral outlook we need to take will encompass these animals into our world view. We have a big responsibility to this first animal we've created. Animal rights activists scream about laboratory animals being abused, but we've anbused dogs for over 10,000 years. What we do to ther animals is what we do to ourselves. If we thinnk about the implications for ourselves, then maybe we'll extend a little caring to other organisms aswell." 101

Interview with Mierle Laderman Ukeles by Mark Dion and Anne Pasternak

"MLU: Here is another word for you: "trash". When the city chose a method to recycle, it took up the model of putting everything into one bag, thus collapsing all distinctions and demanding the least intellect and action from the people of the city. We need to be more complex and think about differentiation. These words, "trash" and "garbage", are masks for saying vastly different types of things are the same. What could be more different than hard or soft, wet or dry, small or large, yet it's all garbage. Once again, our creative brain has dried up. The psychology behind this thing is amazing. First, I desire an object and will do whatever I have to do to get it and make it a part of my larger self. People have spent millions of dollars to assure that I shall soon strip this object of its material qualities and here the lobotomy begins - I call it garbage. It's magic. Our senses dry up and the object's properties disappear. [...] Next comes the compounded fantasy that once it is garbage it's someone else's responsibility to take it 'away'. 170

Zoos, Museums & Other Fictions 

1895 -  The pugnacious William T. Hornaday becomes the director of the Brox Zoo. Over the next four decades, he uses the zoo as a platform for wildlife conservation activism. Hornaday's successes include saving the bison from extinction, ending market hunting, providing protection for marine mammals and having the first wild bird conservation act. 193


You Want a Northern Spotted Owl With That? - D Scott Gregory

"The trend towards the commodification of natural history - and more generally of educational institutions using 'edutainment' to maintain a bottom line - is not singular to the American Museum of Natural History. Such moves are not suprising given our ever-shrinking government funding for culture and education." 195


"The American Museum of Natural History is one of the most important sites of the 'official story' of what gets to stand for 'Nature' at a particular time for a particular group of people. The exhibition halls have always been encoded with the social relations of the period of their construction. In the past, that has embraced conservation, eugenics, the cult of utopian futurism, and a variety of dubious notion regarding gender, class and race. This is no less true today. Indeed the exhibition halls of today with their souped-up techno-aesthetic reminds us of current assumptions of what information has to look like for the Nintendo generation. The challenge facing the museum is a crisis of the wider culture: not only how to negotiate popular culture and scientific education, but also how the pressing need and obvious success of the commodification of nature and natural history affect that mixture. The institutional forays into popular culture might signal a positive effort to engage a wider audience and place science in a larger cultural context or it may simply signal taking advantage of a marketing situation." 200

Magic in Plain Sight: The Art and Science of Diorama Display - J. Willard Whitson

"However, while this meteorite may be stunning evidence for abundant life in the universe, it also offers dramatic evidence that life on a heavenly body can be extinguished. Indeed, a living planet can become a lifeless orb. The implications for our own planet are clear. Biological and environmental scientists today believe that our own planet is on the threshold of, or is in the midst of, a mass extinction episode, one that may spell our own demise. There have been five great extinction events in the Earth's 3.5 billion year history of life. All of these episodes have occured without human intervention. However, the crisis that the living world faces today is the direct result of human activity in the environment. Through habitat destruction and alteration, we are threatening the web of infinit complexity that sustains all life. The biodiversity crisis is the single most pressing problem humanity faces." 201

"At a recent art fair held at the Gramercy Hotel in New York City, one piece particularly struck me. It was very simple, and part of its impact was due to its simplicity and undisguised artifice. A plain, transparent jar contained a frosted piece of glass or acrylic. Behind the jar, a small video camera projected a continuous tape loop depicting a butterfly flapping its wings. The effect was mesmerizing. All of the means by which the illusion of the butterfly in the jar was created were readily apparent. There were no concealing tricks. And yet what we witnessed was magic. Magic in plain sight." 201

"As defined in the museum setting, a diorama is a display consisting of a constructed forground with fabricated or preserved elements (plants, rocks, water, ect.) and (usually) taxidermied (or modeled) fauna. The constructed foreground is blended seamlessly into a realistically painted background, which then illusorily extends the vista to the horizon. The background wall is ideally a semicircle topped by a quarter hemisphere,. Thus, the field of view contains no sharp angles, straight surfaces, or corners. Of course, architectural realities such as low ceilings or unfortunately eccentric spaces - as well as a lack of understanding of the diorama art form itself - often preclude having the ideal circumstances." 202

"I have had numerous conversations with our visitors regarding what they most like about the dioramas. The answers inevitably have to do with the appearence of reality: "It looks so real!" I have also had conversations that reveal that some visitors think of these displays as akin to wax-museum creations. The illusion is not convincing. It is often during these conversations that the unfavourable comparisons with zoos arise- the difference between two types of institutions being primarily that our animals are dead and stuffed, and that zoo animals are alive, but captive, and miserably deprived of their environment. Neither observation is especially flattering. I firmly believe that these negative assessments have something to do with the success (or lack of success) of both types of instituions to create illusions, to artfully employ the sleight of hand that makes for a good magic. If the trick is a good one, people will enjoy the illusion. And if the magician has something meaningful to convey beyond his skill at legerdemain... well, he's got their attention." 204

"As David Brower, noted archdruid and builder of the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, put it "wild species are 2% flesh and bone and 98% place." By their very nature, zoos, museums and films present wildlife out of context. Thus, there are bound to be substantive problems." 210