Having an installation based practice meant that, although I engage entirely with their themes and readings, I hadn't really engaged with how their discursive met alongside their practice and found it easier to engage with more figurative artists such as Alexis Rockman and Sam Leach. However, after reading the book by Lisa C Gorrin surrounding the works of Mark Dion, I began to unlock understanding of aspects of their practice by reading his reflections on his own. I began to understand how subverting and exploring the means of display in institutions such as the museum and zoos, that one could begin to expose and critique aspects of the 'pedagogical sites for the production of truth' as Dion put it. In doing this, the very foundations of modern day peoples understandings and rationalisations could also be exposed, an instance which could then promote an atmosphere for introspection and reanalysis of those core understandings, which is so very crucial.
One particular work of theirs which interested me, and which I considered for inclusion in my dissertation as a case study, was Animal Matters, a collaborative project which in their words lay 'somewhere between curatorial practice and the practice of art' between themselves and nine academics and their research from a number of fields.
"As artists whose research-based practice engages strategically with human-animal relations and what these can reveal about our behaviour and our relationship to the environment, the question of representation – who is speaking for whom – is crucial. To translate a thought into an object, for it to carry a particular meaning also carries with it questions that are topical in the context of academia and artistic research. In our artwork, relationality is of great importance. It’s in the connection between things – for instance the objects in the exhibition – the objects and the exhibition space – the objects and the context of the exhibition – between part or all of these components and/or the worlding of the visitor to this exhibition – that the meanings are generated and take shape. In those moments of encounter, a shift in thinking is made possible. In that shift – in that destabilising, a door opens and beyond it, lies the possibility of new knowledge and of behavioural change." - Snaebjornsdottir and Wilson
From my attempt at research into this exhibiton, of which there was little information available, I then found the book 'Animals on Display: the Creaturely in Museums, Zoos and Natural History' by one of those nine academics; Liv Emma Thorsen. This book then provided much greater context to some of the pieces assembled by Snaebjornsdottir and Wilson for the exhibition, including a photograph by renowned hunter and taxidermist, Carl Akeley, as one of many dead mules he had been commissioned to hunt, and the wider, saddening context of the image. The work by Thorsen was also very useful in my dissertation in other ways, and was a valuable step forward which appeared only through my exploration of these artists.
Another work which attempted to destabilise culturally accepted ideals of the animal was 'Promised Land' which worked with students in the city of Tbilisi, Georgia. The students were tasked with locating discared materials and found objects around the city centre, which would then be overlaid and interspersed with images of animals as a way to change them from widely accepted cultural symbols and into beings of 'transient and shifting hybridity'."Promised Land questions the constitution of the interspecific outsider or ‘other’ within a dominant culture and the bases of acceptance or intolerance. The project considers how ecologies are identified or simply go unnoticed within cultures fixated on individual phenomena and their supposed fixed identity. It considers how the association or juxtaposition of material bodies form new and changing phenomena and meaning, irrespective of human agency or perspective. The project examines the concept of human fear and discomfort in the context of the familiar and how these conditions are manifest in unpredictable and disparate ways. As much as anything, through the deployment of an interspecific lens, the work tests how routine and familiarity, central to our subconscious may be disrupted and threatened sometimes overwhelmingly by marginal and persistent disruption, both actual and imagined."
- Snaebjornsdottir and Wilson
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