Quarry

Fiona Hall, Big Game Hunting at Heide

American academic and author Ellen Dissanayake recently shared with Australian audiences her perspectives on the nature of art. When thinking about what distinguished art from other forms of adaptive human behavior she concluded that art, through ritual, is essentially is concerned with ‘making things special.’ Dissanayake’s worldview has ‘now’ written all over it. We are currently living in a period of human history in which the world as a geo-political entity is fraying but in terms of interconnectivity is creating new systems of collective behaviour. In this, Dissanayake contends, the arts have a key role to play in reinforcing common bonds within communities and coping with change.

To adopt such a framework involves, as it has for Dissanayake and many artists, a cross-disciplinary approach to an understanding of art and its capacity to shape lives. The happenstance of listening to Dissanayake then, a few days later meeting with Fiona Hall, who was engaged in setting up her Big Game Hunting Heide exhibition, was the usual case of the stars aligning. What struck me was the overlap between Dissanayake’s focus on the importance of ritual in times of transition and Hall’s prescient engagement with aspects of global and regional issues. The visual and conceptual impact of Hall’s work is not simply that it deals with such things as environmental destruction, materialism and moral decay but that it uses an intriguing visual language of symbols and materiality to draw its audience closer for a lengthy conversation.

This sustained kind of magnetism between artwork and viewer is rare. But from the first time Hall exhibited her The Seven Deadly Sins Polaroid photographs series then followed with the Paradisus terrestris ‘sardine can’ series of 1989-90 a growing audience became fixated on the artist’s ability to weave meaning and create connections between different systems and filters for organising and making sense of the world. Add to this the artist’s inspired strategy of playing with Linnaean taxonomy to blur the distinctions between the sex life of plants and humans. Some viewers could not look a daffodil straight in the eye again. Hall has continued to ply the uncertain boundaries between the natural world and social life, as seen for example in the series Tender (2003-05) which essayed the outcomes of global economic systems which cause Third World communities to scrabble for the dollar at great social and environmental cost. Central to this and other recent bodies of work is the proposition that the exploitative nature of humanity’s relationship with natural systems and resources has produced a new ‘species’ of hybrid desires and unforeseen consequences.

Such concerns frame recent work currently presented as Big Game Hunting at Heide Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition is built around two bodies of work; Fall Prey, which was originally created for dOCUMENTA (13) in Germany in 2013, and work from the ongoing Kermadec project. Fall Prey has been described as a 21st century hunter’s den or a menagerie of ‘trophies’ of species which are on the International Union for Conservation’s ‘Red List’.  Curator Kendrah Morgan, in discussing this work in her catalogue essay, observes that the wunderkammer analogy has often been used to describe Hall’s work, particularly those that employ the vitrine to imply some quasi-scientific probity or control.

Such is the free-ranging nature of Hall’s extrapolations of scientific facts (yes there is a Belgian Congo chimpanzee whose habitat is being destroyed by mining) with painstakingly crafted manipulations of recycled objects and materials to create effigies which, unlike movie merchandise ‘critters’, are charged with invoking a sense of urgency about what is really happening to the natural world. Perhaps they are the ghosts of a mutant future, holding out their plaintive paws in mute supplication or pleading with sightless eyes to be taken out of the red zone.

Hall’s cross-disciplinary practice has constantly been enriched by exchanges and experiences shared with scientists. In 2011 she undertook a voyage with other artists and scientists to get a little closer to the Kermadec Trench. This Trench, which is in New Zealand waters, is the second deepest trench on earth. Unfortunately for this environment and its various organics and denizens it is rich in mineral resources which could mean that the mining runoffs from Australia’s eastern seaboard will eventually consummate with whatever digging up underwater volcanoes is likely to produce. Hall’s response to the experience of being there has been to ‘adopt’ barkcloth (made from the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree and known variously as ngatu, tapa, siapo and masi) as the material to carry ideas about the region and its uncertain future. A large work, Bowline on a Bight is made from a seven-metre strip of barkcloth cut in two. It may be, as Morgan suggests, a political banner or a map of the two tectonic plates, which define the geology of the region. Drawings and designs, applied in traditional dyes, convene a host of symbols to propose that this area, like everywhere else, is a battlefield. But, as with so much of Hall’s practice, things are camouflaged. You have to go hunting.

 

Fiona Hall, Big Game Hunting shows at Heide Museum of Modern Art until July 21.

heide.com.au

 

Images:

1. Pan troglodytes / chimpanzee, Equatorial Africa 2012.
IUCN threat status: endangered
Belgian military camouflage jacket (also worn in the Belgian Congo, ‘jigsaw’ pattern), aluminium, leather gloves, teeth, medical model heart, plastic toy, mobile phone, nails, bottle caps.

2. Pezoporus occidentalis / night parrot, Australia 2009–11
IUCN threat status: critically endangered
Australian military shirt (‘rabbit ears’ camouflage pattern), aluminium, bottle tops, light bulbs, emergency ration tin, plastic, feathers.
Collection of Bernard Shafer

3. Prionailurus iriomotensis / Iriomote cat, Japan 2009–11
IUCN threat status: critically endangered.
Japanese military camouflage trousers (‘dot’ pattern), ribbon, soft toy, chopsticks, bottle caps, coins, glass beads, Japanese ‘Occupation’ bank notes.

 

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