Remember beauty? The breath-taking, awe-inspiring kind? Take a pause to remember. And remember what followed the initial encounter—the inescapable impulse to share. Did you fumble for your phone or camera to snap a picture for posterity right away? Did you turn to the person next to you, excitedly asking, "did you see…?" or verbally pointing, "look there..!" The urge to share what is beautiful rests deeply within our psyches. Beauty wields the power to humble us, however temporarily, and to re-shuffle our everyday, typically rather self-involved priorities. Rather than secretly stow beauty away, we turn to one another to share it, try to re-create it in order to pass on the experience. In the words of philosopher Elaine Scarry, an encounter with something beautiful leads to a radical de-centering, and grants us a fleeting experience of a dramatically altered relationship to the world around us. Beauty, Simone Weil writes, "requires us to give up our imaginary position at the center."
If Scarry and Weil are right, the creation and the sharing of beauty are acts of resistance. Why? Because creating the opportunity for "the ethical alchemy of beauty," as Scarry puts it, to run its course, to temporarily dethrone us from the human zenith of significance, means resisting a cultural imperative that tells us, in no uncertain terms, to put ourselves first, to insist on our usurping center stage in the narratives of our own lives and in those of others–other people as well as other creatures.
Two shows that opened last weekend in Minneapolis take on the lives of those very others: at form + content, Christine Baeumler’s Lost Menagerie invites us to imagine and vicariously experience her encounters with the strange beauty, sentience, and intelligence of creatures dramatically different from us, while Allen Brewer‘s And Then There Were None pays homage to extinct and critically endangered species at gallery 360. Both bodies of work engage with questions raised by the ongoing loss of bio-diversity: Brewer’s paintings with the loss and endangerment of whole species, Baeumler’s installations and two-dimensional pieces with the risk of losing the experience of the seemingly insurmountable otherness and sheer beauty of the non-human world.
Brewer’s animal portraits are exquisitely rendered. Their at times whimsical and luminescent beauty is paired with somber titles that plainly state either the date and place of extinction–Dodos, Mauritius, 1681; Pink-headed Duck, Calcutta, 1935–or the endangered status of the species depicted. The artist writes about the paintings, hung in ornate but recycled, chipped, and worn-looking frames, as shrines meant to remind us of the "holiness" of these non-human lives lost to carelessness and stupidity of a very human kind. Despite the fact that not all of the creatures in the paintings have already disappeared, that there is some-not much-wiggle room to enact protective measures for some endangered critters, the pieces have an elegiac air. For instance, the Midwest’s black-footed ferret, long thought to be extinct, has recently been returned to the prairies in a Nature Conservancy sponsored re-introduction project. In Brewer’s portrait, though, such hopeful (albeit small) signs of stewardship and caring for all existence are absent: the black-footed ferret gazes out of its portrait under a darkening, sinister, positively ominous sky.
Darkness, too, plays a role in Christine Baeumler’s Lost Menagerie at form + content. Upon entering the sparsely light gallery space, pupils widen in a visceral response to low light, reminding visitors poignantly of our own branch on the family tree of species, our own evolutionary adaptations and deeply-seated instinctual responses. We may not be so different after all from the creatures Baeumler’s work engages with. As the artist reminds us by quoting Charles Darwin, the difference is one of degree, not kind. But the darkness serves another purpose: it asks us to step out of the conventional script of opening night, to interact in semi-darkness with gouache paintings of underwater creatures whose bulging eyes look back at us, and with video and sound installations that invite us to imaginatively enter into Baeumler’s encounters with various species, ranging from Spinner dolphins to flamingos, to turtles and mighty Galapagos lizards.
Here, again, is the urge to share what is beautiful in that breath-taking, awe-inspiring way. Rather than mourn the careless extinction of countless species, here is work that asks us to pay attention to what we stand to lose. Yet Baeumler’s explicit concern lies not only with the threatening loss of this strange animal beauty but, more importantly, with the threat of losing the opportunity to experience and encounter that transformative beauty. Loss indeed figures centrally in Lost Menagerie: the loss of our ability to perceive, to slow down, to let "the ethical alchemy of beauty" run its course, to call out to us and transform us in the process.
Unlike courtly menageries of past centuries, Baeumler’s menagerie does not gather exotic animals together for the sake of displaying wealth and power. And unlike zoos, which grew out of the menageries of old with the added clout of scientific inquiry, this work is not, strictly speaking, concerned with science, despite the prominent invocation of Darwin’s theory of evolution and the appeal to find affinities rather than insurmountable differences in our relationships to the non-human world. (The central piece, Darwin’s Table, includes a video loop of a human eye morphing into a fish eye and back, in a potent allusion to phylogeny). Instead, this body of work addresses experience, the act of beholding, of perception, and, to speak with Scarry one last time, "the creative act that is prompted by one’s being in the presence of what is beautiful." This creative act, driven by the desire to find ways to share encounters that move us beyond words, is the true centerpiece of the show.
Yet in the process of engaging with these inevitably truncated snippets of profound experience, something odd happens.
While poring over the glass-jar covered "specimens of experience," as Baeumler calls them, on Darwin’s Table and following the stop-and-go movement of slow motion video footage of a leaping pod of Spinner dolphins in Surfacing, we are conscious of the fact that the act of perception takes effort and time. The kind of beauty on display here resists short attention spans and exhortations to consume, more and faster all the time. There is resistance, too, to the paradigm of scientific objectivity and the putative neutrality of the observer. The thick glass of the jars on Darwin’s Table allows for distortions, reflections, and color variations dependent on the angle of vision. Clearly, there is no detached, objective position here: what we see depends entirely on where we stand, how hard we are willing to look, and how deeply we are ready to immerse ourselves in what we see. Scientific attempts at encapsulating, isolating, and scrutinizing experiences of this kind must ultimately fail.
These kinds of beautiful resistance–to scientific abstractions, to anthropocentric attitudes, to cultural imperatives to consume and race through life as fast as we humanly can, and even to defeatist laments and cynical inaction–are met with another kind of resistance, though, a resistance that seems to originate from the moving images themselves.
In Surfacing, for instance, the footage of the surface of the water, shot from a moving ship and projected in slow motion, becomes a plane for dreamlike abstraction: the
slow-motion induced interruptions of the smooth flow of images conspire to create an effect of great distance. We are free to imagine that we’re looking at snow-covered mountain ranges from outer space, or wispy clouds, or perhaps randomly distributed, purely formalist marks. This contemplative state of aesthetic appreciation, though, is once again interrupted, this time by the graceful ascent of the dolphins. Glistening bodies rise from below the surface, arch out of the water elegantly, before descending smoothly. Their presence and beauty put an end to any associative mental journeys. But more than that, their unequivocally beautiful movement resists the technologically enforced slow-down, resists the very means of capturing and representing this experience.
The colorful, distorted reflections on the glass jars on Darwin’s Table suggest a similar resistance of the specimens of experience on display. Rather than accept confinement in their isolated bell jars, new images emerge from the semi-darkness, composed in equal parts of video screen and reflection. Simply put, the images refuse to stay put. From certain vantage points in the gallery, the glass covering of the gouache paintings lends itself as a substrate for reflecting the leaping dolphins of Surfacing. Such is the nature of this incorrigible beauty: it resists separation, asserts itself unexpectedly and thus, on a small scale, offers a fragment of that original, mystifying encounter. Yet these feats of resistance accomplish something else still: they re-assert the uniqueness of the original experience, its irreplaceability, and the looming loss of the very possibility of such encounters.
Ultimately, Baeumler’s work resonates with that alchemical, ethically imperative call of beauty to resist the human position at an illusionary center of the universe. Lost Menagerie invites us to embrace and seek out the radical de-centering that beauty may grant us–before it is too late and the menagerie of experiences and encounters Baeumler shares with us at form + content will truly be lost. This beauty is indeed a wake-up call.
Acknowledgment: All references and quotations are from Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just.
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