Untitled (zebras) 2006
charcoal on paper
Julie Comnick
Yesterday I dropped by Julie Comnick’s new show at the Flashpoint Gallery in DC (Jan 4 – Feb 9). I say “dropped by” because, despite her obvious technical skill, my attention was fully engaged for only about five minutes. It’s a solid show, but it didn’t provoke me to the kind of reconsideration & reflection I demand from art on a scientific theme.
Here’s the press release:
In According To Their Kind, Julie Comnick’s exhibition of large-scale charcoal drawings, the artist explores issues of selective breeding and the human impact on the course of evolution. The installation at the Gallery at Flashpoint is comprised of five distinct series of drawings: quotations from the story of Noah’s Ark, depictions of animals paired and bound for breeding, tethered boats (arks), excerpts from modern reproductive medicine and magnifications of in vitro fertilization procedures. The juxtaposition of these images asks the viewer to consider several unsettling trends in contemporary society. While animals are selectively bred in captivity to revitalize endangered populations, humans are able to pre-select the genetic makeup of their children.
Did you catch all that? This show was, despite the small exhibition space, really five shows in one. All of the pieces are “untitled,” and they were so disparate it was difficult for me to take in the entire show as curated.
The grouping that flows best is the series of thirteen small framed drawings depicting the stages of an embryo created by in vitro fertilization. The broad strokes of charcoal suited this series remarkably well. That really is how an embryo looks through a light microscope: black and white, smudgy and grainy, against a stark white field. The careless tumbling of the round embryo from corner to corner of the field throughout the series of drawings successfully conveyed both the unpredictable randomness of development – will this embryo implant, or fail? – and a sort of playful geometric abstraction. I think they’re lovely, and at only $250 apiece, quite the steal.
However, Comnick seems intent on pushing not just the aesthetics of the embryo, but the ethics of it. And here’s where things get messier. The embryo drawings alternate with oversized reproductions of passages from various fertility manuals (example: “Third Party Reproduction: A Guide for Patients“) or the Bible, and with still larger renderings of zoo animals being bred in captivity. The effect of these juxtapositions, to me, was confusing. What, aside from human agency, is the common thread here?
Juxtaposing the passages about Noah’s ark with the portraits of endangered animals makes sense, perhaps, since the population of endangered animals in captivity comprises a sort of genetic ark; but these animals were being bred in the traditional way, not through IVF or biotechnology. I’m hardly an expert, but the restraints and tethers appeared similar to those used to breed common domesticated animals, such as horses; there was nothing exotic going on – except that once you mix restraints, including blindfolds, with apparently unwilling participants – and in the drawing of the lions, a snapping whip – you enter rather fraught territory. The animals were by no means anthropomorphized, but the context forced certain comparisons between human and animal reproduction that I’m not sure were intended!
Looking at these images, are we supposed to be disturbed by the violence of the breeding methods? Are we supposed to make the obvious connection to human reproduction? It seemed so to me. What relevance might such a visceral response have to evaluating our stance on biotechnologies like IVF? Would a response informed by these emotions be a valid entry to reconsidering a controversial subject, or a mere gut reaction? I think it’s relatively simple to create art depicting unfamiliar and disturbing aspects of biology – the science which is, after all, most intimate with sex and death. It’s harder to turn the unfamiliar and disturbing into something new, something that implies an unexpected conclusion, or asks a pointed question. Time and again I see art related to biotechnology which doesn’t ask intelligent, well-formulated questions. Perhaps it’s because I’m a biologist, but I don’t think a tossed salad of controversial ideas – IVF, evolution, extinction, selection, sex, religion – creates an effective debate in the mind of the viewer.
The gallery press release suggests that the pieces are united by the impact of human agency on evolution. But is that accurate? Given the rarity of IVF, it seems unlikely to alter human evolution. One of the reproduced passages describes selecting sperm in order to predispose the gender of the embryo one way or the other, and it’s true that egg donors are often chosen for superficial characteristics (we’ve all seen the ads in campus newspapers offering thousands of dollars for the ova of tall, blond, athletic overachievers). But IVF as currently practiced is by no means going to shift the human phenotypic norm towards blond overachievers. Even if you fear human reproduction might eventually reach a Gattaca-like state of draconian genetic selection, that’s a different scenario than last-ditch efforts to sustain endangered species. We’re not endangered; that’s not why we do IVF. And revitalized populations of zebras and lions would, ideally, show a minimal phenotypic stamp of our interference; that’s the point. We’re trying to counter genetic bottlenecks caused by our species – not caused by natural selection. Breeding dogs or horses to phenotypic extremes seems a more apt analogy for the Gattaca scenario. I could go on, but my point is that these are such complex and disparate issues, interleaving them seems artificially simplistic, and maybe a bit inflammatory.
I suppose one could argue that many gallery-goers never think about IVF or evolution or the ethics of selective breeding, so a show like this at least jars them into considering science in a new context. But is that good? Isn’t the linkage of IVF with a struggling pair of breeding zebras a strange linkage to plant? I certainly don’t expect art to be educational, easy, or explicit. . . so perhaps my expectations of this show are unfair. Comnick has the right to create whatever associations she wishes, and she owes no explanation to me. Yet as a scientist, I prefer shows that provoke the public to ask coherent questions – not leap to associations that may or may not be representative of the real science. And somehow I can’t go into a gallery and pretend I’m not a scientist. That may well be my failing, not Comnick’s.
Ah well. Funnily enough, the most disconcerting aspect of the entire show for me was the inclusion, among all the biological, sexual imagery, of boats. Sailing boats. Yes, I suppose they’re arks, and they’re tethered, and they’re paired – but come on! Although I have the utmost respect for the technical skills of the artist (how does one execute a drawing 100 inches tall without wrinkling the paper or smudging the charcoal?) I’d like a little less of it next time, please.
You rarely see any contemporary art now whose gallery or artist doesn’t describe the work at hand as “exploring issues about…”, “challenging the viewer with…”, “raising a question concerning…” and so on. These claims are often confused, as you note, or downright disingenous.
Oscar Wilde famously said that all art is quite useless but today it’s no longer allowed to be regarded that way. It’s pressured about its irrelevance by popular culture and forced to justify its existence to the people who want to buy it in a vastly over-inflated market, so it has to make claims for itself that are often invisible in the work unless that work is accompanied by reams of explanation. Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth at Tate Modern is a good example of this syndrome, described as “addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world”, a justification which can’t possibly be drawn from looking at a crack in a mass of concrete.
Many artists would be far more honest if they admitted that they didn’t know what they were doing at the time, that they were pursuing some juxtaposition of imagery that they find interesting for reasons they couldn’t explain (as Francis Bacon often did) or were simply trying to make something beautiful or interesting to look at. But they daren’t do this (or galleries and dealers won’t let them) because no one wants to pay a lot of money for a work of art and then have to say “the artist has no idea what this is about”.
I feel like I have something to add…but then I don’t really have much.
Your critique of the show is sound.
John’s comment is generally accurate, though I would argue that it’s also a bit disingenuous to simplify the contemporary Art World mode that much. It’s not so neat. For those of us who are happy to stare at a bit of trash for long minutes, the Tate crack might well captivate. The reproductions I’ve seen do make it look interesting. My problem is with the Art World’s insistence on attaching a specific interpretation, rather than assuming viewers will want to draw their own conclusions.
You’re right, that’s a broad brush sentiment which obviously doesn’t apply to all art. There are artists out there doing things for their own reasons without requiring any justifications that sound like they’ve been pulled from a sociology textbook. Tom Phillips is one of my favourite living artists, an extremely inventive man who does much to demystify the art process as well as managing to create gorgeous artworks in all manner of media. And he’s witty with it. Phillips translated and illustrated Dante’s Inferno in the 1980s, and also did produced a great TV version with Peter Greenaway. If Phillips made a street artwork called Gates of Hell, as Heather B Swann did in Melbourne, he’d regard that the work and title were enough for the viewer. He wouldn’t feel the need to overload the thing by saying:
“Cerberus’s biting, barking heads are designed to frighten us. The artist is challenging our complacency and lethargy.
“She wants us to think about (and act against) the hellishness of now, the purgatories and punishments of the contemporary world.”
as they do on the Wooster Collective page.
For what it’s worth, I like Doris’s crack (if that doesn’t sound too vulgar); the size of the Tate Turbine Hall is a fascinating challenge and it’s always interesting to see what each new artist does with it. But I’d challenge anyone to get “addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world†from simply looking at a crack in the floor. It’s this kind of vague justification I object to, something that the art world gets away with far too easily.
Ooooh, look at you two! Never mind my post, your comments are much more interesting, and of course more broadly applicable. (“the hellishness of now?” good grief . ) Honestly, I wish I had half the familiarity with current art that you two do. I just wander around, curious and uninformed.
I’m not an expert by any means but I like to keep an eye on what’s around, something that’s easier now with the web. In the past you had to buy art magazines to see what was happening elsewhere.
I’m fairly sure that the kind of strangled terminology used to present art wasn’t so common twenty years ago, it’s a phenomenon that’s spread since the 1980s, possibly as a result of the expansion of art as a hugely saleable commodity. It’s always been difficult to talk about art since its very nature is subjective but the problem today is that much of the language used by galleries and artists themselves doesn’t bear close scrutiny. A kind of “gallery-ese” has emerged which has a veneer of importance but which rarely says anything specific. A couple of hours after leaving the comment above, I was looking at another site and saw this:
“25 artists have been invited to produce a site-concerned work inspired by the short story “The Drowned Giant†by J.G. Ballard and by the labyrinthine, vernacular architecture of Shoreditch Town Hall’s basement. The result is a stunning exhibition that exploits the dialogue between space and narrative through Ballard’s concerns. Decay, fragility and relativity of human morality, as well as representation of body through architecture, violence and sanity are some of the conceptual directions taken by the artists.”
What these people have been asked to do is illustrate a story, or at least use the story as a springboard for their imaginations. Yet no one dare state that using those words, it doesn’t sound important enough. So we get phrases like “exploits the dialogue between space and narrative” and “representation of body through architecture”. George Orwell criticised this kind of vague and inflated use of words in Politics and the English Language in 1946 and little has improved since then, if anything it’s got worse.
Well said, John. I’ve been out to lunch on the blog crawl lately, and so just revisited this thread. The language of the gallery press release is absurd and, often, simply wrong.
I’m a uni student, majoring in fine arts and minoring in biology, for perspective.
In High School, we always had to submit a “rationale” with whatever piece we were working on. I hated doing this, as I found it insulting to the viewer and awkward for me, as the artist, to have to draw out all the meaning there might possibly be. The reason, I was told by my art teacher, was to explain the more arcane aspects to some of the cloudier-minded. When you’re an artist working for a living, you have to be able to explain the piece to a non-artistic company figure. This sounds pretentious, but there are many people who simply don’t get the nuances or the emotional impact of a piece of art. When your livelihood relies on convincing people to see something in your work, sometimes you have to verbally elaborate in order to explain it to someone. This is not a case of artistic error or lack of talent, some people just can’t see any meaning in art.
Personally, when I go to an art gallery or look at a colleague’s work, I look at it first objectively, with no knowledge of the artist’s intention, and then discuss it or read the accompanying information. It’s like dissecting literature- some people see only one, obvious theme, some people see many different and unrelated or even conflicting themes, and some people see very little theme at all and just enjoy the ride.
I disagree strongly with the idea that artists often “has no idea what this is aboutâ€. It implies a thrown-together kind of half-assed trickery by the artist “I don’t know what this means but the audience doesn’t know that. Hee Hee Hee $$$” I often change or add something, not knowing consciously why I did it, only to be blown away when looking at the final product. Subconsciously, artist inject truths and images into their work. This is not to say they have no idea what they’re doing, it is just not consciously dissected prior to addition.
Additionally, emotions are what makes us human. To say that decisions should be made exclusively through logic is to deny humanity. Logically, killing the weak to better support the strong id more efficient. Why should we let silly emotions get in the way of making controversial decisions?