Exterminate All the Brutes
The New York artist Catherine Chalmer's work involves photographing animals eating each other and large prints of cockroaches. In the latest work cockroaches are shown "executed" in a number of ways -- hanged with thread, electrocuted in a tiny wooden chair, burned at the stake. There's a short intro (groan, NYTimes link).
Behind her animal-scene pieces are two opposed impulses: earlier works de-sentimentalized the natural world, showed its inherent eat-and-be-eaten violence; this is about how humans project their fantasies and fears onto species, a project that had its most notable used in the Nazi cinema -- but is also present in American movies (Them, The Fly) or Paul Verhoeven's kinky Riefensthal-inspired Starship Troopers:
In 2001 an Artnews feature about Ms. Chalmers said she was planning some cockroach executions. Irate letters poured in. A few years before that, during a book signing for "Food Chain," which includes pictures of a snake strangling a rat and a mantis chewing off its mate's head, an angry vegetarian came up to Ms. Chalmers and called her a Nazi.
The upshot, Ms. Chalmers said, was, "I bent over backwards not to hurt anything." With Hollywood movies no one wonders whether people are actually being killed, she noted. But with video, people expect honesty.
That did not stop her from making a video of roaches in a gas chamber. As the video begins, you see the misty gray air inside the chamber. The roaches are dead on their backs. Then a few legs twitch. Soon the air begins to clear. You can see the bricks of the gas chamber and the little pipe through which the gas came in. More and more roach legs and antennae wiggle. The sounds of whispers, giggling and breathing fill the air. Soon the roaches are crawling everywhere. It is the cockroach equivalent of Martin Amis's Holocaust novel, "Time's Arrow," in which time runs backward.
While making this video, Ms. Chalmers said, she got very upset, not because of the Holocaust parallel but because she thought she had actually put the roaches through an agonizing death. Previously she had always knocked her roaches out by chilling them. But Betty Faber, an entomologist, told her to try carbon dioxide. So she put the roaches in the chamber and with a pipe pumped in the gas from dry ice, which is frozen carbon dioxide. The roaches went into "dramatic convulsions," she said. "They tossed themselves all over the place, threw themselves against the walls. Then they all fell on their backs."
She thought: "I can't show this. It's visually too disturbing." But then, as the videotape kept rolling and the dry ice cleared, the cockroaches rose from the dead. Their legs started kicking. "The most beautiful part is their getting up," Ms. Chalmers said. She decided to show the uncut video from this point on. It shows the cockroaches as survivors. "I wanted to show their character," Ms. Chalmers says. "They keep coming back."
You might think that Ms. Chalmers would have been upset because she had, by effectively reversing the gassing process, given her Holocaust a happy ending. Or you might think that she would have worried that she had compared vermin and Jews, which is what the Nazis did. (Her photographs of lynchings bring up the same problem. She seems to be comparing African-Americans and insects.)
Aha, history rears its ugly head! On a personal note, I never saw a cockroach until I moved to America. So while I don't like them exactly, I just don't feel the visceral hatred of them that Chalmers is invoking in this work. Also, thinking about this as a parent reminds me of how much we anthropomorphize animals when talking with children and how the categories into which we divide them -- pets, zoo and farm animals, "food", vermin, etc, inevitably shape our interactions with them.
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The New York artist Catherine Chalmer's work involves photographing animals eating each other and large prints of cockroaches. In the latest work cockroaches are shown "executed" in a number of ways -- hanged with thread, electrocuted in a tiny wooden chair, burned at the stake. There's a short intro (groan, NYTimes link).
Behind her animal-scene pieces are two opposed impulses: earlier works de-sentimentalized the natural world, showed its inherent eat-and-be-eaten violence; this is about how humans project their fantasies and fears onto species, a project that had its most notable used in the Nazi cinema -- but is also present in American movies (Them, The Fly) or Paul Verhoeven's kinky Riefensthal-inspired Starship Troopers: Aha, history rears its ugly head! On a personal note, I never saw a cockroach until I moved to America. So while I don't like them exactly, I just don't feel the visceral hatred of them that Chalmers is invoking in this work. Also, thinking about this as a parent reminds me of how much we anthropomorphize animals when talking with children and how the categories into which we divide them -- pets, zoo and farm animals, "food", vermin, etc, inevitably shape our interactions with them.
- bruno 5-08-2003 8:52 pm