The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of Arts and Architecture PLANTAE, ANIMALIA, FUNGI: TRANSFORMATIONS OF NATURAL HISTORY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ART A Dissertation in Art History by Alissa Walls Mazow © 2009 Alissa Walls Mazow Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2009 The Dissertation of Alissa Walls Mazow was reviewed and approved* by the following: Sarah K. Rich Associate Professor of Art History Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee Brian A. Curran Associate Professor of Art History Richard M. Doyle Professor of English, Science, Technology and Society, and Information Science and Technology Nancy Locke Associate Professor of Art History Craig Zabel Associate Professor of Art History Head of the Department of Art History *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. ii Abstract This dissertation examines the ways that five contemporary artists—Mark Dion (b. 1961), Fred Tomaselli (b. 1956), Walton Ford (b. 1960), Roxy Paine (b. 1966) and Cy Twombly (b. 1928)—have adopted the visual traditions and theoretical formulations of historical natural history to explore longstanding relationships between “nature” and “culture” and begin new dialogues about emerging paradigms, wherein plants, animals and fungi engage in ecologically-conscious dialogues. Using motifs such as curiosity cabinets and systems of taxonomy, these artists demonstrate a growing interest in the paradigms of natural history. For these practitioners natural history operates within the realm of history, memory and mythology, inspiring them to make works that examine a scientific paradigm long thought to be obsolete. This study, which itself takes on the form of a curiosity cabinet, identifies three points of consonance among these artists. First, these artists are concerned with acknowledging, adhering to, or subverting the borders of naturalist taxonomy. They have appropriated this scientific system of classification, that applies names to organisms— “species”—to question and undermine the very nature of culturally-constructed categories. Ultimately, their critiques are concerned with the very categorization of knowledge itself. Second, these artists demonstrate a sustained engagement with organismal bodies, attending to plants, non-human animals and fungi and how they have been applied to our wider culture. Delving into ontology, they provide a space where viewers may come to terms with, and simultaneously envision, what it is to be a human being, in a body, in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Third, in an attempt to resolve a historical past in the present, Dion, Tomaselli, Paine, Ford and Twombly use natural history to explore and negotiate memory and mythology in the process of their retreat into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural history, its golden age. I take Aby Warburg’s (1866-1929) Mnemosyne, or Atlas Project (1927-29), as a model for understanding historical natural history as a field of observation and recollection, which attended to memory, or according to Warburg, the past conceptualized in the present. Guided by an associative model, Warburg’s project continues to challenge traditional patterns of conceptualizing objects and images and their relationship to one another, leaving us to contemplate our own evolutionary pasts and place within the order of things. The artists here rely on a similar associative model to reckon with history, memories and presentness in the process of constructing new ways of seeing. They have discovered in natural history, as Warburg himself attempted to do with his “serpent” and “nymph,” a kind of resolution of memory and “trauma.” For these artists, trauma is complex and subtle, scattered across a field of colonialism, ecological destruction, and reductive nature-culture bifurcations. It exists in, among other things, the consolidation of living beings into the homogenous category of “life” and the relegation of the field of nature to the laboratory of science, exterior to our own processes of becoming. These artists beckon us with a Visionary Natural History: Through the space of their own serpents and nymphs—historical natural history—they demonstrate an awareness that acknowledges a past both violent and full of promise, rich with possibilties for constructing new ways of seeing and being. iii Cabinet of Contents List of Figures vi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: Securing Passage and Setting a Course 1 I. Natural History 1 II. Plantae, Animalia, Fungi 1 III. Wunderkammern…Unfolding 9 IV. Aby Warburg: Snake Charmer 36 V. Transforming Visions/Envisioning Transformations 50 Chapter 1: Plantae (Vegetable Values): Embarking on the Voyage 64 I. Species, Specimen 64 II. The I/Eye Box 65 III. A Glimpse of Universe 83 IV. Parsing Visionary Verbs of Universe 97 V. Poppies! 114 VI. Natural Selection (2000) Redux 130 Chapter 2: Animalia (From Man to Zoophyte): Observing and Recording Fauna 141 I. Animal 141 II. The Mouse-Man and Other Morphological Musings 141 III. Representing Animals 155 IV. Entomologising 163 V. Visualizing Animals 174 VI. Ocell-Eye 181 iv VII. “‘Floating Fast like a Hummingbird’” 203 VIII. The Delirium of Alfred Russel Wallace and the 217 Ecstasy of a Space Monkey Chapter 3: Fungi: Navigating a Route Home 232 I. Homo sapiens, Human race 232 II. Phrasing Fungi: Cut-Out, Cut-Up 233 III. Phylogenizing Fungi 243 IV. Cy Twombly, John Cage and the Art of 268 Contemplating Mushrooms Conclusion: Natural History—Concluded: Transforming the Specimens 300 I. Taxonomy 300 II. Unloading the Hold 300 Afterword 306 I. Wildness 306 II. Specimen Case 313 III. “I am Evolution” 320 Appendix: Figures 329 Bibliography 394 v List of Figures Intro. 1 Eduardo Kac, GFP Bunny, 2000, transgenic and fluorescent Alba, created with the assistance of zoosystemician Louis Bec and scientists Louis-Marie Houdebine and Patrick Prunet, was born February 2000 in Jouy-en-Josas, France and moved in with the artist in Chicago, IL, Photograph by Chrystelle Fontaine posted on the artist’s website: www.ekac.org, page 329. Intro. 2 Example of a Kunstkabinett, Levinus Vincent, Elenchus tabularum, pinacothecarum, atque nonnullorum cimeliorum, Amsterdam: 1719, Special Collections, University of Wisconsin-Madison Memorial Library, Madison, WI, image posted on the website of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art: www.mmoca.org, page 330. Intro. 3 Example of a Kunstkammer, The museum of Ferrante Imperato from Ferrante Imperato, Dell’historia naturale (Venice, 1672, ed.), reproduced on page 39 of Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), page 331. Intro. 4 Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne, plate 6, around the Laocoön, ritual scenes and serpentine shapes, reproduced on page 91 of Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, translated by Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004), page 332. Intro. 5 LEFT: Aby Warburg, woman playing golf from plate 77 of Mnemosyne, reproduced on plate 61 of E.H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography Oxford: Phaidon, 1986 [1970], and RIGHT: Laocoön, Vatican, Vatican City, Rome, reproduced on plate 1 of E.H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography Oxford: Phaidon, 1986 [1970], page 333. Intro. 6 Aby Warburg in Rome, Winter 1928-29, reproduced on plate 51 of E.H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography Oxford: Phaidon, 1986 [1970], page 334. Intro. 7 Example of a Kunstkammer box, second half of the sixteenth century, moss, shells, plaster, wood, paper, wire, Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, Schloss Ambras collections, reproduced on page 47of Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology, translated by Allison Brown (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995 [1993]), page 335. 1.1 Mark Dion, Linnaeus, 1992, key cabinet, photograph, dead leaf, botanical print, specimen pins, 26.5 x 20 x 6 cm, reproduced on page 53 of Lisa Graziose Corrin, Miwon Kwon, and Norman Bryson, Mark Dion (London: Phaidon, 1997), page 336. vi 1.2 Robert Morris, I-Box, open view, 1962 , painted plywood cabinet with sculptmetal containing a photograph, 19 x 12 ¾ x 1 inches (48.3 x 32.4 x 35 cm), Collection of Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, page 337. 1.3 Robert Smithson in his childhood museum of reptiles, fossils and artifacts, Clifton, NJ, c. 1960, reproduced on page 12 of Eugenie Tsai, “Robert Smithson: Plotting a Line from Passaic, New Jersey, to Amarillo, Texas,” in Robert Smithson (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), page 338. 1.4 Robert Smithson, Poster for the Spiral Jetty exhibition at the Dwan Gallery (1970) [film treatment for the Spiral Jetty], original in the artist files of Robert Smithson at The Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery Library, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., page 339. 1.5 Fred Tomaselli, Ripple Trees, 1994, assorted drugs, hemp leaves, saccharin, acrylic, resin on wood panel, 48 x 48 inches, Eileen and Peter Norton Collection, photographed by John Berens, page 340. 1.6 Fred Tomaselli, Untitled (Rug), 1995, assorted pills and capsules, hemp and Datura leaves, ephedra, acrylic, resin, wood, 54 x 72 inches, Collection of A.G. Rosen, photographed by John Berens, page 341. 1.7 Fred Tomaselli, Untitled, 1999, Datura leaves, pills, acrylic and resin on wood panel, 72 x 54 inches (182.88 x 182.88 cm), reproduced on page 11 of Gregory Volk, Fred Tomaselli (New York: James Cohan Gallery, 2000), page 342. 1.8 Roxy Paine, Crop (Poppy Field), 1997-98, lacquer, epoxy, oil paint, pigment, posted on the World Visit Guide website: www.insecula.com, page 343. 1.9 Pipilotti Rist, Ever is Over All, 1997, video installation, two overlapping projections (color, sound with Anders Guggisberg), dimensions variable, Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, posted to the website of the artists Megan and Murray McMillan, www.meganandmurray.com, on February 23, 2007 after they viewed the piece on display in an exhibition at MoMA—Out of Time: A Contemporary View (August 30, 2006–April 9, 2007), page 344.