Inside the Banff Park Museum the Animals Are All Watching. They Are

Certainly the dead watch us, but not MUSE as opera, nor as the Great Grey Owl tunes in gophers underground. We are their day-time television. –Don McKay, excerpt from ‘Edge of Night’, Camber Inside the Banff Park Museum the animals objects, many opening up new dialogues are all watching. They are transfixed, or, so for interpretation. it seems. This natural history museum is a strange suspension in time. Designated as Part of the allure of the museum is the ‘a museum of a museum’ this unique space abundance of its glass vitrines, cabinets and its specimens serve as inspiration for and cases, even its glassed-in office. The three artists and a curator. The exhibition invisible/visibility of glass layers our viewing title MUSE plays on the word as both noun within the museum. As cultural historian Bill and verb where the museum acts as muse Brown observes, ‘We look through objects for the artist, and, as a place where visitors (to see what they disclose about us).’ In the spend time musing over its displays. space of the museum the objects are telling us about ourselves. Sometimes this history Museums are not simply repositories; they are is uncomfortable. also sites for creative endeavor. –J. Drobnick and J. Fisher, Museopathy In the exhibition MUSE, the artist/ art mediates the experience, revealing As a collaboration between artists, curator another layer. There is an elegiac quality and museum the space is transformed from in the work of these artists, hauntingly being ‘a container of cultural artifacts to a prescient, in their response to the spaces cultural readymade, a medium for artistic of the museum. analysis, commentary and reconfiguration.’ (J. Fisher). Each artist creates work that is a direct response to this collection, its history READING ROOM and its site; an artistic intervention. Tu c k , D’Arcy Wilson, video performance, 14 min, Within the natural history museum the 24 second duration, 2011. taxidermic animal is often a spectacle of Lullaby Series, D’Arcy Wilson, 6 hand-colored display. As a still or stilled life taxidermy etchings and silk-screen on Somerset. allows for a closer examination of the animal than would normally be permitted in nature. D’Arcy Wilson’s Tuck, a video-performance, Although, what we see seems real, it is not originally filmed in the museum, is returned real. Instead it is a cultural construction, the to animate the space of the “Reading taxidermist’s reconstruction, of the animal Room”. Accompanying this work are a set in its natural state. Taxidermy literally of six etchings of the lullabies composed means ‘an arrangement of skin.’ Essentially and sung to the taxidermic specimens it is a re-ordering that has become the art within the museum. The artist notes: of preparing, stuffing and mounting the skins of specimens for display. Taxidermy This activity of singing lullabies presents an grew out of the culture of colonialism alternative to the liaison formed between the that developed with the expansion of specimens and their creators (the hunters and Empire and became part of the growing taxidermists who prepared them a century ago). interest in taxonomy, science and natural Nevertheless, there is a perversity in both our history. In this so-called post-colonial actions: the animals were killed for display, and period artists have been intrigued and now I propose to sing them to sleep, overlooking challenged by these stuffed and classified their inability to abandon their posts. Wilson’s work is an attempt to reconcile the I was thinking about this transition: how/when differences between nature and culture. does a specimen of natural history – already She openly admits that: transformed once by death from a living creature to a specimen – transform yet again Throughout my art practice, I try to bind myself into a cultural artifact? How/when does this to the natural world either by inserting myself one thing stop being what is was and become into wildernesses, or bestowing acts of kindness another? upon nature; nevertheless, the ability to truly –Janice Wright Cheney know and partake in this other world eludes me. My awkwardness in the landscape and To begin to address these questions the lack of understanding highlight my destructive artist turned to Morgan Mavis’s idea of potential as a human, and keep me isolated ‘the cultural afterlife’ of taxidermic objects. from other species of animals. One is made to wonder, who touched these objects, these skulls, furs, antlers and horns, This intentionalotherness is made apparent borrowed from the ‘Discovery Room’ of the as she sings lullabies to the ever-vigilant museum. This sense of feminine touch is specimens. Her maternal sense of longing further fetishized in the white kid-gloves to reconcile the living with the dead is the artist transforms into a hybrid-object, made visible as we follow her through the neither animal nor human, with its found darkened space of the museum. The writer bones and claws. Its potential threat is Rachel Poliquin in her aptly titled book,The made supine, in its gesture – of upturned Breathless Zoo. Taxidermy and the Cultures palms/paws – suggestive of surrender. of Longing, explores what she terms ‘a poetics of strangeness’ that viewers Wright Cheney’s sense of the whimsical often encounter when confronted with is played out in these found objects, taxidermy. There is a sense of the uncanny intersecting nature with culture. A ram’s in our desire to animate or reconcile our horn is transformed into a ‘horn of plenty’ difference with these dead animals. On the with its flaxen wool spilling into crocheted one hand we are seductively drawn into the abundance. Everywhere the artist’s touch spectacle, admiring the sublime beauty and and sense of humour is present. Dressing stillness of the specimens, while on other up a fox stole with an antique doll’s dress hand, we are repulsed by our actions, the the artist plays with these objects, re- inevitable sense of mortality that is before dressing not only our sense of the absurd, us. This push and pull of emotion is played but also our tendency to anthropomorphize out before us in the potential absurdity of animals. There is a dialogue set up between Wilson’s performance, as she attempts to her skilled crafting of needlework into sing the animals into a deep slumber. antler, placed alongside a deer’s antler. We are made to consider the beauty of both art and nature. This theme is again explored READING ROOM in how she uses snake bones to re-create ornamental display often found in Victorian Surrender, Janice Wright Cheney, site-specific fretwork. installation, mixed media, 2014. In the tradition of the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ or ‘Wunderkammer’ the artist Janice Wright Cheney has intervened making the work Surrender where she sees nature as surrendering to culture. Her conception for the cabinet came from her understanding of the museum of as a collection of cultural artifacts, not a museum of natural history. Byron Harmon, 'Polar Bear.’ Image courtesy Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies Archives, NA71-2908 DISCOVERY ROOM a sentiment echoed in John Berger’s essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’ Spectre, Janice Wright Cheney, site-specific installation, crocheted wool, crystals, wooden The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public armature, 2014. purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere Facing up to the others, before the others, its in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an fellows, here then is the apparition of a strange animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers creature: at the same time Life, Thing, Beast, and passes on. They look sideways. They look Object, Commodity, Automaton — in a word, blindly beyond. spectre. –J. Derrida, Spectres of Marx More recently the writer Robert Everett- In Derrida’s notion of Hauntology: the Green commented on the strangeness paradoxical state of the spectre, is neither of going from a zoo to a natural history being nor non-being. The spectre makes museum in ‘Why I’m Never Going to the visible that which is not seen, as invoked Zoo Again’: by Wright Cheney’s Spectre of a polar bear. We all found it eerie to go from live animals to Popularly known as Buddy, the polar bear stuffed specimens in such a short time. In some was housed in the zoo/menagerie adjacent ways, however, the dead animals seemed the to the museum. His memory is made visible more lively, caught forever in aggressive poses through this spectral display of crystals and or preparing to spring from predators that crocheted snowflakes suspended from a would never emerge from the diorama. At the cage-like armature. The artist’s ability to zoo, most animals just seemed to be hanging conjure up this spectre of Buddy is all the around, enduring a long death of what it means more remarkable as her design anticipated to be a natural creature. her knowledge of the photograph - Globe and Mail, 28.03.14. reproduced here. Buddy lives on in this uncanny likeness. The history of Buddy the polar bear is a complex and sad narrative, more telling of This liminality of inside/outside, visible/ the period in which he lived. Housed in the invisible is enhanced by the notion of the Banff Park Zoo from 1922 until 1938 Buddy zoo animals as living taxidermy mirroring was moved to the Calgary Zoo and died from the displays within the museum. One pneumonia the following year. questions: which is more life-like? This is strong sense of his presence as he opens and closes doors, and leaves the room.

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