In 1926, Carl Akeley died a cinematically appropriate death. Overcome by fever, he collapsed leading his fifth safari expedition into the dark continent, and was buried in the jungles of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While his name is not commonly known, his work still tints the lens of how we see the natural world and the role of our species in it. Akeley was a premiere turn of the century naturalist. He developed revolutionary techniques of taxidermy at the Chicago Museum of Natural History (now the Field Museum), and was entrusted with building the primary collections and displays for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. To fill the museums’ halls, Akeley led massive expeditions into the colonial lands of Africa. He hunted in the bush with cameras as well as firearms, returning with specimens, hides, photographs, and masks of his kills cast in plaster. These materials were transformed into breathtaking displays, the likes of which were never previously seen. No longer the stuffed automata of the curious collector, Akeley had the skill to mount his taxidermy as if alive in the wild. He presented the wild in romantic visual narratives: a herd of elephants alerting to a threat; a pride of lions protecting their kill; a mother giraffe with her new born calf; the great silverback gorilla staring down the viewer with self recognition. Tableaux spoke of predation, reproduction, and hierarchy within an aura of uncanny truth seeping from the cured hides. If defining something truly gives one power over it, then Akeley’s effect on our visual culture is deep. Akeley exhibited nature as nobly wild: ferocious, sensual, and honorable. He can be seen like a character from a Jules Verne novel, grandly carrying western ideals into unknown places only to have his own psychology reflected in his vision. In the unfolding decades he has been critiqued as a sexist, racist aristocrat who projected his anthropomorphisms and political fantasies into lands around him. All of which is probably true. But his animals still stare back at us, asking us to see nature as a story, an image, a diorama.
Lauren Davies has not been to Africa. Nor have I. And more than likely you, dear reader, haven’t either. But we talk about it. We talk about tourism and politics. We talk about safaris, race, climate change, genocide, giraffes, hunger, music, colonialism, trade routes, diamonds, deserts, jungles, malaria, AIDS, indigenous traditions, festivals, chimpanzees, bush meat, Christian missionaries, Islam, corruption, globalism, celebrity activism, art, oil, and lions. This conversation revolves around a place we only know from discourse. Our knowledge of Africa comes from a cascade of frames crossing in and out of the classroom. The work of Akeley begat National Geographic begat the Discovery Channel begat Wikipedia. With all of our contemporary knowledge, we don’t think of ourselves as in the same trap of fantasy as Akeley. Somehow our fluidity of information and a post-stucturalist self awareness relieve us of colonialist anthropomorphic guilt. If anything, it’s more fun this way. More insightful. We believe we can talk about things and understand their political subtexts at the same time.
It seems entirely appropriate that Lauren Davies’ investigation into Dominion began in a flea market in provincial France with the purchase of an aging map of the African continent. From this object she created African Map a series of digital images taken from the map and printed on cloth. The images focus on the deteriorating patina of the cartography where lines and figures compete with moldy stains for visual and cognitive meaning. As we explore its surface, we see political demarcations from times past, its facade littered with names of places both real and imagined. The surface has aged away completely in some areas, its regions twisting into an abstraction of linen and pulp, as if the territory was reclaiming itself from the mapmaker.
Davies directly engages the visual legacies of natural history museums with her wall mounted dioramas. In Petting Zoo / Pongo a glass display case contains a loose installation of string, cardboard and various foam rubbers. A matted furry hand of a primate is perched on a tube and set against a graphite line drawing of a banana on ruled paper. The materials feel educational, as if salvaged from an aging elementary school. A stenciled cardboard placard reads “Pongo” identifying the primate hand as the student and subject of the institutional pedagogy. This museological frame is reduced to its roots as a Wunderkammer - a cabinet of curiosities where we witness one of our closest genetic relatives prove its cognitive abilities as it is enculturated into a western educational framework. Our own presumptions of the natural world are viscerally challenged by Glove, a mate to the primate hand in the diorama which has been littered on the gallery floor. This hand is not mounted and displayed as a clean specimen behind glass, rather it resides in the same space the viewer occupies revealing its severed materiality. This intimate observation exposes its construction as plaster layered in paint and animal hair. It simultaneously evokes a cast off garment and a trophy from a bush meat hunt. An unknown violence has placed this object in the viewer’s path, asking us to surmise its trauma. These two hands bracket the range of relationships our species maintain with our close relatives in the natural word. We look around only to find ourselves as fellow members of Akeley’s safari: scientists, educators, and hunters.
As I noted before, Lauren Davies has not been to Africa. But she’s been to the museum and been entranced and terrified and perplexed by what she’s seen. And that’s fascinating.
BRIAN ANDREWS, 2006
References:
Akeley, Mary L. Jobe. Carl Akeley's Africa: The account of the Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy African Hall Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History. New York: Blue Bell Books. 1931.
Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc. 1989.
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