Do you smile? Do you make your bed? Do you plan in cooperation with others? (Male) Can you be sure you are the father of your children? Are you rational? Do you love? Have you bitten a penis off?
These questions – amusing, beguiling, disturbing – are some of the dozens posed by Marcus Coates in Degreecoordinates, Shared traits of the Hominini (Humans, Bonobos and Chimpanzees), a wall-spanning artwork that confronts visitors to the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, Making Nature.
It makes a fitting prologue to a year-long examination of our relationship with the natural world, showing how tenuous the lines we use to separate ourselves from it really are.
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The exhibition follows in the pawprints of at the Marian Goodman gallery in London late last year, which examined our troubled relationship with the natural world through depictions of animals in art, and at Berlin’s HKW, for which Coates’ interrogating artwork was commissioned. All three are especially timely, arriving as the world debates the severity of human impact on the environment, and the price we are willing to pay to remediate it.
An unnatural world?
The Paris Agreement came into force in November, and there is a growing consensus that the Anthropocene is real. When all of Earth is touched by human activity, and worldwide efforts are under way to redirect global climate patterns, does it make sense to talk about a “natural” world?
The Wellcome curators have selected 100 objects to chart how the natural world has been catalogued, displayed, watched and remade over the past 300 years. Inside the exhibition space proper, we start with botanist-zoologist Carl Linnaeus, who divided the world into plant, animal and mineral, creating a tree of life in whose branches we remain entangled today. While cataloguing the world, Linnaeus and contemporaries such as Charles Bonnet found it impossible to resist the temptation to create a hierarchy.
After placing humans among the animals for the first time, amid the apes, Linnaeus subdivided humans into racial groups, complete with notes on their various temperaments. Constructed this way, the arrangement could be used to justify the exploitation of people and animals. It directs our attitudes still, as we struggle with racism and shun scientific experimentation on “higher” animals while accepting equivalent work on “lower” ones.
And while it’s generally accepted that we shouldn’t allow animals to suffer for our entertainment or convenience, we grapple with squaring our own demands with the rights of animals. We spend billions to keep our pets healthy while condoning the mass slaughter of livestock, and go viral over the death of Harambe the gorilla without questioning the ethics of a life spent in captivity.
In the centuries since Linnaeus, our exposure to the natural world and our attitudes to it have been largely shaped by the agendas of museums, zoos and other formal sites. Making Nature takes visitors through an abridged history of these venues, from the anthropomorphised tableaus of writer-painter Beatrix Potter and taxidermist Walter Potter (no relation) to the emergence of more natural dioramas in the late nineteenth century, featuring animals in lifelike poses and settings.
Airbrushing out humans
But just as zoos replaced cages with moats to disguise the fact that visitors are looking at captive animals, these dioramas removed humans entirely. If we created a modern diorama, would we include monoculture farmlands, buried waste, car parks and bare, deforested mountains? Why do we think of nature as no longer being something that occurs in these places?
All credit to the Wellcome Collection for inviting the Center for PostNatural History, an institution in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that collects organisms altered by humans in a way that echoes through their offspring. This includes dogs, horses and lab rats bred for particular traits, as well as transgenic goats and irradiated rats. Even so, the centre’s curator, Richard Pell, points out the need to include the caveat of “intentionality” when discussing transformed animals. If not, where would we draw the line?
It’s not just peppered moths and tuskless elephants: humans have transformed whole ecosystems beyond recognition. Jarring as it is, a discarded badger in the corner of one room of the exhibition (an unlisted taxidermy by artist Abbas Akhavan), is the most naturalistic item in the exhibition. It is presented not for our delight, but as a reflection on how we turn a blind eye to one of our most familiar views of wildlife – as roadkill.
There have always been those who challenged how the natural world was catalogued and depicted. For example, Charles Waterton was famous for his satirical taxidermies and, in 1824, created the Nondescript, a Bigfoot-type creature that sidestepped attempts to confine it to the realm of either ape or man.
Also featuring in the show is the struggle to objectively present the “real world”. This is rendered beautifully in Herman de Vries’s ongoing series From Earth, in which soil from different locations is rubbed directly onto the canvas to form a vibrant patchwork of Rothko-esque blocks. Galapagos, on the other hand, shows Hiroshi Sugimoto’s efforts to reconstruct natural locations, using photographs of museum dioramas to create an image that floats uncertainly between the fake and real.
False utopia
Both zoos and museums have raised awareness and respect for the natural world, fuelling support for its conservation. But by presenting nature as a utopia, with foxes gambolling in plastic brush and lions perching on plaster outcrops, we tell a story that the natural world only truly exists where humans do not. While biodiversity mostly does nosedive when humans encroach on an environment, it’s not a practical basis for conserving areas where we can’t prohibit human activity.
Worse, if we only frame environmental protection in terms of human cost, the environment always loses. No surprise then that most wilderness preserves are in economically unproductive areas: moors, mountains, deserts and other places where we haven’t so much decided that they are worth preserving as that they aren’t worth exploiting. If we saw nature as something in which we are one element among many, we might manufacture environments that serve us all, rather than dancing between development and remediation.
These are not new arguments, but as we stride on through the Anthropocene, our default view has to be that the manufactured world is indistinguishable from the natural world. All corners of the planet are under human management – all that changes is the direction and efficacy of that management.
Nowhere is this more pointed than in the growing call for “rewilding”, a term evoking a sense of returning the land to the state it was in before humans appeared. The reality is that given the time, energy input and management required, the results are scarcely likely to be any “wilder” than other curated landscapes, from cornfields to car parks. We just swap one view of what the countryside should look like – rolling fields of superfluous crops – for another.
It is impossible to reach the end of Making Nature and still believe we can take an objective view of nature, or that we are fundamentally separate from it. Yet our ability to predict the consequences of our actions and our moral tendencies means we are more culpable than, say, a seagull preying on the last Hawksbill turtle hatchling.
Accepting our place among the beasts might allow us to make peace with our own rapacity, to see our needs as essential as the seagull’s, even if our responsibilities are greater. After centuries of standing apart from nature, we might finally be ready to join it.
[exhibition_info title=”Making Nature: How we see animals” title_link=”https://wellcomecollection.org/MakingNature” gallery=”Wellcome Collection” location=”London” fromdate=”now” todate=”21 May”]
