Mumok, Vienna, Austria, until 14 January 2018
VISITORS to Vienna鈥檚 spectacular Natural History Museum may discover some taxidermied exhibits smothered in black gloop. This is artist Mark Dion鈥檚 The Tar Museum, and it is part of Natural Histories: Traces of the Political, an art exhibition about nature and politics, most of which is in the nearby museum of contemporary art, Mumok.
Those venturing across the Maria-Theresien-Platz will not be sorry. Or not at first. Early on, there is charming, sometimes beautiful documentation of work in the 1970s by the Romanian Sigma group. Inspired by research in bionics and cybernetics, mathematician Lucian Codreanu and his fellows applied scientific method to their observations of the rivers and woods of the Timisoara hunting forest. Doru Tulcan鈥檚 abstract sculpture Structuring the Cube makes something surprisingly organic, suggestive of the workings of a crayfish鈥檚 eye, from a tiny vocabulary of rods and triangles. Meanwhile, Stefan Bertalan鈥檚 Structure of the Elderflower earns its place by virtue of its exquisite draughtsmanship. This being the 1970s, the Sigma group also enjoyed a lot of more-or-less undressed mucking about, and became a focus of dissent against Nicolae Ceausescu鈥檚 dictatorship.
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鈥淣ature鈥檚 eradication of human traces can鈥檛 come quickly enough in some cases鈥�
The other artists, groups and movements in this show rarely achieved as direct an engagement with the natural world.
Many pieces here index human activity through changes in the environment. The models and photographs of Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan鈥檚 Debrisphere record how landscapes have been altered for military purposes. More often, though, the art focuses on how nature encroaches on human settlement. In Arena, Anri Sala records the decayed state of Tirana zoo, with feral dogs occupying a space meant for people, while the zoo鈥檚 鈥渨ild鈥� animals languish in cages.
Nature鈥檚 eradication of human traces can鈥檛 come quickly enough in some cases. In 2003, Polish sculptor Miroslaw Balka visited Auschwitz and filmed deer grazing by the barbed wire fence of the concentration camp. A wall board observes that, in 1942 (when Bambi was released), 鈥渨hile cinemagoers were shedding tears about the emotional story of a little deer, the 鈥榝inal solution鈥� and the murder of millions of people was already being planned鈥�. This is silly: would the world be any better if Bambi鈥檚 bereavement left us unmoved?
It gets worse. Exquisite allegorical frescoes by 18th-century artist Johann Wenzel Bergl are 鈥渞ecognizable as strategies of absolutist picture propaganda鈥�. And back with Dion: one installation capturing 鈥渢he lifestyle and self-image of the prototypical ethnographer of colonial times鈥�, isn鈥檛 even that, according to the curators, but alludes 鈥渢o our own imagination of that ethnographer鈥�.
I left feeling rather as Lewis Carroll鈥檚 Alice might have felt if, instead of freely stepping through the mirror, she had been shoved through it from behind by a gang of goonish anthropologists.
Natural Histories is a portal into a world where history, politics, horror, guilt and the natural world are sewn together. It is well worth seeing, but I wish the curators had shut up.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淛ust experience it鈥�
