The Ambiguity of Wonder
Mark Dion, Christine Baeumler, and Eleanor McGough at Gallery Co
Artists have sought to represent the natural world for almost as long as people have been awed into reverential silence by nature’s sublime attractions. Historically, the convergence of nature and art has been, if not tumultuous, subject to occasional controversy—think, for example, of Damien Hirst’s carcasses floating in formaldehyde or the insects in Huang Yong Ping’s work. The paintings, drawings, and photographs assembled in Naked Wonder do not invite such debate; instead, the artwork seems to beckon us to share both the profound sense of wonder at nature’s “intricacies, beauty, secrets, and revelations,” as curator Colleen Sheehy puts it, and to wonder, speculatively, how our human actions might look like from the perspective of sentient creatures big and small, who cannot help but be impacted by our way of life. This ambiguity of wonder allows both for reveling in an old-fashioned sort of aesthetic beauty and for a very timely recognition of our human involvement in the fate of nature’s miraculous frailties.
Naked Wonder is an intelligent show that allows each of the three artists to articulate and share her or his particular vision of nature. Christine Baeumler’s paintings of aquatic life provide us with an imaginary entry point into an alien world, beautifully colorful and vibrant, filled with sentient creatures and, very prominently, their eyes, which look back at us blankly, without sentiment or sentimentality. Eleanor McGough’s work does not take us to exotic oceanic locations but to the microscopic: exquisitely rendered sub-cellular geometries unfold in many layers, tricking the eye into imagining motion and light wafting through forests of tangled grasses, where plankton, pollen, or spores glisten for a split second in a ray of lunar light.
While McGough’s work lends itself to such poetic reverie, Mark Dion’s photographs are of a more prosaic nature: they take us into his extended backyard, a farm in Pennsylvania, where the artist has been documenting the secret life of deer. At times, the deer barely seem to materialize out of mist, are caught in fleeting motion, grazing placidly, or in awkward mid-stride. Each photograph is individually framed, diligently stamped with the words “Bureau of Remote Wildlife Surveillance,” and arranged in a rigid grid that resonates with the mechanics of surveillance technology. Here, the image of romanticized nature—it’s Bambi, after all, not some dirty animal—meets bureaucratic espionage. This unexpected collision brings nature and culture into close contact and raises an important if oft-stated point: what we call nature, what we appreciate as the natural world, is always a creature of culture.
In Dion’s work, the “nature” in question is both a mundane and secretive sort: in the Midwest, deer are everywhere, their habitat expanding with the spread of suburbia. Shot for fun and sport, tragically familiar as road kill, spotted in unlikely places in the middle of the city, deer are everywhere. But in Dion’s photographs, the deer become reclusive strangers, whose inexplicable customs must be closely and suspiciously watched. The pop-cultural incarnation of innocence takes on a tongue-in-cheek sinister edge here, warranting even remote surveillance.
Clearly, it does not take a leap of the imagination to connect the activities of Dion’s “Bureau of Remote Wildlife Surveillance” with not-so-recent political events. Nature becomes an idiom for indirect political commentary here and the deer, those beautiful creatures, invite us to examine our preconceived notions about them: pest, food, menace, or gentle big-eyed innocence incarnate.
While Dion’s photographs make us take a second look at deer that suddenly look very strange indeed, McGough’s paintings invite us to zoom in on what we usually do not see: either because it is too small or because we have seen it a hundred times and can’t be bothered to look again. Familiarity makes us incapable to see the wonder in something as simple and everyday as grasses and reeds. Her paintings and drawings ask for a pause, a conscious act of taking the time to notice the extraordinary in the minute and familiar, and a recognition of the artist’s focused attention that has not only bothered to look this closely but captured the beauty of sub-cellular structures and tangled grasses, reeds, and tubers alike.
Yet McGough’s art is not a slave to accurate representation: what looks like the elastic legs of an octopus emerge playfully from in between the grassy fronds, and topple any understanding of this work as botanical drawing or mimetic representation. Sub-atomic structures drift across shadowy reeds and ornamentally rendered flower heads seem ready to pop off the canvas.
The appeal to see the extraordinary in the ordinary and the ordinary transformed into the extraordinary, the miraculous even, has held human imagination in its thrall for a long time. Curator Sheehy references the Renaissance Wunderkammern, cabinets of wonder that presented idiosyncratic collections of natural objects, which, thus displayed, became objects worthy of aesthetic appreciation in and of themselves. Yet different from this practice of removing a natural object and treating it as a ready-made object of aesthetic merit, the art work of Naked Wonder does not revolve around the natural object per se or even its representation by an artist’s hand. What the artwork by Dion, McGough, and Baeumler investigates is intricate relationships, modes of connectedness, and interdependence in the natural world, which happens to include us, a very successfully propagating species of mammal.
Dion’s work considers how we view, interact, and basically share a habitat with deer. McGough’s many-layered paintings pay homage to the infinitely complex interactions that go on in the microscopically minute and the ostensibly familiar. Baeumler’s work, too, revolves around recognizing complex relations: at first glance, her paintings take us deep under water and far, far away—but the point is that far, far away is actually quite close when it comes to the impact of humans on frail ecosystems. The Midwest, for instance, is substantially involved in the creation of the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico. While it may be far, far away geographically, the fact remains that the Midwest’s agricultural run-off is largely responsible for the steady growth of an area devoid of marine life. So, as we marvel at the sheer beauty of Baeumler’s seascapes and the strangeness of the creatures that populate them, we should also wonder what those big eyes—another case of big, presumably innocent eyes—see when they look at us: predators? Clueless polluters? Creatures who have very urgent choices to make?
Contemplating the beauty of Baeumler’s work—in fact, of all the work gathered in Naked Wonder—makes me wonder if simply “wondering” is truly enough. Baeumler has clearly reached the conclusion that it is not, as her involvement with community organizations, a nature sanctuary and a local park attests to. Perhaps we need to wonder first—at the awe-inspiring places that have made this art possible—and then proceed to wonder, quite actively, what we can do to keep them and their mysterious creatures alive. Naked wonder alone may be an ambivalent indulgence these days. Perhaps it goes without saying that looking at art, even if it is as stunning as in this show, is different from looking at nature. One cannot substitute for the other. It would be a terrible loss if, one day, these imaginary journeys into nature were all that was left to us.
This essay was previously published on mnartists.org in the fall of 2007.
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