Making Nature: How we see animals at The Wellcome Collection
Richard Ross, Museum National D'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France 1982 1
The world is split. One half sees them as resources and products, there for human use, as a result shamefully exploited and killed in industrial numbers. The other half sees them as conscious, intelligent beings, capable of companionship and deserving of respect. And there are those who, in an exericse of extreme cognitive dissonance, hold both views: loving their dogs but eating pigs; tending to cattle before sending them to slaughter. In these contexts, Making Nature: How We See Animals, the Wellcome Collection’s examination of how humans observe other species, in 2016, was always going to be significant, often heart-breaking.
The now-seminal exhibition was the start of a year-long (and long overdue) exploration of what humans think, feel and value about other species and the consequences for both them and the planet. It does this through over 100 fascinating objects from literature, film, taxidermy and photography, organised around four themes – ‘Ordering’, ‘Displaying’, ‘Observing’ and ‘Making’.
Ordering offered a clear-eyed reflection of the Enlightenment-era obsession with natural classification, interrogating the way, as in Charles Bonnet’s Scale of Natural Being, from 1783, humans dominated evolutionary scales. One of the displays featured a diorama of taxidermied fox cubs, frolicking against an artificial landscape, at once sentimental, expressing a type of love and admiration but underpinned by callousness. No reference is made to how the artist obtained a whole troops of cubs, perhaps the remnants of a mother killed during a hunt.
That indifference diddn’t end with the Victorians, argued the curators. In another example, modernist architect Hugh Casson’s early-’60s designs for a radical new type of elephant house had nothing to do with the requirements of the beast itself. A genetically modified mosquito, on loan from Pittsburgh’s Center for Postnatural History, the first institute to explore animals that have been fundamentally altered by humans, and genetically unable to carry the dengue fever virus, was soon to be released into the wild to breed out the rest. Whether this will be problemmatic for the species that feed on the mosquitoes was never discussed.
Curated by Honor Beddard, the exhibition was clever and moving, questioning the approach of ‘learning through looking’ and charting the changing fashions of museum displays alongside society’s shifting attitudes to the world around us, while examining the search for an authentic encounter with nature.
Of all the projects that linger, Allora and Calzadilla’s film installation ‘The Great Silence’ stands alone, juxtaposing footage of Arecibo Observatory’s transmitter, used to broadcast messages into outer space in search of extra-terrestrial intelligence, with the reality of the endangered parrots trying to survive in the diminishing landscape around it. The accompanying text, written from the perspective of the parrots, is at once doomed but affectionate: “You be good. I love you.” it ends. The message is clear: take care of what you have now.
• Making Nature: How We See Animals was at the Wellcome Collection, London.
