Killing Beavers

At breakfast the other day, I heard a radio report that the gray wolf has been removed from the endangered species list. Part of a budget deal, the move was cheered by some, decried by others, and taken as an opportunity to manage the animals by Fish and Game departments.

"Wolves are classified as a big-game animal in Idaho," a Fish and Game official said, "and we fully intend to manage them like we do our other big-game animals that we've done successfully, bears and lions, for example." Already the department has sent out helicopters to cull the pack: wolves have been killing off too many elk.

Beyond the oxymoronic implications in the phrase wildlife management, the story left me thinking once again about our fractured relationship with animals and how it reflects the even deeper fissure that has so preoccupied artists and thinkers of the modern era: our fractured relationship with our selves.

The Intervention Paradox
The photograph at the top of this post comes from Joann Brennan's long-term project Managing Eden, in which she documents scientists' efforts to maintain the balance between human and animal needs. Titled Contraceptive Testing, the picture shows scientists with the Colorado Division of Wildlife inserting a catheter in the animal's neck so they can monitor contraceptive drug levels in its bloodstream. This work, along with that of the other photographers in this post, are included in at Earth Now, an exhibition curated by Kate Ware at the Museum of New Mexico, and featured in the accompanying exhibition catalogue. (I'll be posting more on what looks like a great show.)

You can imagine Letterman getting his hands on this one: maybe all they really need in Colorado are some of those Idaho wolves. Like a lot of wisecracks, that insight gets to the central conundrum. We must intervene because we have intervened: if we hadn't intervened then, we wouldn't have to intervene now. But can we stop intervening? And how?

Brennan scrutinizes our tangled relationship with wildlife. She describes her work as "looking for moments of contact between man and animal. I feel these moments tell us something about the complexity of our relationship to nature. Through making this work, I have come to realize that our perception of nature and our relationship to wildness is precarious and full of paradox. It can no longer thrive unassisted and more than ever before, nature depends on us."

As in Contraceptive Testing, Brennan photographs the work of research scientists focused on habitat and population management. She's also documented alternative capture systems developed by the National Wildlife Research Center to develop humane, non-lethal tools to manage predators that attack livestock. She's looked at habitat manipulations: a bat house for bats displaced from University of Florida stadiums pens that enable researchers to study birds, electric fencing to keep animals from raiding crops.

The picture above depicts a (failed) effort to protect beehives from black bears: the Colorado Division of Wildlife provided the fencing, but installation fell to the hapless owner. In an irony reminiscent of the Idaho wolf-Colorado elk puzzle, another photographer in this exhibition, Brad Temkin, offered up the picture at left. That image -- Beehives, Chicago -- comes from his Rooftops series documenting the green roofs that have been planted on the top of the city's civic buildings where black bears are few, even on the ground.

What To Do?

The people portrayed in Daniel Handal's collective portrait provide one answer to the dilemma: sustainable, small-scale farming. These photographs, from a larger series Between Forest and Field, document the latest back-to-the land movement as it's playing out in the Hudson River Valley. The young farmers he's portraying, says Handal, “are looking for ways to build a saner, healthier life for themselves and their families while providing healthy, locally grown food for their communities.”

In effect, their full-on rejection of factory farming is an attempt to sidestep the paradox: rather than intervention in the form of industrial agriculture, they opt for collaboration with the natural world. As admirable as the idealism and enterprise of this generation of small farmers may be -- and as seductive their slowed-down, bucolic lives may seem --  their model relies on customers who can afford to pay a premium for their produce.

Don't get me wrong: I'm one of those urban-dwelling, farmers-market customers. But it seems to me that, with a world population approaching seven billion -- more than half of them living in cities -- the locavore movement needs to figure out how to scale up. 

We may really need those Chicago rooftops. 

A Cautionary Tale

I'll close with the story of Phil Underdown and his family, dedicated environmentalists who moved to the Adironacks to be close to nature. Shortly after their arrival, a colony of beavers established themselves in the creek that runs along one side of Underdown's property.

Every bit as intent on settlement as their human neighbors, the beavers dammed a creek, felled trees, and wreaked havoc with the septic system – and a reluctant Underdown hired a trapper. His series, Trapper’s Lament, documents the aftermath: what was left behind after the beavers were removed.

As Underdown writes, “I recycle, I drive a Prius, I give money to environmental organizations … and I kill beavers.”

One way or another, don't we all?

______________________

P.S. Google "Earth Now" and, if you're like me, your first hit will be from the U.S. Geological Survey. The site displays images taken by the Landsat satellites as they orbit the Earth.  

The Death Mask in the Darkroom 1

On June 15, 2010, Frances Rodick died in a Montreal nursing home at the age of 91. Suffering from Alzheimer's since the 1990s, she had, in one sense, already passed away from the world she shared with the rest of us into some other, completely private place.

When she died, her son, Frank, did something that was once commonplace but now has the power to shock. He made a photograph of her.

A Modern Taboo

Another friend once confessed to me that he had taken a post-mortem photograph of his grandfather, and the undertone of shame in the telling was unmistakable.

Even Rodick, whose art plunges wholeheartedly into the realms of nightmare, seemed just a little uneasy about what became of the image he'd snapped. [Pictured above: 97537 (Frances Rodick, in death), no. 1].

As he puts it, “Making this image … was like doing something that got out of hand and became a crime of sorts. Before I knew it, I'd gone further and in directions other than I expected. It made me feel like there was a third person involved somehow, but that third person was me, like looking in a mirror and not, for a time anyway, recognizing one’s own reflection.”

At this juncture, such photographs are evidence of a taboo broken. But it was not always so.

Early in its history, the camera was used quite freely to record the remains of the deceased. Many of these pictures depicted children, whose passing would have been particularly hard-felt. They were, often, the only visual record of the departed, and they must have seemed a godsend to bereaved families.

Those pictures might also be understood as the modern world’s answer to the ancient practice of making death masks. The impulse to preserve a likeness of the dead has resulted in far-flung and persistent rituals, with cultures from the Egyptian to the Aztec and every era from Classical Rome to 19th-century Europe leaving behind death masks.

This history – the death masks, the post-mortem pictures – can be read as a story of domestication. All these images, from the Egyptians on, were intended to save the dead. The urge is to hold on to the pharaoh, the king, the poet, the beloved — as though we could prolong the life by making a cast of the flesh.

We want very much just to keep on living and living, and yet we know full well that we won't.

A Brief History of the Death Mask

Today, the most famous death masks are those that were used in Egyptian burial rites starting in the Middle Kingdom (2025-1700 BC). Made of plastered linen, they were placed over the mummified face to protect the dead from evil as he made his way to the afterworld.

The ancient Egyptians believed that, in addition to your body, you were in possession of a soul, a life-force, and a face. When you died, these elements were loosed from the body. But to join the “blessed dead” in the afterlife, they needed a vessel: the body itself. Hence, the exceptional attention to preserving the physical remains – the mummification – and all that provisioning, the foodstuffs, the household items and, for the very wealthy, the statues, called shabti, that would act as servants in the afterworld. Even among the poor, the surviving family was expected to drop food off every now and again for the departed.

The most famous of these funerary masks is that of Tutankhamun, whose tomb was discovered in 1922 by a British archaeologist Howard Carter. In the process of excavation, Carter and his team wrought a fair amount of damage, cutting off the limbs and head and more or less forcibly removing the famous gold mask, which had become fused to the face over the centuries.

In 2005 forensic scientists set out to reconstruct the pharoah’s face. Led by Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, three independent teams of physical anthropologists and forensic artists drew on 1,700 cross-sectional CAT scan images of Tutankhamun’s skull to create a likeness of the boy king. Two of the teams – one French, the other Egyptian – knew whose skull they were looking at but an American team, serving as the control, worked blind. All three busts came out looking remarkably alike. More than three thousand years after his death, the boy king got a new death mask.

But the Egyptians weren't the only ones to engage in the practice. In ancient Rome, families made a wax impression of the family patriarch when he died; they used it in the funeral procession but then placed it on the household altar, preserving it for as long as the wax held up.

A similar custom prevailed in Medieval Europe. At the death of the king, the court painter immediately made a death mask that served as the model for a full-scale likeness. Great care was taken in making these objects. Given real hair, clothed in the royal robe and crowned, the figure lay in state for a week and then accompanied the coffin (carrying the actual corpse) in the funeral procession. The wax death masks are long gone, as are many of the effigies, but go to Westminster Abbey today and you can see a wooden figure of Edward III, based on his death mask and carried at his funeral procession (above).

In France, these royal effigies didn’t survive the Revolution, but the practice, adapted to a more democratic age, survived. In 1761, Philippe Curtius, a doctor of Bern, took into his household his young niece, whose her father had died in the Seven Years War. Curtius was particularly skilled at crafting anatomical wax models and taught his niece, a precocious six-year old named Anna Marie Grosholtz, the craft.

In 1776, they moved to Paris to open a salon where he put on display waxwork models of the great men of the day. Anna herself made many of these figures – among them, Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin – and proved so adept at the craft that she was summoned to Versailles to teach Louis XVI’s sister.

According to her later account, those court connections landed her in prison during the Revolution and, there, her captors compelled her to create death masks from the decapitated heads of the Royals and, later, Danton, Robespierre, Marat, and others.

Whatever its truth, the tale served her well when she emigrated to England, where there was little love lost either for the French or its Revolution. In 1794, Curtius died, and the following year, his niece married Francois Tussaud and brought the collection of wax figures to Britain. She remained there for the rest of her life, first touring her exhibition up and down the isles and later settling it down in a hall in Baker Street. The show included the original collection of life masks of Enlightenment celebrities, but the real draw was the Chamber of Horrors — the death masks of the Revolution’s perpetrators and victims.

Death and the Photograph

The democratic aspirations of the French Revolution notwithstanding, Mme. Tussaud's waxworks were reserved for kings, philosophers, scientists – the "great men." No such efforts would ever have been expended for the masses. For the great unwashed, we would need the camera.

The camera recast a practice that had focused exclusively on the elite into something for anyone with the means to hire a photographer. Now anyone’s image – not just the king’s – could be preserved for the ages.

Like the wax figures of the French kings, post-mortem photographers made every effort to preserve the illusion of life. The subject, often a young child, was typically depicted in an attitude of sleep – as though the deceased might awaken at any moment.

By the time these pictures were made, the American conception of death had evolved from the stern Puritan notion so clearly exemplified by the death’s head and winged skulls that crown 17th-century headstones throughout New England. In the Puritan world view, we are all sinners deserving of eternal damnation. God in his mercy does elect a handful for salvation, but we have no way of effecting our fate. Since even the most devout may be cast into the pit of Hell, death offers no comfort, no guaranteed ticket to Paradise. 

By the 19th century, the imagery of death – lambs and angels and beautiful dreamers – reflected a gentler view of death. The religious revival that swept the country at turn of the century – the Second Great Awakening – replaced strict Calvinist notions like predestination with the far more optimistic belief in redemption through inner faith. Believers could take comfort in the idea that, come the Resurrection, the righteous departed would awaken and be reunited with family in the heaven. 

The imagery of death reflected this new evangelical spirit. In funerary art, the grim angel of death is replaced by weeping willows, winged cherubs, and lambs. In post-mortem photographs, death is similarly romanticized: the deceased, especially children and women, are depicted as beautiful dreamers.

Hung in the parlor, sent to friends and relatives, or worn in lockets or pocket mirrors, these pictures offered comfort to the bereaved. In the 19th century, when photography hadn’t yet saturated the culture, sitting for your portrait might have easily been a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Hence, the market for the post-mortem photograph: if you hadn’t been photographed during your lifetime, the image made after death would be the only possible visual record of your existence. (For a comprehensive study of the subject, see if you can get your hands on Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America by Dr. Stanley B. Burns or Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America, by Jay Ruby.)

Back to the Beginning

As I was researching this piece, I stumbled on Undying Faces: A Collection of Death Masks, a charming book published in 1927. It’s my source for the bit about Medieval kings, but it got me thinking. The author, Ernst Benkard, envisions the history of the death mask as a linear story, a progression from a world ruled by religion and magic to the one bequeathed to us by the “healing skepticism” of the 18th century. 

In this view, all those early examples – Tutankahmun, Edward III – were made merely in service to superstitious funeral rites, whereas the kind made by Tussaud enacted the Enlightenment ideal of individualism. But how is making a death mask of the 18th-century German poet Gotthold Ephraim Lessing any less “superstitious” an act than making a death mask of the 17th-century king Henri IV?

If you think about what has driven this history, you can indeed discern a number of proximate motives: a religious responsibility to usher the dead into the next life, the societal need to mark the transition of power, a psychological desire to comfort the living. Step back, though, and you might suspect that all these folks are chasing after the same, unanswerable question: what is death anyway?

None of those historical motives come into play in Rodick’s work. The product of a doubt-filled era, 95537 defies any of the small comforts offered by the Egyptians or the Victorians. More savage than domesticated, more Puritan death’s head than beautiful sleeper, it promises no comfy afterlife, provides no solace to the bereaved. Rather, it proposes death as the end. Full stop.

So how does 95537 fit in? Although Rodick offers none of the comforting visions of continuity proposed by all those who've crafted death masks before him, he is – like them – transfixed by the mystery.


Next in this series: The Window & The Mirror

Hollywood & the Coming Apocalypse

The Judgment Day has been rescheduled, but that's no reason for us to stop thinking about End Times.

Here's a video link to the Slovenian critical theorist Slavoj Zizek on Alfonso Cuaron's film adaptation of P.D. James's dystopian vision The Children of Men. To listen, click here.

And here's Zizek on disaster films, from an interview on Haaretz.com:

"Apparently it's so hard for us to imagine a new global utopian project based on work and cooperation, that the only way we can entertain the thought is to pay a mental price of extreme catastrophe. What fascinates me about disaster films is how circumstances of vast catastrophe suddenly bring about social cooperation. Even racial tensions vanish. It's important at the end of Independence Day that everyone pulls together -- Jews, Arabs, Blacks. Disaster films might be the only optimistic social genre that remains today, and that's a sad reflection of our desperate state. The only way to imagine a utopia of social cooperation is to conjure a situation of absolute catastrophe. Disaster films might be all that's left of the utopian genre."

See you October 21.