DANCING WITH ALL at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa toys with a tension between what’s ‘real’ and what’s artifice
There’s a moment, midway through this exhibition, when you’re looking at a video of a male eight-eyed Maratus jumping spider, so colourful it looks like it was designed by an artist, performing a dance designed to attract a mate. Against a stark white backdrop, it makes it seem that it is always and already in a gallery, like a work of art, a performance piece. You’re standing on a plate that conveys the vibrations triggered by the creature’s throbbing abdomen. In real life you’d never feel it because the spider is around 4mm big. The whole thing is designed to attract the female spider – who appears on a second screen, egging the male on. The work, On the Origins of Art I–II (2016), is credited to Sydney-based Colombian Maria Fernanda Cardoso. Not the spider (which is also native to Australia). But it sets up a tension between what’s ‘real’ and what’s artifice, or where one stops and the other begins, that is productively toyed with throughout this group exhibition featuring works by over 20 artists or groups from around the world, which incorporates works that deploy organic materials, digital tools, re- and upcycling projects, traditional ink techniques, fabric works and scientific collaborations.
Aki Inomata’s How to Carve a Sculpture (2018–) is a collection of wooden beams, offered to beavers living in five zoos, that were subsequently gnawed into shapes that resemble Giacometti- or Enkū-style sculptures. The beams were then copied and enlarged to human scale (by humans). The final display is a mix of human and beaver versions. Each one of the latter is labelled with the species of beaver that carved it, their name, zoo and the date of the work.
Adrián Villar Rojas’s colossal sculpture The End of the Imagination I (2022) looks like some dirty, industrial winged demon, reminiscent of the protagonist of Richard Stanley’s cult horror-film Hardware (1990), a military robot that self-assembles out of junk. Villar Rojas’s version is assembled by humans, machines and an AI that (using a virtual rendition of the sculpture) simulates the effects of time on social and environmental situations over thousands of years, out of concrete, soil, bits of glass, automobile parts and recycled plastics. The idea seems to be that the software has guided the ultimate form that this collection of materials has taken. That it has evolved as much as it has been made (and in that sense is animate). It generally has the look of something emerging, unbidden, from a landfill site. Above it, on the ceiling, is an enlarged reproduction of Piero della Francesca’s painting Madonna del Parto (1450–75), which was, presumably, another inspiration for the work: it’s unclear if the sculpture is what the pregnant virgin has given birth to; whether we’re supposed to be looking at two radically different ideals of beauty; or if we’re collectively looking at an evolution of aesthetic ideals. But in terms of the show itself, it expands the discussion of nonhuman intelligence and the related ones about authorship (and the idea that any ‘authorship’ can be individual in an absolute sense), as well as the notion that any idea can be ‘new’ or not influenced conceptually or materially by that which came before (the nothing-comes-from-nothing argument). While forcefully framing such discussions within the rubric of ecological Armageddon.
It’s fitting then, for all those reasons, that some of the works on show come as much from the world of science as they do from that of art. PNAT, an independent company associated with the University of Florence working in the field of collaborations between artificial and natural environments, has a micro-greenhouse full tropical plants that acts as an air purification system (Fabbrica dell’Aria, 2023), presumably being developed for use in domestic dwellings. Just as it is fitting that there is space (a room, in fact) for paintings and drawings by Indigenous peoples from the Amazon, the Pacific Northwest and Africa that reflects the necessary interlinkage of human and nonhuman ecosystems in any holistic view of what it takes to create and sustain life. Though this does leave you wondering why the focus has to be on Indigenous art from overseas, rather than on some of the Indigenous philosophies (say, of the Ainu people) of Japan, where various types of shamanism (akin to that captured in the work of Joseca Yanomami, which features here, for example) and similarly holistic outlooks on the world play an equally important role. Then again you could argue that what the internationalism of this exhibition demonstrates is the fact that climate change and ecological destruction represent a planetwide emergency. And any response needs to be interspecies and interdisciplinary in scope.
DANCING WITH ALL: The Ecology of Empathy at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, through 16 March
