Everything has a name…
Gasworks, London, UK
Matthew Buckingham, Muhheakantuck – Everything has a name (2003)
‘Everything has a name, or the potential to be named’ is a group exhibition that focuses on the fall-out following Europe’s colonial expropriation of the Americas. The show’s piqued critique is levied at the scientific adventurers of the 17th and 18th centuries – those early cartographers, botanists and engineers whose propensity for neat categories erased older, indigenous patterns – and finds resonances today in the continuing issues of land rights, cultural marginalisation and political disenfranchisement.
Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves traces the ghost of this shady imperialism in ‘This is Not an Apricot’ (2009), a series of 20 watercolours of various fruit that Amazonian peoples call ‘apricots’ (or, presumably, whatever the Portuguese equivalent is). Alves, an activist who helped found her country’s Green Party in 1986, undoubtedly has a great commitment to the rapidly disappearing Amazonian ecology. More elegiac is Matthew Buckingham’s 16mm film Muhheakantuck – Everything has a name (2003), which traces Henry Hudson’s 1609 mission up the river that now bears his name.
Antonio Caro, Maiz (Corn, 1972-2009)
Plants and politics mix in Antonio Caro’s graphic logo of the corn plant (Maiz, 1972-2009), which is hung outside the gallery. Inside, in Gabriel Sierra’s Cola verde o verde refresco (2003-9), plants grow verdantly from the side of black-taped cartons. Nearby, Miler Lagos presents what appears to be a log, but is, in fact, a pile of sculpted re-prints of an engraving by Carl von Martius (a 19th-century botanist and Amazon explorer). More startling is Vasco Araujo’s video O Jardim (2005), which conflates images of muscular colonial statues of Africans with spoken snippets from Homer.
A witty riposte to vegetative imperialism is Jimmie Durham’s Black Walnut (2005), a text and set of carved sculptures that traces the migration of a species of tree from the mid-west of America to the icy steppes of Russia. However, the work that clinched the show for me was Alberto Baraya’s Herbario de plantos artificiales (Herbarium of Artificial Plants, 2001-present), a comic-yet-poignant photographic archive of plastic flowers. The categories, which indicate the place in which the plants were found, include: ‘eatery’, ‘toilets’ and ‘funeral homes’.
More urgent are Abraham Cruzvillegas’ lyrics, which, pencilled directly onto the gallery wall, seem both fresh and honest. Veteran Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer presents Amanaplanacanalpanama (1995), an installation that memorializes on brass plaques the construction of the Panama Canal by early-20th-century US industrialists (the canal was only finally ceded to Panama in 1999). Andrea Geyer’s Spiral Lands/Chapter 2 (2008) consists of a slideshow depicting images of the American West – breathtaking, big-sky country – with a recorded soundtrack spoken by the artist that incorporates quoted snippets from a range of famous cultural thinkers and anonymous indigenous speakers. It is also, however, a bathetic exercise in portentous hectoring: ‘Quiet now!’ she urges dramatically, ‘You will hear it breathing!’
Geyer’s ripostes come across as untimely; the old-fashioned scientific imperialists have left the scene. Instead, I’d suggest that scientists and sociologists are now more often the principal defenders of habitat, equality and land rights. Categories that once oppressed can, surely, also be used to protect.
Colin Perry
Responses
There are no responses yet for this article.
