JAMES PROSEK: The mural that I’m working on for “The Singing and the Silence” is kind of a memorial, almost, to the death of the last passenger pigeon, which happened a hundred years ago in 1914. I guess the whole exhibition is kind of centered around that event.
You know, it’s kind of common, art historically, to do monuments on walls or memorials on walls, from the stories on the friezes of the Parthenon to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but extinction is a significant event that humans need to think about what it means. I have, certainly, a lot of thoughts about what extinction means, but basically, the mural is a sort of flock of passenger pigeons going through a forest of American chestnuts. The American chestnut is a tree that’s also functionally extinct right now. As with the passenger pigeon, there’s discussions about how to bring them back, possibly, which is a whole other big ethical question. But basically, there’s a flock of passenger pigeons coming through the forest, as the design stands now, and there’s a goshawk preying on one of them, and there’s numbers next to each of the birds, which is symbolic of something else, and then on the right-hand side of the mural, there’s numbers, but no birds. The numbers relate to the names of the birds and how we identify birds in nature, but basically, it’s kind of a memorial to the extinction of the passenger pigeon.
There are other birds in the mural besides the passenger pigeon. One of them, a central one, is a goshawk, which is a bird that can fly very quickly through forests. I’ve actually been chased by them. When you get too close to their nests in the spring, they’ll dive-bomb your head. They’re very aggressive, amazing animals. And that would have been a bird that would’ve preyed on passenger pigeons in the forests where they lived, and so, there’s probably about forty passenger pigeons descending on these chestnut trees to feed, and there’s a goshawk feeding on one of the pigeons— just to kind of bring home that these were animals that lived in an environment and were part of an ecosystem where they were preying on things and being preyed on. There’s also a robin silhouette, there’s a pileated woodpecker, there’s a Swainson’s warbler, a couple other birds that would have lived in the habitat with the passenger pigeon.
And then on the right, where there’s only numbers and no birds, there’s just some random numbers, but most of them are the numbers that were associated with the passenger pigeon. It’s just supposed to kind of— you know, there’s a fence post with some barb wire on the right that symbolizes the presence of man all of a sudden, and then the loss of other things because of man’s presence.
The American chestnut tree is one of my favorite trees, even though when I was a kid growing up in Connecticut, they were already extinct. But apparently in Connecticut, they made up something like fifty percent of the forests around here, hardwood forests of the east coast, a significant part of the population. The floors in my house were taken from an eighteenth century house and they’re American chestnut. It’s a beautiful hardwood. As a kid— a disease from Asia killed the American chestnuts, they were gone by the early twentieth century, but the saplings still sprout from the root stock in the woods, so you get— you can see small American chestnuts still in the woods, but they usually die before they can bear fruit. They die when they’re about two-inch diameter. So, when these chestnuts were around, the fruit of the chestnut was a significant food source for the passenger pigeon, so big flocks would descend on these trees and eat the chestnuts, so they kind of went extinct around the same time. And they had a kind of, not a significant or exclusive symbiotic relationship, but they both were probably important to each other. You know, the passenger pigeon poop probably helped fertilize the trees, you know, who knows? We don’t— part of the thing is, we don’t— humans will never be able to pick apart all the complex intricacies of ecosystems, how one thing affects the other, but the passenger pigeon and the American chestnut had a significant relationship with each other. They were both very abundant in the ecosystem. The passenger pigeon, I’ve read, was as much as twenty-five percent of the bird biomass of North America, so if you put all the birds of North America through a sausage grinder and weighed them, twenty-five percent of the weight of all the birds in North America would’ve been passenger pigeons. So, to lose that biomass must have been significant. And that was also true of the chestnut tree. It was a huge part of eastern forests.
On the left side of the mural, there’s a tree trunk, and a stump, and then a fallen tree. And when I was first starting to do sketches for this forty-foot wall, I wanted to create some kind of triangulation, so the first impulse was that it was just a compositional device to try to— I wanted to create this swirl of passenger pigeons going through the forest, and the triangle helped lead that swirl compositionally. But also, in old growth forests, you have trees that have fallen in the woods, and those old trees, or even new trees that have been hit by lightning or however they came to fall, sustained a lot of animals on the ground and then the leaf litter as they decay, so there’s a whole ecosystem in the soil, the bacteria that help decay the leaves and the trees, and there’s worms living in them, and ferns and moss will grow on them. And in temperate forests in the northwest, the Pacific Northwest, that are essentially rain forests, they call these “nourish” logs, so these logs that fall in the forest nurture a lot of life.
The silhouettes of the birds on the wall, besides kind of being a memorial to something that’s gone— because a black silhouette, I think, is kind of powerful, not showing every detail of the bird. But the source material for this piece is the end papers to the first significant field guide in North America, which was Roger Tory Peterson’s “A Field Guide to the Birds,” from 1934. I think in the second edition he had drawn these beautiful silhouettes of birds with numbers next to them, and the numbers match up to a list of names to how people identify the different species of birds. A major theme in a lot of my work over the years has been about how we name and order the natural world— what it means to join words to nature. Nature is fluid and continuous and constantly changing, but in order to communicate it, humans have to chop that fluidity into pieces, so that immediately sets up a false impression of what the world is really like. It sounds complicated, but to me it’s kind of a major crisis in how we communicate nature. The species idea is very imperfect, because nature is not composed of discrete units that fit into boxes, it’s all interconnected. It’s this big, woven tapestry— you can use any kind of metaphor you want. But, so, I can be a little bit critical of the whole enterprise of going into nature and saying, “Ooh, that’s a cardinal, that’s a flicker, that’s a pileated woodpecker,” because sometimes people will just learn the name of something and think they know what that is or what that means and they move on, when the fact is that a lot of ornithologists are in disagreement about how exactly to split that diversity, and currently, many ornithologists would take the eight- to ten-thousand named bird species of the world, and split them into seventeen- to twenty-thousand species, so what would that do to field guides? What would that do to how we see nature? So a big point of the mural is that the way we choose to split and name nature affects the way we perceive and the way we see it, because if we name more units, then we see more things. Nothing exists in human reality unless we give it a name.
So, I’ve been making these bird silhouette murals since about 2007. The first one I did was at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. So, the basic idea is that there’s silhouettes of birds with numbers on the wall, but I leave the key of names off the wall so people can’t identify them, and I want people to feel frustrated that they can’t satisfy that urge to know what the name is, because we’re very name-driven, we’re very box-driven. We label everything, from birds to ourselves. Everybody— you know, you go to a cocktail party and somebody asks you what you do, and you have to say something. Like, I usually say, “visual artist,” but I also like to write and do other things, so it’s difficult, classification, basically. I just want people to acknowledge that classification and taxonomy is not an exact science, but something that’s very much in a constant state of debate.
Having a piece like this that kind of critiques the way we look at nature and the way we use names to go into nature, and the way we dismiss nature once we think we know what it is because we know its name, to have that in an art museum is kind of interesting because I think that we go through art museums sometimes in the same way. We sort of check little pictures off our box: we’ve seen the Van Gogh, we’ve seen the Manet, and art historians think a lot like scientists, at least taxonomists. Art history tends to be told in a very linear way, that one person influences the next, and it kind of evolves in a very much, like, “Tree of Life” situation. But the reality is that influence is very hard to track from one artist to the next, from one movement to the next, and that there’s messy little tendrils that stick out and that we just tend to squash because we don’t want that messiness. We want that neat, linear path, and art history’s much easier to teach if we can reduce it to those stupid, linear, you know, “this person begat that person,” but that’s not really how nature works. And I think it would be an interesting exercise to take the labels off the wall sometimes and just have pictures, without the title, without the name of the artist. Some artists have tried to achieve that state of unnamed-ness by calling a work “Untitled,” but to me, “Untitled” is the same as a title, it’s just a— I have called works “Untitled,” but I think it’s a little bit pretentious. It would be better just to leave the label off the wall.
But, you know, the fact is that names are very valuable. They’re really our first step to coming to know the world. We wouldn’t be able to communicate the world without them. Like, you know, you and I, the viewer, can sit in a closet, and I can say the word “cow,” and we could both conjure an image of a cow in our heads without a cow even being there, which is very powerful, but as much as names allow us to see things, they also can limit our view. If we think that we have a picture in our head of what that thing is once we know the name of it, a label can limit us and can limit our perspective, so I think we all have to strike a balance between the named world and the unnamed world. The named world is a world where we come into the world saying, “this is this,” and “this is that.” It’s how every child learns what something is, you know, a parent points to a ball and says, “What is that?” and they say, “It’s a ball,” and that’s how you learn, but there’s another aspect to human experience where you don’t need to know the names of things, where you’re jogging or doing yoga or meditating or whatever way you would— or fishing, or whatever way you achieve that unnamed experience where you don’t have to use language to navigate through the world. And we all have to, I think, in order to lead a rich life, enter both worlds. So, what I’m basically saying is that life is about the friction between the unnamed world and the named world, and, you know, that something like this mural of bird silhouettes with numbers is just meant to — you know, as a checks and balances kind of thing — have people acknowledge that we can’t rely too heavily on language because language, in the end, is just a tool, and any tool can be very useful, but it can also be dangerous. A hammer can build a house, but it can also bludgeon someone to death, and names and language are very powerful and can’t be treated, you know, lightly.
