feature nina Katchadourian
that links her interest in literal translation and her lifelong fascination
for explorers. “I have a very long-standing fascination… an absolute
obsession with shipwreck stories”, she now says, before recounting the
story of Dougal Robertson, a Scottish farmer who in 1972 tried to sail
round the world with his family: they spent almost 40 days clinging to a
raft in the ocean. She’s interested, she says, in “the creative mind under
enormous pressure”, its marshalling of resources, flashes of insight
and laborious efforts to maintain life and hope. In Endurance (2002),
a nine-minute video in which film of Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic
expedition is projected on one of her teeth as she smiles at the camera,
Katchadourian parodies her own obsession with such extremes: she
tries, literally, to grin and bear it, but eventually nature takes over and
the artist starts to drool down her chin.
If there’s a strand in her work that best exemplifies, then
rather complicates, her interest in translation, kinship and creative
misprision, it is undoubtedly her numerous works that deploy, refer to
or collaborate with animals. Here Katchadourian reveals the absurdity
of the taxonomic systems that seek to frame the animal world, and at
the same time conjectures that reason, or at least a taste for prodigious
system-building, may not be entirely the preserve of humans. In the
past, she has staged meticulous interventions in the lives and habitats
of creatures of various levels of benignity and anthropomorphism. She
has cross-dressed a snake and a rat in outlandish costumes. She has
repaired broken spiders’ webs with fine red thread, only to find the next
day that the irritated arachnids have dispensed with her clumsy repairs.
In GIFT/GIFT (1998), she introduced the four letters of the title of her
video (in Swedish, gift means ‘poison’), again made of red thread, into a There is something of the inveterate hobbyist or meddler in all
web and watched its owner patiently remove them one by one. of Katchadourian’s work – she apparently cannot stop pulling things
But it’s in three recent works, shown at Sara Meltzer Gallery, apart and reconfiguring them in eccentric ways, so that their original
New York, in 2007, that the animals really begin to flummox the viewer. constructedness becomes clear, often for the first time. That she is not
Zoo (2007) is a 14-screen video installation that draws on footage always sure what she is doing (when she ‘helps’ a spider with its web, or
Katchadourian has been shooting for years at zoos around the world. ‘fixes’ a mushroom with a puncture repair kit) is precisely the point: nor
It’s an extraordinarily disorienting work, even more so as one spends was the inventive insect, or the adventurous mapmaker whose chart
time with it and realises that a patch of gleaming blue plumage that she has pulled apart, or the culture that ‘invented’ a language in the first
fills the screen or a furry expanse that looks like a face are not going to place, before Katchadourian came along and translated it into her own
resolve themselves into recognisable beasts or lovable critters. Zoos, curious, obsessive, meticulous script and obliquely funny tone of voice.
says the artist, “have this very strange agenda”: they want to assure us
that we and the animals are actually alike, that this is after all the source CERCA Series: Nina Katchadourian is on show at the Museum of
of our interest in and empathy with them. But Katchadourian’s Zoo is Contemporary Art, San Diego, from 3 May to 6 July. See listings for
evidence only of their strangeness and of the sheer oddity of standing further details
before them and expecting to be able to translate their movements
and cries into our ways of making meaning.
Equally unsettling is Fugitive (2007): a circle of six monitors,
works
angled upwards from the gallery floor, that show, one after the other in
(In order of appearance)
looped sequence, an orangutan loping along parallel wires, high above its
Accent Elimination, 2005
enclosure at the Washington, DC, zoo: it looked, recalls Katchadourian,
dVd, six-channel video installation, dimensions variable
“like some weird escaping convict wearing a fringed jacket”. As the
Continuum of Cute, 2007
creature slowly makes its way from one screen to another, the viewer
digital prints mounted on aluminium and aluminium shelf,
100 prints at 5 x 5 cm each, edition of five
starts to walk in a circle like a caged animal. “I find that piece very sad”,
says the artist. At the Sara Meltzer show, it contrasted with the frankly
A Short Guide to Writing About Art from the Akron Stacks, (detail),
2001, c-print, 32 x 48 cm, edition of five
hilarious found-photograph piece The Continuum of Cute (2007): a
line of tiny images that depict variously repulsive or endearing animals.
The Genealogy of the Supermarket, 2005
digital prints, frames, wood, wallpaper, dimensions variable
If the concept of beauty is among our habitually least conscious ways
of taxonomising the world around us, the notion of cute is both more
Zoo (stills), 2007
14 dVds, 14 dVd players, 4 projectors, 10 monitors on pedestals
innocent and more knowing at the same time. The urge to rearrange
dimensions variable, edition of three
the images in The Continuum of Cute was overpowering: to mess with
All images
the artist’s definitive decision that a kitten is cuter than a toad, a chicken
courtesy sara Meltzer Gallery, new York
uglier than a koala. In other words: she invited us to tinker with the order
of nature itself.
73 artreview
Nina Kat.indd 73 4/3/08 10:11:53
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