At Cranbrook Institute of Science Through January 3, 2010

Four Taxidermied Heads

T’is the season to forge new territories, expand your horizons, leave the everyday behind and I know just the place to do it: The Cranbrook Institute of Science (http://science.cranbrook.edu). You can become reacquainted with a favorite place while attending an exciting new exhibit! It’s all part of Artology, a year-long program of exhibits and events while the Cranbrook Art Museum is closed for reconstruction.

The exhibit’s title alone, ”Animal Logic” promises some thought-provoking elements alive with visual ironies. Photographs, installations and explorations by New York-based photographer Richard Barnes will not let you down. Be prepared to leave this expedition with a new perspective on wild life, museum life and maybe even your own life.
While photographing archaeological excavations for Yale and University of Pennsylvania in Egypt, Barnes became interested in the idea of how museum collections develop, and their expression of the way the natural world and the human world collide. Specifically, he was drawn to the process of taking the object from its original habitat to it being presented to and interpreted for the public in the museum setting. Barnes eventually found himself “obsessed” with the objects destined to be hidden from view in storage containers, wrapped up and forgotten in some warehoused archive.
Confronted with Barnes’ acutely focused, dramatically lit photographs of atrophied animals–some frozen in a gesture of climbing, flying or moving through space–can in itself take your breath away. Upon closer examination, you begin to notice the artifice of museum paraphernalia. Seeing employees involved in the construction of simulated replicas of their once natural environment adds an additional eerie element to the already mysterious journey these beings must have embarked upon.

Two Chimps

“In doing Animal Logic,” Barnes writes, “I chose to work with collections in natural history museums often undergoing renovation. Granted access to the dismantling process, I was able to cross the proscenium of the stage and go behind the curtain… In these scenarios the conservators, construction workers and scene painters…become replacement actors on the stage. These understudies remind us of our fragile interdependence, just as the animals do in their fictive states of suspended animation.”

Barnes takes this idea further by going beyond drawing our attention to the behind-the-scenes underpinnings of how museums store and display objects. He also shows us museums shedding pieces of their past, and how, for example, the changing political climate makes an impact on the ‘diorama’ as a vehicle for display, as many museums began to phase them out entirely.

The work is organized as a series of photographs and installations of the animal objects themselves. Some are suspended precariously from the ceiling hung with clear fishing line. Dismantled heads of various species are strewn together in a huge acrylic box actually used to store the animal specimens. A video installation titled Murmur brings us into a space in which we are surrounded by three softly lit diffused screens with moving projections taken from still photographs of flocks of starlings migrating in the Roman sky. Murmur is the actual term given to these groups of starlings. Added to the motion of the stills are the actual sounds the birds make while migrating. The series came about when Barnes won the Rome prize in 2005. While there he became infatuated with the subtle graphic-like patterns the starlings created in the sky. The experience involves all the senses, as you feel transported to a distant place.

Problem Shelves

I don’t want to give away all the surprises but photographs of a series of bird nests made from human debris elegantly lit against dark colored Victorian wallpapers are themselves worth the trip. The barely visible wallpaper backgrounds feature bird iconography, the result being these images are deceptively artistic. The nests incorporate brightly saturated colors with natural textures and tones creating beautifully crafted delicate sculptures.

The nests occupy an entirely different context than originally intended, which is the aspects of displacement and disorientation that Barnes brings to the forefront in much of his work. Susan Yelavich points this out in her essay from the book “Animal Logic:”

“The uncanny is the paradoxical sensation of feeling homesick while knowing that a home doesn’t exist anymore. Barnes is alert to the psychic discomfort of ‘placelessness’–a sensation exacerbated by forces of globalization. Today, any residual sense of permanence has been thoroughly undermined.”

Copies of the artist’s book, Animal Logic, are available in the museum bookstore.

This exhibit is part of the University of Michigan’s Theme “Meaningful Objects: Museums in the Academy” and coincides with exhibits at the University of Michigan, University of Michigan Museum of Art, and Museum of Natural History at the University of Michigan.

Other delights to take in at the Science Institute are the natural mineral exhibit, and The Story of Us, an exhibit that references 300 cultural objects with the latest technology including a Hologram guide that has to be seen to believe.

Animal Logic: Photography and Installation by Richard Barnes
Sunday, October 4, 2009 – Sunday, January 3, 2010
Temporary Exhibition Hall at Cranbrook Institute of Science