Fisherman's Trophy: Roger Ballen

Roger Ballen
Fisherman's Trophy
Digital Photograph
TLC Extension Collection (South Africa, 202)

Overview: A digital photograph depicts a taxidermy specimen of a downward-pointing fish with open mouth above a taxidermy specimen of a small bird, perhaps a chick, affixed to a wooden platform, in a circle of dirt and pebbles. The shadows of  fish,  bird, and platform are visible on the wall behind.


Artist's Statement:  The image might convey a metaphor for one being at the mercy of a force larger than oneself that one has little hope of overcoming.

Mark Auslander:  Both the image and the accompanying abbreviated artist's statement are enigmatic.  Other than the occasional shark, fish are not in the habit of eating baby birds, and this is clearly not a shark. Is this an image of an actual fisherman's trophy, or a fanciful artifice photoshopped by the artist himself? It is far from clear what the referenced "metaphor" might stand for.  Is the microscopic SARS-CoV-2 really "larger" than the human hosts it infects?  Is the devouring fish a stand-in for the spiraling pandemic and associated economic pain inflicted by the Lockdown, locally and globally?  Is the chick, seemingly oblivious to the descending peril, a representative of clueless humanity on the verge of decimation?

Perhaps the ominous "force larger than oneself" being evoked is the linked practice of taxidermy and of trophy-taking, and the entire sensibility these activities embody--to wit,  the belief that humans stand in a relationship of unquestioned dominion over the realm of nature.  Hunters and fishers routinely commission taxidermists to create tableaux incorporating their prizes, sometimes in naturalistic, or sometimes, as in this case, utterly absurd poses. Nature in these mises en scène is reduced, in the seemingly omniscient gaze of the human master,  to something outside of and subordinate to ourselves,  its extracted elements to be freely re-arranged and manipulated according to our will.  This was a principle inherent in classic natural history museums, which through taxidermy displays by and large celebrated the extraction of nature's bounty within an overarching narrative of biological and social evolutionism, honoring the survival of the fittest according to a natural and political hierarchy that equated might with progress. The greater devours the lesser, on and on.

This is, one might argue, precisely the mode of thinking that got us into our current mess, including climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. Uncontrolled human expansion into previously intact biodiverse ecosystems, impelled by an ideology of unquestioned human dominion over nature, has brought people into ever closer contact with wild organisms, including bats (which constitute about one quarter of all mammalian species) that serve as catalyzing reservoirs for emergent viral pathogens.  Taxidermy could be seen as a symptom of our underlying condition, of the illusion that nature is merely our plaything, a dream state from which we are rudely awakened when nature's beings, however tiny, strike back.

Having said that, there is something to be said for the humor of this digitally created assemblage. The artist seems to be inverting the poster for the movie Jaws (1975), one of the most familiar icons of global visual culture. An enormous phallic, sharp-toothed Great White Shark swims upwards  towards an oblivious,  scantily-clad swimming young woman on the surface. Article of evidence Number One for a feminist critique of the male cinematic gaze, reducing Woman to the objectified victim of voracious male sexual predation, visually and otherwise (Heath 1985; cf. Creed 1993).

In Ballen's version, however, the attacking fish is toothless and rather flacid, and the female swimmer is recast as a fuzzy little chick. Rather than traversing the deep ocean, the birdling is scratching around in the dirt. And rather than emerging from the watery depths, the fish ineffectually dangles down rather ridiculously from above, with a mouth hardly quite big enough to swallow its intended prey.  Not much prowess left at all.  Even the deep blue sea is rendered ineffective, a painted, roughly daubed wall. 

The June 1, 2020 New Yorker cover depicts an anxious person walking though an empty cityscape, apartment windows filled with the shadows of fellow New Yorkers locked in by the Lockdown. The visual joke is that the entire cover is upside down. Turning to the Table of Contents, we learn that artist Richard McGuire has given his cover art work the title, "This Side Up." A fitting commentary for our topsy-turvy zeitgeist, when all the old certainties are gone, and we need instructions about just where Above and Below actually are.  How far have we come from 1975, when we could enjoy the horror flick secure in the knowledge that Roy Scheider would triumph in the end, in mano a mano combat over nature's most fearsome underwater predator.  Nowadays, we aren't even sure which end is up, and no harpoon, however sharp or explosive, avails us in flailing against a danger we can't even see or quite make sense of.  We could try standing on our heads, but that, alas, won't help either. Welcome to the vertiginous fun house of 2020, a hall of mirrors in which we meet the distorted, upside down enemy, only to discover, at the end of the day, that he (or she) is us.



References

Creed, Barbara.  1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. 1 edition, Routledge. 

Heath, Stephen. 1985.  Jaws, Ideology, and Film Theory. in Movies and Methods, Vol II. edited by Bill Nicols. University of California Press. 509-14. 


For more information on the TLC Extension Collection:

www.artistproofstudio.co.za
 https://www.thelockdowncollection.com/extension-collection

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