Chimera

Monday 3pm, Cooper Gallery, Dundee. I am here for Chimera, an exhibition of new and existing work by Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer. At the gallery then, a double set of swing doors, the inner one papered over to shut out the late afternoon sunshine; they lead me to wonder about what lies within the inner sanctum. Once through the doorway and adjusted to the darkness, I find I’m standing near two pillars beyond which is a white wall on which a film is projected… a film ostensibly about lambing and the bloody, visceral act of birthing.   

Did I just write ‘about’? That preposition seems all wrong. Entering a gallery to see an exhibition that doesn’t give up its secrets easily yet actively desires something from me, always but always makes me feel anxious. My first impression is bewilderment. Will I ever ‘get’ it?  The film does not wait for me. It spools on even when I’m having these thoughts, and I find I have to run after it in repeated viewings.

Lamb is shot in an ordinary barn. Sheep are penned in, huddled benignly together chewing straw; milling around with other sheep, moving about doing what sheep do. Lamb also shows the birth of lambs, and doesn’t shy away from the gore of birthing—where what’s inside the body emerges as a messy outside. My eyes are glued onto the screen. In one scene, the hooves of a newborn lamb protrude from the mother’s back end; in another, a pregnant sheep heaves and shudders with the effort of birthing, her eyes glaze over in pain. Mucous drips from her back end as she convulses in her contractions. Body arched in pain, head thrown back, the female sheep stands up with difficulty from where she is lying down and takes a couple of uncomfortable steps; her front legs then buckles again, and she collapses back onto her front. I am thinking that she must be in place where she is all but alone in her labour. Pure pain like this forces a retreat into an animal self to an exclusion of everything else—you focus solely on getting through waves of pain and contractions; your body takes charge here. Some of the flock turnabout in the film; one sheep looks directly at the viewer. This gaze, directed outside the frame of the film, is altogether unnerving. I look; she looks back. I cannot read her… I don’t know what goes through her head. This creature with her strange rectangular pupils refuses my attempts at an easy empathy.

There’s an otherness to the animal that seems to make them categorically different to humans despite attempts to connect. In What I don’t know about Animals, Jenny Diski writes that ‘best guesses’ at knowing what her pet cat Bunty thinks are likely to be thwarted. That fundamentally she cannot know how the cat feels in the way the cat understands itself. That such ‘anthropocentric’ projections are ‘likely to fail on grounds, very simply, that they are cats and I am not.’[i] The sheep with its strange rectangular pupils and its direct gaze reminds me of this.

The film is six minutes long and when it ends, Lamb starts all over again.  The film’s soundtrack with its portentous drum beat and breathy choral accompaniment echo loudly around the bare walls and spaces of this gallery chamber. When I can finally acknowledge the soundtrack, allow it to seep into what I can see projected—not shutting one out to focus on the other—the film morphs into something else. More sound than music, the intermittent vocalisation has few recognizable melodic lines but, instead, seems elemental, primeval even: a ‘quivering sound, a voice bubbling up without direction, vigour, beginning or end, running weakly and shrilly and with an absence of all human meaning… the voice of no age or sex, the voice of an ancient spring sprouting from the earth’.[ii] The soundtrack’s singular drum beat enlarges the pregnant sheep’s contractions, making them more dramatic, and rendering what they signify more portentous. Lamb is played on a six-minute loop; standing in a darkened gallery watching a film start again and again reinforces this impression. It’s as if we’re in the presence of some larger story…

Does the birthing experience suggest something else? Some kind of ritual perhaps that takes us to a transcendent space—outside of an everyday lambing shed, or an everyday gallery space along the Perth Road in Dundee? As viewers, we seem to be encouraged to grope our way towards a deeper something… a somewhere else? Ordinary actions become ritualistic… become performative spaces that lead to a somewhere place. Did I write we? Yes, this pronoun makes sense for while the film may be particularly resonant for women who have experienced childbirth, the start of life and its mysteries must be a wonder for all of us.

To get our head around that… the wonder and mystery of life beginning as if from nothing.

In the larger, more cavernous gallery upstairs, two separate films, Bear and Our Magnolia are projected simultaneously on opposite walls facing each other. On the wall between these two, four long rolls of brown paper have been painted over, and are displayed unframed, one atop another in two rectangular towers, reaching from floor to ceiling. These paintings, monumental in size and in hues of green, are titled Gates. Seen from opposite facing wall, they appear as huge heraldic columns or gateways to a beyond, indicated by the white space between them. In the middle of the gallery’s wooden parquet flooring, two low stone-like sculptures are placed, each is positioned at one end of painted red and brown rolls of paper spread parallel on the floor. I read from the gallery notes: Haystacks made of Garnet, Garnets made of Hay. But they don’t look like haystacks. (Is the artist doing a Magritte, disrupting signifier and signified?). The dark reds and browns of the paper roll that extends flat on the floor in front of the stones might be dried blood… might catch the real and symbolic (even sacrificial) blood of newborn lambs from the film Bear on one side, and the effects of bombings and destruction suggested by Our Magnolia, on the other. The room also contains two smallish grey slate-like rectangular boxes on legs, placed at one end of Haystacks made of Garnet, Garnets made of Hay. Titled Slate Night (i & ii) and made of stone, chalk and pigment, these give the impression of small tomb-like benches, if benches were more container and less plank-like. (I sat on one of them and was roundly told off for my mistake.) Given the noise of the films’ soundtrack reverberating, the objects in the centre of the room have the aura of an enclosed stillness, as if the secrets kept within won’t be shared. In this gallery then, a primal contrast is being staged between the dynamics of the films—flesh, sound, motion, time—and the entombed stillness of sculptural forms.

Our Magnolia begins with a framed shot of a painting by Paul Nash, Flight of the Magnolia, which record the ‘possible invasion of Britain from the skies, which would “flower” with parachutes’. The associations do their work slowly in this time-based art project, to-and-fro from an image of the painting to footage of real magnolias: their blousy petals in the wind, their colours (in shades of white but also purple), close ups of the veins in their petals in hues and form that echo Nash’s painting. These are juxtaposed with an image of a whale or dolphin carcass washed up on a beach in the film—rib bones and dark eye sockets exposed— and then, later, the dark cavernous eyes of Maggie Thatcher, her black lips and elaborate permed coiffure. A series of associative links then to return us to aspects of Nash’s deadly ‘aerial flowers’ in Flight of the Magnolia. ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’, Robert Oppenheimer was to have said.

Bear, the film screened on the other wall, is a sequel to Lamb. Here some sheep in the lambing shed are overlaid with hand-drawn animations of bears. Sometimes the image of the bear is recognizable in outline… other times, loopy doodles with a broad-brushed marker pen fill in the form of the sheep, obliterating its image. Sheep are, of course, in the conventional hierarchy of the natural world, prey creatures, and bears predators. While this superimposition doesn’t, to my mind, make the prey predator, it does sabotage the sense of film as documentary veracity, and call attention to the artifice of the image, its chimerical fusion—bearsheep. Art/artifice is present as much as the ‘real’ in this film, ostensibly ‘about’ lambing. And the sheep have their own language to which viewers (again) are not privy; their actions are caught on camera; some can be read as maternal care—the mother sheep prods a lamb, another checks and licks her lamb; later still, another sheep is depicted nuzzling a lamb to suckle—and others not. Yet another looks directly at the filmmaker and viewer as if to say, ‘what are you looking at?’ But what these gestures really mean as experienced from the point of view of the sheep is less obvious. Some of the newborns wear the skins of other dead (stillborn?) lambs in a farming practice directed at encouraging the adoption of these orphans by those not their birth mothers. Drawings of adult bears with their young are superimposed on the sheep. Bear mother and child too. Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child (divided) used a cow and calf—not a sheep and her lamb. His animals, preserved in formaldehyde and sawn in half in order, display their insides as outsides to elicit shock, awe and revulsion; Mother and Child (divided) is presented with all of the magisterial jokey presumption of the male artist as maestro. Hirst’s creatures have had to die to make art; Bear’s haven’t. The film calls attention to maternity—mother with child. But Bear doesn’t duck death…

The preview of Chimera was attended by many who came to hear both Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer talk about their art as well as their working processes. The place was heaving with bodies: young and older folk sitting on chairs four or five rows deep on the two sides of the upper gallery, with more folk sat cross-legged on the floor or standing up leaning against the walls. During the artists’ talk, Bear and Our Magnolia played on a loop on each side of me; the screenings became part of the performance. I had the strangest sensation then that all of us in that room were more physical bodies than disembodied minds even as art was being seriously discussed; I thought then… more animal than human. And the pathos of being animal is, of course, that it is ‘begotten, born and dies.’[iii] Four days previously my brother died of a massive brain haemorrhage. (There I’ve written this down here where I couldn’t say it out loud before.) His dying made these feelings suddenly intense and dizzying.

To get my head around that—the wonder and mystery of death as if to nothing…

Art as helicon and well-spring from which to draw sustenance. The whole experience has been illuminating, not so much in terms of knowledge—the ‘aboutness’ of the art on display—but in terms of, precisely, the encounter. Carl Phillips writes of poetry as a ‘restlessness of the imagination’, not as ‘adversary but as opportunity, not as an object of fear but, for better or worse, an object of an all-but-impossible-to resist fascination.’[iv] Chimera is not in the bag; it’s not bagged up… nor should it be. There are things I’m still puzzling over. Yet I don’t think that that matters much. That’s really isn’t the point. It’s about risking an exchange… engaging and then thinking, reflecting—essaying—in a way that extends, expands and enriches.

Chimera will be at the Cooper Gallery until 10 December.

• References

  [i]

  Jenny Diski, What I don’t Know about Animals (Virago, 2012), p.56.

  [ii]

  Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Granada Publishing, 1976), p.72.

  [iii]

  This phrase is taken from WB Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43291/sailing-to-byzantium <accessed 24 October 2022>

  [iv]

  Carl Phillips, The Art of Daring (Greywolf Press, 2014), p.36.