10 - Three Guest Practices (#2)
Mindy Yan Miller - seeing and not seeing (cow hide works)
A re-write of a text written for the exhibition of Yan Miller’s work in Montreal in 2021. This is a group of artworks made from cow hides. This work is engaged with the idea of nature in an era of intense environmental co-fragility within the endgame of colonial culture. That is to say: this work is about the basic crisis-questions of America. The work shown is part of a body of work involving animal hides as primary material. For seeing and not seeing, industrially produced cowhides (a by-product of the meat industry) are the basis for Yan Miller’s processes which involve cutting, shaving, perforating and other pattern-making interventions in artworks which are displayed both as hanging wall-works and as table-works.
Seeing and not seeing is an encounter both with nature and with the human manipulation of nature that is the food industry, of which they are a by-product. One could call that human manipulation world-design, or designed world. There is nothing more evocative of ‘nature’ for humans than the animals with whom we share space or environment, which exist at our scale, and whose style of movement is biologically and neurologically so close to our own. Animal skins are a flattened form, derived from, or expressing, the full living form. They are shapes which are as primal a part of human image-making as we can imagine – prehistoric outline drawings from the survival-hunt as proto-art or ritual practice. Many thousands of years later these contemporary manifestations of material meaning are an engagement with the idea of nature in an era of intense environmental co-fragility within the endgame of colonial culture. That is to say, they are about the basic crisis-questions of America.
These two lines of thought (nature and the collapse of America) might seem grandiose conjectures about work whose making seems to be quite simple. On the level of informational ‘content’ these works seem silent or deliberately empty. The artist would probably refuse any conventional idea of content defined as a bunch of informational language or expressed feelings to be taken out of the ‘communication’ container of the artwork. That is an idea of meaning as ‘content’ that infects us from the information and entertainment industries – our finger-swiping access to the world of consumable outcomes. That is quite different from the prehistoric animal outlines of the Coa Valley. But maybe their directness is related to Yan Miller’s work. If we have in Yan Miller’s work something of a parable about the food industry (which is the origin of these transformed skins) we begin by recognizing that the communication syntax (the meaning-delivery) of the information, entertainment, and food industries must all be very similar. They exist in semantic co-dependence. Perhaps, in our day to day, so do we. This work resists.
To use gestures of making as a way to unfurl other ways of meaning, to speak of what cannot yet have language, or has been forgotten, or is a counterfactual possibility, is something that compels me about some art practices. I describe this as clairvoyant practice. Some art practices are clairvoyant in that they make apparent how changes in meaning takes place.[1] The physical gestures of a practice are a loosening of the thread of accepted meaning to allow other possibilities to be seen. Yan Miller’s work in this exhibition does exactly that for me. We are getting (a little) outside of language, or jostling language to accommodate something unknow into its syntax. We begin with a particular material (these hides) which themselves physically carry the load of human intervention, violence, and manipulation (from the farm, to the packing plant, to the tannery). This artist adds a few simple physical gestures, even rhythmic gestures (I see this making as a form of song), which can hardly outweigh the violence that has already occurred, but which turn our thoughts from passing over what is given in this material to a deeper meditation on it. I will sketch-out a bit these two possible directions of meditation – nature and America – before coming back to how they are going on for me in seeing and not seeing.
Nature: A Question. Re-defining or re-finding the natural involves re-understanding the place of nature in relation to the designed world. If clairvoyant practices of art could have a practical vocation in relation to present-day crisis – literally, that they could be of service – it may be in understanding the conventional sense in which we use the idea of nature to connote a surround to our designed world. This world is a temporally, spatially, and materially specific place of our own making. What is the form and function of nature in this world, to borrow architecture’s disquieting design analytic? How does nature crop up in the designed world? Art historian David Summers suggests that real space must always be considered as a plural – ‘real spaces’. There is no singular ‘real space’ but there are many ‘real spaces’ drawn up by and around artifacts in their different formats. The space of a culture is the space which its ‘made-things,’ its artifacts, afford. Bruno Latour (in The Politics of Nature, 2004) insists that the same is true of nature. We must only speak of natures in the plural, in the same way we speak of a plurality of cultures. Summers’ and Latour’s demands are related. Nature is not a world unifying singularity, not at all a model of the ‘natural’ juxtaposed to the ‘artificial’ (a binary terminology introduced by artificial intelligence visionary Herbert Simon) or a human ‘world’ juxtaposed to a natural ‘surround’ in the manner of content and container that technocratic and some environmental thinking seems to prefer – this binary we might want to reconcile through a truce with ecology.
French philosopher Bernard Stiegler suggested our designed thing-world of “organized inorganic matter,” fundamentally determines how we experience time and space. Is this time and space our nature among a plurality of possible natures? A place among possible places? Stiegler suggests that our ongoing organization of matter, he calls it our technicity, is both remedy and poison with which we must constantly reckon. Focusing practices of art on the grain of this designed world can be a making apparent of the nature of our nature. Some clairvoyant practices make what disappears appear, as a service to our knowledge of thing-world and nature. In a recent book, Montreal philosopher David Morris elaborates an approach to nature as working “to suspend our urge to directly describe nature, as reflecting ideas we bring to the table, and instead lets us be oriented by nature as challenging our conceptual and descriptive proclivities. Nature thus clues us in to critiques of our idea of Nature” (D. Morris, Developmental Ontology, 2018, my italics).
Radically simple practices of art like Yan Miller’s incorporate this same ‘orientation by nature.’ Describing their simplicity may require complex language but the gestures that are involved are everyday gestures tuned to putting stress on the syntax of the everyday. They sort out the everyday in the same way as the Coa Valley rock carvings. More deeply, they are clairvoyant practices as art practices that seek to make the ways of ordering of the designed world more apparent. This conjecture suggests an affinity on my part to this figuring out of how nature crops-up, both as a rich philosophical line of enquiry and in its everyday importance for deepening an understanding of how political, financial, cultural, and knowledge institutions all represent nature in explicit relation and service to themselves. Morris’ ‘orientation by nature’ points to a more complex call to nature where, beyond the screen of our habits, we attempt to sense what there is that gives rise to such human and other natures.
America the Beautiful Crisis-Question. This all hints that the meaning of things, especially humanly organized things, is also the source of meaning in the artworks in this exhibition as an engagement with the idea of nature and its corresponding realm of organization, our culture. In an era of intense environmental co-fragility and within the endgame of colonial culture we find ourselves in crisis. We may fear that the fraying of climate stability and the unravelling of the world-dominant cultural invention that is ‘America’ has put us in an un-survivable situation. One definition of crisis is that it is a precipitous moment where we cannot see the form of things beyond. We cannot see the future. As I threw out in the second paragraph, the crisis of weather and the crisis of systemic violence as colonialism are the fundamental crisis-questions of America. Maybe we should just name this crisis-complex ‘America.’ Maybe artworks and other yet to be invented practices can help us navigate the membrane between this all-too-known and the unknown, as a form of coping. These cowhides are a physical manifestation of this surface – the smooth skin we draw over nature through our technical and social processes to make our world. This artist’s engagement with these skin surfaces is an attempt to understand and articulate the resonances which run through them rather than to read the formed/informed surface as it is given to us – to sense and to sort what is seen from what is not seen.
America is also the name for the European conquest of these continents. The conquest and its consequences were and are generated here. It’s an American thing, not a ‘from elsewhere.’ It is the substance and syntax of this place and it comes with some great tunes and some great inventions and some great technology that we all casually embed our identity in. But it is a layering resonating with violence, the violence of the theft of land, the violence of slavery, the violence of military dominion, the violence of capitalism and the free market, the violence of industrial agriculture and resource extraction. To scratch the surface is to uncover the violence between the layers of high comfort. In the preface to Andrés Ajens’ Poetry After the Invention of América, Montreal poet Erín Moure (with Ryan Gander)[2] notes Ajens’ assertion that “our representational systems have often become machines for exterminations” and that the poem in América is “an instability that might be likened to finding the faces of others in your mirror, faces you touch when you touch, and see yourself touching, your own face.” Poetry in Adjens’ América is an instability, an impossibility, in the face of the institution of literature that is the “West of Conquest.” Is this far too much to ask of these modest art works, these marked hides? Yes. And no, not at all.
These hides are the skin of nature. At the prehistoric rock art site in the Côa Valley, and many other sites that were once gathering places, outline drawings of animals are incised into the rock. Conjectures abound as to what these drawings meant to the humans who made them. The simplest might be that they are a record of, or a rehearsal for, an animal encounter. A real-live encounter or an encounter of the imagination – or the connection or bridge of imagining between the two. So the labour of Yan Miller’s patterning of these animal hides is a connection to animal being, to the conception of nature as a first-thing. These hides are the skin of America. An abiding myth of America (obviously untrue, if one even has to state it) is that the wild bison of the prairie gave way to cattle and crops as the first step in the industrialization of food in North America. This is also the first step towards consumer culture (from the Amazon towards Amazon, delivered right on time, if a business could ever be more aptly named!). The one-on-one violence of the hunt gives way to the mass violence of the abattoir and the industries of meat and leather. It is no accident that one pop-culture cipher of individual freedom in America is the smooth black leather jacket. It is also no accident that a pop-culture cipher of hippydom and the appropriation of the indigenous is the softer leather fringe jacket. The labour of patterning and incising in these art works touches this undertow of violence while caressing the reassuring beauty of its surfaces. Neither is truer than the other – violence co-inhabits with beauty.
From the advent of television, we have been watching animal shows. They were invented in the era when America controlled the world, and we still watch them in the era when ‘nature itself’ seems to be at risk as a result. We consume the animals and at the same time we are fascinated by their lively movement, so identifiable with our own, similar to, but different from our neurological ordering. This seems deeply normal. But also it is a witnessing of something radically in crisis, perhaps explicitly hidden by our primal connection to living bodies in movement. Last year (2020), the meat packing plants of North America were themselves an apex point of cases in the Covid pandemic. In those factories migrant contract workers, refugees and recent immigrants are at the front line of feeding us, we who can de-connect from the process. Perhaps, if not modern-day slavery, this is evidence of the perennial shunting-off of the visceral and flagrant cost of comfortable living. Is ALL THIS too much to ask these art works to respond to? Again, the answer is yes, of course. I’m so sorry. But these works of seeing and not seeing are a special sorting out of the everyday – what is seen and what is not seen. These skins are a inseparable surface between (or is it ‘of’?) nature and culture – a membrane that the attentive and laborious gestures of Yan Miller’s artistic process of re-patterning seek to bring into the visible. They are a coping with the state of things and rehearsal-gestures for repatterning that condition.