Dalziel + Scullion: Raptor
18 October – 23 November 2002
www.houldsworth.co.uk
On a scale of animal iconography, birds of prey rate pretty highly. You know – soaring, majestic, solitary, nobly savage; adopted as national emblems by empires past and present; and now used by Scottish artists Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion as part of their series of works exploring the intersections between the natural world and human civilisation.
Nemesis (2002) consists of seven enormous
feathers, each over a metre long, mounted on the wall. Under the feathers
large Formica lettering spells out the title of the piece. Inspired by the
recent archaeological find of a giant prehistoric bird of prey, the
suggestion is of some ancient sentience, something primitive and terrible.
In fact, these huge ‘feathers’ are each made from hundreds of chicken
feathers. As birds that have been bred according to human exigencies, the
domestication of chickens contrasts with the untamability, and fundamental
unknowability, of the extinct monster. The piece implies a kind of bird
hierarchy – a pecking order – that lies along the axis between nature and
culture.
Also on show was the video Raptor (2002). At the far end of a deserted,
open-plan office, a hawk sits on its perch. Its eyes glare. Its head cranes.
It ruffles its feathers and flexes its legs, shifting its weight, evilly.
And then it lifts, and with great, slow-motion flaps towards the viewer,
over desks and swivel-chairs and rows of computers, bearing ever closer,
till its talons fill the screen, flash past, and are gone. Beyond the
immediate menace of the bird’s attack, the video is subtly unsettling, the
presence of the hawk properly uncanny. Though the office environment is
hardly the animal’s natural territory, it’s also a fitting, almost familiar,
context – capitalism symbolised as a living predator, cruel and rapacious.
In which case, it’s perhaps strange that the rest of the works on show – two digital-print pieces each called Primary (2002) – are simply enlarged stills from the video. While the need to make work in a medium more readily amenable to the average art collector is perfectly understandable – artists hope to make a living, after all – this concession to the requirements of the art market seems at odds with the video’s evocation of the dark spectre of capitalism.
Gabriel Coxhead