Cai Guo-Qiang: Falling back to earth

68 I. In the great encyclopedic museums of the Victorian age scholars attempted to assemble collections of flora and fauna that would help explain the manifold mysteries of life on this teeming planet. Despite their foundations in rational discourse and scientific research, and for all their ambition to educate, such museums were also symbols of political and social power. They staked a claim: who would name the beasts, and who would thereby gain a kind of ownership of the world? But above all else, they were — and remain — charged with a sense of theatre. At the beginning of the twenty-first century such collections continue to articulate a profound sense of wonder: at the strange inventiveness of nature, at its seemingly infinite variation. So it is that institutions such as the Natural History Museum in London, the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Australian Museum in Sydney contain vast menageries of dead creatures — some preserved in alcohol, some taxidermied into semblances of life and presented in lifelike tableaux. Polar bears and walruses recline on ice floes of plaster and paint. Lions prowl landscapes of clay and dried grass against painted backdrops of vast savannahs. Wildebeest drink at watering holes of glass. Away from the gaze of the public, in storerooms and laboratories, great herds and swarms wait silently, a veritable stampede of snakes and lizards, fish and crustaceans, bees and beetles, birds of the air, mammals, carnivores and herbivores; exemplars, variations, anomalies and curiosities, all of them. For many years these collections of scientific specimens were typically displayed in orderly glass cabinets: think of grids of butterflies pinned carefully to archive board. However, by the late Victorian period, and in the early twentieth century, the natural history diorama had become increasingly popular. Such displays were thought to render the experience of the beasts more real, more vital. Yet, they actually present a paradox of life and death. For a diorama presents a theatrical illusion: it is a still tableau constructed of visibly inert matter — dead things — contrived to present an experience of life. Kangaroo diorama, Queensland Museum, Brisbane © Queensland Museum, Bruce Cowell Opposite Waterhole diorama at the American Museum of Natural History, New York © Vince Smith http://www.flickr.com/photos Justine Cooper Australia/United States b.1968 Trophies (from ‘Saved by science’ series) 2004 Digital colour print on Fuji Crystal Archive Matte paper, ed. 1/8 99.2 x 76.4cm Purchased 2005. Collection: Queensland Art Gallery What is or may be inherited: Notes on Heritage Ben Tufnell The eminent biologist Stephen Jay Gould suggested that, for the Victorians, such displays thrived upon an ‘exquisite tension’ as they combined two earlier traditions of collecting and displaying. The first tradition drew upon the seventeenth-century penchant for displaying ‘odd, deformed, peculiar, and prize (largest, smallest, brightest, ugliest) specimens, the Wunderkammer (or “cabinet of curiosities”) of older collectors’. The second, the desire for clarity, for a ‘systematic display of nature’s regular order within a coherent and comprehensive taxonomic scheme’. 1 For ‘Falling Back to Earth’, Cai Guo-Qiang has created a major new artwork that takes inspiration from such display methods, but which turns them to a very different purpose. On entering the installation the viewer is presented with an amazing sight. A huge array of animals is drinking at a large watering hole. While it is surprising to note that grazing animals such as zebra are drinking in close proximity to the predators that represent the primary threat to their existence, it is perhaps more surprising to note that the animals hail from different habitats around the world. Thus, there are brown bears from North America; kangaroos, wombats and dingoes from Australia; giraffes and lions from Africa. This is a truly global gathering, seemingly coexisting in harmony. The proverbial lion and lamb have come to the water and are drinking together. 2