ILLUMINATIONS: A BESTIARY
Rosamond Wolff Purcell, Gwen Akin and Allan Ludwig, and Jane Calvin
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Medieval bestiaries were collections of descriptions of or tales about animals that imposed order on the natural world. Animals were ranked according to human qualities–horses were worthy, eagles noble, owls wise, wolves evil–in a system that reflected human values more than the actual natures of the animals. Today naturalists recognize the folly of assigning moral values to animals. When Purcell raises questions of morality in her bestiary, they are questions about our morality. So, although we’ve abandoned those medieval rankings, what’s being described is still less the natural world than our way of looking at it.
One of Purcell’s most arresting images is of a squirrel monkey–it’s been treated with chemicals that preserve its vascular system while the rest of the animal has been dissolved–using an experimental technique as morbidly fascinating as the photograph Itself. The animal, nestled in cotton to preserve its rather tenuous form, has some bony structure remaining, so we see first the open eye sockets, the gaping mouth. It looks like a human mummy unearthed on some high Andean snowfield. Eerier still, at a second look, are the blue veins th at now delineate the outlines of the body: in conjunction with the screaming mouth, they look like a haze of ionizing radiation at the moment of a nuclear blast. There’s no way to look at the natural world without human associations.
A sample Akin/Ludwig portrait: there are three standing skeletons of children against a dark background. On the left are Siamese twins, joined at the ribs and head but with separate necks and bodies below the rib cage. On the right is a petite skeleton with good posture, skull high and grinning. In the middle is a somewhat larger skeleton, with a comparatively massive skull, looking at the ground like a chastened older brother.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/courtesy Catherine Edelman Gallery.
