untamed
In 1998, I retraced the steps of a death march of all women prisoners that took place at the close of World War II. The project is called Helmbrechts Walk, 1998-2003. The project was meant as a non-monumental memorial to those women murdered during the march—95 of them—and to those who survived it. I always thought of the art work as my physical presence in the landscape, walking for 225 miles in their steps, and I thought of the materials presented afterward in exhibitions and online as a documentation of that work.
Several years later, through a serendipitous encounter with a newly dead sparrow on the sidewalk, I embarked on a many year long project photographing dead and decaying birds. As the images accumulated I recognized in a far more conscious way what I had been doing. Somehow these small embodied creatures had unwittingly become a substitute for images I had seen as a child, images that I can’t remember ever not having known about, of desiccated bodies stacked up like cordwood or being bulldozed into giant pits at liberated concentration camps. They were the ultimate disembodiment, one in which the body had gradually eaten itself alive, disappearing from within until it could not longer support bodily function. What remained was akin to a flattened leather husk. This relationship between my series of found birds and Helmbrechts walk was thoughtfully teased out by G. Roger Denson in an article for the Huffington Post titled: Holocaust and Redemption in the Photography of Susan Silas in 2011.
This was the first occasion upon which I had engaged with birds in my work. In this case, the birds acted metaphorically. But they are never far from their role in mythology or far from our desire to anthropomorphize them to dispense with their wildness. As Roger Denson observes:
“Unless we consider the easy death of birds as a key to acquiring the redemption that humans crave, anyone having experience with birds, or at least anyone who has witnessed birds in the throes of death, also knows how easily and quickly birds die upon encountering adversity or capture. Put a small bird from the wild like those Silas photographs in a cage, regardless of how well it’s supplied with food and water, and it will be dead within days, even hours. And who hasn’t seen a bird caught by a cat going limp within seconds of its capture even without mortal injury inflicted and with almost no struggle. It’s hard not to think of this propensity of birds for the easy death/escape upon seeing their exquisitely photographed carcasses alongside the record of Silas’s Helmbrechts walk. How much more merciful the easy death of birds appears next to our own endurance of imprisonment and terror. Anthropomorphized, it’s such grace that has lent itself to the pronunciation of mystics that birds are the favorite creatures of gods.”
During a residency in the Everglades, I took a somewhat different approach to the dead and the way in which a taxidermied bird might be read with respect to the abandoned body. The South Florida Collections Management Center is tucked inside Everglades National Park at the end of Research road. Within its temperature controlled darkened drawers, birds that inhabited the park as far back as the 1960’s are laid out, each with a handwritten tag carefully tied to its feet, in much the same way that corpses are labelled at a morgue. Some of these birds were road kill, and a few sad specimens have labels indicating that they starved to death. They are, collectively, a part of the record of upheavals and changes in management techniques that have beset the park for over a century. Here the bird is not seen to gradually decay, but is preserved to resemble its embodied state in life and the drawers of birds suddenly brought to mind the preservation of national leaders, mostly communist ones came to mind, who are meant to be revered in death quite literally through the exhibition of their taxidermied bodies. Opening one of the Center’s drawers, I momentarily imagine Lenin resting in his glass mausoleum in Red Square in the middle of Moscow or Ho Chi Minh’s tomb, in Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi—a place from which he was conspicuously absent during my visit to Hanoi—he goes for a makeover to Moscow once a year, where the technology exists to spruce him up for future visitors. Some of the birds at The South Florida Collections Management Center, their bodies stiff and their eyes stuffed with cotton, have resided here as long as Ho has sat in his tomb at Ba Dinh Square. The same can be said of the corpse of Mao Tse Tung whose body had been lived in for 83 years and had been vacated for 38 years at the time of my visit to his mausoleum in Tienanmen Square.This Roseate Spoonbill, ironically seen here in what appears to be a protective self-embrace resonates with anthropomorphic projection at the same time as it documents the deceased inhabitants of the park.
What interests me about these predicaments is their acknowledgement of wildness. While in each case the animal has been placed into an unnatural built environment, all of these works take for granted the wildness of the animals in the room. At a time when the coinage of a new word was required to describe our geological era—the Anthropocene—indicating the degree to which we have altered the environment through human activity, it seems an opportune time to examine anthropomorphism, both as an impulse to control and as a desire to understand, and to consider our tolerance for the unknowable.
The fascination with the story of Leda and the Swan has not diminished since its first representation in 400 BCE. Somehow, not only the ambiguity between rape and seduction that is never clearly elucidated, along with the incredible perversity of a woman fornicating with a swan, seem to have kept the story ever current, no doubt the misogynist undertow was helpful in that regard. This includes the notion that Helen of Troy, the offspring of this union and purportedly the most beautiful woman in the world, whose face was said to have “launched a thousand ships”, supposedly hatched from an egg.
Performing for the camera with a male swan in an enclosed space it was not possible to be certain of the outcome in advance. In fact, the outcome undercut the original myth in several ways. The swan, enclosed with the body of an aging woman, took no interest in me whatsoever. Far from wanting to seduce me, he spent his time preening himself, completely self-involved. He could sit contained for long periods, but when outstretched he was as tall as I am. Occasionally squawking, the only other sound was of his footsteps. Whether sitting close to him or following him about the room, there was little sense of anything that might be described as feeling contact or connection. Rather, the communication between the two bodies was rendered through the responses to the video. Because there is little in the way of action in any of the five channels that make up the work, audiences began to contemplate the two bodies on the screen and compare my body with that of the swan in formal terms. In this sense the language of communication was literally body language.
In the most recent work, as yet untitled and still in progress, the relationship between my aging female body and a Peregrine falcon is central. The falcon too has its place in mythology. The god Horus was embodied as a falcon. In some cases he was seen as a human body with a falcon’s head. Once again we see the fascination with the male body transformed into a bird. Unlike the swan, who was cast as a seducer, the falcon generally represents power and nobility.
There is a long tradition of hunting animals using a trained falcon as a collaborator. Falconry is particularly important in the Emirates and to Arab cultures, which tend to be male dominated and in which I would be unable to show most of the work I produce due its content and the inclusion of female nudity.
Falconry requires a respect for the wildness of the bird. While falcons who hunt with men (and a smaller number of women) are trained, that does not make them tame or domesticated. This is an important distinction. The symbolism of the naked female falconer, surely anathema to most falconers, and the acceptance of the wildness of the bird were my main concern. Here communication between the bird and the falconer is real. Through repetition and trust the bird learns to hunt with its handler and knows that a reward can be expected in return, yet this does not eliminate choice on the part of the bird. Every time the falcon is set loose to fly, it can decide not to return to its handler and go free.
Part of my recent thoughts about embodiment include not only the contrast to disembodiment through death and decay that was a part of my earlier work but also the obsession, mostly visible among men, about a new form of disembodiment in which humans would abandon the mortal body and upload their minds in some form of data to a non-organic substrate and by so doing—live forever. This project is aptly called Whole Brain Emulation. But part of this project, similar to cybernetics in this way, is a denial of the vulnerability of the physical body and a desire to escape the obvious consequences. My naked body in a desolate landscape with a bird of prey aspires to reinforce rather than avoid that reality and to stand in contradistinction to those impulses, which allow for the continued degradation of our environment with the help of the fantasy of our life to be on Mars or here on earth living in a data farm.