From Limb to Limb
This is not exactly the kind of question Bates had in mind. Provoked by accounts of recontextualizing installations by artists like Fred Wilson and James Rosenquist, he was also aware of the fact that many contemporary artists have been inspired by nature. At the same time he knew that many museumgoers “walk into a contemporary exhibit and say, ‘Where is this from? It’s ridiculous.’” He hoped to increase viewers’ appreciation of contemporary art by placing it in a new context.
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The piece that brought the whole show together for me was John McQueen’s wall installation, Occurrence, a seven-foot-square work that looks like a line drawing and is hung like a painting. It gives us portraits, mostly, surrounding an image of a truck, but their lines are created by willow twigs, many of them bent or broken, all tied together with black string. I found the piece a wonderful metaphor for the exhibit–and a powerful contrast to most art, which radically reshapes, even “breaks” natural materials to create forms and images owing little to their material origins. The miracle of this exhibit is that it restores some of the balances our civilization has largely lost: between humans and animals; between nature and the ordered, calculated products we make from it.
