Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Sad safari
Grim images of captive animals more killingly effective than a dozen shouty PETA posters
VOLKER SEDING Enlarge Image
Elephant, Tampa, Florida, is among the 58 images in Captive, on display at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.
‘WHY Look at Animals?" the British art critic John Berger asked in an influential 1977 essay. Humans are fascinated by animals because they are like us and not like us, Berger theorizes. We use these similarities and differences to define what it means to be human. When we look at animals — in zoos, in museum dioramas, in TV nature programs, in paintings — we are really looking at ourselves.
Captive, a series of 58 photographic images by the late German-Canadian artist Volker Seding, tries very hard to see animals not as reflections of their human viewers but as things in themselves, existing beyond our projections and preconceptions. Paradoxically, his animals remain unknowable not because they're in the wilderness but because they're in captivity, in the cramped, clapped-out cages of old, outmoded zoos. (Most of these photographs were taken in the 1980s, under conditions that are hopefully disappearing.)
ART REVIEW
Volker Seding: Captive
Winnipeg Art Gallery
Until June 12
Seding, who was born in Germany in 1943 and came to Canada in 1966, spent 15 years visiting hundreds of North American and European zoos and crafting careful, patient, enormously sad pictures of their animal inhabitants. Seding, whose childhood home bordered on the Berlin zoo, understands why we go to zoos. He also understands why we're almost inevitably disappointed.
We want to see wildness, but what we see is contained and constrained by human-made structures, often in truly bizarre collisions of nature and culture. A lion biding its time under a neo-Renaissance stone arch seems oddly Old World, while a kudu that's been stabled like a domesticated horse in Heidelberg, Germany looks like the victim of some fundamental category mix-up.
In another image, a black rhino stands in a concrete room that's been painted with an elaborate representation of the African savannah, the sweeping vistas of plain and sky becoming a little anti-climactic where they run awkwardly across the doors. A decorative mural doesn't do anything for the rhinoceros, of course, and seeing him stand in front of it, like a short-sighted, ambushed straight-man, makes the whole thing into a cruel joke.
Seding catches all these desperate parodies of nature -- the Star Trek-style fake rocks, the plaster tree trunks and climbing faux greenery pinned to the wall, the blue-painted concrete pools.
Other images show animals in what seem to be jail conditions, punitive and stark. A snow leopard stands behind bars; a weary elephant walks the line in solitary confinement.
The images are grim and glum, but there's never anything obvious about Seding's message. These are unusually still, silent photographs, and they're small, mostly about 24 x 30 cm. Somehow, they're more killingly effective than a dozen outraged, shouty PETA posters.
Beautifully constructed without being show-offy, Seding's images focus our attention on their subjects. And yet something about the subjects remains beyond our reach. These animals look dignified, stoic, anxious, forlorn -- but are we projecting? Can we really know what they think and feel? Compassionate but stringently unsentimental, Seding refuses to supply easy answers.
Maybe what matters are the questions. And the most crucial question comes out when we look at a lioness from Jacksonville, Florida, which seems to be staring right at us.
What does she see?
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