from Frieze issue 108 June -August 2007
Shamanism and anthropomorphism; public art
and 'getting back to nature'
‘Why do cats understand what you say?’ ‘Where
does hair go when you go bald?’ ‘How can the city control illegal bicycle
parking?’ These are just some of the questions that Marcus Coates has attempted
to answer by descending into the ‘lower world’ and consulting the birds and
animals that he encounters there. Usually they respond in cryptic clues;
uncharacteristic behaviour is what he is looking out for, which he then does
his best to interpret for his audience on his return.
Coates was inducted into the ancient
techniques of shamanism on a weekend course in Notting Hill, London. The
workshop trained participants to access a ‘non-ordinary’ psychic dimension with
the aid of chanting, ‘ethnic’ drumming and dream-catchers. Coates has explained
the process as essentially being a form of imaginative visualization.
Historically the shaman would have been employed to solve the daily problems of
the community; since these usually involved the finding and killing of animals,
shamans were valued for their ability to communicate with other species in the
spirit world. Shamanism’s contemporary abstracted form in the West still relies
on animals as ‘guides’, but it encourages practitioners to project personal
spirit worlds in terms that are familiar to them. During his trance the man
sitting next to Coates met and talked to a gerbil.
Coates himself is a keen ornithologist and
naturalist; the animals that he encounters in the ‘lower world’ are usually
from areas of British landscape that he knows intimately. Much of his past work
has reflected his sense of alienation from such places, a frustration that
manifests itself in the sentimental yearning to ‘get back to nature’. Indigenous
British Mammals (2000) was Coates’ ludicrous attempt to reverse the flow of
anthropomorphism and subsume himself within the fabric of the natural world,
emulating wild animal calls while buried under the turf of deserted moorland;
in Goshawk (1999) he persuaded foresters to fasten him to the upper branches of
a Scots pine so he could see the world through the eyes of a hawk scanning for
prey. While the humour of these works springs from the naivety of the desires
they embody, by subjecting himself to such vivid, visceral experiences Coates
holds on to the possibility of personal transformation and so restrains them
from snide satire.
The ambiguity of Coates’ own investment in
the processes he embarks on creates a constant itch in the understanding of his
position; who is laughing, and whom exactly are they laughing at? This question
was at the forefront of his first shaman work, Journey to the Lower World
(2004), in which he filmed himself performing a shamanic ritual in the front
room of a Liverpool tower block that was scheduled for demolition. The audience
of bemused residents fought to suppress their giggles as Coates, dressed in the
skin of a red deer, began by vacuuming and spitting water onto the carpet, then
emitting feral whistles, grunts and barks as he entered the ‘lower world’.
Despite his audience’s obvious scepticism (of
both shamanism and of the contemporary art world), the question they asked
Coates about the lower world was sincere and unguarded: ‘Do we have a protector
for this site? What is it?’ He had gained their trust and implicated himself in
an intimate system of exchange. His tentative answer, interpreting peculiar
feather patterns on a sparrowhawk’s wing as being indicative of the community’s
need to ‘stick together’, acknowledged this responsibility. While remaining
deeply uneasy about the employment of artists in the public sphere as ‘problem
solvers’, Coates has said that often the most valuable thing that comes out of
such performances is the audience’s sense that they are being listened to. This
in turn prompts them to begin talking objectively about issues that concern
them, even if, as in the case of Mouth of God (2006), it is to a man with a
stuffed hare strapped to his head.
This is Coates’ best trick; despite looming
large in the production of his works, he somehow manages to usher people
towards a revelation of sorts within themselves. He achieves this again in his
work Dawn Chorus (2007), the most recent and accomplished of an ongoing series
of works in which he teaches people how to mimic birdsong by copying
slowed-down recordings of birds, filming them and then speeding up the footage
to avian pitch again. The multi-screen video installation shows 19 people
caught alone in quiet moments, intermittently breaking into birdsong. While the
ornithologist in Coates clearly relished the challenge of reproducing the
sequence and positions of a dawn chorus in the gallery, the real magic lies in
the videos’ knack of not only creating highly convincing birdsong but also
accelerating human movements into the nervy fidgeting of birds.
The melancholy of Dawn Chorus is born of the
solitary figures’ isolation, not only from the world of the birds and the
beasts but also from each other. Deceptively, Coates’ real subjects are not the
outdoors and the unknown but interiority and introspection. This is the true
locus of ‘nature’ in the modern world, he seems to imply; not in the open
spaces of the countryside, so obscured by cultural projection and
anthropomorphism, but in the withered memory of something wild and ancient,
buried deep within ourselves.
Jonathan Griffin
Images :
www.google.co.uk/search?q=marcus+coates+images&espv=210&es_sm=91&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=w1SXUrDvKuKb0AXToIHwCg&ved=0CC8QsAQ&biw=1280&bih=598
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