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Visiting mumok, Vienna’s museum of contemporary art, for\u00a0New Scientist<\/em>,\u00a023 December 2017<\/a><\/p>\n Visitors to Vienna\u2019s spectacular Natural History Museum may discover some taxidermied exhibits smothered in black gloop. This is artist Mark Dion\u2019s The Tar Museum, and it is part of Natural Histories: Traces of the Political, an art exhibition about nature and politics, most of which is in the nearby museum of contemporary art, mumok.<\/p>\n Those venturing across the Maria-Theresien-Platz will not be sorry. Or not at first. Early on, there is charming, sometimes beautiful documentation of work in the 1970s by the Romanian Sigma group. Inspired by research in bionics and cybernetics, mathematician Lucian Codreanu and his fellows applied scientific method to their observations of the rivers and woods of the Timisoara hunting forest. Doru Tulcan\u2019s abstract sculpture Structuring the Cube makes something surprisingly organic, suggestive of the workings of a crayfish\u2019s eye, from a tiny vocabulary of rods and triangles. Meanwhile, Stefan Bertalan\u2019s Structure of the Elderflower earns its place by virtue of its exquisite draughtsmanship. This being the 1970s, the Sigma group also enjoyed a lot of more-or-less undressed mucking about, and became a focus of dissent against Nicolae Ceausescu\u2019s dictatorship.<\/p>\n The other artists, groups and movements in this show rarely achieved as direct an engagement with the natural world.<\/p>\n Many pieces here index human activity through changes in the environment. The models and photographs of Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan\u2019s Debrisphere record how landscapes have been altered for military purposes. More often, though, the art focuses on how nature encroaches on human settlement. In Arena, Anri Sala records the decayed state of Tirana zoo, with feral dogs occupying a space meant for people, while the zoo\u2019s \u201cwild\u201d animals languish in cages.<\/p>\n Nature\u2019s eradication of human traces can\u2019t come quickly enough in some cases. In 2003, Polish sculptor Miroslaw Balka visited Auschwitz and filmed deer grazing by the barbed wire fence of the concentration camp. A wall board observes that, in 1942 (when Bambi was released), \u201cwhile cinemagoers were shedding tears about the emotional story of a little deer, the \u2018final solution\u2019 and the murder of millions of people was already being planned\u201d. This is silly: would the world be any better if Bambi\u2019s bereavement left us unmoved?<\/p>\n It gets worse. Exquisite allegorical frescoes by 18th-century artist Johann Wenzel Bergl are \u201crecognizable as strategies of absolutist picture propaganda\u201d. And back with Dion: one installation capturing \u201cthe lifestyle and self-image of the prototypical ethnographer of colonial times\u201d, isn\u2019t even that, according to the curators, but alludes \u201cto our own imagination of that ethnographer\u201d.<\/p>\n I left feeling rather as Lewis Carroll\u2019s Alice might have felt if, instead of freely stepping through the mirror, she had been shoved through it from behind by a gang of goonish anthropologists.<\/p>\n Natural Histories is a portal into a world where history, politics, horror, guilt and the natural world are sewn together. It is well worth seeing, but I wish the curators had shut up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Visiting mumok, Vienna’s museum of contemporary art, for\u00a0New Scientist,\u00a023 December 2017 Visitors to Vienna\u2019s spectacular Natural History Museum may discover some taxidermied exhibits smothered in black gloop. This is artist Mark Dion\u2019s The Tar Museum, and it is part of … Continue reading