Endless Beautiful Adaptations
by Stephanie Sobelle
Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.
—Charles Darwin
When Darwin wrote these words at the end of the nineteenth-century, he could scarcely have anticipated the extremes to which "man" would go to pursue perfection, for better and for worse: Our current cultural fixation on appearance and personal perfection—as implied by pharmaceutical therapies, fertility treatments, plastic surgery and other beauty regimens, designer pets, etc.—attend to a new and extreme period of the human impulse to control biology on an individual if not evolutionary level. Darwin argues that his theories of natural selection are not necessarily in conflict with one's religious devotion to God, yet in the passage above, he also inadvertently foreshadows the contemporary climate's obsession with perfection, even at the risk of complete annihilation.
The work of Laurel Roth concerns itself with our endless adaptations, those natural, those mythological, and more often, those that interfere with the process of natural selection. She critiques the current designer pet trend, for example, with skulls of popular pets that she meticulously carves from clear acrylic —Pugs, Chihuahuas, Persian cats. Their crystal-like glossiness resembles Steuben animal figures fit for a penthouse coffee table, suggesting that pets have become luxury items to display rather than living creatures to embrace. Now only skulls, no longer recognizable as fuzzy friends, they reveal the inherent irony in the title "Man's Best Friend"; the breeding—and over breeding—and showcasing of pets has reduced them to mere commodity.
Roth continues her interest in the human exploitation of animals in "Food," for which she focuses on that which is usually ignored—the physicality of the animals we eat, the consumer relationship between human and cow, that food is both precious and ignored. A cow jawbone, carved from walnut and polished like a fine violin, is offered in a presentation box resembling a gun case. These wooden carvings, all of various hardwoods, again reduce the animals to their species, removing any individuality. A sheep skull carved from South American vera wood, with inset crystals and gold-leafed teeth, at once signifies the trade of animal for money and traces of the bioaccumulation—the build up of harmful substances in a biological organism—that is part of the greater food system.
Roth uses techniques in her work of carving, knitting, and assemblage—traditional artisan skills—and she laments the degradation of the natural world due to the human effect on biological resources. In 2008, 16,000 bird species were listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN's) risk of extinction alert. Of the 153 species lost in the last five hundred years, eighteen were lost in the last thirty. In "Beyond Darwin," some of this loss is cheekily regained. Roth knits suits of extinct (or nearly so) birds—the Dodo, the Ivory Billed Woodpecker—with which she dresses pigeon forms (the ordinary pigeon is a relative of the mythical Dodo). The costumed pigeons, on the one hand, offer reassurance, recreating a biodiversity otherwise dwindling, but they remind us too that we are annihilating certain natural species. At the same time, Roth evokes the recollection that knitting is traditionally a woman's craft, one meant to provide comfort; in "Beyond Darwin," she alludes to the intersections of adaptation, the cultural discourse of feminine beauty, and woman's work. She chooses the pigeon, an urban bird we complain about if not ignore altogether: We are obsessed with cloaking the ordinary in costume, and women in particular.
Roth provokes this assumption in "Hope Chest," a funny yet biting examination of woman's craft, biology, and fertility. A hope chest is, traditionally, the collection of a trousseau by a woman before she marries. Roth teases such customs, filling her chest with sanitary pads, sewn into quilts (a traditional hope chest item), crocheted with phrases like, "fast furious," or "fuckfuckfuck." The red yarn connecting the pads in her "PMS Quilt" should resemble menstrual blood. Yet it is just too bright, too delicate in its design, still subject to the conciliatory logic of the hope chest's representation of married life. Roth does not simply undermine the idea of the hope chest; she forces it to reveal the processes by which it operates.
Many of these projects derive from Roth's early carvings of birds, which also attest to the decoration and abuse of nature and feminine beauty; she carved meticulous and mimetic skulls from found materials, such as plastics and pool balls, dressed them in fantastic outfits reminiscent of fairy tales, and set them in strange tableaus, often within a bell jar. The sculptures are eerie and charming, a strange collapse of natural and synthetic, life and death.
Roth's more recent bird carvings her "Peacocks" are adorned with rich, multi-colored plumage made of dime store beauty accents. Hair clips and false nails, heavily lacquered in nail polish, have the dynamism and vitality of a peacock's feathers. At a distance, the birds are seductive and glamorous. Up close, the glamour gives way: The birds' heads are, again, mere skulls—that which lies beneath the decor. Their trimming is nothing more than the cheap tricks women regularly use to costume themselves.
Beauty indeed has its dark side, as Roth reminds us. And the lengths we go to attain it do not stop at nail polish. If it is not the beauty without with which we are concerned, it is that within. The collaborative installations between Roth and Andy Diaz Hope focus on a societal reliance on chemical and genetic manipulation. Their massive chandeliers, bedecked in festoons of gelatin pill capsules and hypodermic needles adorned with Swarovski crystals, elaborate on the idealization and desperation involved in the dependence on pharmaceuticals. Yet the garlands themselves make vibrant mandalas. In Jungian psychology, the mandala is a symbol representing the self and harmony within the individual. Those of the chandeliers offer a sacred space in which the viewer can meditate on his or her own collusion in the decadence of the pursuit of perfection.
Drugs like Ritalin and Prozac, however beneficial they may be for many, are also a sign of our society's need to regularize behavior, whether we self-medicate or follow the authority of a professional prescription. In the mid-seventies, Michel Foucault was warning us the risks of seemingly benign strategies of behavior modification. Drugs are another—and increasingly dangerous—way to create order in society. As Roth and Diaz Hope assert in their own words, "We live in a time when we have a president-elected council on bio-ethics, drug companies roll out glossy ad campaigns directly to consumers, and society's standards for diagnosing and medicating mental illness are reducing diversity of human experience." Their resulting "Pharmacopoeia" is an installation pharmacy comprised of medicine cabinets, flying pill capsules sculpted into small devils and angels, or others with tiny human figures trapped inside. A sink has been taken over by the natural world, sprouting foliage and blossoms.
All of these themes come together in "Allegory of the Monocerus," another of Roth's collaborations with Diaz Hope. Inspired by The Hunt of the Unicorn, a series of tapestries from early sixteenth-century France that analogizes the chase and killing of a unicorn to the Passion of Christ, "Allegory" is a tapestry woven through the Magnolia Tapestry Project in Oakland, California. (Magnolia is also responsible for a series of tapestries derived from Chuck Close polaroids and daguerreotypes.) Such allegories were typical for Medieval culture, offering a means to make sense of pagan, Classical, and even Old Testament stories that otherwise could not resonate with New Testament beliefs. Some sources interchange a monocerus with a unicorn, yet others distinguish between the two—a monocerus is much like a unicorn, but fused from a great many more species: a stag's head, a horse's body, an elephant's feet, a boar's tail, and a single, black horn. Frequently included in medieval bestiaries, zoological catalogues with illustrations of allegorical beasts, the Medieval monocerus represents Christ.
At the center of the tapestry is a caduceus, the medical emblem of a sword around which two snakes are intertwined. It is quite like the staff of the god of medicine, Asclepius, which features only one snake; in Classical mythology, the caduceus signifies not medicine but peace, and also trade. The junction of medicine and trade is represented in the tapestry by two Dollies, the cloned sheep, who flank the center tree. The abundance of yellow corn growing in the foreground—one of the earliest genetic creations of man and still one of the most omnipresent and dangerously-modified—morphs into now threatened honey bees in the sky above. In the upper corners of the tapestry are sea monoceri narwhals, whose horns have often been passed off as unicorn horns with magical powers—here captured, reigned in. Narwhals are real, not imaginary beasts, and they too are under threat of extinction. In Roth and Diaz Hope's tapestry, it is not the mythical unicorn nor the Christ figure being persecuted, but natural selection itself. Roth and Diaz Hope announce an arrival of designed evolution. They make no sweeping political claims or moral accusations; though the work criticizes, it suggests no consequences and offers no solutions. Rather, it asks us to consider our own complicity, and reminds us that we do not know with what we are bargaining when we one-up the natural order of things.
The interplay between man and nature at the core of Roth's art is likely influenced by her own past work as a Park Ranger in Northern California. However cautioning, she is not hopeless. Her frequent use of collaboration entails vital community and communication. Her sculptures evoke whimsy rather than dread. Just as her Hope Chest criticizes convention, it reinvents it for a modern day. Skulls and bones and even tapestries remain long after life is gone, and the Dodo, extinct for over 300 years, lives on in legend. The unicorn, it turns out, might only have been a misunderstood rhinoceros. "By passing over the endless beautiful adaptations which we everywhere meet with," suggests Darwin in his autobiography, "it may be asked how can the generally beneficent arrangement of the world be accounted for? Some writers indeed are so much impressed with the amount of suffering in the world, that they doubt if we look to all sentient beings, whether the world as a whole is a good or a bad one. According to my judgment happiness decidedly prevails."
Darwin is unsure as to the reason for this happiness—he just feels it to be. In this, he and Roth again converge. Roth's work too embraces all beings, real and mythological, past and present, natural and scientifically created. Perhaps redemption is possible after all, even in the face of extinction.
Stefanie Sobelle is a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and on the editorial staff at The Brooklyn Rail, an Arts & Culture newspaper in New York. Her writing has appeared in Bomb, Bookforum, The Financial Times, Beirut's The Daily Star, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Words Without Borders. She is currently working on a book about architecture in postmodern literature.
copyright Stefanie Sobelle, all rights reserved
by Stephanie Sobelle
Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.
—Charles Darwin
When Darwin wrote these words at the end of the nineteenth-century, he could scarcely have anticipated the extremes to which "man" would go to pursue perfection, for better and for worse: Our current cultural fixation on appearance and personal perfection—as implied by pharmaceutical therapies, fertility treatments, plastic surgery and other beauty regimens, designer pets, etc.—attend to a new and extreme period of the human impulse to control biology on an individual if not evolutionary level. Darwin argues that his theories of natural selection are not necessarily in conflict with one's religious devotion to God, yet in the passage above, he also inadvertently foreshadows the contemporary climate's obsession with perfection, even at the risk of complete annihilation.
The work of Laurel Roth concerns itself with our endless adaptations, those natural, those mythological, and more often, those that interfere with the process of natural selection. She critiques the current designer pet trend, for example, with skulls of popular pets that she meticulously carves from clear acrylic —Pugs, Chihuahuas, Persian cats. Their crystal-like glossiness resembles Steuben animal figures fit for a penthouse coffee table, suggesting that pets have become luxury items to display rather than living creatures to embrace. Now only skulls, no longer recognizable as fuzzy friends, they reveal the inherent irony in the title "Man's Best Friend"; the breeding—and over breeding—and showcasing of pets has reduced them to mere commodity.
Roth continues her interest in the human exploitation of animals in "Food," for which she focuses on that which is usually ignored—the physicality of the animals we eat, the consumer relationship between human and cow, that food is both precious and ignored. A cow jawbone, carved from walnut and polished like a fine violin, is offered in a presentation box resembling a gun case. These wooden carvings, all of various hardwoods, again reduce the animals to their species, removing any individuality. A sheep skull carved from South American vera wood, with inset crystals and gold-leafed teeth, at once signifies the trade of animal for money and traces of the bioaccumulation—the build up of harmful substances in a biological organism—that is part of the greater food system.
Roth uses techniques in her work of carving, knitting, and assemblage—traditional artisan skills—and she laments the degradation of the natural world due to the human effect on biological resources. In 2008, 16,000 bird species were listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN's) risk of extinction alert. Of the 153 species lost in the last five hundred years, eighteen were lost in the last thirty. In "Beyond Darwin," some of this loss is cheekily regained. Roth knits suits of extinct (or nearly so) birds—the Dodo, the Ivory Billed Woodpecker—with which she dresses pigeon forms (the ordinary pigeon is a relative of the mythical Dodo). The costumed pigeons, on the one hand, offer reassurance, recreating a biodiversity otherwise dwindling, but they remind us too that we are annihilating certain natural species. At the same time, Roth evokes the recollection that knitting is traditionally a woman's craft, one meant to provide comfort; in "Beyond Darwin," she alludes to the intersections of adaptation, the cultural discourse of feminine beauty, and woman's work. She chooses the pigeon, an urban bird we complain about if not ignore altogether: We are obsessed with cloaking the ordinary in costume, and women in particular.
Roth provokes this assumption in "Hope Chest," a funny yet biting examination of woman's craft, biology, and fertility. A hope chest is, traditionally, the collection of a trousseau by a woman before she marries. Roth teases such customs, filling her chest with sanitary pads, sewn into quilts (a traditional hope chest item), crocheted with phrases like, "fast furious," or "fuckfuckfuck." The red yarn connecting the pads in her "PMS Quilt" should resemble menstrual blood. Yet it is just too bright, too delicate in its design, still subject to the conciliatory logic of the hope chest's representation of married life. Roth does not simply undermine the idea of the hope chest; she forces it to reveal the processes by which it operates.
Many of these projects derive from Roth's early carvings of birds, which also attest to the decoration and abuse of nature and feminine beauty; she carved meticulous and mimetic skulls from found materials, such as plastics and pool balls, dressed them in fantastic outfits reminiscent of fairy tales, and set them in strange tableaus, often within a bell jar. The sculptures are eerie and charming, a strange collapse of natural and synthetic, life and death.
Roth's more recent bird carvings her "Peacocks" are adorned with rich, multi-colored plumage made of dime store beauty accents. Hair clips and false nails, heavily lacquered in nail polish, have the dynamism and vitality of a peacock's feathers. At a distance, the birds are seductive and glamorous. Up close, the glamour gives way: The birds' heads are, again, mere skulls—that which lies beneath the decor. Their trimming is nothing more than the cheap tricks women regularly use to costume themselves.
Beauty indeed has its dark side, as Roth reminds us. And the lengths we go to attain it do not stop at nail polish. If it is not the beauty without with which we are concerned, it is that within. The collaborative installations between Roth and Andy Diaz Hope focus on a societal reliance on chemical and genetic manipulation. Their massive chandeliers, bedecked in festoons of gelatin pill capsules and hypodermic needles adorned with Swarovski crystals, elaborate on the idealization and desperation involved in the dependence on pharmaceuticals. Yet the garlands themselves make vibrant mandalas. In Jungian psychology, the mandala is a symbol representing the self and harmony within the individual. Those of the chandeliers offer a sacred space in which the viewer can meditate on his or her own collusion in the decadence of the pursuit of perfection.
Drugs like Ritalin and Prozac, however beneficial they may be for many, are also a sign of our society's need to regularize behavior, whether we self-medicate or follow the authority of a professional prescription. In the mid-seventies, Michel Foucault was warning us the risks of seemingly benign strategies of behavior modification. Drugs are another—and increasingly dangerous—way to create order in society. As Roth and Diaz Hope assert in their own words, "We live in a time when we have a president-elected council on bio-ethics, drug companies roll out glossy ad campaigns directly to consumers, and society's standards for diagnosing and medicating mental illness are reducing diversity of human experience." Their resulting "Pharmacopoeia" is an installation pharmacy comprised of medicine cabinets, flying pill capsules sculpted into small devils and angels, or others with tiny human figures trapped inside. A sink has been taken over by the natural world, sprouting foliage and blossoms.
All of these themes come together in "Allegory of the Monocerus," another of Roth's collaborations with Diaz Hope. Inspired by The Hunt of the Unicorn, a series of tapestries from early sixteenth-century France that analogizes the chase and killing of a unicorn to the Passion of Christ, "Allegory" is a tapestry woven through the Magnolia Tapestry Project in Oakland, California. (Magnolia is also responsible for a series of tapestries derived from Chuck Close polaroids and daguerreotypes.) Such allegories were typical for Medieval culture, offering a means to make sense of pagan, Classical, and even Old Testament stories that otherwise could not resonate with New Testament beliefs. Some sources interchange a monocerus with a unicorn, yet others distinguish between the two—a monocerus is much like a unicorn, but fused from a great many more species: a stag's head, a horse's body, an elephant's feet, a boar's tail, and a single, black horn. Frequently included in medieval bestiaries, zoological catalogues with illustrations of allegorical beasts, the Medieval monocerus represents Christ.
At the center of the tapestry is a caduceus, the medical emblem of a sword around which two snakes are intertwined. It is quite like the staff of the god of medicine, Asclepius, which features only one snake; in Classical mythology, the caduceus signifies not medicine but peace, and also trade. The junction of medicine and trade is represented in the tapestry by two Dollies, the cloned sheep, who flank the center tree. The abundance of yellow corn growing in the foreground—one of the earliest genetic creations of man and still one of the most omnipresent and dangerously-modified—morphs into now threatened honey bees in the sky above. In the upper corners of the tapestry are sea monoceri narwhals, whose horns have often been passed off as unicorn horns with magical powers—here captured, reigned in. Narwhals are real, not imaginary beasts, and they too are under threat of extinction. In Roth and Diaz Hope's tapestry, it is not the mythical unicorn nor the Christ figure being persecuted, but natural selection itself. Roth and Diaz Hope announce an arrival of designed evolution. They make no sweeping political claims or moral accusations; though the work criticizes, it suggests no consequences and offers no solutions. Rather, it asks us to consider our own complicity, and reminds us that we do not know with what we are bargaining when we one-up the natural order of things.
The interplay between man and nature at the core of Roth's art is likely influenced by her own past work as a Park Ranger in Northern California. However cautioning, she is not hopeless. Her frequent use of collaboration entails vital community and communication. Her sculptures evoke whimsy rather than dread. Just as her Hope Chest criticizes convention, it reinvents it for a modern day. Skulls and bones and even tapestries remain long after life is gone, and the Dodo, extinct for over 300 years, lives on in legend. The unicorn, it turns out, might only have been a misunderstood rhinoceros. "By passing over the endless beautiful adaptations which we everywhere meet with," suggests Darwin in his autobiography, "it may be asked how can the generally beneficent arrangement of the world be accounted for? Some writers indeed are so much impressed with the amount of suffering in the world, that they doubt if we look to all sentient beings, whether the world as a whole is a good or a bad one. According to my judgment happiness decidedly prevails."
Darwin is unsure as to the reason for this happiness—he just feels it to be. In this, he and Roth again converge. Roth's work too embraces all beings, real and mythological, past and present, natural and scientifically created. Perhaps redemption is possible after all, even in the face of extinction.
Stefanie Sobelle is a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and on the editorial staff at The Brooklyn Rail, an Arts & Culture newspaper in New York. Her writing has appeared in Bomb, Bookforum, The Financial Times, Beirut's The Daily Star, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Words Without Borders. She is currently working on a book about architecture in postmodern literature.
copyright Stefanie Sobelle, all rights reserved
