extinction extension

Extinction, Extension 

A New Slice of the Geologic Record 

2023

Paper Sculptures

Canson cream colored 90lb paper with brass grommets

13-14 ft high and 3-4 ft wide 

As seen at The Guangdong Museum of Art.

“Symphony of All the Changes: the 7th Guangzhou Triennial”

The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk writes “to define humans is to define the envelopes, the life support systems, the Umwelt that makes it possible for them to breathe.”

Breath is life, the basic and most fundamental expression of our life. l have, from a young age, been fascinated by the notion of breathing life into a creature, or the very breath of life, of the wind and stars, the exhale and inhale of one universe and then another.

In choosing to make art, I have been able to go about my own set of concerns, to create a world of interests, problems and thoughts, working through them in material ways. We are at the same time material and spiritual beings. Beings that have come in recent years to reconsider who we are vis a vis the very actual and physical world we live in, if you like Gaia. If, as Nietzsche claimed, in the absence of god,  man would be without moorings for centuries to come, the Anthropocene may be the very thing, to have us look, not to the heavens, but the here and now and bring our thoughts and concerns down to Earth and to the world in front of us. 

The Anthropocene, names a new geological unit of time, process and strata 

and is viewed as the period during which human activity becomes the dominant influence in shaping our climate and the environment.

And with it, as Bruno Latour writes , there is now this ‘painful realization that the classic definition of society - humans among them - makes no sense. The state of society depends, at all times, on the associations between many actors, most of which do not have a human form.’ 

Just as Nietzsche would ask us what will we do without God, the Anthropocene asks, I think, what will we do with nature, or the natural world, that we have thought ourselves apart from, when we are now to understand that we are to be its steward. 

Nature was, till now, a bounty and we lived, us ‘modern men’ in a world of extractive capitalism, of unending horizons, of colonialism and rapaciousness. This will not do. But is it all we know?! 

Though we humans have much agency over the well being of the planet we persist to carry on and to live in denial of this power.

As I worked on these figures, unrolling large sections of paper on the floor and placing a good number of my favorite philosophy and critical theory books all around to hold the paper down, I asked myself, what is a new creature for a new age. 

What is the temperament and thought required for such a creature, to have a sense of the commons and the greater  sense of the many non human actors, we must with urgency care for. Is there an escape velocity, a turning back, a way towards a greater sense of the interconnection of all things, or will it be a mad grab to get it while we can.

As I scissored and shaped the figures, often with Vesuvius’s anatomy book on the floor, I thought of what an extraordinary being the human is, how we come out of the whole universe itself, out of a chain of becoming, how very interwoven we are with all things. And yet how with the brilliance of our scientific materialism and our ‘enlightened’ thinking, with all the knowledge of Gaia we have lost the plot and foreshortened time.

We are as frail and as strong as these impermanent creatures of paper. We all know the planet will do fine without us, us human creatures, that things are unraveling, blah, blah, blah.  And hence we must not only imagine, but live the unimaginable, and that is our own extinction, that we are participants to.

We humans as physical things living on a metabolic and geologic planet must square our imaginations with our physical limits - they are here and they are real. 

We do know that all forms are lost in time, and the particular meanings to them, slip away. 

It seemed as if these figures wanted to come into the world of their own accord and so with shaping and scissoring and a few grommets here and there they came together.  

This idea of the human as the actor that holds in its hands the very temperature, health and breathe of our planet is overwhelming. It requires us collectively to solve and maintain the conditions of habitability of all living beings, on which each of us depends.