We ' re Animals

A photo by Richard Barnes from the series Animal Logic

Part of the cause of my insomnia is my over-active brain. Sometimes I lie there at night and I feel like my head is going to explode because I can't stop thinking and I'm sort of in love with my ability to do it. We're so lucky, with our brains and our reasoning and our thoughts and ideas and memories. Don't get me wrong, plenty of my insomnia caused by concerns of the humdrum variety: bills and paperwork and endless lists of things to do. But lately, a lot of it is a general level of amped-ness about ideas - projects I want to do, concepts I'm trying untangle, things I'm trying to articulate. There are a lot of things to think about, it's pretty cool, but since I've been consistently over-extended for months on end now, the only time I get to think is when I'm trying to sleep. Ergo: the insomnia.

This is an over-long preamble to something I've been thinking about a lot, namely the photos of Richard Barnes, posted by Mr. Alec Soth earlier this week. As I said over there in comments, I just can't stop thinking about that damn bear photo (above) and the entire Animal Logic series in general.

A photo by Richard Barnes from the series Animal Logic

Photos of museums, taxidermy, dioramas - persistent memes, almost always tiresome.* The Barnes stuff is different - it's like he's showing me really what it is, and utterly dispensing with the what it's pretending to be. Most work addressing this subject matter tends towards facile plays on manufactured/idealized realities. I don't need a photographer to show me those aspects of these environments - I can get there on my own.

In this work, there's no ironic distance, no clever posturing and it goes a lot further. He's peeling back the layers of what makes these tableaux so enduringly appealing and showing that our drive to construct them is actually the most interesting and fucked up part. He is capturing the in between moments - the stops along the way. The idea of removing a thing from it's natural environment transforming it into something entirely artificial and then re-inserting into another entirely fabricated "natural environment" and how that practice is so uniquely human and far afield from the animal instincts of the creatures being portrayed.

And that is something I think about a lot - how we are so lucky to have these brains of ours, with their logic and their emotions and it's so easy to hide there and forget (or at least try to) that when it comes down to it, we're animals too.

An exhibition of Barnes' work opens at Hosfelt Gallery tomorrow, Saturday, September 15th and runs through October 27th. I was all excited to attend the opening until I noticed that the reception is from 4pm - 6pm. I will most likely be here at the JB then, hanging out with the work of this season's Hot Shots.

* Not always tiresome, mind you. I've seen some stuff I like, and even shown some of it in the past.

Comments

[Gong Szeto]

these photographs are pretty incredible.