Natural Selections

A Video Installation by Sean Loughrey 2000

This work is part of an ongoing series of works which unite elements of the 'natural' world with technological structures. These works are sculptural in that they are physically adapted objects that spatially relate to objects in a prescribed space, including windows, doors and other architectural features. The video footage experiments with the depiction of common animal characters from the 'natural' world, locally.

On this occasion five monitors are placed together in a line on the floor, each monitor depicting fish swimming simultaneously. The monitors are green, monochromatic overall, placed on the floor in a line like a fish pond with the fish all swimming in the same direction. Another monitor depicting a magpie, is placed high like a nest. There is no prescribed narrative.

This work alludes to objectively replicating a 'natural' world including the viewer as an integral/interactive part of the work.

NATURAL SELECTIONS

A Video Installation by Sean Loughrey, 2003

A space between cornice and dado - a meeting place.

Natural Selections, as an Ocular Lab project, pointedly highlights
the indifference of the space traditionally referred to as somewhere A Video Installation by Sean Loughrey, 2003
between heaven and earth and in this instance, between architectural
features, cornice and dado. As an architecturally aligned project, it
proposes an exacting location between two diametrically opposed
notions of human operatives, freedom and imprisonment.

While both bird and fish appear within contrived spaces of
their own, they alternately profuse an abundance of factual and
mythical resonance with sport and religion. As one subscribes to
geographical and linguistic folklore, the other is the embodiment of
subservience to an organised, unwavering and predictable movement
of its own.

As traditional belief systems ascribe to notions of height and
piety, abject space between sky and water is a site of deep concern but
potentially a point of great relief. Natural Selections, on one of many
intermediate levels of speculation, almost completely effaces the
practice of artifice in search of common discursive dialogues. Freedom as expressed by bird life, and imprisonment as portrayed by fish are non other than a symbolic mutiny, implicating the politics of both height and piety in the structural damage of definitive ideologies. Alternatively, the space in between, by the nature of its geographic historicity, is in turn, non other than a meeting place.

Raafat Ishak
November, 2003

Acknowledgments:
Thanks to Alex Rizkalla and Julie Davies, Raafat Ishak and Jordi Casasayas

DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE COCK AND THE HEN

Good Lord, my dear hen, you do look sad: what's wrong?

HEN: Dear friend, better ask what's not wrong with me. An awful servant took me on her knees, stuck a long needle up my backside, grabbed hold of my womb, rolled it around the needle, tore it out and gave it to her cat to eat. So now I can't receive the attentions of my favourite Chanticleer or lay an egg.

COCK: Alas! my dear, I've lost more than you. What they did to me
was twice as cruel; you and I will no longer get any comfort in this world. They've neutered both of us. The only thing that consoles me in my desperate state is that the other day, near my hen house, I heard two Italian priests saying that they'd suffered the same terrible fate, so they could sing to the Pope with a purer voice. According to them, men started out circumcising their fellow men and ended up castrating them. They were cursing their fate and the human race.

HEN: What! you mean to say that they've taken away the best thing- about us just so we could have a purer voice.

COCK: Alas! my poor hen, it's worse than that; it's to fatten us up and make our flesh more tender.

HEN: So ... when we're fatter, will they be any better off?

COCK: Yes: because they're planning to eat us.

HEN: Eat us! oh, the brutes.

COCK: It's what they do. They lock us up for a few days, force us to swallow a mash of their own making, put our eyes out to keep our minds from wandering. Then, when the feast day arrives they tear out our feathers, cut our throats, and toast us. We are carried in and put in front of them on a large silver platter. They all say what they think of us - it's our funeral oration. Someone says we smell of nuts,
someone else how wonderful our flesh tastes. They praise our thigh, our arms, our rumps, and then our tale is told once and for all in this. poor world.

HEN: What appalling villains! I feel faint. Oh no! they'll tear my eyes out, and cut my throat! I'll be roasted and eaten! Won't these ruffians suffer any remorse?

COCK: No, my dear. The two priests I told you about were saying that
men don't ever have any remorse for things that they're accustomed
to doing.

HEN: What a horrible race! I bet that even as they're eating us they start laughing and telling jokes, just as though there were nothing wrong.

COCK: You're right. But it might help a bit to know that these animals, who have two feet just like us but are much inferior since they have no feathers, have acted exactly the same way with their own kind times without number. I gathered from my two priests that the Greek and Christian emperors always took care to put out the eyes of their brothers and cousins; there was even, in our own country, a man named Debonair who had his nephew Bernard's eyes torn out. As for the matter of roasting human beings, there's nothing more common. My priests said that more than twenty thousand people had been roasted for holding views that a cockerel would find it hard to explain and which I don't care about anyway.

HEN: So, I suppose they roasted them to eat them.

COCK: I'm not too sure. But I do recall very clearly being told that in
lots of countries men have from time to time eaten one another.

HEN: Never mind about that. It's a good thing if the members of such a perverted species eat one another; then we can be shot of them. But what about me? I'm peaceable, I've never done any wrong, I've even fed these monsters by giving them eggs. Am I to be castrated, blinded, have my throat cut and be roasted? Are we treated like that in the rest of the world?

cock: The two priests said No. They were sure that in a country called India, much bigger, more beautiful, more fertile than ours, men have a sacred law that for thousands of centuries now has forbidden them to eat us. One Pythagoras, who had travelled amongst these just nations, introduced this humane law into Europe, and it was followed by all his disciples. These good priests were reading Porphyry the Pythagorean, who wrote a fine book against roasting spits.
This Porphyry - what a good, divine man he was! With so much
wisdom, forcefulness, tender respect for God he shows us that we
are both the allies of men and related to them. God gave us, he says, the same organs, feelings, memory, the same, mysterious germ of understanding that evolves in us to the point decreed by eternal law, which neither they nor we can ever infringe. Indeed, my dearest hen,
wouldn't it be an insult to God to say that we have senses but cannot feel, a brain but cannot think? That fantasy, worthy of some madman they call Descartes, wouldn't it be the height of ridicule and a worthless excuse for acting barbarously?
So the- great philosophers, of antiquity never roasted us on the spit. They made efforts to learn our language and to find out about the faculties we have that are so superior to human ones. We were as safe with them as in the Golden Age. Wise men don't kill animals, says Porphyry; only barbarians and priests kill and eat them. He wrote this marvellous book to convert a disciple who had become Christian out of sheer greediness.

Hen: Well then ... did they, put. up altars to this great man who taught virtue to humans and saved animals?.

COCK: No. He was detested by the Christians, the ones who eat us,
and they still execrate his memory today. They call him a heathen and say his virtues weren't genuine, since he was a pagan.

HEN: What dreadful prejudices come from greediness! The other day, in this barn affair, near our henhouse, I heard a man speaking; others were standing around saying nothing. He was holding forth that God had made a pact with us and these other animals called men; God had forbidden them to feed on our flesh and blood. How then can they include in this stringent ban the right to consume our limbs when boiled or roasted? When they cut our throats, a lot of blood must still be left in our veins, and this must still be mixed in with our flesh. So they are visibly disobeying God by eating us. And
also isn't it a sacrilege to kill and eat creatures with whom God has made a pact? It would be a peculiar treaty indeed where the only clause is to deliver us up to die. Either our creator didn't make a pact with us, or it's a crime to kill and cook us. There's no middle way.

COCK: That isn't the only contradiction to be found amongst these barbarians, our undying enemies. They've been long since the object of criticism, because they never agree on anything. They make laws, only to break them; worse, they break them with a clear conscience. They have thought up scores of subterfuges, dozens of false argu-ments to justify their wrongdoing. They only apply their minds to excuse their injustices; they only use words to cover up their thoughts. Just imagine, in this little country of ours, it is forbidden to eat us two days a week. But they manage to find a way round that law. What's more, though on the surface it appears, to help us, it is in fact barbarous. People are commanded to eat fish those two days, so they hunt down their victims in the seas and rivers. They devour fish which each cost them more than a hundred cockerels, and they call that fasting and self mortification. In short, I don' think
you can imagine a race both more absurd and more odious, more outrageous and blood thirsty.

HEN: Oh, heavens! Don't I see that dreadful kitchen boy with his big knife?

COCK: This is it, my dear, our last hour has come; let us commend ourselves to God.

HEN: If only I could give the rascal who is going, to eat me a bout of indigestion that would kill him! But the weak can only take their revenge on the strong by making futile wishes, and the strong just laugh.

COCK: Ahhh! they've got me by the throat. Let us pardon our enemies.

HEN: I can't they've grabbed me, they're carrying me off. Farewell,. my dear Chanticleer.

COCK: Farewell, for all eternity, my dearest hen.

Voltaire 1765. First published in Compariative Criticism, 20. Cambridge University Press, 1998