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Still Life at the Chameleon CafeOnce we look at the world afresh, and attuned to the cross-references nature delights in, new artistic possibilities emerge. Mimicry in nature is at least a great fancy dress ball and perhaps even, at times, ballet. The realm of natural camouflage is full of thrilling examples of creatures extending their artistic boundaries, and affords an object lesson to artists in the relationship between texture, appearance, and the identity of images. The Sargassum fish, an extravagantly mottled orange and red creature, has frond-like appendages which mimic the floating seaweed amongst which it lives. The Sea dragon (Phyllopteryx eques) takes this even further: its tattered appendages seem to be composed with a sense of humour, giving it the look of a punk's ripped clothes or a court jester. An artistic equivalent can be found in In David Bintley's ballet Still Life at the Penguin Cafe in which a male dancer is transformed into a zebra whose markings allow remarkably unhuman shapes during the dance; and his hands extend into twin tails which swirl around his head similarly breaking up the human form. The metamorphic and metaphoric possibilities of supposedly inanimate matter are glowingly visible in Picasso's sculpture: nothing is dead in Picasso's hands: an old wicker basket becomes the touchingly frail ribcage of a skipping girl; two bent old forks are the splayed feet of a bird; in an American toy car of the 50s he sees the head of a baboon; the kind of junky metal bits people keep in jamjars become a Little owl. Everything that exists, whether organic or inorganic, of natural or human origin, has metaphoric possibilities. And the imagination of a great creator like Picasso requires the material world as its source: he is not alienated from it; without it he would be bereft. Picasso himself said: "God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things. And Picasso is a good example of the crossover between literary metaphor and visual punning we saw in 'The Implosive Animation of the Still Cartoon'. Picasso's Weeping Woman (1937) literally goes to pieces, her face fracturing into splinters, tears, jagged gnawed fingers. Such a visual pun is obviously a late human sophistication of the techniques of the cicadas in composing their 'flower' on a twig. There are indeed 'sermons in stones, books in the running brooks', or as Richard Mabey has more recently said of mimicry and luring in nature: 'If all these interpretations were being done consciously we would be tempted to call it art. Or perhaps a set of brilliant puns. Perhaps both'. I am suggesting that what animates the line of a cartoonist and what the cicadas are doing as they perch on a twig are all dictated by the same formal principles - and the results are all denizens of the empire of signs, with its mimicry, sleight of hand, and blurring of boundaries between the individual and the environment. Armed with this ruling notion, we see the world as the Martian would: delightful in its details, infinite in its possibilities - as far removed from the crabbed regiment of postmodernists muttering 'there is nothing beyond the text', or a Damien Hirst pickling sheep, as Newton was from Neanderthal Man. The possibilities of meaningful symbolic communication and metaphoric invention have in no way been undermined by contemporary science or philosophy. This is, potentially, an unusually fertile period for art. |
