Curious About Existence (2003) functions as a companion piece of sorts, centring as it does on the scientific principle that describes how entropy always maintains the upper hand over order: the first law of thermodynamics, according to which energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but is simply changed from one form to another. Found footage shows us a classroom filled with pimply students attending a lecture comparing the death of a mouse—its “energy and order” converted to “fungus” and “grief,” among other elements—with the death of a relationship and the resulting transformation of the emotions contained within it. The work strives to disprove the idea that total order equals total goodness. In valuing passion and experience over reason and rigour, these videos lay the foundation for the metaphysical vision quests of the duo’s next works.
The musical/science-fiction trilogy The New Freedom Founders, from 2003–04, seems like a transitional work in this regard. Rather than being subdivided into episodes, each part features fictionalized versions of the artists describing new ways of shaping reality according to one’s desire to achieve freedom. For example, in part one, I am a Conjuror, Duke and Battersby laze about in bath and bed, reflecting on the revolutions in medicine and physiology they have effected through the new metaphysics they have developed. Episode two features an interview with Battersby in which he describes his manipulation of time. Duke (as one Karen Annasdaughter), in turn, describes her invention of a new language. This triptych now seems like a deeply personal manifesto.
After The New Freedom Founders, the artists returned to their more episodic structures and created their two most accomplished works thus far: Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure (2006)—a summa of their oeuvre and road map of their concerns and strategies—and Beauty Plus Pity, which in late 2008 expanded beyond the video frame to populate a gallery space (The Power Plant in Toronto) with a council of finely dressed taxidermied animals. The scenes that comprise both works, rather than having the loose, unforced character of sketchbook notes, uniformly carry a distinct—and perverse, of course—gravitas. Each piece builds to a near-transcendent finale that is, appropriately enough, sung.
Songs of Praise concludes with four plaintive solos that unite the world’s creatures in the shared experiences of suffering and its overcoming. Following the laments of a blind shrew eaten by an eagle, an emaciated but happy crackhead and a raped and discarded little girl, all animated, we hear: “I’m a tiny brown seed in the ground. I accidentally sprouted before the springtime came. I almost died. But I’m gonna survive… We’re gonna survive.”
Duke and Battersby wrote Songs of Praise during a sojourn on the shore of Nova Scotia, the rural setting catalyzing their provocative reflections on the natural world. It was completed in rural New York, where they work as professors at Syracuse University. They previously lived a peripatetic existence, moving between Halifax; Cape Town; London, Ontario; Vancouver and Chicago (where they studied with Reinke and received M.F.A.s from the University of Illinois).
Songs of Praise proposes nothing less than a cosmology; its scope and its ambitions are vast, taking in not merely the pas de deux of ethics and desire but the laws of the universe as well. As its theme song intones, “We will sing to the fallen and to the filth in which they lay.” The artists find profound evidence for the future redemption of humanity in the natural world. Birds, for example, “come back” each year despite our not deserving them. Evolving the conjuror personas they introduced in The New Freedom Founders, Duke and Battersby appear as animated witch and wizard, proclaiming their desire to create a “new nature,” since the old one has been domesticated to the point of extinction. With its lyrically abstracted images of natural and constructed environments, hymns addressed to our entire species and other macroscopic strategies, the work’s canvas would seem to be the whole world. Not surprisingly, magic and science—the generators of two very tiny babies that feature in one memorable episode—are the keys to understanding it.
Beauty Plus Pity similarly encompasses a huge swath of human experience, from familial bonds and reproduction to our collective identity as a species. Its title is Nabokov’s equation for “the closest we can get to a definition of art.” The video’s protagonist is a hunter, who is shockingly candid about his passion for killing animals, which he compellingly identifies as a “wrong committed for the right reasons.” It is because he wants to touch and hold them, a longing for closeness with other creatures that can only come from incapacitating them (he yearns for a zoo where all the animals are tranquilized so they may be safely cuddled). The video also examines the simultaneous punishment and redemption we seek from God—and, the artists suggest, from every mythic or symbolic figure we have created. God is clearly past his best-before date here, and is supplanted by the multivocal, multi-species woodland Spirit Guides. Who but the most downtrodden should determine our fate?
Children and animals are intriguing for Duke and Battersby because these figures lack the inner conflict between base desire and moralitybased self-control that haunts human adults. In Curious About Existence, an otter reads from a letter (written by Duke) from Cosima von Bülow to Nietzsche: “Treat your impulses as a comedy…not a doctrine.” (Incidentally, an otter dressed as a flapper is the lead polemicist in Beauty Plus Pity.) According to Duke, children and animals are also easier to forgive, a key concept for the artists given their interest in the earth’s apparently inescapable cycles, the way the seasons change and life reproduces despite everything. As the hunter says, the “song of the universe will continue like a round.” While animals and children embody “bad ideas for paradise” in the video of the same name—paths to transcendence not to be taken—in Beauty Plus Pity the hunter suggests that children, while not good, contain the potential to be so. The artists seem to have reached some kind of answer in their philosophical quest here: humanity’s potential for good is what can bridge the abject and the sublime.
The laborious handcrafting that went into the taxidermied figures the duo exhibited at The Power Plant renewed Duke and Battersby’s taste for forms of art production other than video, and also offered the opportunity to focus more on the decorative than the discursive. They found it quite satisfying to create seductive objects, and plan to incorporate sculptural elements into their future productions. This interest in new kinds of expression also informs their ongoing, multi-faceted Year in the Life of the World project, an ambitious archival endeavour that involves collecting webcam feeds from all over the planet. The goal is to form a kind of monumental, non-verbal collective portrait through a flow of digital image streams.
Duke and Battersby are currently collaborating with the Toronto-based experimental film- and videomaker Mike Hoolboom. The artists have collaborated with others in the past; for example, Duke is close to completing a six-year poetry-and-drawing project with Shary Boyle entitled The Illuminations. The focus of the video project with Hoolboom will be “intraspecies communication” among primates, about sex specifically, and they suggest it will be quite a personal project (as opposed to the universalism I find in their most recent work). Duke suggests that the three artists have very different views of sex, and that the work will need to be more than the sum of its parts.
Duke and Battersby’s inclination to make art that is simultaneously entertaining, intelligent and ethical is underpinned by their understanding that every aesthetic act is in some way futile. Their videos are filled with paradoxes that, rather than being debilitating, somehow spur action into being. As they have shown, every fascination can turn to disinterest and every expression of emotion may be misinterpreted as needy self-indulgence, but such outcomes do not negate the glory that could also come in their wake.
« Page 1 First page
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
