Living rock and human bird

Critical figurations

Disciplines, as Latour suggests, are assembled around areas of concern and have a common purpose in ‘stirring the entities of the collective together in order to make them articulable and to make them speak’ (2004: 89). Cultural geographers, like contemporary art practitioners, have been stirring, experimenting, playing and flirting with methods to reveal the performative qualities of common worlds. Dixon et al. (2012) offer a figurative approach for grappling with the question of what happens when agency is extended, not just to other animals, but to rocks, minerals and bacteria. The figurations of human bird and living rock plunge us into an in-between space where the humanist figure dissolves, and beyond which not only new modes of thought but new modes of humanity are imperative.

The critical figurations of Phillips’ art practice, like Haraway’s cyborg, Oncomouse and companions species, unsettle taken for granted assumptions of dualistic separation. A performative approach stretches Latour’s notion of ‘speaking’ to a broader remit, where artistry of diverse kinds can articulate (in terms of both connecting and communicating) what it takes to compose worlds. In this way, an appreciation of non-human artistry can help create a recomposed ‘human’, one sensitive to the role of non-human companions in crafting the common world. There are, however, multiple ways to figure this ‘sensitivity’ and the aesthetic approach as exemplified through Phillips’ work, decentres the conceit of human action as extending agency or care to ‘make room for others’. Instead we are confronted with worlds in and for themselves. Far from ‘making room for others’, the critical figurations of living rock and human bird challenge our (human) aesthetic sensibilities with artistic actions and time-boggling accretions that have no reference to human experience or timescales. Creativity is thus displaced from its humanist perch in the face of the mindfulness, awareness and self-reflexivity of all life (Margulis and Sagan, 1995: 32, quoted in Clark, 2003: 169). As Nigel Clark notes, ‘the possibility of a performative force that animates not only the depths of the human body, but the bodies of all living things’ suggests ‘a communicative competence implicit in living matter’ reminding us that ‘biophysical forces never cease to animate and articulate the socio-cultural domain’ (2003: 169). Importantly, as Clark reveals, in his case through the figure of the feral, ‘life is neither free to pursue any or every option, nor destined to reproduce itself in a constant and self-identical fashion’ (2003: 169). For example, in the figure of human bird, we encounter busy bower birds, making mounds, collecting objects within a complex sociality of mating, liveliness and flourishing. The birds refuse the nature–culture boundary and collect what attracts them regardless of source: natural and artificial have no meaning here.

Phillips’ artwork both echoes and calls into question the colonial practice of the collection, entwining the viewer with the long history of relations between art and science and the impacts of this in colonial contexts. The bower bird’s penchant for collecting resonates with the practices of both colonial artists and scientists in forging the descriptive apparatuses of natural history that envisioned colonial lands as ‘a storehouse of random flora and fauna waiting for the civilized ordering of the narrator with … Western science’ (Mills, 1994: 41). Human bird nags at the practices, remnants and consequences of colonial art and the bower bird’s lively collecting facilitates a birdly flourishing that shows another view of the collection as a lived and active relation and, as Clark would note, attests to the ability of the birds to improvise in colonised settlings and to ‘compose themselves into new rhythms and patterns and to recompose the milieus in which they dwell’ (2003: 165).

Living rock intensifies the unsettlement of non-human recomposition through engaging human bodies with bacteria and the inorganic. Through Phillips’ sound walk, we are asked to become-with the becoming-rock of the thrombolites. The sound walk unsettles and disturbs as it offers an opportunity to occupy the space between flesh, bacteria, mineral and rock as we ‘listen in’ to the slow accretion of matter. Such visceral turmoil echoes the experience of colonial artists encountering ‘strange’ environs. This resonates with Felix Driver’s (2004) notion of ‘disturbance’ as a lens for grasping the fragilities and struggles that unsettled imperial knowledge in the very process of making it. Driver (2004) notes the ‘disturbance’ to and of western bodies as they struggled with distance, other climes, disease and fatigue in the embodied production of on-the-spot sketches for colonial knowledge-making in the 19th century. In this sense, the disturbing qualities of living rock and human bird reveal the continuities of colonialism but also engender the possibilities of other ways of knowing, other modes of becoming.

The ‘where of encounter’

These reflections lead me to highlight the importance of the ‘where of encounter’, not in a straightforward locational sense, but in terms of Haraway’s notion of situatedness. Acknowledging the situatedness of the living rock and human bird suggests a consideration of the work that aesthetics and figurations might do in different places and times. In the case of Phillip’s work, it locates us in a distinctly colonised setting where the material imprints of an imported aesthetic shaped and continues to shape both the possibilities for birds such as the bower bird to flourish, and for thrombolites to continue ‘living’ at Lake Clifton under pressures of land use change and human-induced climate change.

The figures of living rock and human bird remind us of the specific and partial ways in which aesthetics help constitute material worlds. In the Australian context, English settlers introduced bird species so that the sonorous and sensuous sounds of English birds could be heard above the screeching of cockatoos; the settlers’ negative assessment of a melancholy landscape enlivened bodies to cut down trees, clear, neaten and ‘improve’ landscapes with ‘familiar’ European vegetation and animals. Combined with the sciences of empire, the European aesthetic not only assessed the landscape as wanting, but judged Antipodean life forms as ‘strange’, ‘perverse’ and lower down the evolutionary scale than northern hemisphere ones.

Indeed, it is another collection, that of Australian Aboriginal peoples’ skulls, that situates the development of humanism in Antipodean colonial encounters. As Kay Anderson (2007) argues, it was the colonial encounter between Europeans and Australian Aborigines that precipitated an 18th century crisis in humanism that would (re)define the human in relation to our separation from nature. Anderson locates the encounter of Europeans with Australian Aborigines, who were imagined as lower down the order of humanity, as producing a predicament that was ‘resolved’ through establishing a particular racial dimension to what it means to be human. Indigenous Australians refused the European seduction of rational power and the zeal for domestication of nature and animals. By demonstrating a disinclination to become European, the notion of a singular teleological scale of humanity, stretching from primitive to civilised, was brought into question. That Australian Aborigines did not want to be raised up the ‘ladder of humanity’ meant that new explanations for the variety of humanness in the world had to be forged. The notion of innate race, as a mode of explanation of different orders of the human, rather than a continuum of a single humanity, was instituted to answer the problem, thus binding race, place and humanism in uneasy relation. The result was a humanity characterised by its separation from nature, and humans figured as ‘nature altering beings’, notably through agriculture and domestication, concomitantly materialising nature as mindless and insensate (Anderson, 2007: 199).

A post-humanist performative perspective, as signalled by Dixon et al. (2012), engenders a different appreciation of Indigenous Australians who understand the importance of extra-human actors in the world and that the world comes into being through the agencies of all living things (organic and inorganic) (Weir, 2008). Indigenous Australians speak of ‘country’ (an Aboriginal Australian word) as ‘a place that gives and receives life. Not just imagined or represented, it is lived in and lived with’ (Rose, 1996: 7). Rose continues:

The expression of ‘country’ in Indigenous art links back to the question of aesthetics and geography. Barbara Bolt emphasises this relation when she suggests a radical performativity of Indigenous Australian art. She notes that the paintings, the Dreaming and the land are one, and as such, ‘must be recognised as operating as a force in the world’ (2006: 57–58); a dynamic and productive force that enacts realities. Such a perspective illustrates an aesthetic vested in and of a more-than-human, active and articulate world.

What remains?

To my way of thinking this takes us not to thresholds, inclusions and exclusions but to the possibility of cultivating in-between spaces of connectivity and ethical engagement. The question is not so much ‘what remains’ but what ‘becomes’ in the process of creative interplay between humans, aesthetics, space and non-humans. Critical figurations such as living rock and human bird deterritorialise the figure of the human in Western thought and break down the edifices of exceptionalism on which such a figure has been built. In this sense, the human is remade and resituated through an ontology of agentic and sensate worlds, a mosaic of rearticulated relations and a ‘wholesale working over of our understanding of cognition’. As moments of de- and re-territorialisation living rock and human bird engender a radical rearticulation that can take us in many directions, recongealing heterogeneous elements, albeit in new assemblages that materialise some worlds and not others. As noted above, Indigenous Australians exemplify a mode of humanity attentive to ‘country’ that speaks and acts. As Rose explains, for Indigenous Australians, a sense of connectivity with the natural world is an essential part of ‘becoming human’ or as Yarralin people from northern Australia say, ‘dingo makes us human’ (Rose, 2000). From an Australian perspective where Indigenous peoples were labelled less-than-human to bolster the superiority of a European humanist vision of the human, the value ‘humanist remains’ is problematic.

In the context of Dixon et al.’s (2012) paper, we might ask how living rock and human bird help make us human, and nurture the generative possibilities of an aesthetic approach that refuses reductions and transcendence, or as beautifully phrased by the authors: as ‘a sk(e)in that connects but never envelops its constitutive parts’. For geographers, there may be much on offer in a playful engagement with vibrant matter, creative birds, animated rocks, aesthetic practices and lively papers.