Rachel Mayeri

Project Series 39: Rachel Mayeri Home Page Introduction:Cinema as Primatology | Essay by Doug Harvey | Interview with Deborah Forster

Project Series 39: Rachel Mayeri
October 31- December 20, 2009


 

	Baboons as Friends, 2008 Video Still

“Project Series 39: Rachel Mayeri” focuses on “Primate Cinema,” a video series begun in 2006 that deals with primates and their on-screen dramas and consists of several related videos, performances, and installations. The exhibition includes the first work in the “Primate Cinema” series, Baboons as Friends, a two-channel installation contrasting field footage of baboons with human actors reenacting the primate footage, and How to Act like an Animal, a two-channel video installation juxtaposing documentary footage from Jane Goodall’s 1995 National Geographic special on The New Chimpanzees with performers reenacting a clip from this documentary footage.

Working at the intersection of art and science, Mayeri observes human nature through the lenses of media studies, primatology, video art, and film history. She examines the cognitive processes involved in understanding an “other” perspective as a way of examining how human nature is represented.

The research and development of Mayeri’s project “Primate Cinema” coincides with a new global interest in the interdisciplinary field of animal studies. In the last several decades, scientists—primatologists, biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, etc.—have approached studies of human and nonhuman primates with new tools. The human genome project has demonstrated how closely related humans are biologically to the simplest forms of animal life. A heightened awareness of environmental crisis has brought increasing interest to a new consideration of animal/human relations. Numerous scholars have been reexamining the cultural constructions of terms such as animal and human leading to developments in other fields of study.

In the field of gender studies, for example, art historian Meredith Tromble, in her talk for Tate Britian’s “Eye of the Storm” symposium in June 2009, sums up how discussions of cultural and biological constructions have linked gender and primate studies. She mentions Ernst Haeckel’s diagram of the Tree of Life, from his 1879 book The Evolution of Man, saying “it conveys the exalted position of Man in early biology…women, like animals, were consciously and unconsciously construed as “other” in narratives of “nature” that put men on top.” Tromble continues: “Therefore, women were particularly well-placed to notice the ways in which those narratives sustain oppressive power relations inside and outside the laboratory. As women entered official biology, some of them began to ask if the attitudes towards animal life embedded in scientific culture related to gender issues. Biologists such as Lynda Birke, Donna Haraway, and Ruth Hubbard raised questions about how the exclusion of women shaped biological science.” She goes on to discuss how this “gendering of nature as ‘female’ which authorized domination is not looking like such a good strategy.” She counterpoises new visual strategies that numerous contemporary artists, Mayeri among them, utilize to attempt to “create a relationship with the world in which they contribute to its maintenance and even its flourishing.”

These scientific and critical developments have paved the way for recent exhibitions and symposia devoted to animal studies, among them: “Interspecies: Artists Collaborating with Animals,” an exhibition, symposia, and series of workshops in late 2009 at The Arts Catalyst in London that explored the current state of human and animal relationships; “The Animal Gaze,” in 2008 at the London Metropolitan University which included over 40 artists looking at depictions of animals differing from typical anthropocentric representations; and the first exhibition looking at animal communication, “Becoming Animal,” at MASS MOCA from May 2005 through February 2006, an exhibition of new work by 13 artists that explored the closing gap between human and animal existence.

Mayeri’s work was included in the “Interspecies” exhibition, and she has also organized other projects connected to this field of study. Most recently, Mayeri co-curated a project at the Sweeney Art Gallery at the University of California, Riverside, entitled “Intelligent Design, Interspecies Art” (fall 2009) which presented 20 international artists’ takes on animals’ points of view.

Mayeri’s work brings together art, media studies, and biology to observe the field of primate studies as a model for scientific and cultural research. Her project compellingly connects the social, emotional, and political behaviors of human and non-human primates. Mayeri eloquently states that “as opportunities to study the “unruly lives of nonhuman primates in the ‘wild’ continue to vanish, our imagination of our closest relatives may be all that we have left.” Mayeri’s work provides a unique, and crucial, perspective on creativity, highlighting the profound links between art and science, nature and culture, animal and human.

Rachel Mayeri’s exhibition is the thirty-ninth in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of focused exhibitions designed to introduce experimental art with new forms, techniques, or concepts to the Pomona College campus.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator