New Museum's "After Nature" Exhibition

New Museum’s “After Nature” exhibition

Date of visit: September 20, 2008

                       From July 17 through September 21, 2008, the New Museum presented an eclectic selection of work in “After Nature”. Taking German filmmaker, Werner Herzog’s film, Lessons of Darkness as inspiration, curators Massimiliano Gioni and Jarrett Gregory, collected over ninety works from various artists with a common thread: man’s communion with nature and the vulnerability of humanity under the power of natural forces.

            “Unfolding as a visual novel, the show depicts a future landscape of wilderness and ruins. It is a story of abandonment, regression, and rapture- an epic of humanity coming apart under the pressure of obscure forces and not-so-distant environmental disasters.” This exhibition summary written for the New Museum’s press release is an appropriate premise for analyzing Pawet Althalmer’s sculptures within the “After Nature” exhibition. What better way to approach this show’s theme of visualizing the end and the wilderness of the future, than constructing life-sized models of humans that look like the living dead?

            Pawed Althalmer’s sculptures, made from organic materials such as grass, human hair and animal intestines stand like Museum of Natural History displays. Instead of being antediluvian bones and prehistoric replicas of mammals and reptiles, the viewer looks into the vacant glass eyes of naked frail human beings. Althalmer pulls in the viewer not only by his medium, but the modern day objects his figures hold. A light-skinned man and woman are encased within museum glass holding a camcorder and cell phone. The couple becomes instantly preserved within a slice of contemporary life from the 21^st century. Althalmer’s choice of material to sculpt his figures is not only conceptually smart, but also visually raw. The delicate detail and careful nature in which violet capillaries and blue veins show through his figures’ skin, provoked a visceral connection within me the more I noticed each figure’s human attributes. Another figure was of a fragile looking little girl holding a stick with a leaf on a string attached to it. This piece not only felt the most vulnerable, but the most life-like. Althalmer applies movement to the sculpture by including the leaf on the string. This handmade little toy for the girl floats and flutters on the air currents blowing throughout the gallery. She stands on a pedestal about six inches from off the ground and remains below the viewer at a life-like size and height. Her life-life size adds to the human-like quality of her skin, hair and coy childish stance.

            I was immediately drawn to delicate and vulnerable quality of Althalmer’s sculptures. Having found out that they were primarily made from animal intestines and straw, I was even more impressed by the pieces and the innovativeness of Althalmer. The skin and bones of the figures posing as humans who are mainly composed of animal remains is quite noteworthy. Even the artist makes a life-sized model of himself. He and the other figures are awkwardly pale and stitched together like stuffed animals; it’s quite a two-sided showcase of man and the human form. One could see this representation as a direct deconstruction of man, devaluing and degrading the human form via using “lower life forms” such as animal intestines to capture the human figure. Another view could be that Althalmer is trying to preserve the ancient handcrafts of the past by using primitive materials objects in his sculptures. In creating the human form that produces these objects, he glorifies man and man’s creations.

            The fusion of subject matter and medium create a dialog between each other that I believe makes Althalmer’s piece a success aesthetically and conceptually. The natural ancient sculptural materials allow his pieces to become relics of our modern culture and personas. Applying his artwork to the “After Nature” exhibition’s theme, Althalmer’s figures could almost represent yellowing pale forms of humanity that hope to stand the test of time for our human race.