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| Ricky
Swallow: Science/Fiction Andrew McQualter |
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 Ricky
Swallow, Monkey masks, |
Pierre Boulle Despite the scale his work, Ricky Swallow's sculpture takes on some rather large issues. The artist's use of animal forms such as monkeys, sharks and other sea creatures in the context of his references to Sci-Fi classics like Star Wars and The Planet of the Apes, is a reminder that science is a close relation of Science-fiction and that both science and fantasy have a basis in the world as observed from a human perspective. Swallow's work recognises the diversity and multiplicity of the world around us in its humbling scale. The complexity of evolution, the limits of the known world, the culture of nature, the museum's systems of classification and the taxonomies of science are part of the territory covered in his work. Most importantly, Swallow's work is a tribute to the scope and agility of the human imagination. A scene constructed by the artist on the turntable of an old portable record player depicts a diminutive figure on a platform observing a mechanised model of revolving planets (powered by the turntable underneath). Here, there is something undeniably wrong. The scale of this scene is skewed, the planets too large, moving too fast, the figure observing them too diminutive. When we smile at this trickery, we acknowledge the frivolity of the enterprise that the artist's model museum refers to. To construct planets, to assert that their motion is clockwork, and then to assign the orbits of these heavenly bodies a perfect circularity, is an odd project, to say the least. Often displayed in groups of six or more, Swallow's miniature museum exhibits are monuments to the absurd. Planetariums and mechanised natural history exhibits share the table top with other, more unlikely scenarios. A solitary figure walks amongst a forest of dowelling poles, two of which spin rapidly to no apparent end. A man in a boat encounters a strange lighthouse. Several long extinct bugs, from different stages in evolution, spin in endless pursuit. Whilst these works undoubtedly trade on our fascination for the miniature and detail, there are more elaborate forces at play. Scientific conjecture is a product of poetic reverie, as much as it is a product of logic and empirical observation. Copernicus' circular universe and Darwin's evolutionary ladder appeal to the aesthetic and poetic sensibilities of their historical time. The circle and the line are moral, as well as poetic figures. Despite their iconoclasm, the theories of Copernicus and Darwin nevertheless re-enforce the model of an anthropocentric world. Or perhaps they are evidence of a desire to perceive the world as such. It is not divine purpose which separates man from the entirety of creation, but the ability to perceive pattern, to place the blueprint of culture over chaos. These works take up a position at the point where scientific thought intersects with the poetic or fantastic. The sense of wonder we experience when we encounter Swallow's work is similar to that experienced in a natural history museum or when reading the fantastic travelogues of Jules Verne or Augustan fantasy novels like Gulliver's Travels. The writer of fantastic tales often draws on the stylistic techniques of the journalist or the diarist to imbue their tales of wonder with a realistic air, and the precise descriptive technique of scientific observation to lend them an aura of believability. Calling on the virtuosity of special effects in the work of taxidermists, scenic painters and nature illustrators, the scientist crafts a fictive universe. Swallow's work succeeds in replacing the moral verticality of science with the horizontal movement of the imagination. This act provides a word of caution to those tempted to ingest information presented as scientific fact, wholesale and without question. As a model for critical thought, this work also has much to say about the practice and reception of the visual arts. Like many of his contemporaries, Swallow's appropriation of popular culture is devoid of the proselytising and ironic distance that is evident in much appropriation art of the previous decade. Rubber, dioramas, scale models and occasional excursions into scenic painting all come into play in the artist's studio. The artist takes on the challenge of competing with the entertainment industry, placing himself in a position parallel to the empire of cinema, comic books and media spectacle. The artist's parallel world is one where fine arts and popular culture enter into a process of free exchange, without any need to comment on, or analyse the cross fertilisation. Swallow's exhibitions are delightfully playful, filled with grotesque fascinations and enthralling curios, which move, make noise, and turn on and off. He also dispenses with the moralistic overtones of traditional science whilst maintaining an admiration for the scientist's imaginative capabilities. In a world marked by a disillusionment with traditional paradigms of thought and the values associated with those paradigms, Swallow's work functions as an affirmation of imagination and creativity. The manner in which Swallow's work undermines scientific enterprise is celebratory, rather than moralistic. Dark Brotherhood is a series of busts of Darth Vader each sporting the attributes of a different animal. These appear to be representations of the evolutionary progress of a creature who's gene pool has been contaminated with some stray DNA from a Hollywood studio. Science-fact becomes science-fiction when the associative and combinatory tendencies of scientific conjecture are exaggerated. Swallow's work extends these tendencies toward the hyperbolic. This space is one where hierarchies and taxonomies of common sense are overturned; alternate possibilities are discovered, acted out and acted upon. It is not the vertical, moral order that is re-enforced in Swallow's work, but the horizontal, nonheirachical space of creativity. The universe that Swallow describes is in the fantastic umbra cast over the world of common sense and scientific fact. The blanket covered exterior of Blanket Sharks and Monkey Stills (1,2 and 3), for example, locates the creatures within the realm of the domestic rather than within the realm of the natural and untamed. This taxonomic activity catalogues things not as they are in this world, but as they could be were the world a product of another creature's imagination. Swallow's Dark Brotherhood, Monkey Stills, and Blanket Sharks exist in a world that is as vast and complicated as a child's bedroom, where elements of the real and the fantastic co-exist and multiply in endless combination. At the centre of this remarkable universe is the practice of being human, which is not so much an issue of ontological being, but of being able to grasp the world with one's hands, manipulate it, and re-present it. Here, it is perhaps useful to recall Heidegger's axiom: "Thinking is Handicraft".1 Because it is, as far as we know, this capacity of thought that distinguishes mankind in the animal kingdom. As Stanley Cavell notes, "thinking is practical (no doubt pre-industrial), fruitful work, which must be learned, ... it is work which only the creature with the hand can perform - and most fatefully perform as a mode of necessary, everyday violence"2 Pierre Boulle reminds us in Monkey Planet, that the existence of human society is remarkable and improbable. The apes that inhabit his Planet of the Apes attribute their superiority to their "nimble hands" and their ability to "conceive the three dimensions of space".3 Like the science fiction writer, Swallow explores his theme by presenting us with other possibilities, alternate worlds and scenarios which are an echo of our own. The conceptual work performed by Swallow's sculptures is the product of an inversion. The empirical mode of scientific documentation and the fantastic mode of science fiction are inverted by Swallow's strategies of miniaturisation and borrowings from the culture of the museum. He reminds us of our hubris by exposing the fragility of our scientific fictions. It is humanity, the quality of being human, which appears to be at stake in Swallow's work. If it is our humanity which allows us to perform the everyday violence of thinking - of controlling the world with our eye, hand and thought - then perhaps it is through these very activities, the activities of handicraft, that our humanity might be redeemed. Andrew McQualter Endnotes © The artist and |
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Ricky Swallow, Blanket
sharks |
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 Ricky
Swallow, Dark |
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 Ricky
Swallow, Monkey stills, |
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Ricky Swallow, untitled,
foam, |
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