Purity & Danger
VIDEO | MFA Thesis Project
Scrimshaw piece, carved after 1837. Anonymous. An excess of time and an excess of teeth. Listless in the Pacific, whalers carved. Compelled by hands invisible, they roved in search of golden grease. The sperm whale’s teeth, useless, were left in their grip. On these unsalable canvases, they inscribed the desires of those long left from home. On this tooth, a woman for each side. Curious cohabitants: a fashion plate female and a mythical piratess. The sanctified and the sanctioned. (Wasn’t a woman’s place in the home?) Tenderness and violence, tangled into this tooth, the by-product of a gory hunt. Rictus of our largest mammalian kin, domesticated and lovingly inscribed with another object of pursuit.
Man, woman, whale—bound together in a time when purity was prized and separate spheres governed lives. A product of nineteenth century “modernity,” but a contradiction to it.
Scrimshaw piece, carved after 1837. Anonymous. An excess of time and an excess of teeth. Listless in the Pacific, whalers carved. Compelled by hands invisible, they roved in search of golden grease. The sperm whale’s teeth, useless, were left in their grip. On these unsalable canvases, they inscribed the desires of those long left from home. On this tooth, a woman for each side. Curious cohabitants: a fashion plate female and a mythical piratess. The sanctified and the sanctioned. (Wasn’t a woman’s place in the home?) Tenderness and violence, tangled into this tooth, the by-product of a gory hunt. Rictus of our largest mammalian kin, domesticated and lovingly inscribed with another object of pursuit.
Man, woman, whale—bound together in a time when purity was prized and separate spheres governed lives. A product of nineteenth century “modernity,” but a contradiction to it.
A recent encounter with anthropologist Bruno Latour’s essay We Have Never Been Modern provided fodder for an investigative framework. Latour argues that modernity, in all its complexity, at its base relies on a single basic binary: a division between nature and culture. As modernity strives to separate one from the other (a process that he names purification), it also creates hybrids between the two (translation), a generative act which propels the progress on which modernity survives. The two processes require each other to exist. Translation needs the dichotomy between nature and culture to be drawn in order to reconfigure it. Purification makes sense of the world’s chaos, defines a comfortable, stable, and seemingly predictable partition. Yet these processes are also in opposition to each other—we draw definitions and then we confound them. Modernity, Latour claims, relies on a paradox for its existence, and to be truly modern, we must hold to the pretense that these two processes distinct from each other. Of course, these processes are deeply interrelated— to imagine them as distinct is not really possible without magical thinking. Thus, we have never really been modern.
That theory is a heady brew. Let’s bring the scrimshawed whale’s tooth back into the equation. The nineteenth century world that produced this artifact intently policed the nature-culture binary. At the same time, technological progress leapt wildly against these bounds and created a multiplicity of contradictions to the well-ordered structures of the Victorian world. For example, woman and whale—base animal and perfect angel—exist together in unquestioning harmony.
To tell this story, weighty with theory and history, I developed a visual metaphor, played out in video. To familiar yet off-kilter keening of Ben Johnston’s string quartet of Amazing Grace, the scrimshaw piece appears showing the fashion plate figure. It turns to reveal its surprise: a rogue piratess on the opposing face. The video proceeds into surreal territory to illustrate Latour’s theory. No words are spoken to lay out the theory; the encounter is meant to have emotional, rather than rational resonance. Hands symbolize culture, four liquids—oil, milk, blood, and water—stand for the natural elements in the story. The hands and liquid exist in their own distinct frames, bounded and “purified.” Color, inspired by early American painting palettes, organizes the various binaries. But as the video proceeds, hybridization begins: the hands reach across the divide and subdue the liquid, while the liquid pours messily onto the hands. In the end, the separate frames are gone, replaced by the human figure interacting with each liquid within a frame. After all, we have never been modern.