Opinion: The arts of decline

The nostalgia in database extinction art is directed at action in the present, so that there is a future

By Pramod K Nayar

Hyderabad: The most significant encyclopaedic project about animal life is the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List. The Red List, as is well-known, organises the list of endangered species on a scale of vulnerability. Terming it ‘Risk Classification’, it moves from ‘Not Evaluated’ through ‘Least Concern’, ‘Near Threatened’, ‘Vulnerable’, ‘Endangered’, ‘Critically Endangered’, ‘Extinct in the Wild’ and finally to ‘Extinct’. As on date, the Red List classifies 42,108 species as ‘threatened’.

The Red List, established in 1964, is the source-book for conservationists, activists, policymakers and the state. It also represents, as the critic Ursula Heise has argued, ‘an underlying narrative of decline shapes not only the IUCN’s risk labels, but also the quantitative criteria that define them’.  But is this the best way to speak of the decline of species, a decline that culminates in species death?

Map of Memory

Maya Lin, celebrity artist-architect best known for her design of the Vietnam Memorial, also addresses the decline and extinction of species. Her What is Missing is a ‘multi-sited memorial’. It includes installation pieces across the USA, a screen at Times Square that posts videos from What is Missing, highlighting different extinct species, etc. The website of What is Missing consisting of ‘science-based artwork’, Lin draws attention to mass extinctions of species. The website of this artwork gives us a Map of Memory, which highlights the ecological histories of species and habitats.

The Map is also contributory, and invites anyone with personal memories — of skating on iced-over lakes, being on a beach and other landscapes from childhood — to send these in. The project is a collective memory of landforms, animal and plant life and the transformations in these features over the years. In the process, the Map alerts us to anthropogenic — human-driven — changes in habitats and ecosystems.

A timeline of planet earth is drawn, from earth’s formation dated at 5.6 billion years ago, to 2020. A clickable map takes us to different regions of the world, showing which species of that region are now extinct, or vulnerable (India’s Bharatpur sanctuary is on the site).

Lin draws attention to the several missing species and to the species on the verge of becoming things of the past. Serving at once as a museum of the past and of the future, Lin’s work is a mix of scientific information, art and a deep sentimentality.

Witnesses to Extinction

Isabella Kirkland is, like Maya Lin, an artist whose interest in extinction focalises science and art. In her series Taxa, she categorises plants and animals as ‘Descendant’ and ‘Ascendant’, the former showing us paintings of animals that have declined or died, and the latter showing those which, with serious effort, have been (re)introduced into the Americas.

Kirkland’s work, dating from the late 1990s, also merges scientific data on disappearing/disappeared species with art when she draws the animals in order to document the absences in the contemporary. Wildscreen, a group founded by former BBC’s Natural History head, Christopher Parsons, set up ARKive: Images of Life on Earth as an online resource of over 1,00,000 images of endangered species and their habitats. (The archive is now only offline because the lack of funds forced them to shut it down).

These too are artworks designed to draw attention to what the world no longer possesses: several thousand species.

Nostalgia, For the Future

Extinction art brings together the sciences and the arts, mixes considerable rhetoric of absence, impending decline and sentimentality. The artworks capture specimens, and tell us that we will no longer be able to see these in their natural or post-natural habitats.

First, database art, as Ursula Heise calls it, builds on scientific databases about extinction and biodiversity loss. But, instead of presenting acres of excel sheets, this art presents us visually appealing — in fact, multimodal — texts through which we understand the events on earth. Thus, it is a database plus something more – maybe an imaginative rendering of, say, the dodo or the thylacine.

Second, as Heise points out, an elegiac tone marks database art: “The elegiac and tragic modes in which endangered species are often portrayed in film, photography, and writing are meant to convey this general sense of decline, of sweeping losses of life, diversity, knowledge, and beauty.”

Heise is right to note the tone adopted by such works, whether in literature or database art, but something else also pervades them.

Database art and literature based on extinction themes, right from Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) to Brian Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s Y: The Last Man (2002-08), are nostalgic about the planet’s past. And yet, database art is not infused with a naïve nostalgia but rather a ‘reflective’ one, to employ the critic Svetlana Boym’s distinction. Reflective nostalgia does ‘dwell in the longing’ but also helps us examine the contemporary. It does not seek to return to a golden era but rather sees the loss of potentialities when species die out. Boym writes: “[reflective nostalgia is] not always for the ancient regime or fallen empire but also for the unrealised dreams of the past and visions of the future that became obsolete … for unrealised possibilities, unpredictable turns and crossroads…”

Database art by employing a reflective nostalgia for the lost, never-fulfilled-potential futures of all the extinct species calls for attention to the today in which the material for ‘future nostalgias’ (to borrow Vikram Seth’s phrasing) is being prepared: species not dead but dying. In other words, replacing the tired Red List, database extinction art shows us that while we cannot restore the era of the now-dead species whom we can only mourn, perhaps we should ensure that conditions of similar mourning are not created as current species disappear.

This is nostalgia directed at action in the present, so that there is a future.