Hidden Worlds, Other Views

by Andrea Pollan


Our recent immersion as a culture into the digital age has placed more information than ever before at our fingertips. Nonetheless we constantly face the dilemma of how to interpret and use that widespread data. What sources can we trust? What is fact? What is fiction? What is useful? We may deceive ourselves into thinking that these new technological information paradigms place us perilously at the edge of a brave new world. However, history reveals that we have operated under similar paradigms before.

Such is the operating principle of artist Sue Johnson’s The Alternate Encyclopedia. In 1995 Johnson conceived this conceptual umbrella project that imitates the categorization and presentation of natural history discoveries through botanical and zoological illustrations and ‘actual’ findings. The array of watercolors, prints, paintings, and objects on view in Fragments from The Alternate Encyclopedia prompts the viewer to challenge personal assumptions about the learning of information, particularly as it pertains to nature. The Alternate Encyclopedia mimics a private natural history museum filled with discoveries classified and arranged according to an overriding hierarchy of values. But whose values are these, and how were they determined? Johnson reveals the transforming relationships between nature and cultural context depending upon whom is doing the interpreting, representing and presenting.1 The underlying wit that infiltrates her work invites and seduces us into a world that reveals startling and humorous combinations of flora and fauna. She sees the project “as a postmodern extension of (Charles Willson) Peale’s museum and the vast European collections representing exotic and bizarre plant and animal discoveries.”2

Upon entering Johnson’s fictitious museum space, the viewer encounters the founder’s Self Portrait as an artist-naturalist (Loplop’s sister). The painting is not unlike the famous self-portrait by Charles Willson Peale in which he dramatically lifts up a curtain to reveal the secrets and wonders of his museum, and it immediately cues the viewer to alter expectations. Here Johnson has fantasized a surrogate for herself as the sister of Max Ernst’s bird character Loplop from his collage novel, Une Semaine de Bonté. Using the pictorial traditions of 17th century Dutch and Spanish still life painting, the artist arrays symbolic flora and fauna derived from a variety of naturalist sources. For example, the source for her pinnated grouse head can be found in Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology from 1808-1814. In Johnson’s œuvre, her bizarre juxtapositions and interest in transformative objects evoke seminal Surrealist works such as Meret Oppenheim’s fur teacup and the whimsical constructions of Man Ray. A Surrealist at heart, Johnson merges the worlds of art and science producing an outcome that is both filled with fantasy yet could also prophesy a future landscape in this age of bioengineering.

Her installation subversively questions such widely accepted and disseminated sources of authority in convincing yet counterfeit publications and museum displays. In a body of objects and inkjet prints called Comparative Anatomies, Johnson displays the print, Comparative anatomy (shell/nest/food). Her selection of curved found objects is arranged analytically along formal principles yet betrays an underlying feminist commentary on the nature of domesticity. Johnson motivates us to look at the subtext of what we see exhibited. Another specimen, The Hercules beetle who wanted to be a Clydesdale (re-creation of an experiment intended to test insect strength and endurance) presents such compelling visual evidence of actual documentation that we are caught off guard, suspended between belief and disbelief.

Johnson draws upon the rich and varied traditions of medieval bestiaries, illuminated Renaissance manuscripts, herbarium pages, natural history plates published in historic encyclopedias, and scientific guides for popular use. In particular, she is influenced by the illustrations of a number of important artist-naturalists including Maria Sibylla Merian, Mark Catesby, Albrecht Dürer, Titian Ramsey Peale, John James Audubon, and Alexander Wilson. Many of these individuals were explorers who, fueled by cultural appetites for discoveries of exotica, developed new conventions for depicting nature. A major influence in Johnson’s work is Maria Sibylla Merian, a naturalist artist working in the 17th century who defied all patriarchal expectations of her role in society. Through careful observation, she chose to portray the metamorphosis of insects from birth through maturity. She often placed the specimen in its natural habitat, or “domestic environment”, creating a new gender-based convention at a time when naturalists were focusing on other issues germane to the species. In her watercolor, Soothsaying duckheadtail crocodile, after Merian, Johnson quotes the naturalist stylistically and alludes to some of the astounding novel aspects of species she must have encountered in her wilderness travels.

It is interesting to note that not all naturalist illustrators observed nature directly from life. Some, like Audubon and Wilson, who observed live specimens in the field also hunted and killed their subjects for the purposes of later study. In other cases, some merely copied (and thereby altered) other predecessors’ renditions or worked from distorted preserved specimens of subjects they had never observed in life. As a result, the scientific visual evidence of nature was constantly reinterpreted and altered throughout history. Johnson asserts that the visual form of information outlasts the textual form of outdated information.3 These images, however, continue to appear in historic books and prints thereby blurring the boundaries between truth and myth.

Johnson’s work is as much about art and its history as the study of natural history and documentation. Her earlier oil paintings depict individual specimens blown up large. Convinced that this medium carried too much weight about the history of painting and the loaded nature of paint, Johnson opted to use the traditionally scientific media of watercolor, drawing and printmaking to render a mimetic documentary accuracy. Early works from The Alternate Encyclopedia purposefully focus on media from the pre-photographic era and stylistically exploit the seductive power of realism to construct credibility. More recent works, such as Printer’s Proofs: Evolutionary Paths and New Images for the Stereoscope, mimic 19th and 20th century photomechanical reproduction which has been so widely used to disseminate pictorial records of natural history and science. Johnson even imitates printers’ misregistrations to exploit the mass-production they suggest.

A touchstone image for the artist is Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of a rhinoceros. Her reinterpretation, Reversed Rhinoceros with gauntlets, after A.D. refers to how that particular image entered the world. In 1516 a ship of Pope Leo X, carrying the exotic cargo of a rhinoceros bound for the papal zoo, sank off the coast of Italy. The only remains were a sailor's rough sketches and handwritten notes that discussed the aggressive nature of the animal and its armor-plated skin. The pope commissioned Dürer to depict a creature he had never seen before. Dürer's remarkable woodcut was somewhat inaccurate but inspired many copies of varying quality by subsequent generations of artists. Johnson acknowledges that tradition of spreading faulty visual information in her own whimsically embellished version.

This rhinoceros image laid the foundation for the artist's conception of a world filled with hybridized and mutated flora and fauna. Johnson drolly pictures a genetic landscape complete with self-sustaining animals that grow their own food on their bodies. In Accidents in Food Engineering, she lampoons our consumerist culture's obsession with convenience by depicting genetically altered fauna that are ready-made meals for humans, such as Mrs. Paul's fishstickfish with lemon garnish tail. Johnson presents this implausible biology as historic fact, often imitating the flat frontal or cross-sectioned views of zoological illustration.

Specimen Collections contain images of birds, beetles, and sausages inspired by a recent residency in Bavaria. Blending hybridized, fictional and actual images, Johnson fastidiously paints these gouache images in the middle of an elaborate intaglio border. She alludes to traditional feminine practices of pressing flowers into herbal books or sketching from nature. Here she amusingly focuses on the German sausage, the Wurst, and ennobles its status to an iconic cultural specimen. In so doing, she shifts our awareness to the fact that all naturalist-explorers operated under their own cultural biases. Johnson found her curiosity piqued by the variety of abstract formal properties found in sausage cold-cuts, such as Specimen Collections (cross-section of champignon wurst). These edible cross-sections inspire thoughts of micro and macro worlds.

The fictional protagonist in Johnson’s recent body of work, Hidden Structures of the Universe, leaves behind plates of surprising micro-details embedded in our macro-world. Inspired by the celebrated image of Robert Hooke’s flea published in the Micrographia (1665) and Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature) (1899-1904), Johnson employs digital means to document the groundbreaking discoveries of an anonymous female scientist. This latest chapter emphasizes Johnson’s feminist critique of issues of representation, particularly in the practice of scientific inquiry. Pursuing a postmodern line of investigation, she dismantles our ideas of fixed realities. By inventing a world filled with genetic possibilities and discoveries of curiosities yet to be made, Johnson dares us to question accepted truths and look rather at whom is making those truths. Just as we have learned that we cannot really trust our senses, Johnson points out that established meanings are entirely mutable depending upon the context.

By blurring the real with the fantastic, she creates a magical world that demands a suspension of disbelief, yet she also draws a clever parallel to contemporary practices in art, science, and the entertainment industry. The 90s gave us a pageant of hybrids, clones, strange life forms, aliens, cyborgs, surrogates, and mutated and fragmented bodies. Seeing through Johnson’s clever eyes, we have to wonder how close we have come to nature imitating art.

1 Laura Katzman, Sue Johnson’s Alternate Encyclopedia, brochure for solo exhibition at the Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA. October 18 – December 23, 1996.
2 Sue Johnson, Interview with Alexander Lynn, unpublished, 1997.
3 Ibid.

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©Sue Johnson 2001, All rights reserved for all countries