“Forest Home” is an exhibition which—believe it or not—concerns “The Family,” i.e., Ricky the rat, Bushy Tail the squirrel, Peter the rabbit, and Fox. Fred Escher’s installation of drawings, photographs, stuffed animals, cleaning equipment and book/ catalog suggests the following not necessarily sequential events: Fox trails (and subsequently eats) rabbit, Bushy Tail chews nuts, Ricky kisses another squirrel, rabbit and possum play dead, Bushy Tail bares sharp teeth, raccoon hunts Fox, Ricky jumps into a box, etc.
A lot of recent shows have been concerned with images of animals. Some post-’60s ecological concern? Or city people’s nostalgia for “purity” of country and forest life? Ironically, though, Escher’s work is not really about animals. Rather he has merely appropriated the seedy, natural history collection of the university where he teaches and used the things as art objects, personified them.
Ricky the rat lives in a priscilla curtained, small frame house, blows out the candles on a large birthday cake, and is mercilessly kicked by big human beings. It all reminds me of those anthropology films in which a narrator mawkishly ascribes human motivations and responses to beasts, as if to say, “Now I want you to see these friendly crocodiles are just like us!” I never bought it. And Escher’s animals arranged singly and in clusters on cloth-covered shelves (sculpture stands?) to act out his personal fantasies have even more the air of manipulation.
One Escher photograph shows a stuffed animal, a human skull, and a drawing of the words “frightened to death”—bringing together object and life. Skull and squirrel are remains of a former life or currently inanimate objects; human-made photo sets it all at an objective remove; “frightened to death” suggests both a viewer’s possible response to skull and squirrel and the manner in which squirrel and skull could have initially arrived at their lifeless condition. In some ways it is an interesting package.
Perhaps accidentally, and because his materials are already charged with complex associations, there are some other fascinating interrelationships here. The animals, unlike Escher’s drawings based upon them, are not “pure objects”; they were made artificial by humans who retained their skins and stuffed them. So where do they stand on the scale of real life versus object art? As for the drawings, they clearly never were alive.
Each increment in Escher’s presentations—stuffed animal, drawing of animal, label for animal, photograph of group, and print of photo in catalogue—results in several stages of distance from reality or life, recalling Joseph Kosuth’s past displays of real clock, clock photo, and word “clock” for object, sign and symbol.
And the most troublesome aspect of Escher’s show is that he puts it all out there—intuitively, I think—without any real identifiable intention. Quite apart from art versus reality, another viable theme then becomes “unkemptness”— the drawings of Ricky cleaning house, the real mops and scrub pail in the gallery, the drawings both framed and push pinned, lined up along the ceiling and even with a viewer’s waist, the animal pelts full of dust, and the stack of books (with magic marker price sign) in the middle of it all. In the end, any initial tendency to see Escher’s work as a Dadaish “whatever art doesn’t look like” is really more a sign of conflicting directions.
—C.L. Morrison
