ON THE WING
WITH DON KNOWLER
Negotiating the catacombs of the Museum of Old and New Art I emerged into a narrow corridor bathed in light.
Ahead of me a group of Mona visitors blocked my way. They were gazing through what looked like a window, framed in steel.
An art piece, an installation? I waited for the tourists to take their pictures and, moving into position, I was surprised to discover what they had been viewing. They had indeed been looking out of a window and the “art” object was a pair of Tasmanian native-hens, happily feeding on a grass slope outside Mona’s new $32 million wing.
The native-hens might have been an accidental, coincidental sighting, but the installation I had actually gone to Mona to see, entitled Mine, contained a clear link to birds. Mine is a study of mankind and the technological world but it uses a bird — the King Island brown thornbill — as a metaphor for the conflict between what we humans call progress and the established ways of the natural world firmly rooted in the evolutionary past.
The engendered thornbills have become the “canary in the coalmine” to alert us to the environmental dangers that the future holds.
A subterranean gallery at Mona certainly does resemble a mineshaft in this extensive exhibition by New Zealand artist Simon Denny, revolving around mining as a reflection of hope and anxiety about the environment, technology, and development.
As the exhibit’s blurb suggests, to “mine’’ is to extract elements of the earth’s physical materials — but it also describes data drawn from the landscape of information.
The exhibition acts, says the artist, as a ‘‘theme park to extraction’’, exploring not just the political and environmental significance of mining, but also the role and value of the work of the miner throughout history, and its value in the rapidly changing present.
These ideas are highlighted by the fate of the thornbill. This bird is seen through the use of the augmented reality that operates throughout the exhibition — technology that enhances, measures and challenges the viewer’s experience in the gallery’s physical spaces.
The thornbill’s habitat has been damaged, perhaps irrevocably, by industry and climate change; but hope for the bird’s regeneration lies in gathering data about its habits and movements in the ecosphere.
Such data gathering requires technology that itself relies on the continued extraction of elemental resources from the earth.
Here, the “canary in the coalmine” comes full circle.