Artist
EVENT: Lost Naturalists of the Pacific, a CD-ROM in the video room of the Commencement Art Gallery (902 Commerce St, Tacoma), through Dec 21. There's also an abbreviated version at www.elephantgun.cc.
How did this project begin? "When I was in graduate school I was studying Pacific Island art history, and we'd see pictures of these objects with pedigrees, collected by James Cook. The value of the object increased a lot once Cook touched it. So I started thinking, where's the art in that? They were trophies of colonialism, fetish objects. The people who made them were exterminated, or missionized, and told their objects were evil. Or they'd start to make stuff for tourists, so their work was exotic with a capital E. I thought, what if I started making things that look like the things we see in glass cases, with made-up histories, sort of a hoax? I started making artifacts and creating text to go along with them, and began referring to a book that I'd made up, Les Naturalistes Perdus du Pacifique. Then I thought, I should just write the book. But no one would publish it, so I thought, what if I did it electronically? Once you take the project out of the realm of books and research and put it into art's camp, it has a different relationship to the truth, or truth in general. People expect a different kind of truth from art--like the Museum of Jurassic Technology. There are some differences. [The MJT] is more about the museum experience. Mine is more political, a connect-the-dots between colonialism and academic territorialism, the way academics stake out a turf and become experts.
Do you think that showing it electronically changes people's expectations? Challenges their credulity? "It makes it more intriguing. All you have to go on are the photographs, and when you digitize a photo it allows for a lot of digital trickery. There are some old images of the author, with my [work] behind him. And it depends on context--when you see it in a gallery, you know it's art."
