In November, we reported on the Bates College Museum of Art’s “Cryptozoology: Out of Time Place Scale” symposium (see “Not Yeti,” by Chris Thompson, November 4, 2005), a truly wild event that brought artists, curators, and scientists together to explore the art-crypto interzone and inaugurate the exhibition of the same title that opens this weekend. On June 23, the exhibition goes live, with work by Rachel Berwick, Sarina Brewer, Walmor Correa, Mark Dion, Sean Foley, Joan Fontcuberta and Pere Formiguera, Ellen Lesperance and Jeanine Oleson, Robert Marbury, Jill Miller, Vik Muniz, Rosamond Purcell, Alexis Rockman, Mark Swanson, Jeffrey Vallance, Jamie Wyeth, and the hardest-working cryptozoologist in the business, Maine’s own Loren Coleman, whose Crookston Bigfoot will be on display in anticipation of the Future Museum of Cryptozoology.
It would be difficult to overstate how crucial it is to be looking at monsters instead of masterpieces, which is to say, seeing both as the same thing. That is, it is in the monstrous discursive space opened up by the art-cryptozoology encounter that a collective sensibility begins to emerge along with it, one where what matters is not what is called art, what is called science, and what is called politics, but rather how the inquiries that these words refer to actually operate in relation to each other through the lives of the human and inhuman creatures that practice them. Out of Time Place Scale is a probing to see what kinds of experiments with the world we and our cryptid colleagues can invent in order to produce extraordinary ways of being in that world together.
Cryptozoology: Out of Time Place Scale | June 23-October 8 | Bates College Museum of Art, 75 Russell Street, Lewiston | Tues-Sat 10-5 | 207.786.6158
On the Web
Bates College Museum of Art: http://abacus.bates.edu/acad/museum/
Email the author
Chris Thompson: xxtopher@hotmail.com
