Euan Macdonald
If A City Can Become A Ghost
Screen print on paper. c 2018

A stark image of a taxidermied trophy, Macdonald’s Addax embodies the logic of the fetish. One of a series of mounted animal heads that the artist photographed installed in interiors, the stuffed and mounted specimen illustrates a potent mix of power and dominance, totemism and crass materialism while at the same time pointing to the advent of the natural sciences and tradition of collecting/ museums.

In its physical form, the totem models the logic of animism, chiefly that energy might flow from one source to another through proximity, thereby highlighting the definition of magic as “action at a distance” and pointing to the way art “functions” to animate space/ architecture.

A familiar concept and poetic ideal stretching back to Lucretius, (the word animism comes from the Latin word for breath) the term powerfully conveys the blurring of categories that distinguish early cosmological systems (describing life force as a unifying medium). As such animism has a compelling and sordid parallel history linking it to 18th century racist philosophy and the myriad ways religion and empiricism (aka colonialism) were instrumentalized as the basis for taxonomic systems thereby extending the Biblical dominion established in Genesis.

The title of a recent exhibition by Anselm Franke, “Animism” seeks to reframe the subjectivity of the “so-called object” recomplicating culture’s relationship to things in what Franke calls a “second first contact” that seems to be prefigured in the knowing gaze of the majestic animal.

The poem, from which the work takes its name, accompanies the work.

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