A group of moviegoers leaving the theatre next to Artcite in Windsor, Ontario, crowds around the small lit-up orb of a spacecraft lying in the shattered windshield of a parked car. For an instant, they believe it might actually be an object from space. It’s a dark delight. Who doesn’t want to believe that they are witness to an extraordinary occurrence—that something from outside their world has crashed into it, rearranged itself and shifted the viewpoint? Instead, the object is Sputnik Returned #2 (2015), a fiction temporarily placed by artist Brandon Vickerd with just enough historical “truth” to make it momentarily plausible.
Vickerd trades in this moment of the suspension of disbelief, however fleeting the jolt of discovery might be. He presents us with experiences that fascinate, disturb and unsettle. The aftermath of viewing some of his works is a mixture of relief and the acknowledgement of a prank well played, while other works of his can amplify more troubling thoughts. He prods our assumptions and expectations across the divisions between assumed dichotomies, mixing together tales and history, truth and fiction, high art and popular culture, skilled trades and academia, the human and animal and the organic and technological. In every case it’s an encounter not easily forgotten.
My first encounter with Vickerd’s public artwork was a few months earlier, when I met the figures collectively titled Passenger (2011–) at the Vollmer Culture and Recreation Complex in LaSalle, Ontario. They made me deeply uneasy. I wasn’t expecting the entanglement of taxidermy animals that emerged—instead of human faces and hands—from the clothes of three solitary figures dispersed around the complex. From a distance they looked like people dressed casually in hoodies and pants, but were revealed to be a conglomeration of animals “striving to mimic the human form for some unknown purpose.”
Adding to the discomfort, the animals were as lifelike as the humans they mimicked. Squirrels, owls, doves, hedgehogs and ducklings were suspended in mid-action—lifelike animals placed where they didn’t normally belong. Some of them stared back with a querulous look.
The significance of the looks that animals give us, the ways these looks are received and the impact they might have on our relationships with animals are subjects of much thought and inquiry. Perhaps, as John Berger maintains in “Why Look at Animals” (1977), 20th-century corporate capitalism finalized a process, begun in 19th-century Europe and North America, that increasingly separated us from animals, so that now “that look between animal and man…has been extinguished.” From a world apart, we allow ourselves unthinkingly to perpetuate much injustice upon animals. Indeed some of the ways in which taxidermy animals have been used in art practices would support this: animals are severed and put back together in hybrid forms, used as stand-ins for humans or to make an extraneous point.
Yet it seems as if more consideration is being given to animals as thinking and feeling beings recently. Videos of unlikely animal friendships reveal animals as complex and capable of relationships across species. The killing of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe by an American big-game hunter sparked outrage around the world and, closer to home, an art student in London, Ontario, was forced to remove her art piece—taxidermy rabbits with stitched-on turkey wings—from an exhibition due to an overwhelmingly negative public response. In Toronto, an impromptu memorial that looked very much like an art installation was spontaneously set up around the body of a dead raccoon.
Vickerd, a vegetarian, describes the process of taxidermy as “completely revolting” but states that, “The moment of surprise, of striving to classify what it is you are seeing, is crucial…. It is similar to when you walk around the corner of your house and come face to face with a skunk. It is a visceral confrontation that cannot be sustained with representations, only with real fur and claws.” About half of the animals he uses in his sculptures are bought on eBay or Craigslist, and the other half he taxidermies himself.
What is essential in Passenger is that the animals remain themselves. This elevates the artwork from being exploitative of the very group whose neglect and mistreatment it draws attention to. Vickerd does not claim to see things from the point of view of the animals, speak for them or manipulate us into foregone conclusions. They are not twisted into misshapen forms or made into hybrid species for sensational or instructive purposes.
They are, however, monstrous, in the sense illuminated by contemporary feminist theorists such as Nina Lykke, Rosi Braidotti and Donna J. Haraway: they destabilize the normal order of things to bring it into question. The boundaries between human and animal are made porous in this configuration. The historic rationale for maintaining a human/animal divide is encapsulated in Passenger: the animals wear our clothes, and their bodies replace our tool-making hands. In this embodied gesture, the established order that defines the human in opposition to animals is undermined.
Haraway, in When Species Meet (2007), considers our present challenge in a way that resonates with Vickerd’s work: “We are in a knot of species coshaping one another in layers of reciprocating complexity all the way down. Response and respect are possible only in those knots, with actual animals and people looking back at each other, sticky with all their muddled histories.”
Vickerd uses the responses of his own dog, Blue, to verify the humanness of a particular figure. If his dog ignores it, he knows that he will have more work to do to sculpt a persuasive human, but if Blue barks at it and is threatened and protective, then he knows he’s got it right.
As Vickerd’s dog confirms, the sculptures have a convincing verisimilitude even in their strangeness. The figures in Passenger, as well as Ghost Rider (2015), The Sub-Mariner (2015), Animalman (2015), and even the strange insect-like hybrid assemblages from Chopper Series (2012), feel more inevitable than made, as if Vickerd found them or conjured them from somewhere else and just brought them here to our attention. Plunged into their worlds, we can reflect back upon ours.
Vickerd also brings the comic-book hero into the art gallery. Ghost Rider is transformed into an art object for contemplation as he stands, impeccably painted in red automobile paint, in a classical contrapposto pose, enfolding Michelangelo’s David and the heroic stances of the Power Rangers with Ancient Greek marble sculptures and the cool ’60s icon of Easy Rider. Figures from different times are connected through the mythological intrigue of the heroic.
Animalman embodies our awe of the physical prowess of animals. He has the enviable power to be able to temporarily acquire the abilities and adaptations of any animal. In Vickerd’s version, his animal core is laid bare. The sculpture is entirely made up of taxidermy animals, with the only suggestion of a human form in its verticality and height. The work’s title is a specific allusion for some, but for those of us who aren’t part of the comic-book world, Animalman still resonates with all sorts of imaginings, conjectures and implications.
Vickerd pulls heroes from mythologized episodes in history into the gallery, but with a twist of the unexpected that loosens the moorings of assumed narratives. The bronze-and-steel sculpture Monument to the First American in Space (2014) shows a rhesus monkey’s skull inside a NASA spacesuit. Many primates, including the first astronaut, were sent into space, not just as passive occupants to test biological limits but also as trained operators. This artwork is also a monument to the absurdity and tragedy of the notion of human exceptionalism. The feeling of righteous anger at injustice that Vickerd’s work conveys can be summed up by the motto carved into the bust of Napoleon in the Faltering Monuments series (2012). It reads “Futuis hoc cacas” or “Fuck this shit.”
But as Vickerd tells us this, he also orchestrates Dance of the Cranes (2009/15), performances of illuminated construction machinery moving in synchronized patterns against the darkening sky. The dance draws out the potential for grace from these enormous pieces of heavy equipment and accentuates the finesse required to operate them. A spectacle for the viewer, it is simultaneously a tribute to the crane operators themselves. This connection is “as important to [Vickerd] as feedback from the artist community.”
Vickerd demonstrates respect for skilled workers. The refinement with which he executes his work is an ethical as well as an aesthetic consideration. In part, it’s a way of honouring the motorcycle fabricators, auto-body workers, taxidermists and metal workers whose expertise Vickerd has learned from in developing his own process. His work is deeply rooted in subcultures, such as heavy metal, skateboarding, motorcycles and “the romance of machine mechanics,” as well as the world of comic books and superheroes.
Multiple perspectives converge in Vickerd’s sculptures, installations and public artworks. He undermines established “truths” and assumptions by using humorous twists and ambiguous, mixed and metamorphized monstrous figures. We are drawn in by pristine craftsmanship and attention to detail. Once engaged, we realize that all is not as it seems, and our perspective shifts, provoking new ways of seeing and thinking that emphasize interconnections rather than dichotomies.
Pearl Van Geest is winner of the 2015 Canadian Art Writing Prize.
This is an article from the Winter 2016 issue of Canadian Art, Canada’s most widely read art magazine. To read selected articles from this issue, visit its table of contents. To get each issue delivered to your door before it hits newsstands, subscribe now.
