Auguries
by David Bayles
Photographer, and author of Art and Fear
Centuries ago, when our ancient ancestors gathered around the fire, the great soothsayers among them pronounced their auguries only after consulting the entrails of birds. Jerry Takigawa has limited that consultation to the albatross, the most mobile and pelagic of all the birds. Takigawa’s work depends on the contents of the entrails, rather than the gut itself. Nevertheless, making sense of ourselves through the stomach contents of an albatross is not so different from our elders seeking the workings of the divine in the entrails of lesser birds.
But why birds at all? I am not quite sure. Perhaps all things bird has a latent potential for metaphor that is more expansive than other animals (think flight, think song). Suggestions, hints and allegations provide the raw materials from which auguries or collages can be distilled.
Takigawa’s work is both metaphorical and lyrical yet it is done in sharp awareness of large facts. Even in the farthest reaches of the oceans, the incidental outfall from our ways of living has become part of the food chain. The entrails of the great birds are accumulating our indigestible and apparently indestructible plastic lees. Curiously, the false nature of the plastics, their synthetic blandness, their un-nourishing constitution, is plainly apparent only in their insipid palette. The plain, flat, unmodulated colors so uniform, so familiar, are taken for granted. Take another look at those colors. Try not to recognize them so instantaneously.
These “made” photographs are artfully assembled but they are not about art. They are carefully informed but they are not about science. They are not even about the natural world though they are dependent on that world. They are about us. They are about us, oddly, in the role of creators of things as far-flung as collage and of catastrophe. They are about us, in our new, growing, and ill-fitted role as the major force shaping nature, having become the agent of what was formerly “natural” selection. The cumulative effect of our actions is increasingly decisive in what will live and what will perish as we continue to leave behind us an ingestible but indigestible wake of colored plastic.
