I'm stuck on plants-and-human relationship. Plants narratives.
~cricri
"By connecting the development of botanical science with global
circumnavigation and trans-Atlantic trade, Lin's project addresses the
acts of abduction by which human beings as well as natural and
intellectual resources were removed from non-Western societies under the
pretext of "discovery" and used to augment the wealth and power of
European patriarchs."
+
"Plants were used in this way to negotiate power in conditions of extreme powerlessness."
Link to full article + all the images, below:
Candice Lin's Garden of Earthly Delights
By
Anuradha Vikram
Dragon's Blood. Star Anise. Yerba Santa. Mugwort. These are some of
the evocatively named plants that Candice Lin investigates for their
social and biological properties. The Los Angeles-based artist is
currently in residence in the Artist Lab at 18th Street Arts Center,
where she is engaged in a materials-based investigation of the history
and science of plants we commonly find in our environment. Her residency
and exhibition, "Sycorax's Garden," explores the intersection between
science and mysticism in the evolution of organic chemistry, considering
how botanical treatments were historically associated with female
social roles of healer, herbalist, and witch, as well as how many of the
plant-based materials we use today were introduced to the Western world
through global exploration and conquest in the Age of Empire. Lin's
exhibition is on view in 18th Street Arts Center's Main Gallery through
September 18, with a reception on Saturday, August 29, from 6 to 8 p.m.
"Sycorax's Garden" takes its title from the figure of the witch
Sycorax, mother of Caliban, in William Shakespeare's "The Tempest."
Caliban, described by Shakespeare as "a savage and deformed slave," is
an archetype of European attitudes toward the inhabitants of the New
World in the early Age of Exploration. Prospero, former Duke of Milan,
abducts the child Caliban from his mother and raises him as a house
slave. By teaching him European languages, Prospero learns from Caliban
the magical secrets that the duke later uses to invoke the titular storm
against the captors who have deposed him from his throne. By connecting
the development of botanical science with global circumnavigation and
trans-Atlantic trade, Lin's project addresses the acts of abduction by
which human beings as well as natural and intellectual resources were
removed from non-Western societies under the pretext of "discovery" and
used to augment the wealth and power of European patriarchs.
In contrast, Lin describes "the plants' multiple uses in decolonial
struggles, struggles against slavery, and feminist struggles in Europe."
Considering these historical complexities, she acknowledges, "It is
interesting how plant knowledge (about abortifacients for example)
seeped from being used in resisting and negotiating conditions of
slavery to a knowledge that went over the seas back to Europe, where the
knowledge was co-opted (when it was medically useful or culinarily
delightful) or purposefully erased." She continues, "That Sycorax is a
witch who was learned in the ways of herbs, banished for her use of
sorceries, is also related to anti-colonial and anti-slavery struggles
such as the Haitian Revolution, which was (at least in folk history)
instigated by a Vodou ceremony led by the mambo (Vodou priestess) Cecile
Fatiman (and priest Dutty Bookman), and fueled in great part through
the slaves' use of herbs to poison their master's drinking water and
food. This was an extension of African slaves' common use of poisonous
plants for suicide, contraception, abortion (or the threat of) in
desperate attempts to act out the small shreds of control they still had
over their lives and bodies." Plants were used in this way to negotiate
power in conditions of extreme powerlessness. Lin references a quote
from the botanical illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian's book
"Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam" (1705). Merian writes, "The
Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds
of the peacock flower to abort their children, so that their children
will not become slaves like they are. The black slaves from Guinea and
Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have
children. They told me this themselves." Merian was exceptional; most of
her predominantly male European counterparts did not acknowledge the
African and Indigenous sources of their information, and even
purposefully erased anecdotal subversive uses of plants in the colony in
published versions of their work. While Merian's gender may have made
her more sensitive to non-Western women's use of plants in their
struggle against capitalist exploitation of their bodies, she
nonetheless used her complicity with the colonial expedition to gain
professional opportunities unavailable to other women of her day,
including European women of the working class.
Similarly, the figure of Jeanne Baret, the first woman to complete
circumnavigation of the globe, is another source of complexity and
inspiration for Lin. A contemporary of Darwin's, Baret was responsible
for introducing a large variety of plants to the European continent
including the now-ubiquitous bougainvillea. Disguised as a man, Baret
served as valet and assistant to her employer and lover, Philibert
Commerçon (aka Commerson), naturalist to the French explorer Louis
Antoine de Bougainville from 1766 to 1769. Baret stoked Lin's
imagination because "She embodied a kind of folk knowledge that arguably
was much broader and full-reaching than the newly professionalized (and
masculinized) fields of science. And the fact that she had this asset
becomes visible in what she was able to do against all odds: going on,
in male drag, to circumnavigate the world, and [yet] still virtually
unknown to us, even in France, where she came from." On behalf of King
Louis XV, the party toured the South Pacific, identifying over 70
previously undocumented species of plants and creatures while also
establishing colonial footholds in the Tahitian islands. For Lin, Baret
exemplifies the intersectional nature of history in her dual role as
agent of the European colonial project and victim of gender and
class-based marginalization, having never been acknowledged for her
contributions or expertise. The artist laments that, "The only plant
named after Jeanne Baret on the expedition was later renamed, and there
exists only one plant that was recently named to honor her, but it has
no relationship to the actual plants she used or was responsible for
discovering." This fits with Lin's overarching interest in "the hidden
or obscured stories in history of voices that are not part of the
dominant narrative," particularly the stories of women and people of
color whose knowledge has historically been discredited, omitted, and
co-opted by structures of power.
Plants are a realm of knowledge that has been traditionally more
available to women than other modes of scientific discourse, through the
culinary as well as the healing arts. As such, their use has aroused
the suspicion of patriarchal and colonial leadership, as evidenced by
the 16th century "Malleus Maleficarum" ("The Witch Hammer"), a German
clerical treatise on the moral and spiritual dangers of women's
traditional knowledge that was cited in a number of subsequent witch
hunts in Europe as well as the United States. Says Lin, "The
relationship of colonial struggles is mirrored also in the struggle of
women in medieval Europe (their involvement in heretical social
movements, their role fighting against land enclosure acts and other
land rent issues, agricultural working rights and food riots) and their
related persecution as witches. This was no accident as those persecuted
as witches in Europe were often those peasant/working class women who
were knowledgeable about herbs and could help control a community's
rights to abortion or contraception, or were outspoken women who fought
against issues of religious or feudal power abuses." Though widely
discredited, the "Malleus Maleficarum" is evidence of the threat that
traditional plant-based healing posed to the emerging, patriarchal
scientific doctrines that emerged from the Protestant Reformation and
Catholic Counter-Reformation alongside the introduction of capitalist
economics and colonial exploration during the Renaissance.
Candice
Lin and Patrick Staff, "Plants in Transition," 2015, detail of
installation at 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica. | Photo: John
Lucas.
Candice
Lin and Patrick Staff, "Plants in Transition," 2015, detail of
installation at 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica. | Photo: John
Lucas.
![[Click to enlarge] Candice Lin, "Sycorax's Collections," 2012, etching with watercolor and dried plants.](http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/images/Candice_Lin_Sycorax_580.jpg)
Candice Lin, "Sycorax's Collections," 2012, etching with watercolor and dried plants.
Candice
Lin and Patrick Staff, "Plants in Transition," 2015, detail of
installation at 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica. | Photo: John
Lucas.
This subject is explored in depth by Italian feminist scholar Silvia
Federici in "Caliban and the Witch," a treatise on women's
unacknowledged role in the production of capital through domestic and
reproductive labor. Lin explains how, she "started thinking about
Sycorax when I read Silvia Federici's book "Caliban and the Witch" in
2010 and was struck by her analysis of Marxism from the perspective of
feminist politics. I was interested in imagining a narrative about
Sycorax that gave voice to these feminist struggles, and rewrote a
fuller imagined story from the brief description she gets in
Shakespeare's "The Tempest" as an Algerian witch and the mother of
Caliban." Sycorax's Algerian lineage is also of interest in the context
of the writings of Frantz Fanon, whose "Wretched of the Earth," set
amidst the Algerian war of independence from the French in the early
1960s, was a catalytic text for contemporary post-colonial theory due to
its controversial argument in favor of a colonized people's right to
use violence as a means of throwing off oppression. This specter of
anti-colonial violence is present, if sublimated, in "The Tempest."
![[Click to enlarge] Candice Lin, "Wigan Pit Brow Women" (details), 2006-2012, ink and watercolor on cut and hinged paper, dimensions variable.](http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/images/Candice_Lin_Wigan_Pit_Brow_Women_580.jpg)
Candice Lin, "Wigan Pit Brow Women" (details), 2006-2012,
ink and watercolor on cut and hinged paper, dimensions variable.
The resolution of "The Tempest" speaks to how the female body
functions as a commodity within capitalism. Unable to free himself from
his enslaved condition, Caliban instead focuses his aggression on
Miranda, the daughter of Prospero, menacing the teenager with the threat
of sexual violation. Upon meeting two servants from the party stranded
by the storm, Caliban offers them rule of the island in exchange for
Prospero's death, and tosses Miranda in as a spoil of conquest. "Ay,
lord; she will become thy bed, I warrant, and bring thee forth brave
brood." The bodies of Sycorax and Miranda function as metaphors for the
rights of men to land and property within the text. Says Lin, "Sycorax
is cited in her role as a mother as a way to speak to land rights.
Caliban references her in 'The Tempest' often to claim that she was here
first, and so the island belongs to him. I think it's interesting how
the role of motherhood, reproduction, land rights, freedom, and
decolonization are all related in this visual trope where the female
body comes to stand for the nation or the notion of freedom." Meanwhile,
Shakespeare's contrast of Miranda's purity with Caliban's savagery
illustrates the rhetoric of conquest, in which subjugation and
enslavement of non-Europeans is justified by the supposed threat they
pose to the virtue of European women of the upper class. We see this
opposition at work today in the over-zealous policing of black bodies in
American cities, where the mere presence of a person marked as "Other"
in an affluent community can result in a violent response from law
enforcement, often justified by allusions to rape and other acts of
gendered violence.
Lin uses a variety of media including drawing, printmaking,
installation, and video to tease out relationships between contemporary
prejudices and the historical and literary sources from which she draws.
These objects, as well as a series of workshops where participants can
learn to make incense and tinctures from plant materials, function as
launching points for public conversations about the evolution of sexual
and racial oppressions from the early modern era until the present.
Another aspect of Lin's residency will be realized in collaboration with
London and Los Angeles-based artist Patrick Staff, whose work also
addresses gender and sexuality as provisional, transitional, and
changeable. Lin and Staff met in 2010, and their collaboration was
inspired by the notion of "queer-hacking" whereby "certain [concepts]
(medicines, plants, books, places like parks or libraries) could have
one meaning or seeming neutrality to one person, but then could have a
queer ontology where [each] operated or was used in an alternate way for
different desires." With Staff, Lin will spend the second half of the
residency creating performances and films around the hormonal properties
of plants such as pine pollen: a plant-based substance that contains
high levels of a phyto-hormone very similar to human testosterone. The
appearance of such a substance in plants, which are equipped with both
male and female sexual characteristics, contrasts with the gendered
perspective of humans who are assumed to come in two distinct sexual
varieties. Lin points out that "Our bodies, like plants, have both
[types of sex hormones], but we aren't accustomed to think outside of
this binary setup." Plant sexuality represents a more fluid and
changeable construct of gender, which both artists seek to explore.
Lin's research-based, interdisciplinary practice is ideally suited to
the Artist Lab Residency, connecting her with a long succession of
artists whose interests in feminism, gender and queer theory,
performance, time-based art forms, and cross-disciplinary research have
informed the ethos of 18th Street Arts Center over the past two and a
half decades. Trained in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute
and in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics at Brown University, Lin's work is
deeply intellectual and critical, but she also finds ways to make it fun
and accessible. During incense-making workshops in July and August,
participants could investigate different smells, and hand-build incense
cones and sticks to burn at home. Through this hands-on process,
visitors to the exhibition were able to learn about the larger
historical themes at play in a way that was educational but not
dictatorial. Following the residency, some of the objects that she is
creating will go on to another life at François Ghebaly in Los Angeles,
where Lin's fourth solo exhibition with the gallery opens on September
12. What visitors find there will inevitably be provocative and strange,
and inspire fascination.
