A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan – Unisa Staff Exhibition “Uncanny Stories” (2021)

Abstract

The series of artworks, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences Compiled upon a New Plan interrogates Western epistemology’s overreliance on categorization and reacts against framing and hierarchical approach to the world at large. It expresses doubts about the activity of framing and reframing of humans, plants, animals, and all matter as demarcated and categorized specimens.

Although this project is rooted in Foucault’s insights about knowledge and power relationships, and his insistence that the former is not simply reducible to the later, as well as his observations about reproductivity of knowledge through power, its emphasis is on the relegation of life entities to specimens, generalizations, and hierarchies. The installation examines and subverts 18th century encyclopedic illustrations where representations of life and the world served to formulate power systems justifying dominion and colonialization. Theoretical research for this exhibition is underpinned by insights about categorisation systems in Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: what Categories Reveal about the Mind (1987) and by subversions of the traditional linear narrative of human “development” in Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (2021).

The artworks stem out of personal anxiety about the seemingly ‘impartial’ knowledge systems, especially the Eurocentric view of the world where simplifications of complex phenomena were a thriving ground for creating categories and hierarchies. This truly uncanny ability of our species to give rise to narratives justifying hierarchies and assignation of value is explored in this project.

As Western epistemologies and knowledge about the world have traditionally been reproduced and distributed in a form of books and dictionaries, I decided to use encyclopedias as a vehicle for visual commentary and have reworked some pages of 1771 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica to reflect the last 250 years of Eurocentric leanings towards categorization.

The conceptual strategy used in this project was to employ a variety of visual interventions while ensuring that the references to encyclopedic imagery stay recognizable and the aesthetics of history of knowledge remain “preserved”. Intermixing, rescaling and re-contextualizing encyclopedic images and intersecting them with drawings of dissection instruments for cutting and dismemberment, were some of the visual methodologies applied. Images of tools of “enquiry” like scalpels, surgical scissors and blades are used as metaphors pointing to domination and subjugation of the world (Introduction). Text interventions were also used. Insertions of ironic text into the artworks aim at additional impact towards dismantling the superiority of Western epistemologies. A mocking inscription emulating 18th century language incorporated into the text of Title Page, reads as follows: A Downhearted Journey across Divisions and Categories. A Part of the Anthropocene Book of Trees and Fossils as told by the Dead; Supplemented by the Author, drawing from the Illustrious Dictionary of Arts and Sciences compiled by a Society of Gentlemen in Scotland in 1771 for the Teaching of the New Order and the Elevation of Man. For instruction and reflection on the systems of hierarchies for profit and inequality. For the wise that they have it for a record, for the laypersons to gain some understanding, and for melancholy souls to obtain some slight enjoyment. A Case Against Anthropocentrism as aided by Empathy and Imagination, the which being the Greatest Natural Gifts of any Person.

The artwork, Fig 1, Balena or Great Partitioning is divided and framed into a triptych suggesting butchery of whales into “digestible” partitions while at the same time it subverts the practice of framing and fragmenting knowledge. The use of butler trays (Chapter 2) to display folded sheets of intermixed encyclopedic images, speaks directly to the idea of knowledge as something to be served and sarcastically exposes the colonial mindset of masters and servants. The installation takes form of a dismantled book with pages spread across the gallery wall; some artworks are framed to emphasize the practice of framing in the Western epistemology. All titles of the artworks stress and correspond to contents of a book: Preface, Chapter 1 or Title Page. The installation consists of eight works including two triptychs and one five-piece work.

By exposing the hierarchical mechanisms of Eurocentric epistemologies, the exhibition addresses the strategies of subjugation; by visually revealing, subverting, and questioning them it contributes to the current decolonial debates.