One Last Thing
A column by the Department of Ultimology for the Visual Artists News Sheet from May 2022-January 2023
The Tasmanian Tiger
Fiona Hallinan, VAN Issue May/June 2022
How do we confront a video of a living being whose whole kind has been obliterated from existence by ours? Is there some way to look directly at this, to acknowledge the actuality of loss in a way that can be shared with children?
Ultimology is a term that explores ways we can look at endings. We learned the word through the work of writer and linguist, Ross Perlin, who runs the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA) in New York, a welcoming centre where endangered languages are collected, celebrated and shared. In the ELA someone might drop by and record a lullaby in the language of their homeland. This is a way of sustaining vulnerable entities. In Ultimology we see potential for a practice of paying attention to endings in the present, informed by our experience of looking at visual art.
The thylacine could be considered a victim of what Deborah Bird Rose describes as the collateral damage of colonial pursuits. In her research with Aboriginal people, she describes how white Australian settlers disrupted a sense of time in the communities they colonised:
“They looked straight ahead to the future, a singular path of optimism and salvation informing their dreams and deeds. This future is a characteristic feature of commitments to modernity, that complex of symbolic and material projects for separating ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Moving toward this future requires ruthless ambition – and the willingness to participate in great projects of destruction while ignoring extinction as collateral damage.” 1
If the thylacine was still around today, would its fate be any different? History helps to sort through material such as this, collating and contextualising the past; but perhaps we also need some way to actively sit with the enormity of loss, both human and beyond human. History also strives to develop empathy, according to the Department of Education curriculum. At our first conference on Ultimology in 2016, artist Isabel Nolan outlined the empathetic potentials of looking at art.
Describing a portrait, she said: “A particular juxtaposition of lilac blue and pink shadow lends not just volume, but a poetic drama to the soft pleats in a white garment. And so we wonder not simply ‘who is the person wearing this fine, billowing shirt?’ but also ‘who made it, maintained it, fastened it upon the sitter that morning with cold or warm hands and their mind filled with an endless list of other thankless tasks to be done?’” 2
Nolan illuminates how looking closely at images can reveal not only their subject but the multiple worlds that led to their creation. In Ultimology we hope to explore this way of looking, paying attention to endings as they unfold, revealing their possibilities. In these columns, we will expand on some of the tactics we use to do so.
Footnotes
1 Edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt. University of Minnesota Press, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, University of Minnesota Press 2017
2 Isabel Nolan, Curling up with reality, Kerlin Gallery 2020
Irish Exit
Kate Strain VAN Issue July / August 2022
Finally back in Graz, I am confronted by the material stuff from an entire lifetime ago. A colleague of mine once said that it doesn’t matter how you start a new position within an institution, what matters is how you leave it. Funny then, that I (a self-declared Ultimologist, concerned with and dedicated to the study of endings) might have had such an unceremonious end to my tenure at Grazer Kunstverein. The events that conspired to keep me away, made my ultimate departure feel akin to slipping out the side door at a party, in the spirit of what Irish Americans call ‘an Irish exit’ – a way of removing yourself that avoids any awkward farewell conversations with those you are leaving behind.
Seeing my things packed up in the storage space, arranged carefully but not by me, awaiting collection, disposal or dispersal, reminds me of the inevitable process that follows many endings and almost any death, when that which remains, the stuff, matter and mess of a person’s personal effects, are gathered and sorted, held, contained, quarantined or counted, before being distributed, disputed, packed away, passed on, doled out, boxed up, or binned.
In a recent Instagram post, the artist Every Ocean Hughes wrote about their estranged fathers sudden passing, and how they “…had to ‘death clean’ his truck which was 100 full all over. His life was inside. And we had just a few hours and a roadside dumpster in Abilene [Texas]. And now that truck is my inheritance”.
In their artistic practice, Hughes examines some of the inequalities of the death industry such as the financial drain of funerals, racism in healthcare and afterlife practices, and the bureaucratic hurdles that affect queer communities and inhibit individual agency in death. Full of humour, grief, unknowing and a desire for justice, Hughes’ work encourages us to pay attention to that which we too often try to avoid.
The living’s relationship to the belongings of the dead is one that is tenderly contemplated by another artist, Mikala Dwyer, whose deceased mother’s ashtrays and whiskey bottles sometimes find their way into her ongoing series of sculptural assemblages, titled ‘The Additions and Subtractions’. These earthly possessions act as carriers of the supernatural, a link between bodies living and lifeless. According to Dwyer, “After my mother died, I had to pack up all her stuff. I had to do it way too fast. I thought, what if, instead of putting all her letters into the bin, I could burn them and say a prayer, and somehow embody the ancestral knowledge in a more meaningful, osmotic manner.”
Rituals such as these, brought to life in the form of artworks, may enable us to tune into the frequency of orphaned material, to credit our possessions for their ability to hold and carry meaning, and to potentially tap into a way of channelling matter to somehow transfer that embodied knowledge contained within. Understanding how something ended seems key to grasping the essence of what it was. The stuff I’ve come to sift through is like an accidental preview of what I would leave behind in death. And so cast within the guiding spirit of Ultimology, this column captures and records my inventory of abandoned belongings, and in doing so, becomes the ending I never had to my former life as Artistic Director of Grazer Kunstverein. Ultimology gives me the tools to recognise the importance of endings – even the sly ones that slip almost silently out the side door.
IMAGE: An image of a screen at the Natural History Museum of Belgium, showing the last known footage of a living thylacine in captivity. Image courtesy Fiona Hallinan 2021.