Distribution of Organic Beings: Snail house

[The Space in Between] Book Project.

Curated by Tara Gilbee
VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne
13 July – 4 August 2007
Sidney Myer Work on Paper Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery
15 March – 13 April 2008
Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts
8 August – 14 September 2008

Elilabeth Presa, 2007.

Materials:  Cabinet of inlaid walnut veneer and glass, engraved text, gold leaf on empty snail shells, living snails, fruit, air and water.

The title of this work, Distribution of Organic Beings, is taken from an entry in Charles Darwin’s Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries visited during the voyage of the HMS “Beagle” round the World.  This entry sits between the ‘Distribution of Shells’ and ‘Tameness of the Birds’ in chapter XVII of the Journal.  Following the form of the Journal my work also gathers itself through observations and facts collected during travels round my world.

In this work, a colony of snails from my garden is presented for view in shop 414 Toorak Road over the six weeks of the exhibition.  Each day I take fresh fruit and vegetables to the snails and clean their house.  The two women in the shop talk with me about the snails.  Hiroko comes from a tiny island, Shodo Shima, in the south of Japan.  Michelle comes from an island in Malaysia.  They miss their homes.  They watch the snails carefully. When the sun shines through the window they cover the Snail House with a pale blue silk scarf and sprinkle water on the snails to keep them cool.  They bring friends to see the snails – an elderly Japanese woman sometimes comes to visit and to look.

The glass and mirrors of the cabinet are engraved with passages from contemporary and historical literary, mythological and philosophical texts.  Together these texts represent something of the complexity of attitudes towards snails and animals more generally.

Snail detail.

Texts engraved on Snail House:

Theodor Adorno  (1903 –1969)

The true symbol of intelligence is the snail’s horn with which it feels and smells its way.  The horn recoils instantly before an obstacle, seeking asylum in the protective shell and again becoming one with the whole.  Only tentatively does it re-emerge to assert its independence.  If the danger is still present it vanishes once more, now hesitating longer before renewing the attempt.  In its early stages the life of the mind is infinitely fragile.  The snail’s senses depend on its muscles, and muscles become feebler with every hindrance to their play. Physical injury cripples the body, fear the mind. At the start the two are inseparable.

…The suppression of this potential by the direct resistance of the natural environment is carried a stage further as internal organs begin to atrophy with fear…a preliminary groping of this kind is always easily thwarted; it is always backed by good will and faint hope but not by unflagging energy.  When facing in the direction from which it is finally scared into retreat, the animal grows timid and stupid.    Stupidity is a scar. 

Dialectic of Enlightenment

John Berger: (1926 -)

Nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal.  At the most the animal gaze flickers and passes on.  They look sideways.  They look blindly beyond.  They scan mechanically…The look between animal and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which, in any case, all men had lived until less than a century ago has been extinguished.  About Looking

Sydney Clouts (1926 –1982)

..and a snail hearing the rhetoric of nitrogen and hydrogen, has slowly spread the maxim: the nervous system ails the stars. ‘The melon stalk, the melon…’;

Friedrich Engels  (1820 –1895)

( I experience) a withering contempt for the idealistic exaltation of man over the other animals. At every step one bumps up against the most complete uniformity of structure with the rest of the mammals, and in its main features his uniformity extends to all vertebrates and even – less clearly – to insects, crustaceans, earthworms etc.

St. Francis of Assisi  (1181 – 1226)

The very first animal to appear at the gates of heaven was the snail. St. Peter bent forward tapping the snail with his staff, and asked, “What are you looking for here my fine little snail?” “Immortality” the snail answered politely. Peter howled with laughter. “Immortality! And just what do you plan to do with immortality?” ”Don’t laugh,’ the snail countered. “Aren’t I one of God’s creatures? “Aren’t I a son of God just like the Archangel Michael? . . . Archangel Snail, that’s who I am” “Where are your wings of gold, your scimitar, the scarlet sandals betokening your regality?” Peter replied. ”Inside me, asleep and waiting.” “Waiting for what?” “Waiting for the Great Moment,” replied the snail. “What Great Moment?” “This one now!” said the snail. And before he had finished saying ‘Now’ he took a great leap as though he had sprouted wings, and he entered paradise. . . St. Francis finished by saying to his followers “Do you understand? We are just like Brother Snail. Within us are the wings, the scimitar and the royal sandals. If we want to enter Paradise we can at any moment. We must simply want it more than anything else and we must be willing to take the leap . . . jump!”

Karl Marx  (1818 – 1883)

The nobility takes a natural pride in its blood, its extraction, in short the whole life-history of its body: this is its natural, zoological way of thinking and heraldry is the science appropriate to it. Thus zoology is the secret of the nobility. Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State.

Militant Esthetix

Animals were once resident at the centre of the human world, subjected to power but also worshipped, endowed with magical significance and anthropomorphized. But these animals ‘disappear’, during the process of urban industrialization in the nineteenth century. They re-surface in this new context, first as machines, and later simply as so much raw materials – meat, leather and horn, equivalent to iron, cotton or coal.

Descartes conceived of animals as soulless machines. In order to prove that animals have no soul Descartes nailed his wife’s dog by its four paws to a board and dissected it alive, thereby installing a common practice for scientific researchers at London’s Royal Society. Live animals flayed and dissected appeared to the vivisectionists as watch or clock mechanisms. Ostensibly activated by wheels, ratchets, springs, gears and weights, they were conceived as automatons

Hermann Samuel Reimarus  (1694 –1768)

Descartes had the idea that one could explain all the actions of animals as a mere mechanism, without attributing to them a soul, a life, sensitivity or imagination. He proposed that they were nothing but lifeless machines, which had been structured so artfully and subtley by the creator that, through the external impression in their limbs, of light, air, noise, evaporations, etc, they were set in motion such that it appeared to us as the voluntary actions of a living creature …. It makes the vast majority of nature dead.

Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941)

In the oval flower bed the snail, whose shell had been stained red, blue, and yellow for the space of two minutes or so, now appeared to be moving very slightly in its shell, and next began to labour over the crumbs of loose earth which broke away and rolled down as it passed over them. It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antenna trembling as if in deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction. Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees that waved from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture—all these objects lay across the snail’s progress between one stalk and another to his goal. Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings.

The snail had now considered every possible method of reaching his goal without going round the dead leaf or climbing over it. Let alone the effort needed for climbing a leaf, he was doubtful whether the thin texture which vibrated with such an alarming crackle when touched even by the tip of his horns would bear his weight; and this determined him finally to creep beneath it, for there was a point where the leaf curved high enough from the ground to admit him. He had just inserted his head in the opening and was taking stock of the high brown roof and was getting used to the cool brown light when two other people came past outside on the turf.

A Vietnamese folktale

In the mountains overlooking the Red River Valley it is told of a good family with two fine daughters who seemed always to be doing their duties; yet one day, by and by, while returning home, they stopped to eat some figs and that evening felt very strange. In time, both sisters gave birth, one to a worm and one to a snail.