Running and Screaming

Aotearoa artist, Dane Mitchell’s 2022 exhibition, Unknown Affinities, acts as a

gestalt, which here means a ‘whole’ amounting to more than its sum of parts. The
austere arrangement of 107 sculptures opens a conversation of absence and
presence, the image of extinction and the diaspora as a result of colonisation.

Constructed from plaster, blackened brass and steel, the sculptures share a strict
visual vocabulary. Through negative space, they suggest the forms of various extinct
native species. It is within this absence, that Mitchell creates an image of extinction.
Mitchell’s sculptures resemble the armatures employed to mount museum taxidermy.
Within the museum, each taxonomical specimen acts as a morbid simulacrum,
where a single stuffed animal refers to the extinction of its species.

Extinction means that something no longer exists; how then, can something that no
longer exists be seen? Antithetically to this paradox, one may argue that extinction is
present in every photograph. Roland Barthes, a French philosopher, describes “the
photograph… [as] always invisible, [that] it is not it that we see, but the subject or
spectacle, which adds to it that rather terrible thing… [present] in every photograph:
the return of the dead.”1 Additionally, John Berger, a British art critic, describes
images as the primary reference for history, that the “past [is] a well of conclusions
from which we draw from in order to act.” 2 The images we draw from reside in the
museum, where, for example, the taxidermy image of an extinct wren replaces its
absence in the natural world. Unfortunately, as Barthes argues, the photograph is
not what it mounts; therefore, the taxidermy of the wren is in fact, not the wren.
Without its subject, the photograph is reduced to the actions and reasons that led the
photographer to capture it. Mitchell’s mounts adhere to this conceptual template.
Without their taxonomic subject, they are poignantly reduced to the colonial actions -
of documentation - that foreshadowed their extinction.

1 Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London, England: Vintage Classics, 1981, 5.

2 Berger, John. 2008. Ways of seeing. Penguin Modern Classics. London, England: Penguin Classics,
24.

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Unknown Affinities further concretises the themes of absence Mitchell established
with his 2020 work, Lacuna.3 Lacuna4 also explores extinction – by mounting the
absence of a mammoth – to explore the relationship between colonial history and
absence. However, Unknown Affinities localises the idea of absence to Aotearoa
with its depiction of 107 extinct native species. Mitchell’s mounts inherit the same
diaspora that taxonomical museum mounts represent, where the colonial collection
of specimens insinuates their absence in the natural world. The only remaining
‘proof’ of their existence is contained in the mounts within the museum.

The aggregate of Mitchell’s mounts forces the observer to circle its perimeter, much
like James Cook’s surveyal of Aotearoa’s coastlines. The observer’s movement is
reciprocated with a kaleidoscope of intermeshing black lines. Aotearoa author
Stephen Turner describes the “lines of lacunae traced by Mitchell’s mounts [as
suggestive of] drawings in the air.”5 The image created by the overlapping lines
becomes diagrammatical. These drawings in the air reference the documentative
etchings of the colonial draftsman, Sydney Parkinson.6 Parkinson accompanied
Joseph Banks7 on Cook’s journey as the first European artist to set foot in Aotearoa.
His etchings required the removal of species, an absence reflected in Mitchell’s ‘the
museum without.’8 The action of taking specimens contributes to the loss of species
caused by colonisation’s deforestation.9 With hindsight of these morbid
consequences, Unknown Affinities’ perched eidolons10 whisper, ‘I told you so.’

3 Mitchell, Dane, 2020, Lacuna Scape, mixed medium, Christchurch Ōtautahi, Aotearoa New Zealand.
4 Lacuna is defined as a deficiency or missing part
5 Turner, Stephen. Mounting Extinction, 2022, 2.
6 Parkinson, Sydney (1745-1771). Watercolour on paper, 1769, The Natural History Museum, London.
7 Rose, Edwin D. Specimens, Slips and Systems: Daniel Solander and the Classification of Nature at
the World's First Public Museum. The British Journal for the History of Science, 2018, 205.
8 Mitchell, Dane, Unknown Affinities, 2022, mixed medium, Aotearoa, Auckland.
9 Hunt, Roy. New Zealand Geographic, 2010, 2.
10 An unsubstantial image, an idealized person or thing.

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On a surface level, Unknown Affinities appears as a conventional exhibition, it is
within this guise that Mitchell injects historical context with a subtly maximalist floor
display. Upon entering the exhibition– like any other exhibition– a heavy curtain of
silence falls. The observer knows, without instruction, that it is no place for running
and screaming. These presuppositions exist as a result of the public’s initial
introduction to the ‘exhibition.’ This introduction occurred during the sixteenth
century, when “art came to be seen as the patrimony of the people, who were
thought to be in need of an improvement of manners that calmly looking at paintings
represented.”11 As a result of this, the first public exhibitions were held at the Grand
Salon of the Louvre, where paintings were exhibited floor-to-ceiling, on every
available inch of space.12 Mitchells patchworked floor display visually echoes this
style of hanging,13 which subtly undermines the purported immutability of the white-
cube gallery. Irish art critic, Brian O’Doherty, describes this as a space where “the
outside world must not come in, so windows are sealed off [and] walls are painted
white.”14 This space denies history, existing as a sterilised chamber for the
fermentation of art-work’s capital. It is this fragile, stark-white aesthetic that Mitchell’s
maximalist display of bases disrupts. By mimicking the sixteenth century hanging
style, Mitchell’s bases allow a historical context to seep through the imperfections of
the white cube. This acts as a non-didactic reminder of the gallery’s proximity to its
origin.

The image Unknown Affinities creates is one that must be conceived, rather than
perceived; like one would perceive the museum’s images. Unknown Affinities
transforms with the observer’s understanding, Initially the artwork appears
diagrammatical, cold and didactic. However, the critical engagement required, the
observer is forced to imagine the invisible carcasses. In this age of information,
where so much is visualised and quantified, value can be found in Unknown

11 Obrist, Ulrich Hans, Curating Exhibitions and the Gesamtkunstwerk, 2014, 27.
12 Brauer, Fae Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre, Newcastle
upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars, 2013.
13 This presentation is depicted in F. B. Morse’s Exhibition Gallery at the Louvre
14 O’Doherty, Brian, Inside The White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space Part I, Artforum, 1976.

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Affinities’ ability to ignite the observers imagination. Unknown Affinities reminds
without asking, that the modern world is not severed from its history.

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