English
Bruegel by way of Borges
Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra. Excerpt from the introduction by Bill Buford
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George Orwell famously shot an elephant in Burma when he was twenty-five years old and working as a colonial policeman, after the animal, which had been in must, had killed a man. Orwell fired five times in the vicinity of the elephant's heart. He then sent for another rifle, and shot the elephant some more, until, overcome by its not dying and the protracted wheezing, he walked away. This was 1927. The literature of big-game hunting hadn't entirely devolved into an absurdist wealthy white-man's self-parody. Hemingway hadn't taken his first safari yet, and there were still plenty of raw, genuine bwana-memoirs of the I-saw, I-shot-them, I-returnedhome-with-my-life variety, like The Recollections of William Finaughty, published around the same time, jaunty true tales of an ivory-trader's derring-do—surviving an elephant's trampling, say, or a herd's charging, or being followed by two calves who believed that the hunter, having killed their mothers, had somehow taken over their maternal roles. (Unlike Orwell, Finaughty knew that you shot an elephant by avoiding its hide—not through the heart, but through the ear.) But Orwell's essay is the writing that has endured—more so even than Hemingway's African stories—in part because it is the most modern, possibly the first modern, account of killing an animal.What matters isn't the death so much, or even the animal, but the anthropology: the colonial resentment of the British, the jeering Buddhist priests, the Imperial prisons, the floggings, the immense crowd, two thousand "yellow faces" looking for a piece of theatre, the botched job.
Walton Ford's Nila puts Orwell's essay in mind. In some respects, this painting, too, is a study of an animal's anthropology. The elephant is also in must, but, unlike Orwell's, is not dangerous, but distractedly happy, drooling, opened mouthed, with a long, pink, anatomically precise curving erection. Oxpickers—the indigenous white birds that feast on the parasites in an elephant's hide—have been replaced, in Ford's version, by an aviary of foreign fowl, each with a culturally weighted association (starlings, nightingales, white owls, a rooster, vultures, and a shrike that seems to be having its way with the only native, a little parrot, right there on the end of the penis). The painting seems to be encouraging us to see the elephant as more than an elephant—India, perhaps, or the East, or undisturbed nature. And the birds themselves, all Western, seem to be the insidious successors to Orwell's Empire managers—tourists, hippie backpackers, corporate opportunists, know-it-all field workers. But there is much more going on as well.
For a start, there is the obtrusive physical fact of the thing. The painting is gigantic, literally as big as an elephant. (And deliberately so—these paintings seem to aspire to the actual size of the beasts they depict, as though Ford were driven by some larger purpose, an explorer's imperative, perhaps, to capture an animal in its immediacy before it returns into its wildness.) Nila, the mammoth centerpiece of "The Tigers of Wrath," the Brooklyn Museum's retrospective of a mere decade of Ford's work (it ran from October 2006 to February 2007), used up a whole wall and was too big to take in without standing at some distance from it. If you didn't, you saw only the details. In fact, you had no choice: The picture was broken down into twenty-two panels, like so many separate paintings with their own sense of composition, serving to reinforce the overall elephantine proportions and the sense that anything so large (an animal, a building, a life) will always be understood differently by different people at different spots.
Page [1] [2]
Page [1] [2]
George Orwell famously shot an elephant in Burma when he was twenty-five years old and working as a colonial policeman, after the animal, which had been in must, had killed a man. Orwell fired five times in the vicinity of the elephant's heart. He then sent for another rifle, and shot the elephant some more, until, overcome by its not dying and the protracted wheezing, he walked away. This was 1927. The literature of big-game hunting hadn't entirely devolved into an absurdist wealthy white-man's self-parody. Hemingway hadn't taken his first safari yet, and there were still plenty of raw, genuine bwana-memoirs of the I-saw, I-shot-them, I-returnedhome-with-my-life variety, like The Recollections of William Finaughty, published around the same time, jaunty true tales of an ivory-trader's derring-do—surviving an elephant's trampling, say, or a herd's charging, or being followed by two calves who believed that the hunter, having killed their mothers, had somehow taken over their maternal roles. (Unlike Orwell, Finaughty knew that you shot an elephant by avoiding its hide—not through the heart, but through the ear.) But Orwell's essay is the writing that has endured—more so even than Hemingway's African stories—in part because it is the most modern, possibly the first modern, account of killing an animal.What matters isn't the death so much, or even the animal, but the anthropology: the colonial resentment of the British, the jeering Buddhist priests, the Imperial prisons, the floggings, the immense crowd, two thousand "yellow faces" looking for a piece of theatre, the botched job.
Walton Ford's Nila puts Orwell's essay in mind. In some respects, this painting, too, is a study of an animal's anthropology. The elephant is also in must, but, unlike Orwell's, is not dangerous, but distractedly happy, drooling, opened mouthed, with a long, pink, anatomically precise curving erection. Oxpickers—the indigenous white birds that feast on the parasites in an elephant's hide—have been replaced, in Ford's version, by an aviary of foreign fowl, each with a culturally weighted association (starlings, nightingales, white owls, a rooster, vultures, and a shrike that seems to be having its way with the only native, a little parrot, right there on the end of the penis). The painting seems to be encouraging us to see the elephant as more than an elephant—India, perhaps, or the East, or undisturbed nature. And the birds themselves, all Western, seem to be the insidious successors to Orwell's Empire managers—tourists, hippie backpackers, corporate opportunists, know-it-all field workers. But there is much more going on as well.
For a start, there is the obtrusive physical fact of the thing. The painting is gigantic, literally as big as an elephant. (And deliberately so—these paintings seem to aspire to the actual size of the beasts they depict, as though Ford were driven by some larger purpose, an explorer's imperative, perhaps, to capture an animal in its immediacy before it returns into its wildness.) Nila, the mammoth centerpiece of "The Tigers of Wrath," the Brooklyn Museum's retrospective of a mere decade of Ford's work (it ran from October 2006 to February 2007), used up a whole wall and was too big to take in without standing at some distance from it. If you didn't, you saw only the details. In fact, you had no choice: The picture was broken down into twenty-two panels, like so many separate paintings with their own sense of composition, serving to reinforce the overall elephantine proportions and the sense that anything so large (an animal, a building, a life) will always be understood differently by different people at different spots.
Page [1] [2]
Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra
Hardcover + Box 14.8 x 19.7 in., 354 pages
$ 1800.00
$ 1800.00
Walton Ford's meticulous depictions of wild and mysterious animals. Limited to 1,500 individually numbered copies, each signed by Walton Ford
La Historia Me Absolvera (detail), 1999
The Sensorium (detail), 2003