Floccus: Wild and Woolly
Sebastian DiMauro
Brisbane City Gallery, Brisbane, 1999

There is grandeur in this view of life.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

In many of Sebastian Di Mauro's installations, he alludes to and references transformative processes grounded in the magic of alchemy. These transmutations were integral to those works. In the course of exhibition their material or matter was substantively altered. In this installation [title] at the Brisbane City Gallery, Di Mauro seems to be setting the stage for a rather different kind of transformation, a morphological process concerned more with the biological than the chemical.

Floccus is duly concerned with form, a kind of fugitive and elusive morphosis. The use of carpet underlay in the manufacture of the sculptures accentuates the artist's interest in form and his fondness for this mute and tactile material. Conceptually, this work is seeded in a previous exhibition, Manifestations. Describing that body of work, Alison Kubler said

the underlay forms which sit on the floor and the wall would seem to be in the process of transforming, literally taking on their prescribed forms in the temporal relationship to the viewer. Di Mauro has caught these little creatures in the act of manifesting their shape. Some of the forms might animal or human, hovering between a distinct anthropomorphism and a minimal abstraction.

In relation to us, the toy-like 'creatures' comprising Manifestations were of a different scale. In terms of their size, those flocculent anomalies posed no threat. They were idosyncratic and witty. They were inviting and playful - Kubler described them as 'abject', both repulsive and attractive - and could be held, cuddled and petted. With the absence of danger, one could be more curious than cautious.

No longer cute and cuddly in this incarnation, the towering giants of floccus might provoke a different response. One might approach these more monstrous manifestations with a degree of apprehension. Curiosity is tempered by a heightened sense of caution. The weighty shapes, herded and huddled, are only just perceptible in the semi-lit gallery. The distinctive fusty smell of the underlay permeates the air, adding to the den-like quality of the space. As our eyes adjust to the dimness, a drama unfolds. The 'creatures' loom through the dark, we might consider whether the fear is double. These gentle giants have been cornered. Afraid, they look as if they're about take flight. Although their flight is more likely to be lumbering and awkward rather than swift and fleeting.

Art can also provide other spaces for encounter with these majestic and totemic monoliths. The encounter tends to be uncertain, a phenomenological experience of embodied thought: body, mind, emotions and the senses are engaged. As an example, although not art, recall the American primatologist, Dian Fossey's co-existence with the mountain gorillas in Rwanda in the 1960s and 70s. Fossey was said to be mediating between culture and nature as she received the touch of an inquisitive gorilla. She had, as Karla Armbruster described, "reached across the boundary of difference and superiority that Western culture had constructed between itself and the rest of nature."

Here Di Mauro undertakes a similar, although substantially different project, seeking to destabilise the culture/nature boundary. Rather than immerse himself in nature, attempt to become natural, in the manner of Fossey, Di Mauro mediates the division of culture and nature as a cultural exercise, through the trope of art. Oddly and discursively, the distinction between nature and culture is proffered as the 'natural order' of things. Floccus encourages you to consider exactly how order exists, its implications and its effects.

Perhaps you will consider your own responses to these suggestive and random shapes, to determine human, animal and vegetal resemblances. They are uncanny, providing an experience which is not wholly strange or unfamiliar. Perceptually, they are recognisable yet their likeness is elusive. One can experience the uncanny as in-betweenness, between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Sometimes the 'uncanny' can be disorienting and frightening but, at other times, that in-betweenness might be experienced as 'wonder'. It happens all too rarely, that surprising and pleasurable sensation of marvelling and compelling curiosity. It catches us off-guard, before caution prompts wariness. That sense of wonder draws you closer to something unknown: Inquisitive, you might touch it, listen for a heartbeat and breathe its pungent scent; so that you might experience an other without seeking to assimilate it or consume it, without possessing it or knowing it. These sculptures, despite their likeness, appear to us as different or new. They move us. Wonder at 'the grandeur of life' refuses the hierarchy of binarism: culture/nature.

It would seem that through this art, as a space of wonder, Di Mauro is re-negotiating a relationship, primarily our own complex relationship with nature mediated by science and philosophy. These cultural practices and discourses tend to locate 'nature' at the lower end of a hierarchy. However, Di Mauro does not subscribe to the prescriptions of hierarchy and determinism. He does not argue the primacy of particular ontologies or lifeforms, nor does he paternalistically or custodially advocate on behalf of other living things.

Natural history's concern with classification excludes humanity, while the penultimate creation or cause of evolution is humanity. Despite the discovery that humans share more than 98% of genetic material with two species of chimpanzees, humans, existing seperately, distinctly from nature, have come to epitomise culture, having recourse to the divine. Our dealings with nature are characterised as chaotic, catastrophic, sublime and savage.

Natural history, as a science, orders the unruly and unpredictable nature. According to Jared Diamond, "between ourselves and all other species lies a seemingly unbridgeable gulf that we acknowledge by defining a category called 'animals'." The effect is that creatures as diverse as "centipedes, chimpanzees and clams" are thought to not only have more shared characteristics with each other than with humans, but also lack those features typical to humans. Such accounts of life on this planet entail a certain conceit. As Stephen Jay Gould argues, these narratives rely

upon the fallacy that evolution embodies a fundamental trend or thrust leading to a primary and defining result ... That crucial feature, of course, is progress - operationally defined in many different ways as a tendency for life to increase in anatomical complexity, or neurological elaboration, or size and flexibility of behavioural repertoire, or any criterion obviously concocted ... to place Homo sapiens atop a supposed heap.

Di Mauro seeks to undo some of this arbitrary and self-serving conceit through his symbolic language. The fibrous underlay provides a generic language which undermines the mania of taxonomy and classification. These analogous forms reveal the artifice of order. Subsequently, floccus suggests something else, not unlike what philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe as 'becoming':

Becoming is a rhizome, not a classifactory or genealogical tree. Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing; neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation or producing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to or lead back to, "appearing," "being," "equaling," or "producing".

These philosophers are concerned with multiplicity and difference: accordingly, becoming and multiplicity are the same thing, continually transforming, in symbiosis. For Deleuze and Guattari, "a fiber [sic] stretches from a human to an animal, from a human or an animal to molecules, from molecules to particles, and so on to the imperceptible."

It is the transformative processes of connectivity and crossing implicit in symbiosis that Di Mauro is embracing with his cluster of sculptural forms. He has not defined a hierarchy of life/forms but rather created a space so that we might wonder at them. He has acknowledged a heterogeneity (or multiplicity) in which organisms and particles are both different and connected. In a world comprised of symbiotic relations, there is no natural order, only 'the grandeur of life', only bio-diversity.

NOTES
1. Alison Kubler, "Manifestation", catalogue for Manifesations, an exhibition by Sebastian Di Mauro, Beatty Gallery, 1998, unpaginated
2. Karla Armbruster, "Surely God, These Are My Kin: The Dynamics of Identity and Advocacy in the Life and Works of Dian Fossey" in 3. Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior (eds), Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History, Routledge, New York, 1997, p 214
4. Jared Diamond, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, Vintage, London, 1992 (fp 1991), p 1
5. Stephen Jay Gould, Life's Grandeur: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, Vintage, London 1997, p 19-20
6. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1987, p 239
7. ibid., p 249