Musée Dauphinois Residency
As part of the ‘Dépaysments’ program curated by Passage Paysages Douglas White has been invited to complete a residency at Musée Dauphinois, Grenoble from 1st-18th October 2020. An accompanying text by writer and anthropologist Marc Higgin can be read below.
There is no ‘Away’
Marc Higgin
Seen from afar, it is a palm tree. A palm tree that simply grows on the terraces of the Musée dauphinois, a black silhouette casting its shadow over the city and its crown of mountains, the globalized symbol of tourism, of exoticism, of a change of scenery, of an unlimited promise of freedom. Seen up close, the voluptuousness and complexity of the plant world are the result of a disturbing simulacrum, a simulacrum of rusted steel and vulcanized rubber shreds caressed by the wind.
Douglas White lives and works in London. He works with base materials: exploded tyres, decaying trees and cacti, burned-out garbage bins, exploring their potential to form and transform into something even stranger. At the foot of the Alps, he rummaged through Highways Agency containers full of roadside detritus, looking for blown-out shreds of tyre, which he then sculpted as if they were now, like rushes, clay or stone, the very material of the country. Emblematic of the age of the automobile, the tyre is the humble servant of our dreams of mobility, of our insatiable thirst for landscapes and panoramas, of our dreams of exoticism and disorientation. These abject shreds braided by Douglas then set up as monuments seem to come back like a nightmare to mock us and our chimerical elsewhere. They remind us, while our eyes are hypnotised by the road opening up before us, that our waste piles up mercilessly at our feet.
The discovery of rubber was as much a blessing as a curse. It is one of the materials that has most profoundly shaped human societies, including our own. Rubber was an integral part of the way of life of the Mesoamerican peoples, as were corn, potatoes, chili peppers, coca and tobacco. These peoples combined extraordinarily detailed botanical knowledge with real technological inventiveness. In particular, they exploited the sap of certain trees (those listed by Europeans as Hevea brasiliensis) by drying and hardening it with wood smoke, in order to use it to coat fabrics, make utensils and objects, or as a sacred fluid in pharmacopoeia and in certain ritual practices. The conquistadors noticed the possibilities offered by this material, while systematically decimating the cultures in which it had become established.
Rubber first found its way to Europe as a simple curiosity, a material with unusual qualities. On his return from an expedition to the Amazon in 1736, Charles Marie de la Condamine presented specimens of two plants that had caught his attention: cinchona and rubber, from which quinine and rubber were derived, two plants that were to flourish until they found themselves at the very heart of the colonial and industrial regimes of the 19th century. Having witnessed the many uses of rubber by the inhabitants of the Amazon, de la Condamine experimented with its ability to make fabrics water and airtight. Others followed in his footsteps, such as Albrecht Berblinger, who is said to have coated the fabric of his glider with rubber, or the Montgolfier brothers, who made their balloon watertight using rubber dissolved in a turpentine solution. In 1849, John Boyd Dunlop, a veterinarian obsessed with the newly invented velocipede, turned rubber-coated fabric into the first tyres. Then André and Édouard Michelin experimented with their own version. The familiarity of these names, now industrial giants, is a testament to the integration of the tyre into our lifestyles and our dreams of unfettered mobility. To meet the insatiable demand for rubber, vast tracts of forest were turned into plantations, countless communities were turned into labour, fostering the global ecological and social transformation of lands and societies. And at the end of the epic, mountains of used tires languish, indefinitely toxic to the environments in which they are left. No longer useful to man, they remain indigestible to life.
This central material of the colonial plantation, then extractivist, is transformed here into a palm tree, the universal symbol of a life of idleness devoid of constraint. Douglas White's "Black Palms" are thus at the crossroads of twin logics of intensive and blind exploitation of the world. They are not the symbols of an art of recycling nor of the circular economy that would be able to repair the world and improve it. They contain no hope. They are monuments to toxic wastes scattered throughout all our the oceans, all our cities, all forests, all farmlands and all seemingly uninhabited spaces. They are monuments to the state of the world. These black palms are meant to be provocative, as is the humour of those sentenced to the gallows or the electric chair. They mock our dreams of elsewhere, and invite us to lie down in the shadow of tourist globalization and the domination of our imaginations. "There is no away," writes Timothy Morton. There is no elsewhere, where we can escape and distract ourselves from the consequences of our actions.