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About Nick Jordan:
Nick
Jordan is an artist whose practice includes video, drawing, painting,
events and publishing. With overlapping themes that range from flytraps,
ancient woodlands
and extinct species to cinema, off-beat fables and frontier explorers,
Jordan's work draws upon the relationship
between the diminished natural world and our own multifaceted cultural
histories. Nick Jordan also makes ongoing collaborative work
with Jacob Cartwright.
Recent
exhibitions include MoNO, The Museum of Native Oaks, The
Manchester Museum; Beck's Fusions, ICA, London; Videonale 11, Kunstmuseum,
Bonn, Germany; Darwin's Eye, Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art
(INHA), Paris; 3rd Beijing Independent Film Festival, Songzhuang,
China; Rub-a-dub-dub, Projektraum Exex, St.Gallen, Switzerland.
Some
Texts:
West Point
a film by Jacob Cartwright & Nick Jordan
Text by Devin Zuber
“Animals
have only their silence with which to confront us”—so
claims Elizabeth Costello in J. M. Coetzee’s fictional take
on animal rights. If it is hard to empathetically place ourselves
in the otherness of slaughterhouse animals as Coetzee’s Costello
does, how much more the challenge for animals that no longer exist,
that cannot confront our eyes and ears with their collective witness.
The silence of the extinct animal is thus a doubled one, an echo
all the more recriminating if the species has perished at our hands.
Such is the silence we meet in West Point, an experimental film
haunted by the vanished American Passenger Pigeon. The film combines
voiceovers from John James Audubon’s descriptions of what
was once the most common bird in North America with footage of locations
in Kentucky, where Audubon watched over a billion birds fly in a
single flock for three consecutive days. The panoramic beauty of
the Ohio river that framed Audubon’s writing sets the flow
of images in Cartwright and Jordan’s film, reminiscent of
work by the photographer Robert Adams, or the experimental cinema
of James Benning, where modern detritus—road kill, a washed-up
tire—encounters American traditions of the sublime and picturesque.
As
the images of modern rural America in West Point can never satisfy
what we hear from Audubon’s Romantic prose, the tension between
the spoken text and the moving image offers a space for reflecting
more broadly on analogical thinking, the relations between species,
how it was that we failed, so fatally, to imagine the fellow being
of Passenger Pigeons.
There
are moments when West Point comes close to re-imagining this, perhaps
simply by luck of the documentary genre that the film plays with.
When we hear Audubon complaining that he cannot describe the “extreme
beauty” of a massive flock of pigeons alighting, we are met
with the silhouette of a factory, capped by a beautiful sky. Wavering
flocks of birds weave in and around the concrete towers, framed
by the deep blue. In the background we hear intermittent strains
from Coro, a 19th century musical piece composed by an acquaintance
of Audubon’s. The pathos of the moment is genuine, even as
the scene is visually anchored at the bottom by a cheap road sign
that reads “Audubon St.” The sign indicates the emptying
of an embodied experience of place into abstract space, where “Audubon”
becomes nothing more than a detached name for an industrial street
and the local dental hygiene center. The beauty in West Point that
survives these depredations becomes elegiac, pointing to the silenced
birds that caused Audubon to marvel, “struck with amazement”
at a beauty that was “immense beyond conception.”
Devin
Zuber is Assistant Professor at the Institute for English
and American Studies, Osnabrück University
Let the user
speak next
Videonale 11 catalogue, Kinstmuseum, Bonn, 2007
In Let the user speak next, Nick Jordan takes the viewer with him
on his exploration of a very special place: the Dominican monastery
of La Tourette near Lyon. The title refers to a book by the architect
Le Corbusier, who designed the modernist building according to his
›Modulor‹ system. In Modulor 2 [La parole est aux usagers,
1955], Le Corbusier explains how to apply his doctrine of proportion,
based on anthropometry and the Golden Section, with which he tried
to create an architecture with both human dimensions and an objective
order. In Jordan’s images, the cubic building evokes a cool,
hermetic and deserted impression, with only the narrow window slits
and small holes in the bare concrete walls connecting us to what’s
inside. From the interior comes a magnetic white noise, which increasingly
mixes with the sounds of birds gathering on a tree outside the monastery
walls. The outside world is all the more colourful when seen from
within the building, the bright blue sky and the glowing red blossoms
of the trees forming a stark contrast with the sallow grey of the
concrete whose few touches of warmth come from small windows in
primary colours. Nick Jordan documents here a compelling encounter
with an icon of modern architecture, which both stands out like
a solitary accent from its surroundings and yet attains a harmony
with nature. [Tina Rehn]
Alien Invaders:
A guide to non-native species of the Britisher Isles, by Jacob Cartwright
and Nick Jordan
From:
New Scientist magazine, 26 August 2006:
This
bizarre little book - a beautifully illustrated, 45-page introductory
guide to some of Britain and Ireland's non-native plant and animal
species - is presented by its publishers as a "cross-pollination
of fact and fiction". As well as information about invaders
such as the American bullfrog, Chinese mitten crab and the pharaoh
ant, be prepared for some fabulous anecdotes, such as the claim
that the toxic hazards of the giant hogweed only fully came to light
in the summer of 1977 "when, under the influence of the film
Star Wars, many children made impromptu light sabres from the stems".
Or that shortly after the death of Princess Diana, who was fond
of grey squirrels, five dozen of the animals were found drowned
in the lake of her home, Kensington Palace, allegedly killed by
royal gardeners desperate to be rid of them.
Squirrels
and Hard Nuts
Nicholas Clee on Alien Invaders: A Guide to Non-Native Species of
the Britisher Isles
From:
The Guardian, September 9, 2006:
Cartwright
and Jordan are artists, who describe this little hardback as a "cross-pollination
of fact and fiction". The reader may find it hard to separate
the strands. Can it really be true that between 30,000 and 50,000
road accidents each year in the UK involve deer? According to a
website called deercollisions.co.uk, it is. On the other hand, I
do not think that itten crabs, plaguing fishermen, steal a bait
called "Urk". A stew of grey squirrel, we read, was known
in the US South as "limb chicken", and was a favourite
of the young Elvis Presley. The Princess of Wales used to take Princes
William and Harry to scatter nuts for the grey squirrels in the
garden of Kensington Palace; after her death, five dozen squirrels,
allegedly the victims of vengeful royal gardeners, were found drowned
in the palace lake.
Alien
Invaders has entries on 10 species that have become ruthlessly efficient
at adapting to their new home in the UK. There are silhouettes in
the text - of Elvis, for example - and slyly humorous colour plates.
The combination of fact, bizarre anecdote and invention gives to
the species a patina of myth. Cartwright and Jordan may have human
analogies in mind.
Aliens Invaders
of The Britisher Isles
Nick Jordan
and Jacob Cartwright make assumptions and assertions about Alien
Species
From: Garageland,
Issue 3, Nature
The
alien invaders of this new Book Works title are flora and fauna
that have colonised these fair isles often to the detriment of our
own native species. Volume 1 includes profiles of the beautiful
cerulean-billed Ruddy Duck, the stately Giant Hogweed and the frankly
alarming American Bullfrog. Outwardly the book mimics a pocket nature
guide with the comfy look of the Ladybird series. However naturalists
beware as this book is by artist tricksters Jacob Cartwright and
Nick Jordan and is full of stories that cross-pollinate truth and
fiction drawing on “scientific fact and bizarre cultural anecdote”.
Many stories are so fantastical that they may even be true, such
as Biba’s Art Deco style terrarium containing breeding bullfrogs,
the German street wandering Mitten Crabs that ‘made a mess
in many houses’ and the five dozen Grey Squirrels found drowned
in Kensington Palace lake after Princess Diana’s death.
There
is however a darker side to the fun. The success of these invaders
implies that they may be Darwin’s fittest, something that
will no doubt alarm those of a right wing disposition as they contemplate
human immigration. And the book’s crazy cultural anecdotes
worryingly recall alarmist rumours about immigrant communities in
host countries. The purity dichotomy is typified by the Bluebell;
the Spanish Bluebell has hybridised with the British leading to
a real danger that the weedy British version will become extinct.
But fear not as this has led to legislation that makes it ‘Totally
illegal to offer bluebells for sale or to smoke them’!
Overall
the book is entertaining and thought provoking and I hope that Volume
2 will contain my favourite invader, appearing soon on a coastline
near you… The Hottentot Fig.
-
Cathy Lomax
Some
more reviews of 'Alien Invaders' book:
Lab
Times
New Statesman
Mapping
The Marvellous
Alien
Invaders
From:
The Saatchi Gallery, editorial, September 9, 2006:
Speaking
of otherworldly beings, 'Alien Invaders: A Guide to Non-Native Species
of the Britisher Isles (Volume 1)' is a wonderful collaboration
between Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan, recently published by
Bookworks. Researching invasive non-native species of plant and
animal life, the project documents, through drawing and text, the
discovery and history of selected alien species introduced to the
British Isles, and the effect on native wildlife. Presented as a
cross-pollination of fact and fiction, the book is fashioned as
a illustrated natural history guide, offset by the artists' interventions.
Who ever thought the American Bullfrog, Giant Hogweed, Spanish Bluebell
and Welsh Catfish would create such controversy - but believe me,
I've seen gentle-looking conservationists get hot headed about those
non-native bells taking over Abney Park Cemetery, and it was a reminder
of humanity's urge to possess and compete, chillingly vivid and
real as evolution itself. Bizarre as the examples may seem, these
artists are really onto something. £6.50, available from Bookworks.
Fury
Videonale 10 catalogue, Kinstmuseum, Bonn, 2007
Views
of a French village prelude the film and lead to an interior space
with a woman sitting at an open window. This classically composed
view from a window alternates with close-up shots of flies
who swarm among the kitchen utensils on the table. Their fellow
species-members are already stuck dead upon the fly paper. The camera
shows in close-up the struggle for survival of the last twitching
flies, whose oversized representation induces repugnance as well
as a certain attraction. Both responses are effects of the quiet,
contemplative images. The close-ups reveal even more about the seemingly
inappropriate title: Fury is simply the brand of the insect trap.
Everyday life is the point of departure and also the contents of
the work. The effect of the formal realization is the aestheticization
of the everyday scenario, as well as a loathsome, morbid aspect.
The flies’ corpses and the sleeping woman call up associations
of death, which may be pursued further through the presence of iconographic
set pieces, such as the basket of fruit as a still life and vanitas
motif. Among the references to cinematic practice is the visual
dissection of the moving picture into a sequence of individual
images: "The stillness of cinema at 24 frames per second,"
comments the artist in reference to Godard’s remark: "Cinema
is truth 24 times a second." (Stefanie Zobel)
The Goose Fair,
Castlefield Gallery, Manchester
From: The Guide, The Guardian April 2004:
Manchester-based artists Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan present
a collaborative exhibition redolent of the cool irreverence so typical
of the visual culture of the city. In a mix of painting, drawing,
sculpture, sound and digitally manipulated video, the pair have
created a bewildering spectacle, with side-shows of surrealist fantasy,
quirky Americana, natural history and English folklore. Subjects
given a passing nod to include magic mushrooms, pigeon fancying,
the hypnotic drone of cicadas, fly paper traps and a dozen dogs
found in Chelsea, New York. Make sense, or nonsense, of it as you
will. - Robert Clark
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