The Audubon Trilogy and the Violence of Space
by Devin Zuber

In many ways, John James Audubon (1785-1851) resembles one of the elaborate and unique drawings that illustrate his famous Birds of America. On first glancing through his writings, the image Audubon presents of himself is that of a natural woodsman, an autodidact who embodied Rousseauvian principles to learn “to follow Nature in her walks.” However, like the pictures in Birds of America that appear to look so natural, to effortlessly present American wilderness “drawn from life,” yet under closer scrutiny reveal themselves to be a highly stylized artistic compositions, so, too, does Audubon come to unfold a much more complex and contradictory persona upon closer inspection. Audubon’s Ornithological Biography (the text that accompanied the lavishly illustrated Birds) indeed constitutes some of the most significant nature writing in early America. The texts are also remarkable forays of a mind attempting to come to terms with itself through a highly creative use of descriptive ornithology for that most perennial of American genres, the autobiography. Audubon’s descriptions of birds, then, are never really just about birds, the more you read into their intricate descriptions. They are records of a consciousness working through the staggering wonder and beauty of the new world as it negotiates a deep ambivalence about the changes civilization and culture were then wreaking on the wilderness.

Audubon’s writings repeatedly fashion himself as a kind of all-American frontier boy, and he frequently refers to his “youthful days as an American woodsman,” and a life well-spent observing (and shooting) the wild animals “of his native land.” Yet Audubon did not in fact set foot in the United States until he was 18 years old, and was only naturalized as an American citizen some three years later. In a land made-up of immigrants, Audubon’s fiction of national patrimony is a quintessential kind of American performance, one that authenticates and roots his sense of identity in the drama of civilization unfolding on the frontier, a borderland between nature and culture.

It is this abstract potential of transformation--of the self, of the land, of the two locked inextricably together--that has attracted and repelled many American writers both before and after Audubon. The poet Charles Olson saw this recurrent need for self-invention as an essentially bloody and violent transaction between mind and landscape, one that converted the heterogeneity of place into the possibility of space.

Through the interstices of Audubon’s many self-inventions and contradictions, in the discursive gap between the thousands of dead birds he happily shot and the subsequent astonishing frozen beauty of his illustrations, one can glimpse this mercilessness of American space, a land running with blood. It is the “real” Audubon who regretted “a day wasted” if he shot any less than a hundred birds that comes nearer to the ambivalent truth behind the deadly toll of his picture-making, the same paradoxical man, an European immigrant, who rails against “the surplus population of Europe coming to assist in the destruction of the forest” by bringing their corrupting civilization into the “dark recesses” of the frontier wild.
In each of the three films that form The Audubon Trilogy, Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan have provoked a confrontation between the Romantic legacy of Audubon’s words with contemporary images of places Audubon once limned. Cairo, West Point, and New Madrid are dramas of the transformation of place into space, but they are not without their mercy. There is something gently cartographic about their camera’s approach to landscape and vistas, undercut as it is by the intrusion of the bridges, tunnels, and railway tracks that insistently mark the modernity that Audubon lamented.

Quite specifically, the trilogy’s situated presence of roads (and a roadster in West Point) evokes the American on-the-road tradition that hearkens back to earlier exploration narratives that were intrinsic to Audubon’s writing and his myth of self-creation. While the resulting juxtapositions come close to a kind of irony--as when the “Commercial Avenue” sign rots and rusts in front of gutted storefronts in Cairo--they nonetheless maintain an authentic pathos for the loss of place, and even fleeting moments of genuine natural beauty (radiant clouds, birds winging on the air).

This differentiates Cartwright and Jordan from other artists who have drawn on Romantic aesthetic traditions for strategies of parodic re-presentation. Audubon’s 19th century words, here, are jagged and raw when brought into careful constellation with the tarnished images of contemporary place, people, and wildlife--their original ambivalent power is never very far from us. In this regard, The Audubon Trilogy joins a growing body of work that is revisiting Romantic tropes to force a charged encounter with the historical present, a flash of doubling time that Walter Benjamin called Jetztzeit (“now-time”) in his philosophy: an explosive flash of possibilities latent in the past, realized only in a present field. Like Tobias Hauser, who built a replica of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden on Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, or Robert Adam’s photographs that deconstruct picturesque landscape traditions to focus attention on the effects of deforestation in the American west, Cartwright and Jordan’s Trilogy activates the latent possibility in Audubon to speak to the precarity of our present moment, be it ecological or economic.

This sense of uncertainty, of an imminent threat, runs as a leitmotif through each of the three films. It is bolstered by Cartwright and Jordan’s selection of three of the more overtly sublime moments in Audubon’s corpus, places where the representational power of language consistently fails to map out the excess and intensity of an embodied experience. In the Trilogy, when these sublime words are juxtaposed against footage of contemporary places and landscapes, a brooding kind of tension is evoked, a gap between the spoken word and pictured thing that is reminiscent of the original fissures in Audubon’s own prose. In Cairo, there is a particularly deft use of Audubon’s climactic description of the frozen Ohio and Mississippi rivers violently colliding together in a “spectacle strange,” as Audubon wrote. Without warning, the camera shifts from scenes of river ice to the desolate streets of nearby Cairo. The violence of nature is brought to frame an urban catastrophe: gutted and burned-out storefronts, abandoned streets, ruined interiors; the images accruing as we hear Audubon describing the “fearful” breaking up of the ice. The striking absence of humans further evokes an uncanny sense of the ghostly (if not the apocalyptic), and Cairo’s haunted past as an epicenter of earlier racial violence and lynchings looms as an unspoken subtext in the background of the footage of these rubble-strewn streets. It is an ingenuous cinematic inversion of 19th century natural history, turning it inside out to read the dire cultural conditions of the present. In this regard, Cartwright and Jordan stay true to the metonymic link between nature and nation that structured the discourse of 19th century natural history writing. The sum effect of the images and words is to draw a full circle of sorts, portraying the terminal end of the civilizing frontier narrative that Audubon’s texts so often celebrated and partook in. The fleeting, beautiful images of birds that survive among these post-industrial landscapes--not only in Cairo, but in all the three films that compose the Trilogy--suggests the power of these animal beings to persist long after the depredations of humans have run their course. What remains is this visual record of a past and present that will continue to elegize our collective futures so long as we continue, in Olson’s words, to perpetuate the harshness of space.

Devin Zuber is Assistant Professor at the Institute for English and American Studies, Osnabrück University

Published on the occasion of ‘Cairo;The breaking up of the ice’, an exhibition by Jacob Cartwright & Nick Jordan, Cornerhouse, Manchester, Jan 22 to Feb 28 2010.

The full version of this essay appears in The Audubon Trilogy: Delineations of American Scenery & Manners, a new DVD & chapbook publication by Jacob Cartwright & Nick Jordan

The Audubon Trilogy: Fugitive Narratives and the Drama of the Natural World
by T.J. Jones
Carbondale Nightlife, July 2010

A showing of the documentary film The Audubon Trilogy: Delineations of American Scenery and Manners will take place Thursday, June 24 at the Morris Library Auditorium. British filmmakers Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan set out to create a stirring document of American cultural and natural history while using the writings of famed ornithologist John James Audubon.

Cartwright and Jordan began with the idea of using Audubon's writing while the two were a part of an artist fellowship at Manchester Museum in England. Coming across a stuffed passenger pigeon on display, Cartwright says they were struck by Audubon's text, which foreshadowed the eventual extinction of the species."Compelled by this absurdly inconsequential specimen, we researched the history of the species with all its prevailing mythology. We decided to make a film for the museum fellowship-- to document on film the places where Audubon once lived, explored and observed the passenger pigeons."

The filmmakers travelled to Kentucky and followed the Ohio River from Louisville, all the while filming the places about which Audubon wrote. They found West Point, where Audubon first observed vast flocks of passenger pigeons. The product was West Point: The Hunting of the Passenger Pigeon, the twenty-four-minute short that makes for the first part of the Trilogy. Jordan says there was no intention of making an actual trilogy, but while filming in the backwoods and along the Ohio River's banks, the artists found themselves in locations that triggered further narratives and connections with Audubon."We were excited by such rich material," explains Jordan. "Just driving around, away from the big towns and cities, you sense how close history is to the surface, and the enormity of the task that faced the pioneers. Some of the small country villages and townships seem to exist very much on the edge."

New Madrid, the second film in the Trilogy, was filmed at Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee, which was the product of the 1811 earthquake in New Madrid. Audubon himself wrote his account of the earthquake while on horseback in Kentucky.

Cairo: The Breaking up of the Ice, the final film in the Trilogy, came to Cartwright and Jordan purely by chance."[Cairo] surprised us with both its beauty and its dilapidation," Cartwright says. "This is a special place, intriguing and mysterious. It presented another unexpected filming opportunity and allowed us to expand the project from its original premise into a series of three short films, allied to Audubon and the wider region's natural, cultural, and social histories."

Audubon's The Breaking up of the Ice details the six weeks Audubon and his crew spent trapped in the confluence in Cairo in 1809. Two centuries later, Cartwright and Jordan returned to Cairo during the winter and followed the frozen upper Mississippi River through the borders of Wisconsin and Iowa while filming at locations along Missouri and Illinois."Our intention was to combine Audubon's tale of winter adversity with images of a frozen landscape and the abandoned streets of downtown Cairo; to reconnect a two-hundred-year-old narrative with its present-day, troubled location," Jordan says. "The films took on wider-ranging themes than had been originally anticipated-- from species extinction to economic failure-- yet each film has been framed and influenced by the words of Audubon."

Thus is The Audubon Trilogy. Using the unorthodox marriage of modern-day natural filming of the Southern Midwest and the nearly two-hundred-year-old narrations of Audubon, filmmakers Cartwright and Jordan haven't so much created a documentary, but instead have created a living visual and natural experiment, turning time and history into a constant illustrative narration. "Using a voiceover in juxtaposition with the footage tends to create a slightly fugitive narrative whereby some words become fixed and others drift away," says Jordan. "I think all three films have moments of both correspondence and contrast with Audubon's narrative. We didn't set out to illustrate Audubon's words, in a literal way, and neither did we aim to create jarring juxtapositions, or any kind of parody. I think we tried to remain true to the text, seeing as we value its inherent power and impact. Working in a relatively unplanned manner, we were happy to follow our noses, so to speak, to be fairly instinctive about subject and location. At the same time, we were always on the lookout for connections to Audubon and his words, environmental parallels, and visual or conceptual motifs." The artists refer to Audubon's writings as having a performative nature, and how he was clearly trying to identify himself as an American woodsman. Cartwright says Audubon was without a doubt vain, self-aggrandising, and at times a fabulist, all of which, he says, is evident in Audubon's writing. "The stylized aspect of his writing is important to us, as it creates an imaginative space to draw upon," Jordan says. "At the same time, Audubon's accounts are based on real events and locations, which we wanted to keep to the fore. We probably expected more opposition or striking contrasts between Audubon's accounts of frontier America and the present day, but we were struck by the dramatic scale and abundant ecology to be found in and around Southern Illinois and Kentucky."

Cartwright and Jordan remain proud to have explored in the shadow of Audubon. "We do have an affinity with his keen interest in the drama of the natural world, and in his enthusiasm for exploring and recording unfamiliar places," they point out. "People have remarked on the elegiac aspect of the Trilogy, with an undercurrent of loss and violence. There is a sense of pathos in Audubon's writings, particularly in the vivid descriptions of both animal and human brutality, which I think the films draw out and can't help but connect with the present day."
The filmmakers are now working on a new film about Cairo, Illinois. More of a straightforward documentary than the experimental Audubon Trilogy, Jordan says he and Cartwright hope to leave form and narrative lines open to avoid what Jordan calls a simplistic view of the town and its people. With hopes to allow different voices, viewpoints, and pictures to coexist, the film-makers promise the forthcoming Cairo film will not be for disaster tourists but, like The Audubon Trilogy, a document of American history.

New Scientist
26 August 2006

Alien Invaders: A guide to non-native species of the Britisher Isles, by Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan

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.

Lab Times
April 2006

The Aliens Amongst Us
A pair of British artists has written a fine 40-page book on invasive species.
It trumps the dull heavyweights of life science literature.

by Weanée Kimblewood

You can blame George Lucas for the mess. After the Hollywood producer brought out his film Star Wars in the summer of 1977, thousands of British children spent sunny hours fencing each oth er with “light sabres”. Unfortunately, these play fights were more similar to the light sabre battles in Star Wars than the children expected. Within a few days hospital accident and emergency units were overcrowded with screaming children suffering from grave “Darth Vader” burns. Nursing staff treated acres of swollen, painful blistered skin. What had happened?

A kind of “alien invasion” was responsible. For their impromptu weapons the uninformed children had used the huge reddish purple stems (3-8 centimetres in diameter) of Heracleum mantegazzianum, also known as “Giant Hogweed”. This member of the Apiaceae family is characterized not only by its size (it can reach 2-5 metres tall) but also by its phototoxic sap, which causes photodermatitis (meaning that the skin becomes inflamed and itchy when exposed to sunlight). Subsequently, disfiguring scars form, which can remain for years. Even more alarmingly, sap in the eyes can cause blindness.
The Giant Hogweed is not a British plant, not even European. It is native to the Caucasus and Central Asia. The Azeri botanist, Vakif Jalilabad, introduced it to England when he donated 5,000 seeds of this (in his words) “awesome but well-mannered curiosity” to Queen Victoria in 1851. Today, if anything, you would call his “gift” an act of terrorism. Integrated as grown plants into the ethnically themed gardens of Buckingham Palace, the Giant Hogweed soon escaped. It became widespread throughout the British Isles, causing the greenest plague of the 20th and 21st centuries. Today, Germany, France and Belgium are also overrun by Heracleum. Even though planting or causing Giant Hogweed to grow has been a punishable offence in the UK since 1982, nobody has been able to halt its propagation so far.

Although the Giant Hogweed is possibly the UK’s best-known alien invader it is not the only one. The UK-based artist duo Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan (known collectively by the moniker würstundgritz) has written an extraordinarily brief hardcover book called Alien Invaders: A Guide to Non-Native Species of the Britisher Isles, which includes plenty of quirky anecdotes about invasive non-native species of plant and animal life. Besides Heracleum the authors describe nine other migrant wildlife species that now live in and terrorise the UK. Each species is categorised (by würst Jordan) and illustrated (by gritz Cartwright), including “the erosion and flood risk increasing” Chinese Mitten Crab (Eriocheir sinensis), ”the eighteen feet long, swan eating” Wels Catfish (Silurus glanis) or “the shoe polish eating and infection spreading hazard” Pharaoh Ant (Monomorium
pharaonis).

Quirky anecdotes about invasive species
The alien invaders and their effects on native wildlife are each presented over four witty pages (under the headings ‘Origins of Introduction’, ‘Problems caused by Introduction’, and ‘Efforts of Control or Eradication’) based upon serious scientific facts as well as hearsay. This makes 48 pages of entertaining reading, including ten beautiful colour charts. The latter demonstrate a certain black humour: the explosively prolific Ruddy Duck (Oxyura jamaicensis) is mapped on page 37 with two gun cartridges, and the cute Grey Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensi) on page 21 faces the carcass of an unfortunate fellow, hanging dead as a dodo from a tree. To cut a long story short, Alien Invaders is a marvellous pocket-sized book packed with instructive words that will make you smile. What more could you want?

The Guardian
September 9, 2006

Squirrels and Hard Nuts
by Nicholas Clee

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.

Garageland
Issue 3: Nature

byCathy Lomax

Aliens Invaders of The Britisher Isles
Nick Jordan and Jacob Cartwright make assumptions and assertions about Alien Species

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.

New Statesman
18 December 2006

Strange and Wonderful
by Sukhdev Sandhu

The other day, looking for books to buy as Christmas presents, I went strolling along Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road in London. There are huge biblio-emporia here - Borders, Waterstone's, Blackwell's, Foyles - covering thousands of square feet, offering big discounts on prominent titles, and staffed by friendly and sometimes knowledgeable men and women. Yet, for all the deft displays, the cheerily laid- out tables and the handwritten recommendations, what was striking was the sameness of the titles. Freakonomics, Smash Hits annuals, biographies of 18th-century courtesans, novels by long-established writers: everywhere a dulling homogeneity.

Where, I wondered, were copies of the really great books that emerged in 2006? Books such as Andrew Kötting's In the Wake of a Deadad (University College for the Creative Arts), a 440-page meditation on death as charming and funny as it is pensive and unsettling. Deadad chronicles the author's creation of a huge blow-up version of his father that he lugs as far as Mexico, where the annual Day of the Dead celebrations are taking place. An extraordinary montage sequence shows images from his father's belatedly discovered porn collection with the faces of its rutting stars replaced by that of Kötting himself. The book's playfulness subverts the sobriety of the conventional father-son memoir and forces us to reconsider our notion of what is an appropriate tribute.

Equally fascinating is Ilf and Petrov's Ameri-can Road Trip (Cabinet), a travelogue originally commissioned and published in the mid-1930s by the Soviet magazine Ogonek. The writers, couching their satiric observations in less rowdy language than another eastern-bloc observer, Borat, cruise along the freeways and note that: "Roads like this are laid out with a specific goal: to show nature to travellers, to show it so that they don't have to scramble around on the cliffs in search of a convenient observation point, so that they can get the entire required quantity of emotions without ever leaving their automobiles."
The book, rescued from Ogonek's archives by an enterprising academic called Erika Wolf, is co-published by Princeton Architectural Press, the most consistently interesting university imprint operating today. Unlike its British university-press equivalents, it produces beautifully designed and printed books that are as attractive to look at as they are to read. It makes a point of commissioning smart intellectuals, both inside and outside of the academy, who can write about emergent topics and complex ideas for general audiences. Adopting an elastic notion of architecture that encompasses philosophy, graphic design and urban studies, its recent roster includes books on the damage wreaked by Hurricane Katrina and Rebecca Lepkoff's beautiful photographs of New York's Lower East Side in the 1940s. Best of all is Ghostly Ruins, Harry Skrdla's bewitching exploration of abandoned Americana - penitentiary centres, amusement parks, aristocratic mansions - that evokes a country far more crepuscular and haunted than might be imagined from looking at any mainstream coverage.

Closer to home, a terrific source of off-kilter, engaging pamphlets and volumes is the London-based Book Works. Over the past 20 years, it has published early works by artists such as David Shrigley, Cornelia Parker and the Turner Prize-winner Jeremy Deller. A recent oddity is Siôn Parkinson's Head in the Railings, which features photographs of the author trying to squeeze himself into all manner of unlikely places: a toilet bowl, a kitchen sink, a postbox. One picture shows him, or at least his arms, sticking out of a public waste bin. In these funny, bewildering shots, Parkinson becomes an anti-Houdini, wriggling into rather than out of objects. His subdued captions evoke the sadness of someone wanting to disappear into architecture.

A very different Book Works title is Jacob Cartwright and Nick Jordan's Alien Invaders: a guide to non-native species of the Britisher Isles. A small hardback in the style of the Observer guides that used to be very popular, it is an elegantly illustrated mixture of fact and myth about foreign creatures and their impact on indigenous flora and fauna.

It's also a tart and pleasingly oblique commentary on the alarmist discourse surrounding contemporary immigration. Like all the books I have mentioned, it is delightful to handle, wears its learning lightly, and is as much artefact as product. Would that you could find a copy in most British bookstores.

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.

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]