The Language of Flowers
Michael Taussig ________________ Asked on a radio interview a couple of years back why he drew animals and not people, the great cartoonist Chuck Jones of Bugs Bunny and Road Runner fame replied: “It’s easier to humanize animals than humanize humans.” Recently the Colombian artist Juan Manuel Echavarria gave this a twist. Reacting against the stupendous violence in his country, he humanized flowers by photographing them like botanical specimens, replacing the stems, leaves, flowers, and berries with what look like human bones. He called this series of thirty-two black-and-white photographs The Flower Vase Cut, referring to the name of one of the mutilations practiced in the Colombian violencia of the 1940s and 1950s in which the amputated limbs were stuffed, so it is said, into the thorax via the neck of the decapitated corpse. In cartoons we laugh at distortions of the body, suggesting just how close violence is to humor. Indeed the human face when crying can seem very close if not identical to that same face laughing. It is, moreover, almost trite to observe that great comedians and clowns bear the burden of great tragedy as well. As for the cartoon quality in violence, hearken to Michael Herr’s reference to his experience in the Vietnam War; he goes to considerable effort to deny these two elements have anything in common: “No jive cartoon,” he says, “where the characters get smacked around and electrocuted and dropped from heights, flattened out and frizzed back and broken like a dish, then up again and whole and back in the game.” No jive cartoon—indeed! So why bother to raise that specter, only to deny it? Why bother to come so close, only to draw back? Is it because the resemblance is too, too troubling, true but troubling, and by this maneuver we do precisely what is necessary, which is to catch a glimpse of the impossible unthinkable and then close it over again? Well, then, what is this impossible unthinkable that in equating war with a cartoon simultaneously heightens their stupendous difference? Did I say heighten, as does Herr when he refers us to the cartoonish move of being dropped from heights, flattened out, “then up again and whole and back in the game”?What emotional register, what law of aesthetics and logic is being transgressed by this heightened drop and even steeper fall into . . . well, into what? Not redemption. That’s for sure. Back into war, that’s what—“up again and whole and back in the game.” Is this not also what occurs when Echavarria humanizes not animals but flowers, meticulously duplicating the exactness and whimsy of botanical drawings with his bleached-out photographs of human bones? At one point in an interview, Echavarria says, “My purpose was to create something so beautiful that people would be attracted to it. The spectator would come near it, look at it, and then when he or she realizes that it is not a flower as it seemed, but actually a flower made of human bones— something must click in the head, or in the heart, I hope.” I myself do not see it that way. The flowers are so obviously not flowers. Instead it is the very clumsiness, the deliberateness of the artifice of posing bones as flowers, that perturbs one—and this is of the same order of artifice that makes the mutilation of the Corte del Florero so powerful, too. The flowers in Echavarria’s photographs have stems made of curving ribs or of the decayed long bones of arms. The petals are formed from what appear to be the human pelvis or spinal vertebrae. In some photographs, small bones like teeth or chips of bones lie to one side, thereby disturbing pretensions to symmetry or completeness. A vertebra hangs delicately off a rib, five of which are bunched together like plant stems emerging from a column of three vertebrae glued together, not as in the human spine, but separated from that, like a child’s building blocks, then stuck front to back, Lying on their bleached-out background, the flowers appear fragile, suspended in midair and ungrounded. They could be flying. The law of gravity no longer holds. There is a sense of a world on hold, a painful absence of sound. What we see is silence, the silence of something gone awfully wrong with the human world such that we are all, God included, holding our breath, which is probably what happens when you fall a long, long way. To add to their strangeness, each photograph bears a title like the Latin names used in the plant illustrations of the famous botanical expedition to Colombia organized by the Spanish crown and led by Jose´ Celestino Mutis at the end of the eighteenth century. Echavarrı´a is very conscious of this genealogy. In fact he sees his flowers as its latest expression. The difference is that Echavarria’s latinate names are hybrids suggesting the grotesque, one pelvic bone flower being named Dracula Nosferatu, while another flower made of a curved rib with a bunch of metacarpals at one end, suggestive of petals, is called Dionaea Misera. Although these names are in small, discreet letters, names are of consuming importance to this work, beginning with the name of the mutilation—The Flower Vase Cut. The name is crucial because on viewing the mutilated body without the name, I doubt whether an observer would get the point—as we say of a joke—without the name. All the observer would see would be a bloody morass of hacked-off limbs and a limbless trunk. The mutilation would be incomplete, by which I mean it would lack the meaning that destroys meaning. I do not understand this. Perhaps I am not meant to. But what I do know is that what mutilation registers, what all mutilation registers, is this wave, this continuous wave-like motion of autosacrifice of meaning heightened then dissipated by the name in conjunction with the corpse as a work of art. I think it goes like this: that in attaching