Rich Pell | This Is Not An Artifact

Rich Pell

This Is Not An Artifact

Berlin, Germany: K. Verlag, 2023

440 pp., 24 x 18 cm., hardcover

Edition of 1200

I was listening to a conversation today between Laurie Anderson and Paul Holdengräber, recorded a few months ago at Occidental College. At one point in their seventy-minute dialogue, Anderson picks up her phone and reads a message sent to her earlier that day, about pigeons. It was originally shared in a tweet (and not a hundred percent accurate) and it reminded me of the above book. Because since reading This Is Not An Artifact (and visiting  the Pittsburgh museum that it documents), I find myself thinking about domesticity constantly. 

The message is as follows: 

"My friend grew up in New England where they have pigeons. Apparently they also hate them. He was always saying bad things about pigeons until I pointed something out that he never thought of before:

We domesticated pigeons. They are (nearly) all over the world because HUMANS BROUGHT THEM THERE. And, they were more than pets. They carried messages. People raced them. They lived spoiled lives as honored human companions for centuries.

Then we got telephones and we threw them out like trash.

Literally, we threw them away.

Their species had already been fully domesticated and they could not survive in the wild; they lost all their survival instincts during the centuries that they lived caged by people.

That is why they live in cities with people instead of in a forest somewhere. It's OUR fault. And not only did we throw them away, but now humans curse them as "winged rats;" casting them as pests.

But they don't know how to live without us, and their instincts tell us that they should trust us. So, they continue to come up to humans and beg for food, because it's the only survival skill left in their genes.

They love us because they were bred by us to feel that way, and yet we hate them.”

Brandon Turner, the lead author of a study done last year at The Ohio State University determined that pigeons are not merely highly intelligent, but that their problem-solving skills can be likened to AI. They employ a "brute force" method that is similar to what is used in Artificial Intelligence models. They are also highly adaptable, with more survival skills than the above text suggests. 

They live in cities instead of forests because they do not eat bugs or fruit like other species of birds, but instead seeds and grain, which forests do not provide. They evolved on cliff sides and rock ledges not dissimilar to the concrete and stone found in urban areas. 

Pell includes a half page about pigeons in This Is Not An Artifact: 

"City pigeons are the ones who live in the nooks and crannies of our urban infrastructure. They eat from our discarded, or soon to be discarded, food. These are not the captive pigeons of the fancy breeders, or the homing pigeons who travel great distances, though those may be among their ancestors. The pigeons who fill our city squares are the descendants of the captive, domesticated, possibly fancy, pigeons. Either through escape or release, they are now free and feral. 

“Whether feral, fancy or otherwise, pigeons are all descendants from wild rock doves who were domesticated as far back as 10,000 years in either Egypt or Mesopotamia. The rock pigeon is the oldest domesticated bird in the world. Their ability to adapt to the architecture of human civilization has severed them incredibly well. Pigeons are today the third most populous bird on the planet with a global population of approximately 475 million birds, the vast majority of which are the feral descendants of escaped domesticated pigeons. They are surpassed in number only by the domesticated chicken and the wild red-billed quell in Africa.”

My original post about the book is here: 

https://artistsbooksandmultiples.blogspot.com/2024/06/rich-pell-this-is-not-artifact.html

I really can’t recommend it highly enough. 

Rich Pell | This Is Not An Artifact

Rich Pell

This Is Not An Artifact

Berlin, Germany: K. Verlag, 2023

440 pp., 24 x 18 cm., hardcover

Edition of 1200

The first pages of This Is Not An Artifact feature endorsements from some prestigious colleauges: Mark Dion, the Critical Art Ensemble, The Yes Men, Trevor Paglan and bio-artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg. The latter describes the book as “like a visit to the Museum of PostNatural History followed by a long dinner chat with its ingenious creator, Rich Pell.”

While in Pittsburgh last week we were lucky enough to do both. Pell toured us around his incredible museum, and then joined Roula, Jon Rubin and myself for tacos on the corner. This Is Not An Artifact successfully captures the genius and unassuming quality of Pell, who introduces the book claiming that the ideas it contains are neither complicated nor earth-shattering. They are actually both, in the best possible way. 

The notion that “human desire, curiosity and fear shape the evolution of certain plants and animals just as they shape architecture, technology, art, music and sports” is both immediately and indisputably true, but also somewhat staggering. Only four percent of mammals are wild (lions and tigers and bears) while sixty percent are domesticated (sheep, pigs, goats, camels, horses, etc). By biomass, even domesticated birds outnumber the wild by more than two to one (with poultry farming tipping the scale considerably). 

Pell's introductory text is titled “Who Left The Dogs Out?” and notes that a natural history museum is far more like to display an elephant than a dog, or a chicken, or other animals bred for human consumption, companionship, labour, clothing or transportation. He describes his museum (now operational for over a decade) as a kind of sequel to Natural History museums, picking up where their efforts end. The focus is both narrow enough to distinguish the collection from other ventures, and broad enough to include SeaMonkeys. 

The Museum focuses on deliberate human intervention - such as the selective breeding of fruit to taste better or not have pits - versus the unintentional ways that human affect nature (eg. pollution).  Examples span from the dawn of domestication to contemporary genetic engineering. 

A display of SeaMonkeys and related ephemera date back to Pell’s own childhood, when he ordered them from the back page ad of a comic book. 

Harold von Braunhut invented the two most dubious and ubiquitous items advertised to children this way: the X-Ray Specs and the SeaMonkey. Originally called Instant Life and sold for half a dollar, von Braunhut changed the name to "Sea-Monkeys" in 1962 and secured a patent in ’72. They were essentially just brine shrimp, bearing little resemblance to the friendly illustrations by Joe Orlando (associate publisher of Mad Magazine, vice president of DC Comics, etc.), disappointing thousands and thousands of kids. 

Another display illustrates the wide approach to PostNature: a sound booth featuring recordings of bird calls sang by virtuoso singers who added enough embellishment and interpretation that the songs became a bird and human hybrid sound. 

Only open one or two days a week, admission to the museum is ten dollars, five for kids and students, and free to those who reside in the zip code. Entrance price includes a pair of 3D glasses, which can be used to view a number of the displays. The book, too, provides a pair and select images are presented in this format. 

The book aims to function as traveling version of the museum. There’s about a dozen compelling facts per page, and half of them sent me down my own research rabbit holes. I was surprised to learn, for example, that the domestication of dogs precedes agriculture, by a couple of thousand years. 

A visit to the museum should be on the schedule for anyone traveling to Pittsburgh. This Is Not An Artifact can be purchased for $40 from Printed Matter, here, or directly from the Museum, here. 

“This truly brilliant volume elucidates the deep history and nuance of artificial selection, providing a visually lush and beautifully written contribution to the history of natural history. In fact, natural history museums would do well to use Rich Pell’s brilliant book as a road map for how to move away from the colonial romance of nature and towards a progressive, fresh culture of nature. This Is Not An Artifact hybridizes biological research, the history of science, museology, and art, to produce an impressive and visually stunning volume concerning the future of life. Essential reading for anyone invested in the culture of nature."

- Mark Dion

Pittsburgh

We just got back from a week or so in Pittsburgh, where Roula installed a small exhibition at Gallery Closed. The window gallery, in the Troy Hill neighbourhood, is operated by artists Phillip Andrew Lewis and Lenka Clayton, from their studio. The enormous former bank building (complete with functional vault) has two street-facing windows, allowing the gallery to be permanently closed and also continuously open. 

For a fourteen month-long series called Exhibition Copy, works by artists in the window space spill out into neighbouring businesses, residences and nearby school. The series includes projects by Martin Creed, Louise Bourgeois, Roman Ondak, Ryan Gander and others. Roula created a party room scenario reminiscent of fish-bowl party spaces and play areas where children celebrate in full view of passersby (like the one in the Rainbow Cinema in Toronto, which we keep threatening to host a party in for our friend Jon Sasaki). Balloons from the party appear to have drifted off and become lodged in the other windows. The painted cast resin balloons can be seen in the window for Ron’s Pizza Palace, a Public Notary Office, a former Beauty Salon and several other adjacent spaces. 

Troy Hill is also home to several “Art Houses”, the brainchild of collector Evan Mirapaul, who buys up dilapidated homes and invites artists to transform them into installation spaces. German artist Thorsten Brinkmann produced the first one, complete with Being John Malkovich style half-floors and passages to crawl through. Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski’s Kunzhaus followed in 2016. 

The most extraordinary of the three is Lenka and Phillip’s Darkhouse Lighthouse, which gutted the original home and built an elaborate lighthouse inside it. Mark Dion is currently working on the fourth home. A fifth possible space is currently covered in vines, with bricks from the crumbling chimney threatening to fall from the roof. All are located within a block or two of each other, with Gallery Closed close by. 

Affordable space in Pittsburgh means that artists can often rent out spaces and create DIY museums, billboards and restaurants. Jon Rubin (a co-curator of the Exhibition Copy series and one of our excellent hosts) has done all three. His work often explores the authority of text in the public realm, and his projects include Waffle Shop (Talk Show), The National Museum and the renowned Conflict Kitchen. More on these in future posts. 

Rich Pell has operated the Centre for Post-Natural History for about a decade. I was expecting a thrifty studio space with some objects on makeshift tables, but the presentation was top-notch, with a full library of books, museum-quality glass cases, audio descriptions, projected films and taxidermied animals. 

The week was pretty packed, and we only managed to visit three bookstores: Fungus Books and Bottom Feeder (both excellent and around the corner from each other) and Caliban, which - we later learned - was involved in an eight million dollar heist, regarding prints and plates cut from books from the Carnegie Library (read the story, here, at the Smithsonian site). 

Over the next week or so I’ll try to get to the above titles, which tell the larger story of some of the great places we visited.