A Short History of Wildness

A Lithuanian Bison: The ideology of landscape oscillates between two poles: the mushroom you'll never be able to eat (too poisonous) and the one you've already digested without knowing it (ground in your mush). But charting it places us, once more, against real trees, some unnamable lettuce-like undergrowth and an abandoned forest ranger's hut. There are also body parts stuck to bed sheets; this provokes horror and a desire for the concise and unambiguous.

Vertical Rock Face Separating Bison from Cheetahs: From here I can see a group of German campers dressed in mythical Hermann outfits.

Zookeeper: The forest is open to everyone; we only regulate flows-employing ha-has, for instance, to separate the animals without the messy machinery of fences. Messy in their penal associations, in the language they seem to broadcast into the air.

A Bust of Pliny in the Zookeeper's Cubicle: And language does come from the air: various circumstances in nature prove to us, that there are impressed on the heavens innumerable figures of animals and of all kinds of objects, and that its surface is not perfectly polished like the eggs of birds, as some celebrated authors assert.

Zookeeping Intern/Painter: I object. After the invention of the fixed-harness plow in the 7th century AD, our coexistence with the land stopped forever. It's this history I embody critically in my paintings.

Pole #1: I object to you. These paintings that would use flowers and animals to encode all of world or a nation's history crush thought in an impossibly broad summary, succumbing to what the Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss call bedeutungskitsch, or the 'kitsch of heavy meaning.'

Provoked Onlooker: Is there a "light" meaning of violence?

Pole #2: No, but sentiment makes it friendly.

Alan Greenspan: We could notice a kitsch of heavy hitting, for instance, when a man of Mark McGuire's literal size and international stature speaks in therapeutic language of his "issues." Where I work, we would say that this code has no place in the lexicon of baseball.

Social Grammarian: That's funny but totally inappropriate. You seem not to be aware that humor can operate like sentiment. Sometimes it's simply out of context.

Phil Rizzuto: I disagree with those sticklers for logic, like Henry James, who, when someone must speak out of a conversation's immediate frame of reference (in order to object, or even to be polite), characterize her remarks (it's usually a woman) as "irrelevant." "'I disagree,' she remarked irrelevantly."



Lytle Shaw