It’s always interesting to visit museums, especially when traveling to a city you’re experiencing for the first time. On a recent trip to the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, we came across Fatigues by Toronto-based artist Abbas Akhavan.
Is that really a deer?
The whitetail buck was lying on a wooden floor, carefully placed in a corner near large white walls, and, of course, well-lit. I began to read the artist’s statement: “Fatiques consists of a series of animals stuffed and laid right on the floor in different locations around the exhibition gallery.”
Hmmm…okay.
There was also a screech owl, a gray wolf, a red fox, a black bear, and a North American porcupine, among others. “While taxidermy animals are most often exhibited in posture suggestive of their grace or agility in their natural state,” the statement continues, “those of Abbas Akhavan are mounted in positions that evoke their vulnerability and show them as inanimate creatures, consigned to a state of perpetual silence. By avoiding giving them narratives or prominent displays, the work hopes to avoid dramatizing their deaths in order to prompt consideration of the precariousness of life.”
All right, I wondered, what constitutes art? And what might a first-time visitor be thinking? Will he ever come back? And why isn’t the tongue hanging out of the deer’s mouth?
I’ve seen plenty of dead deer in my lifetime, but they’re usually on the side of the road. (And when they’re stuffed, they’re positioned upright.) But seeing animals sprinkled about inside the museum was unexpected. Imagine the conversation between the artist and the curator…
Perhaps author Joyce Carol Oates put it best. “My belief is that art should not be comforting,” she wrote. “For comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”
Which explains why, two weeks later, I’m still thinking about it.
by bill blanck