18 May 11
exquisite corpse study two
4.5 minutes
1st edit _ exquisite corpse contributors:
Tor Linbo, Ben Fountain, John Simmons, Ron Skylstad, Ed Kowalski, Cynthia Pederson, Brent Brock, Lars Osterdahl and Linneaus,
Ben Fountain:
How strange and utterly logical that Tracy Hicks' intense engagement with the natural world would lead him down into the guts of the museum storage room, this windowless, climate-controlled, rigorously inventoried place with its zeroed-out funk of alcohol and slow decay. Maybe the real crux of the man-nature mashup lies here, as opposed to the grocery store or the kitchen table. We all understand the need to feed ourselves, but the impulse that drives a child to collect feathers or interesting rocks, this is a real human mystery that Tracy Hicks is trying to crack. Just as a kid collects feathers and rocks for the pleasure they give, perhaps we should view the museum as a highly elaborate blowup of various pleasure centers in the human brain--the pleasure that the scientist takes in knowing; that the collector takes in having; that the historian takes in preserving; and that the aesthete takes in order, proportion, paradigm and variation. This is the territory Tracy Hicks is working, the intersection of science, culture, and nature where the human world happens.