Hunters Welcome
artist: Mark Collop
New Project Space @ 500X
Dallas, TX
12/04/2010
The new project space at 500 X has balls: big red, glittering, pig balls. Thanks to Mark Collop’s exhibit, “Hunters Welcome,” the space offers a disturbing commentary on hunting culture and masculinity complicated by sacral references. The installation reveals hunting’s situational power, and subsequent deification, while exposing its gruesome underbelly… or something close to it.
Why should we care if a fringe group of armed citizens finds sport in hunting and all the subsequent tomfoolery surrounding death, guns and alcohol? Because this previously time honored profession of hunter has become obsolete as a practical necessity in America, yet continues to offer a very real, possibly pathological and primal, experience to many men and some women.
These aggrandized, yet playfully constructed, testicles are the focus of the space based on events the artist witnessed while on a hunt. As a token of masculine pride and, by removal, a trophy of domination, the pieces reveal a bizarre depravity, reminiscent of “Lord of the Flies,” and more closely related to warfare than actions taken by weekend warriors.
The spiritual epiphany and relation to a higher power in hunting is often linked to evolutionary biology, as hunting provides a “heightened awareness,” which affords the hunter a profound unity with his surroundings (see philosopher Jose Ortega y Gassat’s “Meditations on Hunting”). Unfortunately, the modernization of the sport provides fewer opportunities for this level of natural epiphany, offering instead a weekend of debauchery and savage catharsis. Which is also an attempt at an authentic experience, a reflexive release, before modern man returns to the mundane.
“Hunters Welcome” explores–amidst a series of contradictory rationalizations such as the invocation of Jesus, spiritual epiphany through alcohol, genital trophy taking, and killing from on high with bolts of lead– the very real possibility that socialized barbarism provides revelation.
_Ryder Richards
12/2010