SEEN AND HERD
By Peter Bowen
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| Sam Easterson’s Animal, Vegetable, Video: Where the Buffalo Roam. | |
Sam Easterson takes the point of view of animals quite seriously. Since 1998, he has embarked on creating with his project Animal, Vegetable, Video the largest library of video from animals’ perspectives. In each of his videos and installations, he straps animals with small video cameras to capture their experiences of the world around them. This winter at Kansas City’s Grand Arts Gallery, Animal, Vegetable, Video: Where the Buffalo Roam, his nod to the American West, marked the latest installment in what has become his life’s work.
Easterson’s career in the art world started off as a perfectly respectable one. He studied fine art (albeit with video maverick Tony Oursler) at New York’s Cooper Union before moving to the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis to gain a B.A. in landscape architecture. But along the way, his video experiments attempting to animate the everyday – from household appliances to household plants – lead to his radical reinvestigation of the American landscape. In 1998, A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing, his installation at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis in which he attached a small video camera to a friendly sheep, began his journey down this bestial path. Since then he has investigated the perspectives of those inhabiting a number of other landscapes. In Animal, Vegetable, Video: Swamp Sanctuary, he includes the POVs of an alligator, frog, millipede, picture plant and lily pad, among others. In Animal, Vegetable, Video: Desert Oasis, we see what the dry land denizens – including a tarantula, tumbleweed, scorpion, and armadillo – see.
For Walker curator Douglas Fogle, Easterson’s mad experiment to outfit animals as nature’s d.p.’s is part and parcel of an American aesthetic tradition that links the perceiver and perspective, the individual to the landscape. As Fogle explains: "In visual arts in the 19th century and even in the 18th century painting was documenting the landscape from a particular point of view. Sam’s interested in looking, and in the process of looking. You’re never going to be able to approximate an animal’s vision completely, but I think that in many cases he’s attempting to get us to that point of view which takes you outside of yourself as a viewer."
Indeed, for Sam, "The buffalo as a representative or a symbol of the American landscape is something that really interests me. I’m taking people through these landscapes by the perspective of these animals."
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