In Val Plumwood’s essay titled Being Prey, she goes into detail about her experience surviving an attack from a crocodile. While out canoeing at Kakadu National Park, a saltwater crocodile catches her off guard and starts attacking her canoe.
“Few of those who have experienced the crocodile’s death roll have lived to describe it. It is, essentially, an experience beyond words of total terror, total helplessness, total certainty, experienced with undivided mind and body, of a terrible death in the swirling depths. The crocodile’s breathing and heart metabolism is not suited to prolonged struggle, so the roll is an intense initial burst of power designed to overcome the surprised victim’s resistance quickly. Then it is merely a question of holding the now feebly struggling prey under the water a while for an easy finish to the drowning job.”[1]
She thankfully managed to get away from the crocodile trying to tear her leg off, and walked on downstream despite her severe injuries until she was found by a park ranger and taken to the hospital.[2] Despite what had happened, Plumwood refused to allow the rangers to go and shoot the crocodile that attacked her—a breaking down of binaries between humans and animals or between humans and nature. I’d like to focus on the idea of the breaking down of binaries in relation to Serra’s art installation piece.
With Plumwood, it’s important to remember that humans are typically put on a higher pedestal and are seen as more important than nature—so when nature seemingly breaks that normalized idea, humans feel the need to take action. In this case, the rangers wanted to shoot the crocodile, and the media tried to portray her as a victim not unlike those seen in classic monster movies (think King Kong or The Creature in the Black Lagoon).[3] Plumwood rejects this notion wholeheartedly, stating that “Because crocodile attacks…have often been followed by episodes of massive crocodile slaughter in which entire river populations were wiped out…1 tried hard at first to minimize media publicity and keep the story for my friends’ ears alone.”[4]
In a way, Serra also rejects this oppositional binary of humans versus nature with the way he actively interacts with the natural space he’s given. With the “East-West/West-East” installation, rather than changing the natural landscape so as to make the steel plates completely even, he simply adapted and made two of the plates taller and two of them shorter; however, to the naked eye and due to the uneven landscape, they all look like they are exactly the same height.[5] He uses natural materials that are not harsh on the environment in ways that could damage it.[6] “…the pillars bring the magnitude of the surrounding into focus,” according to Serra, allowing for the empty ‘nothingness’ of the Zekreet landscape to become something. At the same time, this does beg the question of is it up to us as humans to decide what is nothing and what means something? Arguably, every bit of nature should mean something simply because it exists, which is more along the lines of what Plumwood is leaning towards when she refuses to allow the rangers to hunt down the crocodile. With Serra, his installation falls into the trap of giving off the sense that in order for nature to be viewed as significant by humans, humans need to give it that significance somehow and in some way, which Plumwood would probably find problematic.
Bibliography
Niarchos, Nicolas. “Richard Serra in the Qatari Desert,” June 18, 2017.
Plumwood, Val. “Being Prey.” Terra Nova: Nature & Culture 1, no. 3 (1996): 32–44.
“Richard Serra in Qatar – East-West/West-East.” Public Delivery, May 7, 2020.
[1] Val Plumwood, “Being Prey,” Terra Nova: Nature & Culture 1, no. 3 (1996): 35.
[2] Val Plumwood, “Being Prey,” 37-38.
[3] Ibid, 40.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Nicolas Niarchos, “Richard Serra in the Qatari Desert,” June 18, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/richard-serra-in-the-qatari-desert.
[6] Nicolas Niarchos, “Richard Serra in the Qatari Desert.”
