AMERICAN COCKROACH, Aperture 2004. Essays by Steve Baker, Garry Marvin and Lyall Watson.
Catherine Chalmers' second Aperture monograph invites us to meditate on the pleasures and terrors of the common domestic pest, Periplaneta americana, also known as the American cockroach. In three different series of photographs—Infestations, Imposters, and Executions—Chalmers challenges us to reconsider how we distinguish between creepy infestation and acceptable nature. With a slight B-movie quality, the images push us to think carefully about the ways in which we determine some creatures to be lovable and others best squashed under a shoe.
Excerpts from a Conversation, with Lesley A. Martin
from AMERICAN COCKROACH (Aperture 2004)
Insects are a window into the unimaginable. Their biology and behaviors are routinely bizarre and enigmatic to us – they are refreshingly outside the human perspective. I think that our experience can be enhanced by an attempt to understand and give meaning to other life forms. Yet, is it possible that a human-centric viewpoint is setting the stage for an impoverished environment?
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Where nature and culture collide is a nexus of fear and confusion. With my previous book, Food Chain, I wanted to explore a basic process of the natural world – killing and eating, being eaten alive – away from which we have endeavored to civilize ourselves. The carnage in Food Chain was deeply disturbing to many viewers. Although I spent much of my time on the project providing meticulous care for the animals I worked with, many viewers blamed me when they saw, for example, images of a snake eating a baby mouse – as if I had killed the mouse. I was fascinated by the strange disconnect between what people seem to want to believe happens in nature and what actually does happen. The snake, of course, needs to eat, regardless of our opinions.
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With American Cockroach, I am interested not so much in troublesome behavior as in an animal humans find problematic. The roach, and the disgust we feel for it, make for a rich conduit to the psychological landscape that inculcates our complex and often violent relationship with the animal world. I can think of few species that are as thoroughly loathed as the cockroach. But interestingly enough, although they carry this heavy burden of our hostility, they don’t do very much in terms of behavior. They don’t eat in a dramatic way, and they certainly don’t have the wild sex life of, say, the praying mantis. They don’t sting, bite, or carry the dangerous pathogens that flies, mice, and mosquitoes regularly do. Having a cockroach in your kitchen is not like having a venomous snake living in the house. There’s nothing about the animal that is life-threatening. The dichotomy of the roach being a loaded subject, yet in habit, a fairly blank canvas, allowed me to bring more to this work.
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It’s likely that there are a multitude of factors that fuel our feelings about cockroaches. They’re nocturnal, coming out at night when we are asleep and vulnerable. They also operate in numbers, whereas we see ourselves as individuals. If we find ten in the kitchen, we know there are hundreds more behind the walls that we can neither see nor get at – a hidden enemy is horrifying to us. And by mutating quickly they can genetically outwit the technologies we throw at them. I also wonder if we have an atavistic memory of when mammals were a diminutive species ruled by the dinosaur. Are we skittish about being dominated again? Who knows? Cockroaches outnumber us, we can’t control them, and they don’t share our values.
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It has never been my intention, though, to offer them an apology, to say we shouldn’t hate or shouldn’t kill them. I’m not advocating for their conservation or their destruction. What interests me is that the degree to which people hate cockroaches is so disproportionate to the actual potential for threat in the actions of the animal. This schism is indicative of the subjectivity – perhaps arbitrariness – with which we respond to nature in general. The cockroach is like a distorting mirror that amplifies the attitudes we harbor.
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One of the things I discovered when reading up on the American cockroach is that they are no longer found in the wild. They have existed for hundreds of millions of years, have survived several mass extinctions, yet we have succeeded in changing how they life. Our homes are now their natural habitat. They are, in a sense, our alter-egos, the shadows that clandestinely follow in our wake. As humans dispersed from Africa, where roaches too are believed to have come from (Linneaus misnamed them Periplaneta americana), they have accompanied us through our colonization of the planet.
I have a theory that early Homo sapiens living in caves probably did not find the cockroach as abominable as we do now; certainly they had more dangerous animals to fear. Our hatred of the roach has perhaps grown in proportion to the boundaries we have erected between ourselves and the natural world. These animals are one of the few remaining species that can cross over at will and challenge those barriers. I think, at a fundamental level, their trespass upsets our confidence in our ability to successfully control and transform nature to suit our needs and desires.
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The distance humans have forged between ourselves and nature is creating villains out of species that were originally seen as benign, and increasingly transmogrifies animals into one of two categories: pets or pests. And, of course, the animals that fall outside these sets are rapidly becoming extinct. Our expanding lifestyle decreases the number of animals on which we spend millions to save, and conversely gives rise to the so-called “weed species,” the animals on which we spend millions to exterminate. It’s a portentous conundrum. People persevere in feeding their need for contact with nature, but what satisfies that longing is increasingly notional. Our culture surrounds itself with natural forms; patterns of flora and fauna abound on walls, sheets, and clothes, but we remove ourselves from the real things in their normal environments. I think we have become a species that prefers the substitute.
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What are the aesthetics of human empathy toward animals? What if cockroaches were red with black spots like a ladybug, or green like a plant, or, iridescent like a dragonfly? Or perhaps came in a variety of colors and patterns, like cats? People seem to prefer soft and fuzzy to hard and shiny, big eyes to thin antennae, feathers to scales, colorful creatures to dull ones. These are choices based on abstract visual qualities, often independent of the animal’s behavior. And I think these preferences have had a formative role in determining our attitudes toward specific species, and even entire classes of creatures. They have played a part in defining what we find to be “good nature” as opposed to “bad nature.” Unfortunately for the roach, it embodies several of our least-favored aesthetic attributes.
I found that once I got past the dark, twitchy exterior, the roach is remarkably subtle and beautiful. Its wings are a glowing, translucent amber, its lithe legs are accented with randomly-drawn spikes, and its antennae explore the world with the grace of a ballerina’s arms. I was surprised to be allured by its shape – its body parts are formally compelling, and this is what led me to expand this project into drawings and sculpture. From there, the roach’s syncopated, rhythmic gait led me to video.
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People prefer to see insects in a garden, pollinating flowers and being useful. That’s idealized nature. But of course, most insects are predators, savagely ripping apart fellow insects, or, in the case of the cockroach, acting as scavengers, recycling waste and debris. Humans don’t like scavengers. And that the American cockroach can successfully scavenge off of us is the worst of insults. We have worked tirelessly to coerce nature to match our vision, but would the world really be a better place if all insects were pretty and only did nice things?
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I sometimes paint or add spines or feathers to the shells of my roaches. These embellishments are superficial and fall off in a few days, leaving the roach unharmed. But the act of transforming the animal brings up an interesting characteristic of human behavior. We specifically set out to shape the planet as if it is a tabula rasa for our desires. The terror of whatever a roach does to us pales in comparison to what we can do to it. Genetic engineering is opening up new possibilities for designer plants and animals. Pretty soon, “glowfish” will be available – goldfish engineered to fluoresce, created just for our entertainment. If roaches are here to stay, might we take an alternate route and begin pest manipulation instead of pest extermination? Engineer them to look like a favorite insect, or mammal, or perhaps the kitchen wallpaper? There is real power and bite behind our aesthetic choices. We have been practicing this craft for millennia, such as carving a wolf into a toy poodle, but now we have more tools in our box.
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Death ties us to the roach in a unique way. We kill them – they survive. We kill ourselves – they survive. I wanted this body of work, though, to get away from the discussion of specific deaths. So my executions were reenacted with already-dead bugs. I have been raising roaches for years and consequently collecting the dead for years; their corpses animate this part of the project. The “Execution” series is not about the suffering humans have endured at the hands of humans, but what other species have endured at the hands of humans. I do not want, in any way, to diminish the pain and horror that we have experienced through the centuries with these methods of killing. It is the opposite perspective: not looking in but looking out across the animal barrier that I am endeavoring to explore through this work.
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We have difficulty looking something in the eye as it dies – even if we really want it dead. Not so other predators. For example, the dog; the more its squeaky toy squeals, mimicking a suffering prey, the more excited the dog gets. Humans are incredibly efficient killers, yet remarkably queasy at facing or acknowledging what we do. For us, there is a disjuncture between mass, anonymous, silent deaths, and those that have been individualized. We do not feel the same emotion and responsibility for what we do not witness, whether it is a behind-the-wall pesticide death, or the graver problem of wildlife loss from habitat destruction. But, for the animal facing extermination or extinction, what meaning are our distinctions?
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We are at a time in history when we are becoming aware of the larger impact we have on other species. The roach, strangely enough, is emblematic of the questions we face as we struggle to decipher our relationship to the animal world in general. What do we love, what do we kill, what do we save, and what becomes extinct? We have been drawing lines in the sand forever, but maybe now is a good time to re-imagine what’s on the other side.