NEVER GREEN C.C.P., Rurart

There is no green light.

Man has devised lots of systems – political, religious and economic – in an attempt to impose meaning on the chaos of life and to reduce the risk of the unexpected. Engaged in a truly Sisyphean effort, he has tried to cage the complex system of nature, and he has struggled to impose his will on natural systems.
The installation Never Green recreates this inherently human endeavor and subtly challenges the futility of it. It clusters and integrates five basic elements of the Vanmechelen oeuvre into a visual and auditory Greek chorus lamenting man’s arrogance.

The cage in the corner houses two primal chicken – a hen and rooster - belonging to the Red Junglefowl species, which is ancestral to the domestic chicken. In Vanmechelen’s work, they embody the first human animals before they left the safety of their environment. The next millennia man domesticated the world and himself and aimed for the future by creating a multicultural and multigenetical environment. The two caged animals live on a stretch of raised brown soil, the metaphorical platform from which they started on their millennia old journey across the globe.
The consequences of that brave endeavor are expressed in the other elements that comprise the ‘tableau vivant’. The perfectly formed egg stands for the world of the future. The other elements pave the chaotic way towards that future. The palm trees look out of order in this context, and they are. They are the result of the human desire to change nature towards his needs. The quest for organization has only brought about more chaos as the natural world is now being destroyed with frightening speed. Although extinction is a natural process that has existed for as long as life itself, it is speeded up considerably by man. In the last millennium, the impact of humans on the biosphere has accelerated out of control. Hybridity is rampant, things seem out of control, global chaos awaits us. Mankind is disoriented.

The answer is reflected in the transparent container which contains 3D-prints of DNA of the chickens that Vanmechelen has been crossbreeding into his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project. And which is shown on video also. Portraits of these animals hang on an opposite wall. The desire of the creator to connect them, his energy, is captured by the red throbbing breeding lamps. They are only the beginning of a extraordinarily long experiment to crossbreed a whole new type of hybrid being that will lead us out of the chaos. It will be born under a giant transparent light, a beacon of the future, somewhere ‘out there’. As a third coming.
Mark: no green but a pink light. There is no ‘go’. Life is surprising in its splendid and fascinating otherness.

Koen Vanmechelen