Question

Sarah Tynan's image of a hen harrier taking a Range Rover as its prey is clearly a piece of wishful thinking--or, as Jeremy Deller called the exhibition in which it served as the focal point, English Magic. What is "magical" about it? Are you sympathetic with Deller's point of view? In the United States, wolves are protected by the Endangered Species Act, but wolves often come into conflict with ranchers who claim that they kill their livestock. If you could imagine reimaging Tynan's hen harrier as a wolf, what would it have in its jaws?

Answer 1

Jeremy Deller’s presentation of Sarah Tynan’s mural of the Hen Harrier in the Venice Biennale is an example of the complexity of life for human beings and the organisms in the changing world of technology. In a certain number sense, the Hen Harrier’s act of capturing the SUV car in its talon marks a radical response of nature to the rapid exposure And excavation of the otherwise ‘hidden’ wildlife by the human greed for excess.

Thus, Deller’s comment about the image as ‘magical’ holds much relevance as it depicts a new way of interpreting the Present and imagining the Future. What results is a unique almost unreal therefore magical event that in a certain way blurs the boundaries between force and vulnerability, between horizontal path of discovery( as made possible by human technology like the Range Rover) and the vertical ‘flight’ of the nature ( as symbolised in the figure of the owl in the image).

While much of the ‘magic’ in Tynan’s image works through its representation of the British history, it can have an ethical value when imported to the American context itself. In the North America, wolves present a controversial species as they are held in reverence by the indigenous customs and folklores, protected by the federal legislatures as a vulnerable species and yet are resperesneted in popular media as ferocious creatures who threaten the livestock of the farm rangers. The wolves thus in a way are similar to Tynan’s Hen Harrier who can be said to make a comeback in spite of the backlash against them. In a scenario of a direct import or reproduction of art, the wolves are imagined to make a claim to the world through their hunting tool- their jaws. A historically potent and visually appealing image of the wolves could show them clutching a piece of ham against the background of a refrigerator as a symbol of the growing deforestation and settlement of the North American wildness which has uprooted the wolves from their lands and brought them in proximity with the human civilisation.