Unbelievable part 14: Coral
7
February 2020
In
part 13
I wryly suggested that between the invocation of Ariel from The
Tempest and
the several severed heads of Medusa, Treasures
from the Wreck of the Unbelievable
was sorted for fictional coral. Damien Hirst is already well-known
for turning parts or wholes of once living beings into sculptures,
and with Treasures it
seemed that West Indian Ocean coral was collateral damage in
resurfacing artefacts it had supposedly made its home for around 2000
years. Knowing that the Amotan/Apistos
story is a new rather than ancient myth, the possibility that the
coral-encrusted works in the show had been made and submerged a while
ago should be floated, yet also held up to scrutiny. Knowing little
about the science of coral, my questions have included:
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Does coral grow that fast?
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Do so many different types of coral grow so close together?
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How did the coral retain so many bright colours? Does it not bleach when surfaced?
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Would so much (coloured) coral really grow at the depths the submerged works must have been at in the Indian Ocean to have not been found until recently and what is indicated by the Treasures film and documentation?
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(An ironic one, but) What would the ethical implications be of raising so much coral when, even with the vaguest awareness, we know the ecological dangers of coral being dredged, bleached and other events contributing to its loss?
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Are reefs not nearer to coasts?
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Could coral really grow on the materials the sculptures are made from (mainly bronze)?
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Could it be that the coral isn’t really coral, but part of the sculptures? Was there a ‘coral department’ at Science during the making of these works? And is that why I spotted what looks like a thumbprint in the coral on a bust I managed to get close to? Is Demon with Bowl (Exhibition Enlargement) an obvious indication that the coral shapes aren’t just added to sculptures after but are part of the base material?
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Is the coral not only part of the set-dressing for the story and its spectacle, but a way of riling up activists, and perhaps even drawing attention to our interactions with Earth’s waters?
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| Detail from Hermaphrodite (Damien Hirst, black granite, Palazzo Grassi room 2) showing what looks like fingerprints in the 'coral' |
To
address some of these questions, I’ve been learning more about
coral and the broad area of the Indian Ocean in which the finds were
said to have taken place. I began with reading about research on the
bleaching of Indian Ocean coral being conducted around the Chagos
Archipelago in the British Indian Ocean Territory which is roughly
2000 nautical miles from Dar es Salaam on the coast of Tanzania.i
Ronan Roche and John Turner shared their findings in an article
for The Conversation published
in
March 2017, a month before the exhibition opened. They explain that:
‘“Bleaching”
is when corals lose the highly productive algae (termed
zooxanthellae) from their tissues due to stress from high
sea temperatures
and solar irradiation. The algae and coral have a symbiotic
relationship: the algae remove the coral’s waste products while the
coral gives the algae a safe environment to live in, and provides
compounds for photosynthesis. Without the algae, the coral no longer
has a sufficient source of food, meaning that it essentially starves
to death.’
The
article outlines the rapid increase, spread and frequency of global
bleaching events, pointing out that although the Chagos reefs do not
face the same pressures as others in more populated areas, they have
suffered extensive losses which can only be due to increasing water
temperatures related to global warming. It takes up to a decade for a
reef to recover from a 90% loss, and the Chagos reefs have
experienced annual bleaching events fairly consistently in recent
years. While this example is a fair distance away from the
exhibition’s vague allusions to an unspecified part of the ocean
off the east coast of the substantial continent of Africa, given that
the Chagos reefs are about the most unaffected by direct human
actions and yet are just as affected by bleaching as other reefs begs
the question: if the Treasures
coral was real, how would it be so abundant under these
circumstances?
Before
we deride Hirst and his team, the timing and
location might just
work out as
plausible.
As the article states, there was a major bleaching event recorded in
1997–8 and the works were said to have been discovered and
recovered from 2008 onwards. The next major bleaching in the Indian
Ocean and elsewhere was recorded, according to Roche and Turner, in
2015, and the Chagos reefs at least seem to have until then recovered
well from the previous 90% wipe-out. The western part of the ocean,
though, experienced further localised warm-water events, which I’ll
get to momentarily.
A
peer-reviewed report
published in 2012 that Roche and Turner draw from (and to which
Turner contributed research) includes maps and data indicating where
in the west and central Indian Ocean there are areas of substrate
upon which they know coral grows, bearing in mind the studies have
identified little of its extent. The image linked here
shows such sublittoral substrate areas near the granatic Seychelles
and Seychelles atolls which happen to be plausible locations for the
Treasures finds.
Recalling part 9
in which archaeological evidence indicated more than just a kernel of
possibility (as distinct from truth) in the exhibition’s claims
over the existence of the Apistos,
more evidence is mounting up that rather than being an outlandish
hoax, Treasures and
its works were instead a perfectly plausible fiction; while the
Apistos
story didn’t
happen, it could have.
Looking
closer at the ocean near the coasts of Tanzania and Kenya as the most
likely stretch of water for the Apistos
to have met its fate, I found an earlier study published in 2007 by a
team of scientists who gathered and interpreted data to determine the
resilience and potential for extinction in coral communities across
western areas of the ocean. The combined studies responded to severe
bleaching caused by warm-water events in 1998, 2004 and 2005. This
might indicate that by the time of the first archaeological
expeditions in the Treasures
story
in around 2010, surely the coral would be unlikely to have returned
as abundantly and with as much diversity as is seen on the supposedly
recovered sculptures. McClanahan et
al.’s
report suggests that while this might be the case for some types of
coral, others are more resilient. This requires further probing and a
closer look at the taxa of coral represented on the sculptures.
On this point,
every
time I regard
photos to compare the coral on the works with photos of specific taxa
and genera of coral, I come across details
in the works
I hadn’t seen before that blow everything up and take me on another
direction. For
instance, I now know that the Medusa heads have nuanced differences
and are not cast from the same mould; they are like the stills making
up the moving image depicting the moment of her death, capturing the
fear and pain as she is murdered. Importantly, the broken bronze
‘original’ has a coral growth that is distinctly tree-like. Even
in death, Medusa’s transformative abilities bring life. This is
just one example that needs closer examination.
Back
to the coral issue, the story goes in
the Treasures film
that fishermen from an unspecified coastal village found the first
artefact in 2008, and that a viral video of this was spotted by a
doctoral researcher who instigated the formation of a team of marine
archaeologists, who then, rather than apply for funding from a
research body approached Damien Hirst, who coincidentally was looking
for a new venture. More than any of the work under Hirst’s name
before (if we indulge the story a little here), this presented an
opportunity for him to collapse his collector/artist personas and
activities into one. This happens in the previous work made from
human skulls and animal carcasses, but this time it plays out on a
much grander scale. And as with Hymn
(1999–2005),
the established trend of basing sculptures on extant objects was
pushed further with repeated replicas of many of the works throughout
(with more than a nod to Walter Benjamin’s ‘The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’).
That
a fishing village on the east coast of Africa was the locus of the
contemporary part of the myth is significant. McClanahan et
al.’s
research was spread across eight clusters, the seventh and eighth of
which were reefs off the coasts of Kenya and Tanzania (2007 p. 4):
‘Cluster
7 is composed of heavily fished reefs in southern Kenya that have
high dominance of Porites,
followed by massive Porites,
Galaxea,
Favia,
Pavona,
and Stylophora.
Central and northern Tanzania and Kenya’s most southern reefs are
in Cluster 8 and have a high abundance of the subdominants Synarea,
Fungia,
Galaxea,
and massive Porites.’
As
documented in their 2007 publication, they found that these clusters
had the most diversity of the eight they sampled, which was
surprising given the heavy fishing of the Kenyan reefs. Further study
is needed to be sure, but the findings suggested that the dominant
taxon of branching Porites
was found in prior research to be sensitive to warm-water anomalies
and to being eaten by fish and had not recovered well from the
widespread bleaching in 1998. Nevertheless, it was dominant.
McClanahan et al.
posit that ‘[i]t is possible that it has greater acclimation of
adaptation potential to warm water than recognized in the original
site-specific study, and responds well to disturbances under
different fishing or grazing conditions’, reiterating the unusual
nature of this behaviour for this type of coral (2007 p. 10).
So
to address my questions about different types of coral growing close
together, growing in these locations and being so colourful,
McClanahan et al.
sum up that ‘southernmost Kenya and Tanzanian reefs stand out
because of their high density and moderate bleaching effects,
resulting in a community structure that still reflects the expected
dominance of branching, solitary, and encrusting taxa’. They stress
that these ‘sites that have escaped catastrophic damage are a high
priority for increased management in order to reduce synergistic
stresses to corals’ (2007 p. 11). So I wonder – in the case that
they’d have a say, and,
again, indulging the story
– if they’d allow a bunch of marine archaeologists to raise
artefacts encrusted with the
very
coral it was imperative to protect.
An
important disjuncture to point out is that the research published in
2007 was conducted at less than 15m depth and the Treasures
film
shows a large research tanker in wide aerial shots looking like it’s
floating on deep basin water far from any shores or islands. Due to
the lighting in the film and photographs, many of the Treasures
dives
look like they are no more than 20m in depth. But that’s not to say
there wouldn’t be any substrate for the coral to grow on in deeper
areas. Let’s face it, my understanding of all this is basic at
best, and the shots could be cutting out how close the ship might be
to islands (or the boundaries round a special effects tank have been
digitally painted out,
as I suggested before).
I think it’s also fair to point out that with the field work
conducted by marine biologists and archaeologists in locations
relevant to the exhibition’s claims that it’s a wonder the
artefacts were never stumbled upon before. But it’s a vast ocean
and these teams are small and concentrated to certain areas at any
given time. The more logic and inquiry you apply, the more tangled up
in possible truths the lies become.
Depth
is accounted for more in McClanahan et
al.’s
later study published in 2014 when they sampled down to 30m. Beyond
that, as is my understanding, it gets into black and colourless coral
territory
– the sort of murky depths Hydra
and Kali is
dramatically made out to be discovered at in the film’s
end-of-second-act low-then-high point. At the test sites, they found
greater richness, diversity and abundance in the coral at deeper
levels than in shallower levels (2014 p. 5). The biologists also
confirmed that the north-western sites have coral communities made up
of ‘predominantly bleaching-tolerant fariids and poritiids that
survived the 1998 bleaching event’ (2014 p. 5). Importantly, the
Mozambique Channel has high coral richness possibly because it has
‘reefs that are less exposed to wave action and storms’ (2014 p.
7). It may be too far south for our interests, but things shifting on
the ocean bed – even incredibly weighty art – is not beyond the
realms of extreme possibility, and, hey, it’s a fiction.
To
return
to territory with which I am more familiar, I
want to pinpoint
Kenya
as
the most likely location for the Treasures
discovery/recovery
story, particularly in the film, given its booming service industries
(mainly tourism) and, that as a member of the British Commonwealth,
English is one of its main languages. It also has a more nuanced
democratic political structure in contrast to neighbouring Tanzania,
which has one dominant party in an only recently two-party state and
a gamut of human rights violations. Kenya
seems the mostly likely ‘host country’ for filming. Figuring
out how to evidence this further is another element I need to work
on. Given the complexity of the
science and the wilderness of conjectural
explanations, it is no wonder many folk
prefer an ‘it was magic’ option for understanding how things are
and come to be, but I persist in trying to get to the core of it.
References
McClanahan,
Tim R., Ateweberhan, Mebrahtu, Darling, Emily S., Graham, Nicholas A.
J., and Muthiga, Nyawira, ‘Biogeography
and change among regional coral communities across the Western Indian
Ocean’, PLoS
ONE 9.4 (2014), pp. 1–9.
Further reading
- McClanahan, T.R., Ateweberhan, M. & Omukoto and J. Mar Biol, ‘Long-term changes in coral colony size distributions on Kenyan reefs under different management regimes and across the 1998 bleaching event’, Marine Biology 153.5 (2008), pp. 755–768.
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- Gaia Vince, ‘Sunken steel cages could save coral reefs’, The Guardian, 16 August 2009.
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