In an abandoned artificial mountain–originally constructed by King Fernando VII as a nineteenth century folly before falling into decades of disrepair–in a corner of a public park in Madrid, the Nigerian-American artist and poet Precious Okoyomon has installed an artificial forest, filled with silver birch and ferns, in which sits an animatronic anthropomorphic lamb, which responds to the presence of a spectator by mutely fixing their gaze on whoever steps in front of them. The air is scented, and the space is filled with sound: music by Spanish composer Juan Manuel Artero with a libretto by Okoyomon, inspired by the Russian virtuoso Alexander Scriabin’s unfinished apocalyptic opus, Mysterium–a composition intended to be performed in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, and which Scriabin hoped would inaugurate the end of the world and the dawn of a new age of nobler beings. Okoyomon–in collaboration with Artero, the show’s curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and the technicians responsible for fabricating the animatronics and maintaining the garden–has attempted and achieved an enormously ambitious undertaking: a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk, heavy with intertext and sensory provocation.
The name of this work, When the Lambs Rise Up Against the Birds of Prey, is borrowed from a text by the poet Anne Boyer, itself a counter-text written in riposte to Friedrich Nietzsche’s thoughts about lambs and the birds that eat them in On the Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche writes that the lamb, the symbol of good, feels hatred towards the bird of prey, and thinks that anything that acts like the bird of prey must be evil. The bird of prey, in contrast, thinks of the lambs with fondness–albeit a fondness tempered with derision: “We don’t bear any grudge at all towards these good lambs, in fact we love them, nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.” Birds of prey are strength: it would be absurd, Nietzsche tells us, to ask strength “not to be a desire to overthrow, crush, become master, to be a thirst for enemies, resistance and triumph.” Strength is strength; weakness is weakness. The lamb is the lamb, innocent and yet full of loathing for the one who would eat it; the bird of prey is the bird of prey, knowing and yet full of affection for its dinner.
But in Boyer’s text the true wisdom of the lamb’s way of knowing is restored to us: “The lamb is not innocent. The lamb knows how to read the quivering of each lamb nearby, how to become not one lamb but many lambs in the form of lamb-like relation, each lamb-back mostly indistinguishable from the back of the next. The lamb knows how to read the feeling of the form of each other all together, the fears and pleasures and neutralities of each other, what is expressed in a bleat or twitch when the lamb is with the next one and there is never one lamb alone.” The lamb arrives at its knowledge because its life takes place within community, together with other lambs. The bird of prey is solitary, and its desire is the desire of something that has a beak and claws, which means, Boyer tells us, that all the bird of prey knows how to do is to kill and then eat its dinner. “The bird of prey understands a kill to be the world in its entirety when, in fact, a kill is only dinner, and dinner is not the entire world.”
Boyer’s text offers us a world turned upside down, one which celebrates the shrewdness of the lamb–its knowledge gained in common with other lambs; its understanding of the whole system of the world, in contrast to the bird of prey, who only knows its own tastes. Hidden in the shrewdness of the lamb is a message about who inherits the earth: “The world was to be grasped in its all; then it had to be sensed as what it is–already ours.” But there is always risk, there is always threat–this is part of the lamb’s education. Take up the knowledge of the lamb, but beware of talking about it: “the lamb who tells the story of itself as a lamb is the lamb who is rehearsing its own eulogy.” This is why Okoyomon’s solitary artificial lamb looks at us mutely. Instead of telling us what it knows, it remains alone–and in its solitude, it forgets. “Every animal has ideas. Hers was oblivion, or how to make solitude bearable,” as Boyer puts it in a new text, ‘The Mysterium of the Lambs,’ written in conversation with Okoyomon’s exhibition and delivered in a performance by Boyer, like a message from an oracle, at an event at the exhibition on March 5th.
Building off this network of allusions, influences and responses–Scriabin, Nietzsche, Boyer, among numerous other unnamed presences–Okoyomon’s When the Lambs Rise Up Against the Birds of Prey actively engages and disorganises all the senses: the scent that confronts the audience as they enter the garden is intense, announcing a shift into a space that is charged and emphatically outside the everyday. Juan Manuel Artero’s brilliant, overwhelming composition mixes voices, discordant organs, bells, what the libretto refers to as ‘soft mysterious giggling,’ screaming, muttering, the repetition of the phrase ‘we captivate everyone,’ coughing. This is an installation which approaches an almost baroque understanding of artifice. The Martiniquan poet Édouard Glissant wrote that the baroque emerged as a reaction to the idea that nature can be rationalised, understood, and known–then, following this knowledge, reproduced. The baroque turns its back on this way of thinking, rejecting the imitation of nature in favour of contrast, circumvolution and proliferation. The baroque celebrates the artificial because it knows nature exceeds us. Okoyomon’s work understands this too: the artificial forest in the artificial mountain in Madrid proliferates; the spectator wanders around its circular paths, almost aimlessly, confronted with an opposition between the false naturalness of the plants, and the natural falseness of the animatronic lamb. Like all successful gardens, Okoyomon’s show reminds us of its artifice at every moment. In this way it looks backwards at the same time that it looks forwards, evoking both a recognition of art’s opposition to nature, and an image of a future in which that distinction won’t matter.
The viewer who enters the magic mountain is quickly disoriented, overwhelmed by sensory stimulation. Okoyomon’s solitary lamb–either a last survivor of the old world or a herald of the new age–doesn’t offer any guidance or direction: it just looks on, silently. Scriabin’s music was written with the hope of salvation achieved through destruction in mind; Juan Manuel Artero’s reworking of Scriabin suggests the same hope, but now the salvation is not for us: the voices that chant in Madrid do so for the salvation of the lamb. The lamb remains silent. What could it see when it looks at us, other than the bird of prey?
