Creating an object that superficially resembles another.
Stick insects look like sticks and so, in a world of hungry carnivores, are not identified as food by
birds that do not eat sticks. Leaf insects survive because they look like leaves. Many species of
butterfly gain protection by resembling noxious or poisonous species. We use the word mimicry
for these situations, not because we think that animals consciously imitate other things, but
because natural selection has favoured those individuals whose bodies were mistaken for other
things. Ancestors of stick insects that did not resemble sticks did not leave descendants.
Andre Breton, who was the dominant intellect in defining surrealism was enormously attracted to
mimicry, as were all the Surrealists. In his personal manifesto ‘L’Amour fou’, he gave it as one
of his three concepts of surrealism. The instances of mimicry Breton uses are the coral
imitations of plants on the Great Barrier Reef and a wall of quartz produced in a grotto, which
offers the spectacle of natural erosion producing the image of drapery ‘which forever defies that
of statuary’.
The forms that coral colonies may take vary considerably. There are branching corals
resembling the antlers of deer, or somewhat thicker branches resembling fingers. There are table
or plate corals that spread out from a central stalk, forming a large rounded disc sometimes
several metres across. There are colonies that form massive boulder-like structures, some with
convoluted grooves giving the appearance of the human brain. There are corals that form sheets
or leaves and others that have distinct tubes for each polyp. Some corals are encrusting and
grow over any number of objects, usually taking the general shape of that object. Solitary corals
are, as the name implies, formed from a single polyp, and there are free-living corals that lie
unattached to the substrate. Some corals have different shapes depending upon where they
grow. Some species might look quite different if located in a calm, protected part of the reef
from the way it would grow in a part exposed to the surge or surf of the waves. Although
cleaned, bleached corals are generally white, in life, the polyps and tissues covering the mineral
skeleton give the colony a typical colour. Sometimes the colours do not depend on the tissues of
the polyp but on the colourful microorganisms contained within their cells. In all of their variety,
corals exhibit the evolutionary principle of convergence. The contingencies of exchanging
nutrients with the surrounding sea water have resulted in these animals taking up shapes of other
organs of plants and animals that have in common the need to present the most efficient surface
area/volume relationship that ensures the best chances of survival. The common names we give
to distinguish the different forms of these creatures that do not enter our day to day lives indicate
common objects that they mimic; i.e. brain coral; organ-pipe coral, tree coral, slipper coral,
honeycomb coral and mushroom coral.
Mimicry is thus an instance of the natural production of signs in nature that humans select and
turn into a representation of another form. Surrealists placed great stress on activating
unpredictable mental activity, or inner nature, as the significant source of signs, and by the 1920s
they were exploring the possibilities of automatism and dreams provoked by the use of hypnotism
and drugs. In this context, dreams and fantasies may be taken as mimicking reality as the mind
runs through the brain’s stored images to illustrate feelings, some of which never surface in
wakefulness.
Franz Marc took a unique view of the psychological aspect of mimicry in that he tried to think
about the environment as a non-human mammal might perceive itself and the environment as one.
Painting forest dwelling deer he remarked, “…. It feels like a deer, and thus the landscape must
also be deer”. Working in the immediate aftermath of the inventions of Picasso and Braque it is
not surprising that he says that the deer feels the world to be cubistic, and this is a matter of its
very survival.
(101) Franz Marc (1912?) ‘Deer in the forest’
The artist Vera Lehndorff, in the 1960s made her name internationally as the celebrated fashion
model Veruschka. In 1970 she met the artist and photographer Holger Trulzsch and together
they began to use her body as a canvas on which to create a new and startling art form. In their
work, Vera’s body is denied its reality. It mimics another- a glamorous film star, a gun toting
gangster- chameleon-like it disappears into its surrounding of dead or decaying matter, sculpture,
trees and stones. The painted Veras with their backgrounds were photographed to produce a
stunning amalgamation of photography and painting. The following quotations are from the pair’s
description of their methods and motivations.
“In the 1960s, when I was working as a fashion model, I thought it would make a more
interesting photograph if I changed the colour of my skin, giving the image a strangeness
that would distract attention from the often very boring dresses. As a model I could
transform myself into many different characters. Soon I began to paint myself as
different animals and plants, knowing that they are often more beautiful than we are.
The nakedness of human skin always disturbed me. By painting myself I could create
the illusion of having feathers, fur, scales or leaves. When I saw a photograph of myself
painted like that, it pleased me. Camouflaging myself also made me feel that the public
could not trap me so easily. The photographs could reveal something new both to myself
and to others”. VL
“The painting of Vera’s body is a touch, a labour of love; it is also, simultaneously, the
elimination of that body so that it no longer belongs to her and is no longer identical with
her. The human body inserts itself into the picture as an outline without a self. Seen
without its illusionistic (anamorphic) perspective, the body emancipates itself from its
own materiality and becomes an autonomous pictorial and sculptural unit. Fragmented,
the body distorts its component parts into ‘abstract curves traced on its own convex
surface. In order to find a formal counterpart for this transformation we have- as its
logical sequel- adopted ever more expressive postures until the transformation came to
match our conception in the context of the picture as a whole”. HT
(030) Vera Lehndorff & Holger Trulzch ‘Sentimental killer in striped white suit with rose and
revolver’ Cibachrome
(032) Vera Lehndorff & Holger Trulzch 'Decorative piece' Polaroid Vera Lehndorff & Holger
Trulzch
(031) Vera Lehndorff & Holger Trulzch
