Safety Gear for Small Animals is a project started by Toronto-based artist Bill Burns, claiming to "look out for the little guy", intended to relocate and rehabilitate small animals since they are the ones without protection and in need of support in order for them to sustain they're habitat and stay alive. He does this by creating a miniature series of safety equipment gear, ranging from rubberized work gloves to hard hats and emergency blankets. However the project extends further to cover life insurance and annuities, all being innately human appliances and therefore being entirely useless to critters. http://www.safetygearforsmallanimals.com
The project is intended to raise awareness about how much humans are cared for by having safety equipment designed for a specific purpose or systems in place in order to sustain they're loved ones in case of an accident. The point he is making is that small animals have to get by without all this special attention, and therefore have to literally struggle for survival in an increasingly man-made and urbanised world.
In my opinion the project is a mockery of a serious issue, since the extinction of certain critter species would have a far greater impact that to be treated with such a humorous approach to the subject matter. As explained by Paul and Anne Ehrlich (http://home.pacbell.net/mjvande/ehrlich - visited March 26th 2009) the extinction of species would result in a complete shift in nature's balance, causing links in the food chain to break and therefore creating species without a natural counterpart, causing them to exponentially increase in numbers, crushing other links in the chain and eventually bringing the whole system to a collapse.
I would like to think that the general public would have a greater appreciation of this subject matter if it were not presented with a mock-series of objects, simply scaled down from human application and "intended" for use by small animals. The idea to inform about this issue is indeed a positive one, however a more rigorous route should be followed. The approach of using humour to convey important issues is definitely an effective one, however the actual issue should be identified more clearly, not leaving the interpretation of the objects up to the viewer entirely. The obejects are obviously not meant to be used by real animals, they are much rather a reminder of what could be in place for small animals and they're safety, represented by the human equivalent of such equipment.
Essentially the project is trivializing and "humanizing" a very real problem in nature, caused entirely by the human race. In order for people to comprehend the problem, it is made to be seen through human eyes, and therefore failing to really address the issue at hand.
*Due to technical difficulties this entry is on behalf of Chris Waggot*
ReplyDeleteRight, this is going to look like all I do is watch telly, (it just happens that two of the things I actually have watched in the last month or so are relevant to this blog.) but I saw a very interesting Channel Four documentary a wile ago about the struggles of an MP and a licensed pest control officer, who were waging a war against grey squirrels. Basically the MP Lord Rupert Redesdale was employing this pest control chap (all troubled lookin' he was,) to drive around his home county and shoot, trap and smash up as many grey squirrels as he could in an attempt to bolster the numbers of our indigenous red squirrels. They were claiming that it was all in the name of ecology, to a certain extent I agree with them, there should be more done to promote the red squirrel returning to the woods of Britain, there are only a few outposts left where you will regularly see one. But there is just something about a guy in camouflage with a gun and miniature bear traps spouting squirrel racial abuse that seems to be the wrong way of going about things.
Chris Waggott