At Dudley, several of the enclosures are notable for the theatricality of their design and the ways in which they orchestrate the views of the animals. The Bear Ravine is arguably the most dramatic, utilising an abandoned quarry at the foot of the castle mound to maximum effect, with multilayered and projecting viewing terraces allowing the visitors a variety of views from a carefully choreographed series of vantage points. Where Dudley Zoo most clearly diverges from Stellingen and the 19th century zoos, is that it makes no attempt to simulate the animals’ natural habitats. The buildings at Dudley are constructed of crisply detailed concrete, with the juxtaposition of the animals against the expressive and ‘rational’ enclosures intended to heighten the spectacle of their antics. As with his earlier and highly acclaimed Gorilla House and Penguin Pool at London Zoo, he sought to create enclosures that would bring out the most extrovert and entertaining traits in each specie’s behaviour. This design objective was pursued without recourse to simulated wildernesses or the pretence of free-roaming wildlife. For Lubetkin, Dudley was to be an unashamed celebration of the zoo as spectacle and as articulation of a deeply held belief regarding human superiority.
In contrast, Billingham approaches the zoo enclosures as a literal and metaphorical ‘frame’ through which to view not just the animals themselves, but also the interactions of humans and animals in a modern, artificial environment. While the videos are the most overtly critical pieces in the exhibition, focusing on the repetitive behavioural traits to which many captive animals are susceptible, the works cannot be reduced to a simple statement. For the first public showing of the video works at Compton Verney in October 2006, Billingham selected a single photograph to accompany the series of video installations for the exhibition. This was Bear Pit, an image that is notable for the absence of an animal subject. The empty zoo enclosure seems perverse - shocking us into a realisation that this absence represents an affront to our expectation of spectacle. Our scopophilic gaze goes ungratified as the incompliant animal remains hidden or removed from view. The painstakingly realised fake rock face becomes the subject of the photograph, as much as the absent bear, a reminder of the physical manifestation of the zoo as contrived backdrop and scenery. It is notable that, the design of Lubetkin’s Gorilla House at London Zoo also makes express acknowledgement of this desire for spectacle, with the floor of the enclosure designed in such as way as to force the gorillas to move forwards, closer to the assembled viewers. But what Billingham’s images most often express is a sense of loss. We cannot help seeing these captive animals as reminders of a threatened and rapidly diminishing wilderness. The animals are cowed by their manmade environments and the incessant gazes of their spectators. To the contemporary viewer, to view captive animals through the frame of Lubetkin’s modernist enclosures is not to ‘affirm man’s hope to understand, to explain and to control his surroundings,’ but to bear witness to human hubris and short-sightedness.
Billingham’s work often conveys this strong sense of melancholy and his photographs of zoos present these institutions as strange anachronisms. These little-loved and sometimes reviled places appear as leftovers from another era, in which the acquisition and confinement of exotic animals in small man-made enclosures seemed not only normal but desirable. Billingham is expressing an instinctive and very contemporary disquiet about our relationship with animals and the natural world which zoos simply make more explicit. He identifies his own interest in this area as originating in a childhood fascination with natural history, developed through library books and television programmes and later on at university, through the reading and questioning of John Berger’s essay, ‘Why Look at Animals?’ The essay is a critique of what Berger perceives as the impetuses in a late capitalist society towards the marginalisation of animals and the natural world - corporate capitalism’s tendency to break ‘every tradition which has previously mediated between man and nature’,5 Berger’s assumptions about the relationship between humans and animals in a pre-industrial society can seem nostalgic and problematic. Billingham openly expresses his reservations about Berger’s conclusions6 and despite the critical subtexts in his own work, Billingham often chooses to pull back to preoccupations with the formal aesthetic organisation of the picture. Like Lubetkin, the intention is – on a purely visual level - to use the enclosure to enhance the visual composition and “psychological charge” 7 experienced by the viewer. Billingham has repeatedly compared his compositional approach to that of the painter and uses this self-consciously mediating approach in some of his photographs to accentuate the sense of the animals as another incidental element within the image. In Lion II the enclosure is used as a compositional device that places the lion in a formal and painterly relationship with its surroundings. Billingham uses the stark visual contrast of the lion with its enclosure as a means of enriching his image. The implication is that the animal is secondary to the overall image and therefore, in line with Berger’s analysis, only half observed.
http://benflatman.com/Richard%20Billingham/Richard%20Billingham.html
