Dylan Mayer, an art student at Green River Community College, was assigned the task of drawing from nature. Like any respectable art student, Mayer placed further challenges on himself, stating, “I thought, ‘How about something underwater?’ “
Mayer purchased a day permit and entered a popular dive site in West Seattle. Instead of leaving the water with a (waterproof?) sketchbook full of drawings, Mayer emerged clinging to – in fact, bludgeoning – an 80-pound octopus.
Apparently the great cephalopod was fair game; Mayer’s shellfish permit allows for one octopus kill per day, and forbids using devices to pierce the animal, which is why the young man was witnessed punching the octopus. However, local divers were outraged and beach-goers traumatized. The story went viral, and now some of people who are infuriated that he killed the octopus are, perversely enough, sending death threats to Mayer and his family.
This just scratches the surface of this story, but I want to pause in an attempt to instigate some conversation. Feel free to add to the story above, or comment on any of these parting thoughts:
• As a former professor of drawing who, oddly enough, used to live next to the “crime site” on Alki Beach in West Seattle, I have to say I applaud the kid for his initiative. I have taught extensively in the Pacific Northwest and Southern California. Not to stereotype an entire region, but my students in Washington had a much different (read: rawer) relationship to nature than do my students in California. The fact that Mayer’s methods were within the limits of the law shifts the conversation from criminality to aesthetics and/or ethics.
• Certainly this is not the first time an artist has used highly questionable methods to create a picture. One need look no further than celebrated artist and naturalist John James Audubon. In an effort to study birds in their natural habitat, Audubon would shoot them with fine shot, wire them into “natural” poses on-site, and create pictures before the dead birds succumbed to the elements. (I wonder how the Audubon Society spins this?)
• Tangential to this story is a comment about subcultures. I bring it up now because I think it will relate to a variety of future posts that deal with subcultures, especially transgressive ones. It appears that the dive community had a bit of a double standard with the Mayer event. Though they respect one’s legal right to hunt and fish they just didn’t want it happening at that spot (for a variety of well articulated reasons). The idea of subcultures self-policing is interesting to me. In this case we have a subculture calling legal activities unacceptable. What about subcultures whose activities often break laws? Do they self-censor? For instance, what happens with graffiti or skateboard subcultures, many of whose activities results in defacing private property? Do these subcultures make distinctions regarding whether something is not “worth” the crime? For instance, is quality refracted through the lens of criminality, e.g., experienced graffiti artists telling amateurs, “That wall is too important for you to paint.” Members of these groups as well as cultural studies people should comment on this.
Related posts:
Animal hunting an art or barbaric act?
The Beauty of Animal Testing
The Importance of Remembering: Orlando Shooting Victims to be Memorialized in New Haven Artspace Exh
Originality, Publicity, and Lawsuits
Bryan Saunders-Drug Altered Art
Banksy: Graffiti Artist
Skateboarding is an art form, not a crime
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It’s quite fascinating the lengths to which a person will go to create the most accurate life drawing of a creature. Shooting a bird, punching an octopus, it’s all a very extreme method of getting the end goal you’d like out of it. However, this method is very effective in it’s purpose. I feel that It can be unnecessarily cruel when done in excess. You don’t want to endanger a species that’s close to extinction nor do you necessarily want to make an animal suffer. There are many layers to this conversation on what possibly makes it “ethical” or “right.” I believe that to some extent Dylan Mayer is in the right due to his legal right to “fish” in the area, but his approach is rather brutal than many onlookers would expect from fishers in the area. However, I believe that Audubon was in the wrong due to the many birds he hunted and killed for his art due to the wastefulness of it all. Honestly, I find that as long as Mayer ate the octopus or found a good use for it after drawing its corpse, then I don’t find too much wrong with his result or process. It’s very interesting to judge the ethical basis of this practice though.