Shark

by David Owen

  • Jason Holmberg runs the web-based Ecocean which utilises a pattern-recognition algorithm to identify individual whale sharks based on their skin patterning.

  • Sonja Fordham holds senior positions with the Ocean Conservancy, the Shark Alliance and the IUCN’S Shark Specialist Group.

  • Rob Stewart made the documentary Sharkwater, exposing ‘the exploitation and corruption surrounding the world’s shark populations in the marine reserves of Cocos Island and the Galápagos Islands’.52

  • Matthew T. McDavitt’s work on the international sawfish trade—their fins being among the most valuable in the trade—led to sawfishes becoming the first and so far only elasmobranch family listed on CITES Appendix 1: where a species is threatened with extinction and trade will exacerbate that threat.

  9

  SHARKS AND CREATIVITY

  Visions of Hunter and Hunted

  I have a great picture of New York City and Jaws in the summer of 1975 and there are lines all around the block [of the cinema] and I have the same picture in the same theatre at Christmas in the snow and there is snow all over New York and Jaws is still on the marquee; there is not a line any more, but the film is still playing.1

  Steven Spielberg

  The creative depiction of sharks, ancient and modern, is limited only by the artist’s imagination and materials to hand. The many attributes we associate with or bestow upon sharks—fear, respect, derision, power, spirituality—have always found expression in painting, sculpture, literature, film, cartoons, craftwork and more besides.

  Earlier in this book there was reference to the Australian Dreamtime, and how ancestral spirits created the landscape, one such being Mäna the whaler (bull) shark. Similarly, an ancestral sawfish used its powerful toothed rostrum to carve out the Angurugu River on Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria. A modern painting of the event, by the prominent young Aboriginal artist Nekingaba Maminyamanja, includes three creator stingrays (see plate 19). In keeping with the utilitarian philosophies of the Dreamtime, these creator stingrays ensure the wellbeing of people: a man waits to spear them in order to eat.

  The three-dimensionality and physical assertiveness of sculpture makes it a good medium to depict the relationship between humans and other life forms, particularly when some form or manifestation of power is intended. And sharks are powerful. A 1.6-metre wood and paint sculpture of the shark-king Gbehanzin (he who took on the might of colonial France) depicts ‘the metamorpohosis of a mortal into the awesome being of a Dahomean king’, although despite Gbehanzin’s ‘being armed with foresight and protective imagery, the shifting tide of history proved too powerful to overcome, and thus the subject of this divinatory likeness stands as a defeated figure’.2

  One of the more curious uses of elasmobranchs for creative expression, which also relates directly to the world beyond the known, is of European origin and was practised at the cusp of the Scientific Revolution, when early ocean-going voyagers returned with their tales of hideous deep-sea monsters. Mischievously and ingeniously, dried skates and rays were cut and otherwise shaped into fantastical-looking apparitions. (Drawings, etchings and paintings of such creatures abound.) Their ventral mouths and gills become spooky faces, their claspers and tails an assortment of legs. A batoid so sculpted was known as a Jenny Haniver. ‘Sculpted’ is perhaps a generous term, since the aim of the ‘sculptor’ was often to deceive, as with the example:

  Called both a sea eagle and a flying fish, a ‘Jenny Haniver’ [was] a forgery made by mutilating a ray to resemble a winged sea monster with a human head. The trick worked, and Ambroise Paré recounted a second-hand tale of how a live specimen was presented to the lords of the city of Quioze. The origin of the name ‘Jenny Haniver’ is unknown, but the first known illustration of one dates from the 16th century.3

  Many of these Jenny Hanivers were grotesque, but some of the ‘faces’ have a certain pathos, a weird beauty which may have convinced some that they were not monsters but mermaids. Their oddity is striking even now, in a world accustomed to more and more sophisticated illusions.

  An earlier chapter examined how the symbolic power of sharks was frequently appropriated by indigenous peoples in social, spiritual and political contexts. It has also been shown that European colonisers made a point of attempting to suppress such un-Christian vulgarities as shark worship. Yet modern western culture has shown itself capable of being absorbed by the threatening otherness of sharks, to the extent of creatively influencing us, in complex and surprising ways. By way of illustration: what do sharks and flowers have in common? Very little—with one standout exception. At the beginning of the nineteenth century French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, restoring the nation traumatised by its 1789 revolution, turned his attention to Lyons which had been ransacked, the city having been the major producer of fine embroidered silk attire for the aristocracy. Its strong tradition of textile manufacturing and design resumed when Napoleon ordered the re-opening of its Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Appointed as professor of flower painting was a Lyons native, Antoine Berjon, returned from Paris where he had been an impoverished still life and portrait painter. Now financially secure, his artistic career flourished.

  Botanically accurate flower paintings were very popular, closely associated with Romanticism and the wonder of nature. Other natural forms, such as fruit and birds, became part of these aesthetically serene compositions. Berjon, vigorously competing with other artists in the genre, conformed—until in 1819, for reasons unknown, he painted a masterpiece, a subversive work entitled Still Life with Flowers, Shells, a Shark’s Head, and Petrifications (oil on canvas, 107.7 × 87.4 centimetres, Philadelphia Museum of Art) (Plate 20). Berjon, son of a butcher, beautifully created this:

  A mahogany work table, its drawers pulled open, supports three humble, earthernware containers. The foremost, perilously balanced, on the edge, contains branches of fresh-cut pink roses, droplets of dew still on their petals. A paper broadsheet, its print bleeding through to the verso, has been pinned around them to protect against the thorns. Behind, a brown and yellow vase contains a motley array of peonies, tulips, crab apple blossoms and—jarringly at odds with this sumptuous gathering—a coarse, dry sunflower. Jonquils, narcissus, a columbine, and a tulip lie in the foreground, some falling into the open drawer. On the right, a small, squat jug, visible only in silhouette, holds blue asters and a faintly indicated iris.

  To the left, in a strong raking light against the nearly black background, is a pile of shells and sea objects: a branch of coral, a large clam, a conch, and—most mysteriously—the severed head of a shark. The flaps of its roughly cut skin fold behind the conch, its inward-grasping teeth the more exposed by the semi-decomposed flesh of the skull. It is a remarkable grouping, sensuous and fresh, sinister and disturbing . . . The brutal intrusion of the shark’s head adds a profound sense of disquiet and disarrangement . . . it is, all in all, a tour de force of intense theatricality, certainly meant both to please and repel, seduce and frighten.4

  This painting may have been Berjon’s take on the concept of vanitas, the fleeting nature of life, classically depicted as a human skull on top of a pile of books, or he may have been drawn to the physical similarities between profoundly different life forms—rose thorns and shark teeth: ‘The introduction of an horrific element into an idyllic setting . . . suggests something of the heightened emotional state that permeates all of the Romantic movement.’5

  Two famous and intriguing artworks that are creative responses to shark attacks were painted one hundred years apart. John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark (1778, oil on canvas, 182.1 × 229.7 centimetres, National Gallery of Art, Washington) (Plate 21) and Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream (1899, oil on canvas, 71.4 × 124.8 centimetres, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) (Plate 22) are both concerned with complex political issues that were gripping US society at the time and they use the threat and fear of the shark as a potent metaphor.

  At first sight, Watson and the Shark is a dynami
c, tension-filled story. And it really happened:

  Brook Watson loved to swim. He was only acting on a natural impulse, then, when he dove into the green waters of Havana Harbor while on a voyage to the West Indies in 1749. A shark sharing those same waters acted on its own natural impulse. Three times it attacked the fourteen-year-old boy. In the first attack, the flesh was stripped from the calf of Watson’s right leg. After the second attack, his foot was gone. As the shark rose for its third strike, it was at last driven off by a group of sailors, and Watson was saved.6

  Yet the painting is significantly more complex, and controversial, than that. The hero—wealthy Watson, who commissioned the painting—is in the water with the beastly shark, forming the base of a compositional pyramid at the apex of which stands a black man, a slave. Copley used classical compositional techniques as a matter of course, the primary convention of which for centuries had been that nobility occupied the apex, animals and slaves the base. Why, with respect to the black man, the deliberate inversion?

  Copley didn’t say and art historians still cannot agree with one another. A starting point in considering the mystery is that Copley, who had been the pre-eminent portrait painter in Boston, actively sought to become a history painter after he had moved permanently to Europe. History painting was highly regarded, because it did not merely depict something, but used it to contemplate the really big picture: God, man and nature. Another starting point is that polarising social and political divides were hard at work on both sides of the Atlantic, with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 setting British Whig against Tory, New World loyalist against patriot. Furthermore, early calls for the abolition of slavery were considered a great threat to the economic fabric of both Great Britain (by far the greatest slave trader) and her American colonies, so lucrative was the triangular trade that saw rum and other goods leave Boston (and other ports) to be traded for slaves in Africa who were then sold in the Caribbean for sugar and molasses to make the rum back in Britain and her New World colonies.

  Watson himself spent many years as a Boston-based entrepreneur engaging in trading with the West Indies. He may or may not have indulged in ‘blackbirding’, illegal slave trading, undercutting the British monopoly. Slavery was a greatly emotive issue and cut across party lines—his attitude towards it is not known with any certainty. He eventually moved to London where he flourished as a wealthy merchant and became an active conservative, and was Lord Mayor of London for a period. What is also not known is the extent to which he directed Copley, also a conservative and a friend of his, as to how to represent the incident. It has been suggested that the contact in the painting between Watson and the black slave—arms reaching out, rescue rope limp in the black man’s hand and around Watson’s arm—represents some form of contrition on Watson’s part, for profiting at the expense of slavery. It may also be a critique of the hypocrisy of the loyalists wanting freedom from the mother country while enslaving others. Some say the boat and those in it represent the brave new world, the shark voracious Great Britain. For others, Watson’s actual shark experience in the New World is symbolic of its danger (revolution) and its ‘idle blacks’ (a contemporary phrase used to describe the slave’s curious posture in a rocking boat of frantic activity). Either way, the shark doesn’t come out if it very well; indeed, religious interpretations of the painting juxtapose a chaste, pure white victim imperiled by evil.

  At the end of the following century when highly respected artist Winslow Homer painted The Gulf Stream, slavery had long since been abolished, the Civil War had been over for 30 years, and yet race relations in the US were at their lowest level, through a grim combination of social Darwinism, institutionalised racism, lynching and conservative theorising that the American Negro race was naturally headed for extinction. Homer came from a line of merchants active in trade with the West Indies and he developed a lifelong interest in that part of the world and, as a result, in its peoples. According to one interpretation, Winslow Homer

  . . . clearly assimilated every iconographical ingredient of Copley’s Watson in The Gulf Stream. Yet in stripping away every figure except the black man—thereby making him the central focus of the triangular design—Homer constructed a new meaning based on his understanding of contemporary race relations . . . If the black man in Copley’s picture embodies an intellectual abstraction of the libertarian viewpoint, Homer’s besieged fisherman is an allegory of the black man’s victimization at the end of the nineteenth century.7

  Thus the four visible sharks around the boat, together with the large pieces of sugar cane, recall a grim story of slavery: thousands of sick Africans were thrown overboard to sharks on the trans-Atlantic crossing (partly for the ship owners to claim insurance). Sometimes slaves were even used as bait to catch sharks to feed to other slaves. Could their lot have got any worse? Yes. If the work seems heartless, it is intended to be. Sharks, a broken boat, a fierce waterspout bearing down and a ship that won’t be offering any assistance: it’s overwhelmingly suggestive of the man’s extinction by both the force of nature and a superior breed of human being. By this interpretation the unrelieved pessimism of The Gulf Stream

  . . . is a response to the predatory racism that gripped the nation at the turn of the century . . . any liberal Republican vision there might have been of achieving social justice genteelly was replaced by withdrawal and even cynicism . . . there was little for white liberals to do but what viewers of The Gulf Stream do: look on, aghast, at the degradation of a race that was now fatally surrounded by sharks.8

  The most controversial contemporary artistic treatment of a shark is British artist Damien Hirst’s 1991 sculpture The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, which The Guardian newspaper calls ‘one of the most famous icons of modern art’9, but which has been controversial since first commissioned for £50 000 by advertising guru Charles Saatchi. Its technical description: ‘Tiger shark, glass, steel, 5 per cent formaldehyde solution, 213 × 518 × 213 cm’. The 4.27-metre tiger shark was sourced from Australia at a cost of £6000. The container, classically known as a vitrine, a glassed-in showcase, was made by aquarium specialists, being three cubes bolted together. Late in 2004 the US hedge fund manager Steve Cohen bought the artwork for a reputed £6.5 million, setting up Hirst to become the world’s most expensive living artist.

  Hirst had not, however, adequately preserved the shark’s deep tissue and it began to decay and change shape, while the water grew murkier and murkier. A taxidermy solution didn’t work, and he therefore replaced it with a large female tiger shark sourced from Queensland, described as a female of between 25 and 30 years old and weighing 1.92 metric tonnes. The shark was to have originally been a great white but apparently Australian legislative protection of that species came into force a few days before he was to place his order. All of that aside, what is the meaning of this sculpture nicknamed the pickled shark—the single ever most valuable, stared at and discussed dead animal?

  Hirst is preoccupied with ‘the ambiguity of human experience’10 and his art is intended to reflect this ambiguity. He said about the work, ‘The sculpture brings hunter and hunted face to face. Why are we so fascinated by animals that kill and eat us?’11 The second sentence of the statement may be true enough; the first only correct when viewing the shark not as the hunter but the hunted. Sharks, for this artist, ‘play havoc with our value systems, they make us aware that we are meat, part of the food chain’.12 It is an interesting artistic echo of what has gone before: in Winslow Homer’s time the laws of thermodynamics were in vogue and applied beyond physics and thus it was that the black man on the broken boat eating his sugar cane, then being eaten by the shark, merely represented part of a transfer-of-energy chain, with all matter eventually and equally subject to entropy. And in a connection to both The Gulf Stream and Watson and the Shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is also unresolved. ‘The work offers drama without catharsis, confrontation without resolution,
and provocation without redress. Responsibility is returned to the viewer.’13 It is a safe bet that neither of Damien Hirst’s tiger sharks tasted human flesh.

  Hirst’s fascination with bodies and the decomposition of bodies is part of a long tradition. Artistic absorption with mortality is as old as civilisation. As noted earlier, perhaps the earliest known depiction of a shark attack appears on a 725 BC piece of ancient Italian pottery. Two millennia later, Damien Hirst described photographs of human (war) wounds as ‘completely delicious, desirable images of completely undesirable and unacceptable things’.14 In the broad context of physical human suffering, it is hard to equate the fear of a shark bite with art; perhaps, in the eternally dead tiger shark in Hirst’s tank, there is a soundless echo of our dark impulses. Not surprisingly, Hirst the artist has been attacked, not by sharks but animal rights campaigners.

  Hirst’s work inspired the innovative high-profile Czech sculptor David Cerny to continue the tradition of shark art as enabling an implicitly potent political message. (Cerny’s works include his Pink Tank, in which, one night, he painted pink a Soviet tank mounted on a huge plinth in Prague, commemorating the 1945 liberation of Poland from the Germans by Soviet forces.) To make a statement about the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Cerny created a sculpture entitled Shark: ‘It features a life-size Saddam Hussein in underpants with his hands tied behind his back, floating in a large glass tank filled with the embalming fluid formaldehyde.’15 Interestingly, the sculpture was banned from its proposed display in a Belgian town in the wake of the violence caused by Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

  Shark, 2007, by David Cerny. (David Cerny)