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Thursday, February 4, 2010

The Art and Activism of David Bygott




The Art and Activism of David Bygott

by: Phillip Barcio on February 3rd, 2010 |

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Rating: 5.0/5 (2 votes cast)

Ultimately I would love to be able to produce art which helps people respect and connect with the natural world in a more realistic way. To make them aware of their dependence on it and the way their choices and actions affect it. It’s not something to fear, or to control, or to endure while we wait for some Great Hereafter – it’s the only home we’ll ever know, and we’re doing our best to wreck it for our kids.–David Bygott

Did you realize the giraffe antelope has the ability to stand upright on its hind legs?

Did you know there was any such thing as a giraffe antelope?

Chances are you didn’t. And chances are there won’t be much longer. The giraffe antelope is one of thousands of species that have existed for millennia on the African continent that are being threatened by human folly.

Thankfully, for we billions who have not yet had the chance to contemplate their beauty or their importance, Artist/Zoologist David Bygott has been working diligently for more than three decades photographing and sketching the giraffe antelope and the rest of Africa’s disappearing animal companions.

Recently in an effort to expand further his means of self-expression, Bygott began participating in digital photography manipulation contests on a website called Freaking News in which artists compete to create doctored images relating to current events.

A frequent winner, Bygott uses the Freaking News forum to express his sensitivities toward consumerism, vanity and the other unsustainable human values which threaten the animal diaspora.

money-quarter

(To see more of David Bygott’s work, visit the Tikkun Art Gallery.)

Says Bygott:

There’s really nothing like human consumerism in nature. Carnivores, for example, are programmed to hunt a lot more than they actually eat – but usually, a pride of lions kills one zebra and all the others run away. We might see that as admirable frugality. However, it is purely contextual. If the lions get into a cow corral, they may kill far more than they can eat, because the cows can’t run away, and then we see the lions as vermin.

We ourselves have developed many ways of “killing all the zebras” and justifying it as perfectly OK, because then we can feed more people, and we need more people, don’t we, to make or buy Stuff. That brings us to another side of consumerism – Stuff for Status – “the more Stuff I have, the more important or sexy I must be”. The struggle for social status is widespread in the animal kingdom, the payoff generally being reproductive success. Humans have been particularly ingenious at creating and marketing all kinds of unnecessary Stuff and convincing people that they are inadequate unless they buy it. Remember all those decades when advertisers convinced us that smoking was not only smart and sexy but even healthy. They don’t tell us that any more, but why should we trust whatever they are telling us now? Knowing that, and feeling no need to be more sexy or important, I can ignore 99% of what advertisers are trying to sell me. I find that very liberating!

Humor is evident in many of Bygott’s doctored images, and so is outrage.

Bygott and his wife lived in Tanzania for 27 years where they studied lions and worked with Jane Goodall on her National Geographic funded chimpanzee research. He makes his living now in part by leading safaris (ones where the only shooting is with cameras).

Living a life of thoughtful activism Bygott is immersed in the world he loves, and yet also interacts daily with the forces of corporate totalitarianism and military dominance that threaten to destroy what he finds precious. Somehow his imagery captures this absurdity while maintaining a sense of humor and avoiding cynicism.

nike-invader

(To see more of David Bygott’s work, visit the Tikkun Art Gallery.)

Says Bygott:

Isn’t activism an antidote to cynicism? Cynicism says “everything sucks”, activism says “so do something about it.” Personally I find it helpful to back off and take a high-altitude or long-term view. I spend about a week each year 30,000 feet above the ground. Up there, many of the manifestations of human culture don’t look too different from a bacterial culture on a petri dish. Those little critters down there cover the area, eating whatever they can, and produce a lot of toxins and bad smells, and eventually they’ll exhaust their resources and die out.

Looking back at the 4.5 billion year span of life on Earth, the real microbes had it all to themselves for most of that time. All of human history, even vertebrate history, is a little blip on that timescale. The sentimental part of me mourns the hundreds of strange and wonderful species of our fellow travelers we drive to extinction every year. On the long-term scale, however, the effects of our destructiveness will be perhaps the sixth in a series of major extinctions that Earth has experienced, each of which wiped out 80-95% of whatever was alive at the time, and somehow life bounced back each time.

Most species don’t last more than one or two million years; that still gives us time to make things a lot worse, but be assured that some resilient life forms will survive us and find new diversity. Zooming back to the personal level I count myself exceedingly lucky to be alive at a time when we understand our biosphere better than ever before, even as we destroy it, and I savor what I can while it lasts.

To see more of David Bygott’s work, visit the Tikkun Art Gallery, or see some of his animal photography here.

The Art and Activism of David Bygott5.052

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