The Sound of Silence: Inside “Flatwing,” Madeline Hollander’s New Exhibition at the Whitney
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There’s a fairly long story behind “Flatwing,” Madeline Hollander’s new exhibition at the Whitney (up through August 8). Here’s how it goes: Hollander, an artist and choreographer based in Los Angeles and New York, was developing New Max (2018), a piece that had dancers raise the temperature of a room using the movement of their bodies alone. Preparing it involved a lot of research (Hollander’s pieces, drawn from a catalog of familiar—or “ready-made”—gestures observed in everyday life, generally do), including looking at all kinds of manifestations of temperature change, from tropical-storm patterns to what happens when different molecules reach their boiling points. Crickets, she thought, would be a useful reference too; according to Dolbear’s law, there is a direct correlation between the rate of a field cricket’s chirp and the air temperature. (The simplified formula for degrees Fahrenheit: Count the chirps over 14 seconds and add 40.)
Yet her reading on the subject yielded an interesting discovery. On certain islands in Hawaii, a parasitic fly has devastated the local cricket population, hunting them down by their sound. As a result, the crickets in those areas have largely gone silent: Most males now lack the ridges on their wings that produce the chirp, a genetic mutation that, while protecting them from the fly, creates quite a different problem. That chirp is a mating call, so these “flat-wing” crickets can only reproduce by hunkering down near a chirping cricket and, well, waiting. It’s an utterly unsustainable situation; etymologists are almost certain that all of the crickets will soon go instinct.
That problem lit a spark for Hollander. “I was really fascinated by these studies that were explaining how this was an example of accelerated evolution—this new species [the flat-wing] came about in 10 years, and usually that takes 10,000 years,” she says. Surely, the silent crickets were inventing some kind of behavior to keep themselves alive? (They were continuing to rub their wings together like chirping crickets do, but that was a reflex more than a strategy.) “In my head, I was completely convinced that I could potentially witness the evolution of a mating dance,” she says. “They would have to figure out some way to convert their mating call, which was an acoustic way of attracting a female, to something that was visual or physical.”
But when she reached out to research labs for videos of the silent crickets—she had a mind to incorporate whatever they were up into her own choreographic vocabulary—she was told that those videos didn’t exist. So, “I just decided to rent an infrared camera and book a flight to Hawaii,” Hollander says. She flew to Kauai, and for five nights in a row, she set off looking for crickets. Twenty hours of footage later, Hollander had found frogs, fruits, and chickens but not a single cricket.
“I came home thinking that that was a failure,” she says. But that failure evolved into “Flatwing,” a fascinating meditation on process, the tension between scientific and artistic sensibilities, and both the possibilities and the limits of adaptation. The centerpiece of the Whitney show is Flatwing (2019), a 16-minute video combing fragmentary glimpses of the Kauai rain forest—bathed in the pinkish, purplish light of Hollander’s infrared camera—with a circuitous conversation between Hollander and Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota, about the flat-wing crickets. (Hollander’s musings about how they might be trying to attract a mate—by running around in circles, for instance, or rubbing up against leaves—receive a rather desultory response: “They don’t have that much of a repertoire,” Zuk says simply.) That dialogue, like the footage in Kauai, was just part of Hollander’s research at first: “I had only recorded it because [she] was speaking so quickly and using terminology I wasn’t familiar with,” Hollander says. “I never thought that it was going to be used in a work of art.”
In a sense, “the entire work became the search for the choreography,” says Chrissie Iles, who cocurated the exhibition with Clémence White. In fact, she adds, “it is almost like her movement through the rain forest becomes the choreography.” (Hollander more or less agrees with this assessment: “Deciding where the frame began and ended, and how to connect it with another part of the footage, was such an intensive process,” she says. “Whittling that down to something that really does kind of create a narrative visually felt like I was using the same part of my brain [that I would] as a choreographer.”)
Hollander has mounted work related to procedure and evolved behaviors at the Whitney before; for the 2019 Whitney Biennial, she created Ouroboros: Gs, in which she choreographed the installation of part of the museum’s flood-mitigation system, bulked up in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. But in “Flatwing,” she folds the curtain back on her own artistic practice, revealing its mechanisms. “It felt extremely vulnerable,” she says.
In presenting her first-ever video installation to the public, Hollander was keen to reimagine her discombobulating experience in Hawaii. “I wanted to try and recreate the feeling of being completely immersed in this pink infrared light and the feeling of being inside the camera almost, or inside my head,” she says. In the room where Flatwing is projected, the images bounce off the walls and onto the floor, “so what you have,” Iles says, “is a dematerialized kind of environment.” Elsewhere in the show, a hallway that leads outside is lit a glowing green and hums with the sound of crickets—Hollander has rigged it so that the chirps reflect the local temperature in New York—and a salon wall displays the sketches, diagrams, notes, and other works on paper that filled Hollander’s studio as she worked on New Max and Flatwing.
“It has this very ominous undertone, but I feel like it is also desperately hopeful,” Hollander says of Flatwing. In fact, her sense of conviction in the piece—that she will find the flat-wing crickets and that they must be doing something interesting—speaks to the endless malleability of human beings. That quality was certainly in evidence during the pandemic, as “Flatwing” was postponed from the summer to the spring. Unlike crickets, we “are very plastic and we are very capable of adapting super quickly to change,” Hollander says. “We’ve already witnessed that in our day-to-day interactions. You see someone, and instead of giving them a hug or shaking their hand, what is courteous now is stepping back and potentially putting your hands behind your back so you don’t freak them out.”
There’s something wonderfully promising about that, Hollander thinks, as we face down existential threats like climate change. “The fact that all of those very pedestrian behaviors have done a 180 in the course of a year was a signal that we can really change [not only] our behavior,” she says, “but our habits, our infrastructure, our policies, and the way that we communicate with each other.”
“Flatwing” is on at the Whitney through August 8. For visiting information, see here.