Alison Ruttan
Alison Ruttan (born 1954) is an American interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates human behaviors such as appetite, sexuality and aggression and the degree to which they are governed by biology or social conditioning.
[1][2][3] She has explored diverse media from animation to photography to installation and drawn on fields from primatology to social theory, creating work that ranges from light-hearted gender critique to sobering meditation on war.
[15][17] Her inquiries lead her to diverse disciplines (primatology, evolutionary biology, feminism, political science, history) and often-new media that she chooses to best physically manifest the narrative she is structuring.
[33][14] She captured three different couples tickling one another to exhaustion, heightening the emotional charge as they traded roles of aggressor and victim by shooting close with an encircling camera and manipulating the playback speed.
[8][33] The video Lapse (2005) projects a large, slow-motion close-up of a man's face as he bursts in rage and then calms in cognition of the act, foregrounding the dislocation between the two emotional states.
"[26][37] The series slyly compares species, while entertaining the idea that habits of individuation and self-adornment might represent, like toolmaking, legitimate intelligent behavior involving socialization.
[39] Her "Bred in the Bone" works (2008) paired videos and photographs of primate social interactions that she shot at Wild Animal Park with like images of people in order to problematize assumptions of human rationality.
[44][1][26] The series contrasts pastoral scenes of the intact community that she modeled after Corot plein air paintings and images of 1960s American communal life with tableau of the murders (e.g., the installation, Honey Bee Watches the End Come for Willy Wally) which reference films such as Deliverance, West Side Story and Lord of the Flies.
Inspired by Han Dynasty funerary models, she chose to work in ceramics for its physicality, intimacy, and ability to break through the desensitization of media images to facilitate empathy.
)[48] Critics and curators described them, variously, as uncanny, disorienting, "eerily beautiful, and graphic in their depiction,"[49] noting how Ruttan's material and formal choices complicated the work's reception.
[3][18][1] In a jarring mix of aesthetics, memorial and documentation, the sculptures juxtapose familiar International Style architectural grids and objet d'art scale and beauty against the reality of rubble, collapse and (undepicted) death.
[18][3][47][1] Ruttan's decisions to leave some of the buildings intact on one side—thus portraying the transition and path from whole to collapse—and to place others on low tables organized like city-block grids had a similar effect, positioning viewers to embody time and destruction as they moved around the work.
[18][1] Critics linked the uncomfortable, God's-eye view to a distanced, perhaps American perspective, interpreting the works overall as a reflection on the failures of modernism, reason, and basic empathy.
[18][44] Set low to the ground in a Chicago Cultural Center exhibition (2015), it recreated for visitors a bird's eye view chillingly akin to that of the bombing pilots.
