I know that title doesn’t sound right…or does it.
Thanks to a tweet by Jimmy Stamp that was retweeted by Alexis Madrigal, I found this delightful post by Robin Sloan entitled “The Moby Dick Variations” that speculates about what it means to be a novel as a unique work of art. In the post, Sloan investigates how a novel can vary and still maintain its identity. The post instantly connected to two divergent thoughts in my brain. Continue reading “The Mobiest of Dicks”
The beaching – and threatened explosion – of a whale near a small town in Newfoundland last month was a reminder of just how huge, mysterious and fascinating these creatures are to humans.
Artist Tristin Lowe was so intrigued by the tale of a rogue albino sperm whale from the 19th century that he decided to recreate the whale at full scale in felt. Mocha Dick is a fifty-two-foot-long sculpture of a legendary whale that was said to have attacked numerous whaling vessels near Mocha Island in the South Pacific in the early 19th century.
Writing in the Knickerbocker Magazine in 1839, Jeremiah Reynolds described the original Mocha Dick as appearing “as white as wool . . . as white as a snow drift . . . white as the surf around him.” This was especially striking because sperm whales are usually dark gray, brown, or black. The unusually colored, highly aggressive creature provided the inspiration for literature’s most famous cetacean, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, published in 1851.
The “white as wool” description (and Melville’s novel) spurred the imagination of Lowe, who had previously made smaller pieces in felt. To work on this massive scale, he collaborated with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia to make the sculpture: a large-scale vinyl inflatable understructure covered in highly detailed white industrial felt.
Lowe was careful to give the sculpture a personality. He imagined the whale at over forty years old, covered with hand-stitched scars and barnacles. “All of his life is revealed on his skin,” says Lowe. “He wears that.” And like the real Mocha Dick, this 700-lb sculptural whale is well-traveled. Made in 2009, Mocha Dick has been exhibited in galleries and museums in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, Florida, Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
A video with more information about the artist and the piece is here.
A little preview from a forthcoming Darwin Day essay on The Voyage of the Beagle, here are the contrasting styles of Darwin and Melville in their descriptions of the Galapagos. Melville’s imagery is impressionistic and improvisational, while Darwin’s approach to imagery depends, naturally, on observational precision and tight organizations of his thoughts, which can be just as successful as Melville’s more consciously literary style.
Melville’s description of the Galapagos from The Encantadas: Continue reading “Darwin and Melville in the Galapagos”
