Likewise he doesn’t hunt and begins to starve. The previously astonishing ability to change colour and shape to blend in with the surrounding environment dims. Coordination of those remarkable, labile tentacles also degrades as movement slows and the process of rapid senescence begins. He too will be dead very soon.

It’s tempting, of course, to read the condition of octopuses as an allegory for the human condition, especially, perhaps, for people lurching reluctantly away from youth toward their own senescence. Octopuses are, after all, the most intelligent invertebrates in the world, likely to have the cognitive capacity of a 4-year-old human. They have a rich aesthetic life and possess highly developed optical, tactile and (their equivalent of) olfactory systems. Like humans they are known to decorate their living spaces. But it’s not that straightforward to map the human onto the animal world. Animals and their environments are radically different to us humans and our environments; and whilst their behaviours and milieus might point toward some strange residual animal core of our own natures, there remains a weirdness to animals’ worlds which means they will, at least in part, remain untamed by narratives and metaphor.

There are no octopuses in Fieldworks but it does bring the audience face-to-face with a menagerie of other beasts and their habitats. This smart, witty and handsome show curated by Chris Clarke (senior curator at the Glucksman) is clustered around several well-chosen themes all pertinent to the relationships and acts of reciprocal observation taking place between animals, humans and their respective environments. And it looks great. Clarke has used the architecture to the show’s advantage, with many works gesturing through the large windows to the green and leafy grounds of UCC which surround the building. Another benefit of the university setting that’s been well used is its ecology of research and education. Here Clarke has also been canny in his use of a light touch that has resisted didacticism or the heavy-handed illustration of theories. Instead the show is presented in the spirit of fascination with, and playful investigation into, animal worlds. All the work is, thankfully, not too reverential to its subject matter(s) but rather uses creaturely concerns as jumping-off points into speculations on the relationships between animals and their habitats; each other; humans; and, consequently, humans to one another.

Several artists look at those acts of observation that go back and forth between animals and humans. Chris Marker’s modest yet beautiful little films show animals in their surroundings, including his own cat lolling on a keyboard, owls and creatures in a zoo. The divide between human and animal observation is underwritten by the quality of both the video and accompanying treated electronic sound, which feel lossy and crummy to today’s ears and hence declare their artificiality. Adam Chodzko presents photographs which hint, through the covert surveillance of nocturnal activities, that some sort of unsanctioned behaviour is going on, whilst in Jochen Lempert’s black and white documentary images creatures are tiny, almost insignificant specks amidst indistinct, quotidian landscapes. This difficulty in observing natural activities is revisited by Ho Rui An’s film in which two filmmakers struggle against annoying human interruptions to film some deer. In this context Ruth van Beek’s odd and choppy photo-collages, in which animals are twisted into themselves; Julia Schmid’s delicate yet large drawings; and Ciarán Murphy’s exquisite painting of birds, beasts and display cabinets, presented through muted palettes and delicate details, all also suggest that acts of observation are going on which may or may not be inhuman. Other artists reflect on the patterns and orders that can be produced through these acts of observation, including Vanessa Safavi’s scattering of stuffed birds around a gallery wall, and Petra Ferianocova’s reprinting of colour photos of birds taken by a relative in Africa in the 1970s to produce an off-kilter yet intimate taxonomy. Equally personal is Petrit Halilaj’s installation (including a bird sculpted from cow dung, soil and metal, in front of a faded fragment of a diorama) drawn from objects such as inventory cards borrowed from the Natural History Museum of Kosovo. He grew up during the Serbian-Kosovar war and spent time as a refugee in Albania. His work points to the many different histories and borders (personal, national, ethnic) that, whilst traumatic for humans, animals may freely range across.

Other artists find ways to imagine the environments in which these two-way acts of observation might take place. Flo Maak, for instance, uses c-prints and manipulated images to produce impossible spaces in which various beasts sit, somewhat uneasily, in artificial scenarios. Wesley Meuris on the other hand both draws and literally constructs exhibition spaces such as enclosures, tanks, and cages where life might be enclosed and studied, whilst Sonia Shiel has made a crappy, riotous habitat from detritus; it hovers perilously yet comically between constructed and natural worlds.

Nestled within these more overt subject matters and concerns is a tacit theme: nature presents humans with an ontological threat. Our humanity is enfolded within nature and inseparable from it. Hence, easy distinctions such as those between creature / environment; natural / artificial; animal / human become increasingly fluid; untenable even. Inevitably, nature will get us in the end.

As I finish writing this I’m looking over at the dog who’s sharing the room with me. Just now she’s resolutely and stubbornly refusing to be a metaphor for anything in particular. I don’t see anything being signified but rather a shitting bundle of fur, teeth and barks that dozes in the corner occasionally looking up at me bored and askance. If animals are an allegory for anything, then perhaps it is what I want art to be like. If art is the creation of new things in the world that we don’t understand then perhaps art is creaturely and feral. Animals, like the best art, are not reducible to metaphorical meaning; they have lives that sit outside human systems of reference and signification. They are lawless little perverts running amok leaving their fluids and faeces all over the shiny surfaces we spend our lives struggling to keep clean.

And what strange objects these were. Rekab’s Protos hanging above the fabric were a series of odd shaped things that seemed to be designed to be held in the hand but whose function and meaning was uncertain. In the accompanying video pieces Rekab performed with them by following the cues of a Tai Chi master in an instructional video. She seemed to be following the script but to what end we can only speculate. Lucy Andrew’s Law of Contagion was a roiling mass of rockwool and bubbles that simmered in the corner whilst threatening to infect the whole space with an alien presence. In another corner a tap merrily burbled to itself in its own thingly language on a TV screen, which slowly filled with water and then drained away. When the piece was first shown on Scottish television in 1971, as one of David Hall’s 7 TV Interruptions, it was, Hall has said, ‘unannounced and uncredited – a total surprise and mystery’. Then, each interruption disrupted the normal human flow of information, news and drama for just a moment. Here, another disruption took place in which a micro-narrative of things and of conversations between taps and televisions screens, became briefly visible.

 
There was a more obvious, although no less obscure, narrative in Isil Egrikavuk’s film Infamous Library in which a man recounts in Turkish a story of being taken forcefully to a library to undertake unspecified research. The film is diverted from its obvious Borgesian and Kafka-esque inflections through the presence of the film-maker who prompts the actor on how and what to say. She hands him an unidentifiable object – a macguffin – telling him that it will help the audience believe the story.
 
Another unidentifiable object was suspended above the fabric divide. This was Judith Scott’s untitled piece which had emerged from accretions and clusters of different types of materials such as string, paper and audio tape. In her work hidden articles are wrapped away under surfaces that offer only a hint of what lies beneath. One can only imagine what stories this thing might reveal if we could only find a way to question it in a manner that it could understand.
 
Go to any national gallery in Europe and you’ll be confronted by walls and walls of paintings which demand a certain level of conceptual understanding from their audience. The paintings of Fine Art are not, and never can be, neutral objects free from theoretical meanings. They are rather painstakingly built up, layer by layer, from a complex palette of learned practices, pigmented with received histories and protected from their environment by the yellowing varnish of culture.
 
This show offered a different proposition: a chance to imagine objects that had been untethered from their everyday relations and allowed, just briefly, to run amok. It didn’t weigh down objects with familiar concepts or narratives. Rather it gifted them a holiday from the banal and petty systems they inhabit day after day.
 
 
A Macguffin and Some Other Things was on view 12 April – 16 June 2012.