In both literature and history, bounty has come to be synonymous with these extreme latitudes: utopia versus eschatology.

Regardless of outcome, bounty is linked to fate and illustrates the contours of fantasy as destined by our material world.

As such, those in search of bounty have long been concerned with classifying and controlling our planet’s flora and fauna and, by extension, its peoples.


These tensions can be seen in Maria Thereza Alves’s Utopia, which pairs the artist’s photographs of her native Brazil with texts that describe the contradiction inherent in a “promised” land. The way faith in words determines power and shapes both religion and science also underlies the performance, poetry, and photographs of Mexico City based Lucía Hinojosa. In Hinojosa’s Acción Fértil (Fertile Action) and for Candice Lin, who combines language and performance with multimedia sculpture to explore history, research is an essential instrument for deconstructing cultural taxonomies. Lin’s Despacho for Chinese Coolie Laborers mixes a rigorous inquiry into colonial economics with an interest in syncretic and divinatory systems. This correlation between inchoate materials and social systems can be seen in Rodney McMillian’s Untitled (sac) II and in Nick Herman’s A Self Sustaining System, where magnets are used to animate an inert form. Both works evoke hybridity, pairing landscape with anatomy. This coupling of tyranny and the sublime can be seen in Camille Henrot’s ongoing drawing series Tropics of Love and in Tacita Dean’s short film The Green Ray. The repercussion of faith is expertly dissected in Dean’s relentless loop of a setting sun and in the morphology of Henrot’s trans (sex/species) tourists. This sense that not only materials, but the land itself is haunted, can also be seen in the paintings of Lui Shtini, whose meticulous marks belie the way grace and subversion are inexorably intertwined.

PR LONG VERSION (rejected)



By Destinie, and can no other choose?
Paradise Lost



The word bounty is freighted with numerous, often contradictory, meanings. On the one hand a bounty suggests a good harvest (bountiful). On the other hand it connotes judgment or worse (bounty hunter). In both literature and history, bounty has come to be synonymous with these extremes: utopia versus frontier justice. What links its many reference points, and underlies its ubiquity, is the way bounty foregrounds the consequences of actions and aestheticizes causality. Bounty is synonymous with what people call fate and as such it illustrates the contours of fantasy while hewing to the real world. As such bounty has long been concerned with classifying and controlling our planet’s flora and fauna, and, by extension, its peoples.

Historically a bounty has been associated with a contract, a bond, and this correlation is exemplified in the Biblical allegory of “the fall.” Indeed, the mixed metaphor of the bounty, where reward is both a boon and a sentence, is rooted in the storyline of the Garden, humanity’s punishment, and the quest for a promised land. As a model for understanding destiny and, more broadly, the proverbial tension between man, nature, and time, bounty’s slippery promise can be said to represent an eschatology; it both reifies anthropocentrism and imperialist attitudes while at the same time promoting a cosmology that holds out hope for something different, something better.

It is this inchoate coupling of belief with base forms, that makes bounty a relevant syllogism for art making. Especially in our era, when, no matter how demythologized and apocalyptic the mood, people are still governed by visions. In this arena, the act of making an abstract thing retains, I think, a prevailing faith—in the powers of intercourse across mediums and taxonomies and in the future. The artworks in Bounty each manifest this potential, balancing their virility, their generosity, with the violence of their critique.



**The H.M.S. Bounty–best known for its mutiny–is a resounding historical example of this legal contradiction, as it was a vessel expressly chartered to collect and transport trees to cultivate and feed enslaved people, linking dominion of nature and the perceived imperatives of science with Christianity’s “Doctrine of Discovery” and the colonial perversion of progress.Progress is at the root of bounty, because bounty implies time as the common denominator for assessing value, and bounty is fundamentally a value judgment.