Assembling the Archive

Abstract

In dialogue with extinction studies scholarship and literary studies debates about methods of reading, this chapter explores how Walton Ford’s great auk paintings register species loss. In “Funk Island ~ or Good Conduct Well Chastised (1791)” (1998), Ford stages the death of the island’s great auk colony, once the largest breeding colony in North America. In “The Witch of St. Kilda ~ 1840” (2005), he portrays the capture of the last great auk in the British Isles. By attending to the content of both paintings, their relationship to each other, their art historical contexts, and the socioecological contexts of great auk exploitation and extinction, I argue that Ford employs and critiques the conventions of natural history illustration to present anthropogenic extinction as an explicitly colonialist and violent form of loss. In addition to parsing their critiques of natural history illustration, I attend to the ways in which the allusive and intertextual operations of both paintings produce reading practices that lure the viewer into assembling an archive of great auk extinction. Finally, this chapter suggests that reading great auk extinction stories with Walton Ford has important outcomes. First, Ford’s paintings, and the archive they evoke and constellate, proliferate a series of new dates for thinking a variety of Anthropocenes. These dates decenter more familiar Anthropocene narratives and highlight the exploitation of nonhuman creatures as fundamental to colonialisms. Second, by foregrounding the violence inherent in extinction, Ford’s paintings eclipse the effects of grief and melancholy that inform other cultural representations of extinction and plumb the existential horror that adheres to the irrevocable severing of genetic lines and socioecological relationships.