This Is Not a Rhinoceros
The Substitute (2019) by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (image: courtesy of the artist).
“There are no rhinos in this exhibition,” says Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. It’s a strong statement to make about a rhino-themed show, but it’s hard to hear her over the din in the Natural History Museum. We’re not speaking in front of the animatronic T-Rex, usually the loudest of the extinct animals bellowing through the Victorian halls. Instead, we’re across the hallway at The Lost Rhino, a new art installation curated by Ginsberg for the museum starring The Substitute (2019), a very vocal virtual replica of the functionally extinct northern white rhinoceros. Since a bull rhino named Sudan died in captivity in 2018 there are only two of the subspecies left, both female.
The Substitute is one of four rhinoceros displays in the exhibition, except, as Ginsberg already explained, none of them are a real rhino. They are copies, copies of copies, powered by AI, taxidermy, or grown in a laboratory. Together they pose existential questions about extinction in the Anthropocene. “When we think of this powerful animal these are actually cultural ideas, not necessarily the real thing,” says Ginsberg. Humans have been obsessed with rhinos for a very, very long time. Prehistoric people daubed herds of them onto the walls of the Chauvet Cave in France some 32,000 years ago. A couple of millennia later, humans painted their majestic horned outlines onto stone plaques in the mountains of southern Namibia. Mosaics of rhinos can be found on the floors of ruined Roman villas in Sicily and Israel (in what was ancient Palestine). We’re compelled by these gentle giants – but now we’ve almost wiped them out. As of 2022, there are under 27,000 of them left in the wild, according to the WWF.
Cardiac cells made in the lab from preserved cells of Angalifu, the last male northern white rhino in the United States who died in 2015 (image: San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance).
The exhibition is kept dark to best display the projections, and it lends it a certain gloomy, gothic air to this reanimated menagerie. Upon entering, the first thing visitors encounter is a video of a microscope slide blown up to the size of a car door and projected onto a shroud-like sheet of gauzy fabric stretched taut. The pulsating scene is a video of heart cells grown from samples taken from Angalifu, a male northern white rhino who died in 2014. Ginsberg first saw the footage over a Zoom call with Dr Oliver Ryder, the director of San Diego's Frozen Zoo project, which preserves genetic material for use in conservation efforts.
Could this subspecies be bought back from beyond the brink? Prof Thomas Bernd Hildebrandt, project leader for German conservation organisation BioRescue, has overseen the creation of 12 northern white rhino embryos. The hope is that IVF techniques could be used with a southern white rhino – an entirely separate subspecies – as a surrogate. It’s a well-intentioned project laced with philosophical and ethical concerns, as outlined by Ginsberg. “Would it be a northern white rhino?” she asks. “If you were the only one of your kind, how do you learn how to be what you are?” White rhinos are particularly social, so what would lab-grown calf raised by a separate subspecies be? “Its cultural as well as biological,” she adds. “Birds are born with song but they become more complex as they interact with other birds. There’s been experiments raising rare birds in isolation, and their songs don’t become as complex.” It’s the kind of heartbreaking conundrum that’s skipped over by Jurassic Park and its (many) sequels. Life may find a way, but it’s a questionable quality of life then you’re the last of your kind.
'The Rhinoceros' (c.1515), Albrecht Durer, Germany, (image: The Trustees of the British Museum).
The next part of the exhibition moves from copies of cells to a game of telephone from the age of the printing press. In 1515, the German artist Albrecht Dürer created a woodcut of a rhinoceros that became an enduring image of the animal. In The Lost Rhino, Ginsberg reunites a series of Dürer rhino facsimiles sourced from the museum’s own rare books collection, including a copy of the 16th century encyclopaedia Historia animalium. Dürer, however, had not laid eyes on one himself. Instead, the image was based off of a sketch and an eyewitness account of the arrival of Ganda, an Indian rhinoceros who was shipped from Portuguese-occupied India to Lisbon as a present (animals as diplomatic gifts continues to this day, see ‘Big Panda Energy from Disegno #24). The doomed Ganda would later die horribly on the way to be gifted once again, this time to Pope Leo X, when the boat whose deck he was chained to went down in a storm.
Dürer’s less-than-realistic vision of a rhino, however, lived on for hundreds of years, and was even printed in German textbooks until the 1930s. Other artists copied it, exaggerating already exaggerated or mistaken features, such as the folds of skin – typical of an Indian rhinoceros – that appear more like the plate armour of a knight. This may have been more than just artistic licence. At the time, the rhinoceros was heralded as a cunning beast that was the mortal enemy of the elephant, and as poor Ganda was made to attend a grudge match with a pachyderm from the Portuguese king’s menagerie he could have been wearing his own custom armour. The two herbivores didn’t come to blows, as the elephant ran away from the rhino, but the bloodthirsty image of the horn versus tusk lived on in Dürer’s image, argues Ginsberg. “This is the Western, modern idea of the rhinoceros as an object, a symbol of power, an animal that is different to us, the wild and savage,” she says. “Something that, perhaps, deserves to die.”
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, curator of The Lost Rhino (image: Nathalie Théry).
The third not-a-rhinoceros is The Substitute, although you will certainly hear him before you see him. Ginsberg created this piece in 2019 following the death of Sudan. In this incarnation, visitors sit or stand in front of a back-projected screen showing a looping animation of a blocky Minecraft-esque bundle of pixels that hoofs around the room, gradually resolving itself into a startlingly realistic simulacrum of a northern black rhinoceros. The soundtrack of vocalisations is taken directly from archive recordings of the animals in the wild, adding to the immediacy of the encounter. Ginsberg uses the pronoun to refer to her creation, even though they are as genitalia-free as a Barbie doll, and it’s hard not to adopt the habit. Rhinos are charismatic megafauna, a wild animal that we imbue with the human emotions we experience at the sight of them, the pull-push of awe laced with fear. “At the end of the cycle it looks you in the eye and it’s that transformative moment that interests me,” says Ginsberg. “We suddenly recognise ourselves. We are the wild ones who are not allowing the rhino to exist.” At the moment of eye contact, The Substitute vanishes into thin pixellated air.
A lot of the excitement around The Substitute is generated by its use of AI, something Ginsberg finds inevitable if slightly missing the point. To create the piece, she used technology from Google’s DeepMind research, which developed an AI that act autonomously by situating itself in a space. On the floor in front of the projection two screens track the AI’s path around the empty room and its simultaneous development of its grid cells – the neurons that allow a being to locate itself in space. A lot as happened in the AI space over the past three months, let alone the past three years, and looking at this AI replica I can’t help but draw parallels with the debates over art and originality prompted by text-to-image generators such as Dall-E and Lensa. Can you call an image art if its just an amalgamation of stolen artworks scraped from the internet and rearranged at a whim? “I’ve been thinking a lot about the tools I encounter as an artist making fake constructs,” says Ginsberg. “You can make it, but its not real. But the synthetic begins to take over the idea of the real.” However realistic the technology gets, there is always something lost.
Taxidermy southern white rhino (image: The Trustees of The Natural History Museum).
At the back of the exhibition space is the final and arguably most close-to-life rhinoceros: a taxidermy southern white rhinoceros from the Natural History Museum’s own collection. This specimen didn’t just make its way by chance – it was killed to order in 1893 by a man Robert Coryndon. Coryndon, a top colonial administrator for the British Empire, had attracted the attention of the private collector Lionel Walter Rothschild by shooting one southern white rhino, and Rothschild commissioned him to kill two more. This was more than just a collector’s bloodthirsty zeal, says Ginsberg. By the 19th-century, humans were already aware that rhinoceros populations were dwindling alarmingly. “The advent of gun technology, and improvement, gun technology meant that more and more rhinos were being killed both by indigenous peoples and European hunters, for meat and for trophy,” she explains. “It’s a complex story around colonial expansion and technology. There was a sense that more rhinos needed to be collected for museums in Europe, and America so that they could be studied once they've disappeared completely.” A wild white rhinoceros can live for up to 50 years, but so many were snuffed out in this paradoxical attempt to preserve them.
But even the stuffed rhinoceros is a chimera. Its horn has been removed and replaced with a fake one as a security measure. Their horns are so valuable that criminal gangs have targeted museums, smashing cabinets and hacking off horns or stealing entire skulls. In the first half of 2011 alone, at least 20 public and private collections were targeted. Kilo for kilo, a rhinoceros horn is more valuable than gold, diamonds – or cocaine. Even dead rhinos can’t rest in peace from human avariciousness.
The seemingly endless rooms of fossils and long-dead fauna of the Natural History Museum are the perfect setting for The Lost Rhino. Afterwards, I am allowed to roam the halls of the museum in these strange, silent hours before it opens to the public. Passing cabinets full of stuffed dodos and the great auk – two flightless birds driven to extinction by human greed – I spy small black circular titled “The Natural History and Colonialism”. Three brief paragraphs outline the institutions intention to review its collections, hopefully to tell a fuller picture of its complicity. Standing at the feet of the animatronic T-Rex, all decked out in his jolly 10-ft Christmas jumper, I think about Britains most festive gothic tale. Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843, half a century before Coryndon killed those rhinos. Now Ginsberg has bought four of their ghosts [1] to confront us. But can we change our ways in time?
1 Yes, there are four ghosts in A Christmas Carol, go count again. You can thank me after you win your Christmas pub quiz.
Words India Block
The Lost Rhino is on display at London’s Natural History Museum until March 2023.