Red Chuck

Buggin at the St Louis Zoo

Though I'm sure this is the last photograph relatives, grandparents, and friends want to see from our trip to St Louis, I just couldn't resist. (Please excuse the annoying shadows in this photograph - they couldn't be helped.) So then, what's so interesting about a 1970s-ish illustration of downtown St Louis? Not much really, unless you are drawn to kitschy art like me, but wait. . . let's put this in its context. This illustration is part of an innocent looking, interactive, educational display at the St Louis Zoo. Interactive in that you look at the picture, read a caption, and then slide a panel next to the picture to reveal. . . Yikes! (mouse over the picture) There's that same 1970s-ish illustration of St Louis only now. . . now St Louis looks as if it's been dipped in brown gravy! Make that, dried brown gravy. But that's not gravy folks. That's an artist's depiction of human waste. And more to the point, that's what every city would look like if we lived in a World Without Insects. OoooHaaaHaaaHaaa (that's my evil laugh, in case you were wondering). See the city caked with crud? See the poo dripping off the arch? See the uninhabitable wasteland? That's right kids, insects are the only thing keeping our society from devolving into a putrid, hellish, sludge bowl. Remember that. And thanks for visiting!

(Now is it just me or is that drawing kind of weird? And I'm not just talking about the poor draftsmanship. Also, I don't think they are intentionally going for a kitschy, let's-play-up-the-midnight-sci-fi-horror-movie look with this stuff. The message seems sincere though humorously flawed. Thus I rant. . .)

I photographed these pictures in the Insectarium at the St Louis Zoo on Saturday. And I guess the argument could be made that if you are hanging out in a place called an "insectarium" then you are bound to see some weird stuff. Point taken. But how many poorly-executed post-apolcalyptic imaginings of a World Without Insects does the St Louis Zoo need? I ask this because the Insectarium played host to several such cutely morbid, artistic renderings of how horrible a World Without Insects would be. And yeah I get the point. Insects are weird and scary. Yes they are. But not as weird and scary as a World Without Insects. Damn! That would be terrifying. We're talking Mad Max terrifying. Actually if we take the illustrations literally we're talking Mad Max in-a-hardened-caca-wasteland terrifying. Why? Because insects help break down waste. Without insects, we'd be neck deep in shit. OK. Given. I guess. But what sort of message am I supposed to relate to my kids about this picture? That's right, son. If it weren't for insects, we'd be wandering a lawless, barren world, populated by motorcycle-riding cannibals and. . . let's see what the captions says here. . . um. . . a lot of excrement. . . No, not eggs-ament, excrement. . . You know, poo poo. . . OK. . . stop laughing. . . alright, move along. . . let's see what those dung beetles are doing over there. Like I said, the reason this caught my attention was because this wasn't the only visual demonstration to make this point. On one wall there's the aforementioned silly-slidy-door-picture-thingy while on another there's a video loop riffing on the same, future-doom theme. (This loop is also very funny in its own right. The first image in the video is a verdant pasture bisected by a creek - oh, how beautiful, one should think. A butterfly and a man in a beekeeper outfit also appear in the pasture, very obviously pasted onto the scene - Awww life. First the butterfly dissolves - signifying the apocalyptic demise of all insects, gulp. Following that, the beekeeper dissolves - duh, no bugs, no guys in white, bug catcher suits. And then - OH MY GOD - everything dissolves - SUDDEN REALIZATION - THE BUG SUIT MAN SYMBOLIZES HUMANITY - leaving nothing but a desert where once a verdant meadow stood - IT'S ALL GONE, ITS ALL GONE!!!) Yeah, so the video was also a hilarious little demented vignette. And really they should have taken the whole Eden-to-Badlands montage to the extreme. Why not follow the pasture-to-desert dissolve with a desert-to-negative-image-of-desert dissolve. Add an ominous, John Carpenter synthesizer drone to that final edit and you could really scare the pants off some little kids. Which begs the point, what are we trying to accomplish here? Oh yeah, get people to imagine a World Without Insects. Yeah, once again, I get the point. Nice dystopian scare tactics. Who's in charge here? Aldous Huxley? Or Vincent Price?

For more information about the St Louis Zoo, the Insectarium at the St Louis Zoo, or The Horrifying Potentialities That Await Us In A Future Devoid Of Insect Life, please visit wwww.stlzoo.com.

Disclaimer: I, the author, do not find the extinction of any life form to be humorous. I do, on the other hand, find bad art to be humorous. But just because I find bad art to be humorous doesn't mean that I hope one day it will be extinct. I don't hope anything will be extinct (except the Republican Party) but I guess that's besides the point.

Posted by Red Chuck at January 16, 2006 04:19 PM