Mass-Produced Mammoths
Reviewed: Leo Elia Jung's "Charging Mammoth" at SARA's, New York
Leo Elia Jung’s installation “Charging Mammoth” (2023), which closed in early October at Sara’s in Chinatown, brings into question the 21st century effort to resurrect the woolly mammoth—and highlights the ways capital instrumentalizes not only the present but the past. The show is a dual exhibition between Jung and another artist, but my interest is its striking centerpiece: a giant cardboard model of said woolly mammoth. The mammoth dominates the gallery at an imposing eight foot tall, standing confidently with tusks raised toward the gallery entrance. Its name references Wall Street’s famous “Charging Bull”.
The work is the product of Jung’s research-based practice. It references two real-life projects concerned with mammoth “de-extinction” as described in a 2022 essay co-authored by the artist. In the essay, Jung and collaborator Jae August detail how Russian nature reserve Pleistocene Park and American startup Colossal aim to repopulate the arctic with genetically engineered elephants. This all ostensibly in the name of slowing climate change by restoring the climate of the prehistoric “mammoth steppe”. Together, the bold-faced absurdity of these real-world projects approach comedy—a quality Jung expands on by imagining a future in which they somehow manage to succeed.
In this speculative future, the stoic, primeval mammoth is profaned in modern reproduction. The mammoth’s construction, central to this message, is a feat of factory-friendly reproducibility. Rather than the bull’s serious bronze, Jung renders the mammoth in clean, white corrugated cardboard. Rectangular sheets are cut into a set of flat-packable 2D shapes, which one can imagine were shipped to the gallery in the very crates it’s mounted on, emblazoned with the logo of the American Museum of Natural History. On delivery, the pieces can then be quickly assembled, owing to precisely designed interlocking joints, to form the contours of the beast.
Curiously, the sculpture is fenced in by retractable crowd-control barriers—the type you see in the airport. This contributes to the impression of a hurried, half-finished installation. It’s a sort of cheapness that runs the risk of feeling gimmicky or crass, but up close reveals care and consideration. The mammoth, once an autonomous living creature, is debased, stripped into core components, and reassembled as a human product: one which can be patented and sold, to be deployed liberally for public entertainment or environmental intervention.
This is made literal in another piece by Jung titled “Declaration of Independence: Patent Application”. Jung frames a mocked-up U.S. patent application for the “Colossal Mammoth” in an Amazon Basics picture frame, trims it with fur, and mounts it in a fragile shadow box. The patent, based on a real company and cleverly redacted, is realistic enough to raise the question whether it’s real or not. This uncomfortable blurring between real and imagined, future and past, is the core tension I feel in coming face to face with Jung’s work. This all begs the question: what insidious instruments can be smuggled into existence under the guise of climate science? In the near future, will companies be entitled to patent prehistory?
In reviving the mammoth, its spirit dies. What is left is its ghost, which haunts the gallery by the inclusion of the sculpture’s cardboard negatives. Otherwise an art-industrial waste material, these sheets are mounted in adjacent windows and cast forlorn beams in the shape of disembodied mammoth parts on the gallery floor. It’s in this light that Jung’s works come to mean more than the sum of their parts. Despite their casual quirkiness, the impact of the Mammoth is not lost. Returned to the present, we are left to contemplate not whether we can, but whether we should.