Fungi: Anarchist Designers review – a perverse plunge into mushroom mayhem, from stinkhorns to zombie-makers | Art
SThe poem Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath is a sinister paean to the natural world. His observations on mushrooms are fraught with apprehension, noting how “very / Whitely, discreetly, / Very quietly” they “seize the soil, / Acquire the air.” The poem ends: “In the morning we will inherit the earth. / Our foot is in the door.”
Plath’s disquieting 1959 ode is the opening salvo of an exhibition devoted to the frightening omniscience of mushrooms. Far from simply getting a foot in the door, the door has been torn from its hinges by the supernatural ability of fungi to reproduce, spread, evolve – and annihilate itself. How they thrive with perverse intensity on abandoned, dead and dying things, furthering the cycle of decay and regrowth. Coprophiles, necrophiles and silent assassins, they are legion and have existed for more than a billion years.
Featuring installations, films and soundscapes created by a range of artists, Fungi: Anarchist Designers is a Dantesque journey through the many circles of fungal hell, designed to convey their terrifying ubiquity and resilience. A time-lapse film of the aptly named basket stink horn transforming from a fleshy phallus into a perforated umbrella sets the tone. The stinking horn gives off the smell of rotting flesh to attract flies, which feast on it and disperse its spores.
“Mushrooms refuse orders from human masters and to conform to human standards of propriety,” say the exhibition’s curators, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and architect and artist Feifei Zhou. “They cling to our worst habits, turning industrial commerce into continent-killing machines. They move into commercial agriculture, wiping out vast fields. They crawl into hospital beds and from there into our lungs. We cannot ignore them.”
The exhibition does not focus on the growing role of fungi as a passive building material or product, exemplified by the rise of mycelium boards. Instead, it focuses on “anti-design,” emphasizing their role as “co-designers of the world,” outwitting it and bending it to their will.
From the sea to the stratosphere, the domain of mushrooms is vast. Taxonomically, it encompasses more than two million organisms, from microscopic yeasts and molds to lichens and fungi, some with psychotropic properties or deadly toxins. Amanita phalloides, or death cap, is the primary culprit in most human deaths from mushroom poisoning, including that of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in 1740. Now established globally, through the cultivation of non-native tree species, the prevalence of death cap illustrates the unintended consequences of human alteration of nature.
Mushrooms feed on our venality and myopia. Monocultural forests and agricultural plantations, cultivated in a reductive way for profit, provide grist for their mill. The genetic similarity of industrially grown produce such as sweet corn, bananas and coffee makes them particularly vulnerable to fungal attack. Capable of devastating conifer plantations, heterobasidion root rot is one of the most feared diseases. Its baleful and destructive impact is crystallized in a multimedia installation by forest pathologist Matteo Garbelotto and artist Kyriaki Goni, titled: “In the Morning We Shall Inherit the Earth,” based on Plath’s chilling poem.
Plants and trees are not the only victims of the advance of fungi. A giant “tombstone” bears the names of species of frogs made extinct by a microscopic fungus. Accompanying it is an enlarged image of a fungal tube piercing the skin of a corroborate frog. It may seem harmless, but to date, more than 90 species of amphibians have been wiped out and many are still endangered.
Aficionados of The Last of Us will know how humanity was reduced to mushroom-headed monstrosities by the Cordyceps virus, based on an all-too-real type of parasitic fungus that infects insects, controls their brains, and then emerges from the host’s corpse as fungal stalks to spread its spores, a deliciously gruesome conjunction of death and sex.
Humans are in fact susceptible to fungal infections, mainly of the prosaic type, which favor hot and humid crevices and lack of personal hygiene. But more sinister invaders still lurk. A mock-up of a hospital bed provides an impromptu shrine to multidrug-resistant candida auris, which spreads in hospitals and can be deadly, killing up to one in three patients who contact it.
Yet the fungi’s nihilistic propensities are underscored by a curiously fascinating beauty. Historical architectural drawings from the Nieuwe Instituut archives are shown mottled with fungal discolorations, like Rorschach inkblots, while Japanese artist Hajime Imamura creates “mycelial sculptures” in the form of thin intertwined coils, draped elaborately across a ceiling.
Lizan Freijsen’s “tufted floor objects” (i.e. rugs) resemble patches of dry rot, a fungus that thrives in damp houses and wooden boats. It was originally confined to a corner of the Himalayas, but has since spread across the world through colonial trade. Michael Poulsen’s imposing model of a stalagmite-shaped termite mound highlights the symbiosis between fungi and termites; fungi destroy plant cell walls to provide food for insects.
After the destruction of Hiroshima by an atomic bomb, one of the first living things to emerge from the devastated landscape was the matsutake mushroom, traditionally fetishized by the Japanese as a gourmet delicacy. Shiho Satsuka and Liu Yi’s lyrical animated film illuminates the relationship between matsutake and Japanese pine forests, showing how the fungi can make trees habitable in terrain disturbed by the impact of humans, earthquakes or war.
Real living fungi make an appearance in “Architecture Must Rot,” an installation exploring how materials – in this case, plywood cocoons in sealed terrariums – are broken down and transfigured by fungal growth. By reimagining degradation as a positive and ecologically beneficial mechanism, it challenges the fiction of the physical permanence of architecture (in reality, all buildings have a limited lifespan) and the way in which fungi might mediate processes of transformation and regeneration.
The Dantesque journey culminates in a series of manifestos urging us to rethink how we live with a more-than-human world and to envision a future shaped by negotiation and interdependence. Brought to life by a wealth of details, many of them delightfully eerie, this atmospheric and captivating exhibition ensures you’ll never look at a mushroom the same way again. Humanity, beware: “Our foot is in the door. »
