Duke Riley’s Scrimshaw and the Folk History of Climate Collapse
International Awards for Art CriticismThis essay was shortlisted for the ninth edition of the International Awards for Art Criticism, 2023.
NO ONE KNOWS exactly when or how scrimshaw began, but many historians believe American sailors first began ornamenting the teeth and bones of hunted whales following contact with Indigenous South Pacific woodcarvings, ornamented shells in the Caribbean and tusks adorned with hunt scenes by Inuits, Yupik and Aluets in the Arctic. After a whale was harvested for oil and blubber, its carcass held no value, unless its parts were broken down and recrafted as decorated objects. The whaling industry, which transformed the early United States from an agrarian economy into an oil-rich nation, also gave rise to the country’s first homegrown folk art—a byproduct of global capital.
Contra adventurous portrayals in novels and newspapers, whaling was often tedious, its years-long voyages punctuated with the spectacular violence of intermittent hunts. Scrimshaw was practiced almost exclusively by whalers, and, as far as records reveal, it was practiced by nearly every single one of them. Officers encouraged the art form to occupy idle hands and stave off insubordination; for sailors it became a medium to express the romance of life at sea and cope with homesickness. They engraved lighthouses above stormy waters, fashionable ladies from Godey’s Magazine, allegorical personifications of America and Liberty, vignettes of heroic hunts and harpooned beasts. The most masterful objects were humble tools shaped into majestic animal figures—a serpent, a horse, a swan—or abstract geometries, their delicately carved reliefs dyed with ash and inlaid with polished bone. Despite a total absence of schools and an established market, the craft spread across the Northeast, acquiring an idiosyncratic lore. Sailors believed no suitor could penetrate a corset carved by a lady’s lover, and so they’d craft scrimshaw girdles to ensure their wives’ fidelity while a-sea.
Contra adventurous portrayals in novels and newspapers, whaling was often tedious, its years-long voyages punctuated with the spectacular violence of intermittent hunts. Scrimshaw was practiced almost exclusively by whalers, and, as far as records reveal, it was practiced by nearly every single one of them. Officers encouraged the art form to occupy idle hands and stave off insubordination; for sailors it became a medium to express the romance of life at sea and cope with homesickness. They engraved lighthouses above stormy waters, fashionable ladies from Godey’s Magazine, allegorical personifications of America and Liberty, vignettes of heroic hunts and harpooned beasts. The most masterful objects were humble tools shaped into majestic animal figures—a serpent, a horse, a swan—or abstract geometries, their delicately carved reliefs dyed with ash and inlaid with polished bone. Despite a total absence of schools and an established market, the craft spread across the Northeast, acquiring an idiosyncratic lore. Sailors believed no suitor could penetrate a corset carved by a lady’s lover, and so they’d craft scrimshaw girdles to ensure their wives’ fidelity while a-sea.
In his exhibition “DEATH TO THE LIVING, Long Live Trash” at the Brooklyn Museum, the contemporary artist Duke Riley reinvigorates the art of scrimshaw, which died with the whaling industry’s collapse in the 1860s following the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania. Today, only a few Indigenous communities legally allowed to hunt whales still make “true” scrimshaw on bone and ivory; to the extent that it’s now practiced elsewhere, it’s largely to produce stock Americana on thermoset plastic and recycled or fossilized ivory. Yet Riley’s scrimshaw is more than a relic of an early industrial past: the artist revisits the foundations of our modern global economy to deliver a powerful critique of its excesses today.
The exhibition takes its title from a 19th-century bone inscribed by Frederick Myrick, the era’s most famous scrimshander: “Death to the living, long life to the killers / Success to sailors’ wives & greasy luck to whalers.” Riley’s scrimshaw reveals and critiques the American attitudes toward nature encoded on these animal remains, offering an acerbic take on environmental destruction caused by industrialization. The artist makes his work on synthetic materials that he salvages from New York City’s beaches: straws, bottles, a honey bear and lawn flamingo—even a flipper extracted from a tiger shark’s stomach and other such materials harvested from the dead—are coated in wax, engraved and dyed with India ink. The works feature ominous scenes of water pollution, often accompanied by cheeky captions, as in a crosshatched drawing of a Victorian woman and a willow tree. She picks plastic bags from the waves above a banner that reads: “For Eternity.”
Historic scrimshaw motifs were inspired by Liverpool jugs, or household goods showcasing political allegiances, yet civic messages were exceedingly rare within the folk medium. Riley’s scrimshaw, on the other hand, puts faces to a generalized, centuries-spanning destruction, endowing these quaint artifacts with newfound social relevance. The first manufactured plastic was invented in 1862 out of an effort, in part, to protect whales, elephants and other species facing extinction; today the biggest threat to whales isn’t hunters, but waters polluted by plastic—unrecycled material now enters the oceans at such an alarming rate that it’s estimated to outweigh all of the fish in the sea by the year 2050. A salvaged can of motor oil bearing a whale hunt and a portrait medallion of Andrew Swiger, the CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp, is one of several of Riley’s objects targeting specific chemical lobbyists and corporate executives by name. In another, a seagull defecates on a water-bottle magnate
The exhibition takes its title from a 19th-century bone inscribed by Frederick Myrick, the era’s most famous scrimshander: “Death to the living, long life to the killers / Success to sailors’ wives & greasy luck to whalers.” Riley’s scrimshaw reveals and critiques the American attitudes toward nature encoded on these animal remains, offering an acerbic take on environmental destruction caused by industrialization. The artist makes his work on synthetic materials that he salvages from New York City’s beaches: straws, bottles, a honey bear and lawn flamingo—even a flipper extracted from a tiger shark’s stomach and other such materials harvested from the dead—are coated in wax, engraved and dyed with India ink. The works feature ominous scenes of water pollution, often accompanied by cheeky captions, as in a crosshatched drawing of a Victorian woman and a willow tree. She picks plastic bags from the waves above a banner that reads: “For Eternity.”
Historic scrimshaw motifs were inspired by Liverpool jugs, or household goods showcasing political allegiances, yet civic messages were exceedingly rare within the folk medium. Riley’s scrimshaw, on the other hand, puts faces to a generalized, centuries-spanning destruction, endowing these quaint artifacts with newfound social relevance. The first manufactured plastic was invented in 1862 out of an effort, in part, to protect whales, elephants and other species facing extinction; today the biggest threat to whales isn’t hunters, but waters polluted by plastic—unrecycled material now enters the oceans at such an alarming rate that it’s estimated to outweigh all of the fish in the sea by the year 2050. A salvaged can of motor oil bearing a whale hunt and a portrait medallion of Andrew Swiger, the CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp, is one of several of Riley’s objects targeting specific chemical lobbyists and corporate executives by name. In another, a seagull defecates on a water-bottle magnate
While many of the works are pointed toward such individuals, what the artist ultimately harvests from the history of whaling in the early industrial era—arguably the beginning of manmade environmental collapse—is the sailors’ swashbuckling ribaldry, resuscitated here as punk protest. His pictures are full of vengeful sea life armed with bowie knives and Molotov cocktails, drunk revolutionaries, rude graffiti, crudely drawn cocks and shit—see, for example, a carnivalesque ink-on-paper triptych which features murderous mermaids, a rodent pirating a tin can and a seaman screwing a cat. Titled A Semi-Subjective Map of the Glorious Gowanus Canal from the Colonial to Post-Industrial Eras, 2021, the triptych depicts a saturnalian history of the South Brooklyn estuary named after the Canarsie chief but best known today for its regular floods and a gonorrhea infestation so bad that it kills dolphins. In Riley’s 17-foot drawing, Red Coats advance on slime-spouting factories, soaked rats execute a colonist, junkyards are leveled to make way for luxury apartments. There are no upright sailors here; mutiny is at hand.
Riley draws a direct line between the decadence of modern-day coastal cities to the European project of colonialism, situating the New York Harbor’s plastic waste within a greater history of exploiting the earth for material gain. He pillories, for example, the folly of transoceanic transport in an elegant mosaic depicting the Erika, a tanker that shed thousands of tons of oil onto France’s shores, made from shotgun shells collected from a beachside pheasant-shooting club. This consumerist critique is present throughout much of his work, especially his public murals, such as Not For Nutten, 2021. Decorating Manhattan’s Battery Maritime Building—where ferries depart to Governor’s Island, a former military outpost transformed into a sprawling urban retreat—the mural depicts Lord Cornbury (the Governor of New York and New Jersey during the French and Indian Wars) along with cargo ships and oil rigs painted in various plastic containers, clearly in reference to bottled model ships. Nautical flags spell out “Pagganuck,” the Lenni-Lenape word for the island, connecting the environmental abuses of global trade to empire expansion.
The artist’s museum exhibition slyly suggests the extent to which the mercantile logic of resource domination continues to define our relationship to the environment under capitalism. In fact, it goes so far as to reveal a pernicious sentimentality toward nature that’s embedded within museums—which are, after all, also a product of colonialism. Threaded throughout the show are historic scrimshaw and other period Americana, including several etchings on sperm whale teeth, faded to a warm sepia tone, that Riley has copied directly on plastic. In one, a woman leans on an anchor, a forlorn expression on her face; the object radiates a sense of homesickness and melancholy, which then extends into Riley’s modern reproduction, recharging a colonialist nostalgia.
Riley draws a direct line between the decadence of modern-day coastal cities to the European project of colonialism, situating the New York Harbor’s plastic waste within a greater history of exploiting the earth for material gain. He pillories, for example, the folly of transoceanic transport in an elegant mosaic depicting the Erika, a tanker that shed thousands of tons of oil onto France’s shores, made from shotgun shells collected from a beachside pheasant-shooting club. This consumerist critique is present throughout much of his work, especially his public murals, such as Not For Nutten, 2021. Decorating Manhattan’s Battery Maritime Building—where ferries depart to Governor’s Island, a former military outpost transformed into a sprawling urban retreat—the mural depicts Lord Cornbury (the Governor of New York and New Jersey during the French and Indian Wars) along with cargo ships and oil rigs painted in various plastic containers, clearly in reference to bottled model ships. Nautical flags spell out “Pagganuck,” the Lenni-Lenape word for the island, connecting the environmental abuses of global trade to empire expansion.
The artist’s museum exhibition slyly suggests the extent to which the mercantile logic of resource domination continues to define our relationship to the environment under capitalism. In fact, it goes so far as to reveal a pernicious sentimentality toward nature that’s embedded within museums—which are, after all, also a product of colonialism. Threaded throughout the show are historic scrimshaw and other period Americana, including several etchings on sperm whale teeth, faded to a warm sepia tone, that Riley has copied directly on plastic. In one, a woman leans on an anchor, a forlorn expression on her face; the object radiates a sense of homesickness and melancholy, which then extends into Riley’s modern reproduction, recharging a colonialist nostalgia.
Near its end, the exhibition merges with the Brooklyn Museum’s period rooms—staged displays that can be seen as representations of modest Euro-American households and, simultaneously, trophy halls of a burgeoning New World empire. Neither cynical nor condemnatory, Riley subtly layers his works into the domestic environment: Scrimshaw plastic complements pastoral landscape paintings. A nautical souvenir called a sailors’ valentine, here made from bottle caps and cigarette butts, is mounted above colonial furniture. And a massive chandelier hangs between the beams of an 18th-century Dutch farmhouse reconstructed within the galleries. The fixture is so beautifully constructed that at first it appears to be made of glass, rather than polyethylene terephthalate—the gem-like crystals are actually single-serving liquor bottles.
“DEATH TO THE LIVING, Long Live Trash” ends with a quiet, haunting note. After departing the farmhouse, it appears again in miniature: as a charming reproduction made by Albert Fehrenbacher in 1970 and modified by Riley. Peering closely through the vitrine, the scene is desecrated by tiny plastic bags stuck in the trees, flapping in an artificial wind. In this picturesque vision, this 20th-century idyll of settler-colonialism, it is these very foundations of colonial wealth that have caused the despoliation of the environment. In Riley’s work, the two are inextricably intertwined—the rape of the earth and the refinement of aesthetic sensibility—in a continuous cycle and recycle.
︎ IAAC Ninth Edition︎︎︎
“DEATH TO THE LIVING, Long Live Trash” ends with a quiet, haunting note. After departing the farmhouse, it appears again in miniature: as a charming reproduction made by Albert Fehrenbacher in 1970 and modified by Riley. Peering closely through the vitrine, the scene is desecrated by tiny plastic bags stuck in the trees, flapping in an artificial wind. In this picturesque vision, this 20th-century idyll of settler-colonialism, it is these very foundations of colonial wealth that have caused the despoliation of the environment. In Riley’s work, the two are inextricably intertwined—the rape of the earth and the refinement of aesthetic sensibility—in a continuous cycle and recycle.
︎ IAAC Ninth Edition︎︎︎