Domestication of the Sea

Humans = Masters of the sea?

The ocean, a realm of boundless mystery and life, has long been a canvas for human ambition. Our desire to contain, commodify, and dominate nature – including the sea and its creatures – reveals a worldview steeped in hubris and exploitation. This exhibit features artwork that reflects humanity's relentless domestication of the ocean. The exhibit consists of two parts, "Confinement" and "The Hunt", covering the two ways in which man extracts value from the ocean and its life.

Confinement acts as a tool to harvest fragments of the ocean for human use, forcibly displacing marine life to the surface world where their value, both visual and economical, are extracted. This section interrogates how confined sea creatures, encased in glass tanks or transparent enclosures, are transformed into curated spectacles.

The works in this subsection share a material commonality: the use of transparent mediums (glass or plastic), which both separate and connect the worlds of humans and marine life. These barriers are metaphors for the illusion of connection between humanity and marine ecosystems. By forcibly removing sea life from their habitats and framing them through these translucent interfaces, the artworks prompt critical reflections on humanity’s role in reducing the ocean to a resource for entertainment, aesthetics, and profit. Together, they expose the ethical, environmental, and existential consequences of this domestication through confinement.

At their core, the works in the hunting subsection represent its applications to the sea by harnessing, trapping, and exploiting through fishing. The exhibition offers contrasting approaches to demonstrate this: an abstract line drawing and a posed photograph. Both convey the human influence on the sea and its disruption of nature. The crowded illustration and somewhat empty-feeling photograph display the sullen emotions of the aquatic life presented in both pieces, a note to harm that inevitably comes from industrial fishing and whaling.

Confinement

Morston Constantine Ream, Still life with goldfish, oil on canvas, 111.8 x 129.5 cm, Johnson Museum of Art

The seemingly ordinary still life speaks volumes about the two fish circling around one another in the bowl at the center of the composition, emphasizing the terrestrial riches of the fruits in disharmony with the fish and the aquatic. The extravagant frame contributes to the feelings of confinement, as if the painting is stuck or trapped. Morston Constantine Ream, known for his oil paintings and commissioned in 1866 to paint a similar still life representing the indulgence of food but not consumption, encapsulates elements of land and sea that are likewise placed on display for aesthetic purposes. The goldfish on the right solemnly gazes upon itself in the reflection of the painting and towards the only source of sunlight from the window. Even the small insect savoring the honeydew mocks the trapped fish, free with flight.

Dwight’s lithograph Queer Fish satirizes the human gaze through a transparent barrier of glass that both separates and connects species. By paying entry fees, aquarium-goers gain access to observe displaced ocean life, transforming wild ecosystems into curated spectacles. Through playful exaggeration – the fish’s drooping mouth and wide, bulging eyes – Dwight subverts traditional power dynamics of observation, blurring the line between observer and observed. Who is truly on display?

Yet beneath the lithograph’s humor masks a darker truth. The ocean’s inhabitants are removed from their natural habitats and rendered queer – out of place – forced to perform as curiosities for human amusement and profit. The fish’s exaggeratedly downturned mouth and uncomprehending eyes suggest a message of disdain: we are as alien to sea creatures as they are to us. Dwight’s lithograph viewed through a contemporary lens calls for a recognition of shared sentience and mutual respect, urging us to reconsider the ethics of confining life for paid entertainment.

Mabel Dwight, Queer Fish, lithograph on ivory Rives paper, 1936, 26.7 x 32.4 cm, Johnson Museum of Art

Janus van den Eijnden, Hong Kong Fish Market, digital photograph, 2021. Available from: Janus van den Eijnden Photography Website, https://janusvandeneijnden.nl/portfolio-item/hong-kong-goldfish-market/ (accessed April 13, 2025).

Janus van den Eijnden’s photograph series Hong Kong Fish Market aestheticizes the grim reality of Hong Kong’s Goldfish Street, where marine life is packaged into disposable commodities.

The photograph captures the plastic bags arranged with a sterile symmetry, which echoes the orderly display of supermarket goods. In the wild, these fish would swim together, their vibrant scales merging into a fluid symphony of colors. Here, they are isolated into tiny plastic pods, reduced to eerie decoration. Like products on market shelves, the fish are marked with prices scrawled in black marker on their bags. Van den Eijnden’s photographs exemplifies a culture that prioritizes transactional convenience and capital over ethical responsibility in the portrayal of vibrant ocean life as commodities. In turning marine biodiversity into a commodity, the series inadvertently reveals domestication as an erasure of life, wildness, and dignity.

Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living features a preserved tiger shark corpse, suspended in a glass tank of formaldehyde, frozen in a moment of hunt. Commissioned for $8 million, the piece epitomizes what art critic Robert Hughes condemned as “cultural obscenity,” where the commodification of art reaches grotesque extremes. The exorbitant price tag mirrors the extractive valuation of nature under consumer capitalism, framing the shark not as a living entity but as a luxury commodity.

By exploiting marine life in the name of fame and fortune, Hirst’s work is a prime example of the brutal consequences of our anthropocentric worldview. The shark becomes an icon of both human arrogance and ecological neglect.

Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991. Photograph (2010) by Prudence Cuming Associates. Tate, United Kingdom Website, Research Publications. Available from: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/luke-white-damien-hirsts-shark-nature-capitalism-and-the-sublime-r1136828 (accessed April 13, 2025)

The Hunt

Nahum Tschacbasov’s bold line work creates a rigid dichotomy between the power of humans and the fragility of the sea. The face overpowers the piece, drawing the focus to the net of fish. Whether the face represents humans or some higher power, it dominates the piece compared to the simplistically portrayed land animals and waves around the net. The chaotic overload at the center of the composition where the face starts to blend in with the lines of the net, contributes to the invasion of humans in nature. Rather than a mutualistic connection, this piece evokes feelings of control, consumption, and domination.

Nahum Tschacbasov, The Fisherman, hard-ground etching and aquatint on BFK, 1947, 24.8 x 20 cm, Johnson Museum of Art.

Leslie Hamilton Wilson, A 70-foot fin whale, plate 15 from the series Whaling Fishing/The Blacksod Bay Whaling Co. Ltd., platinum print, 1911, 10.6 × 18.7 cm, Johnson Museum of Art.

Leslie Hamilton Wilson captures this moment as a part of a sequence of photographs, telling a story of two men gone whaling. The photograph from 1911 of a lifeless whale, belly up, is one of the 63 that the Blacksod Bay Whaling Co. killed that year. The two men triumphantly stand on top of it, as if claiming the whale as a trophy or their property. The photographer’s unique presentation in a book with gold-embossed letters on the cover and gold edges extends its meaning to a symbol of wealth and status: whaling for leisure with a custom photo album to document it. The juxtaposition of scale between the men and the whale both minimizes their importance and reinforces their power, showcasing strength hidden in small frames. The stance the men take above the whale presents a grotesque frame, with the oceanic giant toppled in an inversion of the natural order.

To give context to the Morston Constantine Ream's background and his artwork's main themes, this source provided information that aligned with the Still life with goldfish, contributing to the fish being confined and put on display for humans' visual pleasure, ignoring the natural environment the fish should live in.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Black & Red, 1970.

Debord’s concept of the “spectacle” directly applies to the chosen artworks. For example, Hirst’s shark is a natural entity turned into a visually arresting object of consumption. The life of the shark and its ecological role become secondary to the shock value it creates and the market value it generates. In each case of "confinement", transparent mediums like glass containers, plastic bags, and aquarium glass enforce a detached gaze, enabling viewers to consume marine life as passive images while obscuring ethical and ecological realities.

Feldman, Alaina Claire. The ocean after nature. New York : Independent Curators International, 2016.

Feldman's book is an accompanying publication of an exhibition that explores humanity's relationship with the ocean, in which themes such as the aestheticization of sea life and human domination of the sea are explored. This source provides additional examples of how human exploitation of sea life is explored through art. A notable example is "Leviathan" by Fiona Tan. It features large-scale projections of whales being impersonally sliced and butchered for their blubber, feeding into discourse about human-animal relations and their economic contexts (Sasha 2017).

Went, Arthur E. J. “Whaling from Ireland.” The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 98, no. 1 (1968): 31–36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25509669.

This source helped give context to Leslie Hamilton Wilson's photograph of the two men gone whaling with the Blacksod Bay Whaling Co. This company produced whale oil and helped put the photograph into perspective, knowing that 62 other whales were killed that same year by this company. This source supports our theme as it speaks to how humans so easily exploit the ocean.

Artworks:

Dwight, Mabel. Queer Fish. 1936, Lithograph on ivory Rives paper, 10 1/2 x 12 3/4 inches (26.7 x 32.4 cm). Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University. Available from: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art Online Collection, https://emuseum.cornell.edu/objects/29363/queer-fish (accessed April 13, 2025).

Hirst, Damien. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991. Photograph (2010) by Prudence Cuming Associates. Tate, United Kingdom Website, Research Publications. Available from: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/luke-white-damien-hirsts-shark-nature-capitalism-and-the-sublime-r1136828 (accessed April 13, 2025).

Van den Eijnden, Janus. Hong Kong Fish Market. 2021, Digital photograph. Available from: Janus van den Eijnden Photography Website, https://janusvandeneijnden.nl/portfolio-item/hong-kong-goldfish-market/ (accessed April 13, 2025).

Others:

Grbich, Sasha. “Countercurrents: The Ocean after Nature.” Artlink, April 11, 2017. https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4587/countercurrents--the-ocean-after-nature/

Page updated

Report abuse

Domestication of the Sea

Humans = Masters of the sea?

Confinement

The Hunt

Further Reading