Losing Time: Whaling Rendered in Contemporary Print, Clay, and Plastic

Black stamped whales appear in abundance against a white backdrop in Daniel Ranalli’s (b. 1946) 1405 Whales (1992). The print combines with actual bones to refer to an event of inconceivable loss: the largest known whale stranding that took place in Truro, Massachusetts in 1874. Ranalli’s medium replicates a practice from nineteenth-century whaling: in pelagic logbooks, similar inked figures recorded the deaths of whales at sea. This formal comparison helps Ranalli’s piece span space and time, as it refers to deep-sea factory ships as well as the shore whaling that killed 1405 pilot whales to make watch oil. Additionally, the piece refers to events up to 2019, as whale strandings continue with worrying frequency. Ranalli purposefully conflates historic and contemporary whale deaths to highlight the disturbing impact humans have on the sustainable survival of human and whalekind.

This paper argues that contemporary artists are reckoning with whaling’s legacy by using media that call attention to the trans-temporality of ongoing oceanic destruction. It examines the Ranalli's abundant stamps alongside Duke Riley's (b. 1972) plastic scrimshaw and Courtney Leonard’s (b. 1980) ceramic whale teeth. These artists each grapple with the viability of hope, resilience, and repair in the face of the environmental loss that cetaceans present. In so doing, it responds to previous scholarship in art history and ecocriticism to place whales at the center of a more-than-human ecology and chronology.