§. The abstract painter Agnes Martin died in 2004, at the age of ninety-two, and a new retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum affirms that the greatness of her work has only amplified in the years since. That’s something of a surprise: no setting would seem less congenial to the strict angles of Martin’s paintings than the curves of Frank Lloyd Wright’s creamy seashell. I also worried that the work’s repetitive formulas—grids and stripes, mostly gray or palely colored, often six feet square—would add aesthetic fatigue to the mild toll of a hike up the ramp. But the show’s challenges to contemplation and stamina turn out to intensify a deep, and deepening, sense of the artist’s singular powers. The climb becomes a sort of secular pilgrimage, on which you may feel your perceptual ability to register minute differences of tone and texture steadily refined, and your heart ambushed by rushes of emotion.
“The Islands” crowned the second act of Martin’s career. Nature is cruel. There is no getting round that. Some creatures inflict all manner of horrible torments on others in order to feed and reproduce, or even just to play. Many species across the animal kingdom are cannibals, eating members of their own species for sustenance or dominance. But there is one behaviour that is even more extreme than simple cannibalism.
It sounds like something Hannibal Lecter would come up with, rather than something evolution would favour. Some animals will, on occasion, eat parts of their own bodies. This weird behaviour is known as "autocannibalism". We asked our readers if they had ever heard about animals eating themselves. It is better to lose a limb than to lose your life "I don't think any animal would deliberately try to consume itself for sustenance.... kind of defeats the self-preservation part [of] desperate eating," says Selina Tick Konkin. This is true, and distressingly well-documented. However, none of these are cases of autocannibalism.