ANIMAL: A CURATORIAL APPROACH

(Spine title: Animal: A Curatorial Approach)

(Thesis format: Integrated Article)

by

Corinna Ghaznavi

Graduate Program in Visual Arts

Adapted Project Stream

A Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies

The University of Western Ontario

London, Ontario, Canada

c Corinna Ghaznavi 2011 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et Canada Archives Canada

Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition

395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-89511-5

Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-89511-5

NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distrbute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats.

The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission.

In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these.

While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. Canada ii

THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO SCHOOL OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES

CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION

Supervisor Examiners

Dr. Bridget Elliott Mr. Patrick Mahon

Supervisory Committee Dr. Anthony Purdy

Mr. David Merritt Dr. Joshua Schuster

Dr. Anthony Purdy Mr. Robert Enright

The thesis by

Corinna Ghaznavi

entitled:

Animal: A Curatorial Approach

is accepted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Date.

Chair of the Thesis Examination Board iii

Abstract

Animal: A Curatorial Approach does not illustrate curatorial practice but presents it by thinking with objects, understanding discourse as an act, the text as an activity of production, and writing as a practice. Each component is an entity (each artwork, each essay in the catalogue, each juxtaposition of artist and theorist) that stands alongside my own thinking around the question of the animal. I enact 'the practice of playing the text,' as outlined by Roland Barthes, but the play is quite serious and strives to exemplify how rigorous thinking manifests itself in a practice. The dissertation consists of three equal and entirely curated components: the exhibition, Animal, the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, and three essays that approach the question of the animal through the selection and juxtaposition of artists' work and a number of theoretical, philosophical, and ethology-based writings. The exhibition includes ten artists, sculpture, installation, video, and photography, and investigates real and imagined relations between the human animal, the animal, and the natural world. It addresses ideas of natural history, museum display, the human endeavour to understand the natural world, our relation to animals, and the lived reality of animals in relation to us, the ecology, and the threat of extinction. The catalogue has three written components: my curatorial text contextualizing the exhibition, a theoretical text by artist, curator and doctoral candidate Sally McKay, and a short story by novelist Alissa York. The three essays focus on captivity and the zoo, the question of the animal in continental theory, and animism. The artists presented in conjunction with these ideas are Douglas Gordon, Frank Noelker, John McEwen, FASTWURMS and Kenn Bass.

Keywords

Art History, Visual Arts, Curatorial Practice, Contemporary Art, Critical Animal Studies, Ecocriticism iv

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the department of Visual Arts at the University of Western Ontario for their support of my research and doctoral work. Particularly my supervisor, Bridget Elliott, and my supervisory committee, David Merrit and Anthony Purdy. As well, John Hatch, Patrick Mahon, Susan Schuppli, Paul Dias, Marlene Jones and Sandy Leboldus. I would also like to thank Museum London for their support of the exhibition, catalogue, and tour of the exhibition, especially Melanie Townsend and Brian Meehan. Thanks goes to all the artists in the exhibition: Lois Andison, Kenn Bass, Dagmar Dahle, Tom Dean, Rebecca Diederichs, Arnaud Maggs, John McEwen, Lyndal Osborne, Su Rynard and An Whitlock, the writers, Sally McKay and Alissa York, and art dealers Christopher Cutts, Olga Korper and Paul Petro, and Kent Archer at the University Galleries in Saskatoon, Peter Dykhuis at the Dalhousie Art Gallery, and Linda Jansma at the Robert McLaughlin Art Gallery in Oshawa. I would also like to thank the artists Kenn Bass, John McEwen and FASTWURMS for their time and interest. Finally thanks to those many who have supported me in the past few years and contributed variously to the success of the project: Antje and Yaqoob Ghaznavi, Michelle Gay, Johan Prins, Nigel Rothfels, Andres Villar, and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay. V

Table of Contents

Certificate of Examination ii

Abstract iii

Acknowledgments iv

Table of Contents v

List of Plates vi

Preface viii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1. Captive Animals and Human Control: Zoo in the Work of Frank Noelker and Douglas Gordon 9

Chapter 2. Looking Back: John McEwen and the Force of the Encounter 64

Chapter 3. Animal: Animism and Entanglement in the Work of FASTWURMS and Kenn Bass 120

Bibliography 173

Curriculum Vitae 184 vi

List of Plates

Frank Noelker, Gorilla, Erie, 2002 25

Frank Noelker, Gorilla, Toledo, 1998 26

Frank Noelker, Gorilla, Texas, 1998 28

Frank Noelker, Hippopotamus, Washington D.C., 1997 30

Frank Noelker, Seal, Germany, 2000 33

Frank Noelker, Bear, Paris, 1998 34

Frank Noelker, Deer, New York, 1998 35.

Frank Noelker, Giraffe, New York, 1997 36

Frank Noelker, Giraffe, Washington D.C., 1997 37

Douglas Gordon, Play Dead Real Time, 2003 40

Douglas Gordon, 10ms-l, 1994 51

Douglas Gordon, B Movie, 1995 52

Frank Noelker, Sue Ellen, 2002 57

Frank Noelker, Yoko, 2002 58

John McEwen, Marconi, 1978 72

John McEwen, The Distinctive Line, 1980 77

John McEwen, Western Channel, 1980 80

John McEwen, Western Channel, 1980, detail 80

John McEwen, Still Life and Blind, 1988/89 84 vii

John McEwen, Buck, 1978/82 87

John McEwen, Babylon, 1991-98, detail 90

John McEwen, Babylon, 1991-98, detail 91

John McEwen, Jealousy/Jalousie, 1992 99

John McEwen, Star Dust and Time, 2008 104

John McEwen, Ragged Ass Bear, 2008 107

John McEwen, Internal Logic, 2009, installation view 111

FASTWURMS, Woodpecker Column and Snom 'n, 1997 120

FASTWURMS, Turtle Pond, 1997 123

FASTWURMS, Giant Beaver Charm, 1999/2000 129

FASTWURMS, Spoticus and Taalon, 2004 130

FASTWURMS, Dr. Dre, 2004 131

FASTWURMS, Gusset Nation, 2004, installation view 134

FASTWURMS, Pussy Necropolis, 2004, video stills 135

FASTWURMS, Red of Tooth and Kaw, 2001, video still 149

Kenn Bass, Ear to the Ground, 2001, video still 157

Kenn Bass, Fugue, 2004, video still 159

Kenn Bass, Hypnagogue, 2010, video still 163

Kenn Bass, Daylight Will Not Be Noticed, 2011, video still 169

FASTWURMS, Telepathacats, 2003, video still 172 Preface: Curatorial Practice: A Discursive Act

How might art take measure of the multiple mutinies and upheavals that currently beset global society? The challenges for concise and strong artistic interventions to articulate the current ruptures could also be seen as an opportunity to act critically and imaginatively - with no guarantees, no illusions, and without sentimentality. Okwui Enwezor (Enwezor 2006, 13)

Animal: A Curatorial Approach does not illustrate curatorial practice but presents

it by thinking with objects, understanding discourse as an act, the text as an activity of

production, and writing as a practice. Each component is an entity (each artwork, each

essay in the catalogue, each juxtaposition of artist and theorist) that stands alongside my

own thinking around the question of the animal. I enact 'the practice of playing the text,' as outlined by Roland Barthes, but the play is quite serious and strives to exemplify how

rigorous thinking manifests itself in a practice.

There are as many definitions of curatorial practice as there are curators. A cursory glance at conference agendas or collected essays on curating, shows that the role of the curator is defined in ways as divergent as care-taker, organizer, producer, mediator, and catalyst, to name just a few. The most basic premise of curating can be reduced to the fact that we work with artworks, space, and audience. An artwork, understood as an autonomous entity, is put into relation with others in certain spatial configurations

(literally and metaphorically), and then presented in a public site where an active audience interacts with the works and ideas set forth by them. I understand curating as a practice based on thinking with objects where, in the words of Okwui Enwezor, curating is a "particular way of aligning thought and vision through the separation and ix

juxtaposition of a number of models within the domain of artistic production and public reception" (Enwezor 2003, 76).

Thought occurs alongside the artworks; rather than reducing the work to a theoretical construct, curating establishes a premise within which a dialogue between artworks, and between works and audience, takes place. My curatorial process involves developing an idea and then formulating it visually, it is not a hierarchical process in terms of what comes first. An idea can be triggered by observation (the artwork) or by speculation (the theory). The process of selection is based on the visceral and the intellectual: how an artwork feels when I experience it, how it works in a space, in relation to me or to other objects, and what ideas it generates. Hence the word practice, which entails doing and thinking while working with physical objects or images, and the thinking that these objects/images initiate. The final outcome of the process, the exhibition itself, produces ideas that might not have been obvious during the conceptualization because of how the works come to function together in the space, and what the audience brings to them. Barbara Fischer describes this as the "vicissitudes of meaning that can be produced in the relation between work and exhibition, and exhibition and context" (Fischer 1996, 17 If). Sharon Brooks, introducing the idea of exhibition as open structure, suggests that "by engaging the singularity and irreducibility of works, and exploring their affinities with other works, other times and other subjects, something else may be produced, something that neither curator or the spectator can actually control"

(Brooks 1996, 100). Lest this sound like a vague touchy-feely endeavour, I would like to apply Roland

Barthes' idea of'text' to curating, where the text is structured but decentered, without closure, in fact, plural. For Barthes, the text does not define the work or explain what it means, but is understood as a practice made up of an activity of associations, contiguities and cross-references (Barthes 1984, 171). The text, the curatorial project, seeks to uncover the layers of meaning that a work produces in relation to other works or to the reader/viewer. The role of the curator is to maintain and respect the integrity of the artwork ('the singularity and irreducibility of works') while creating a space for that work to open itself up to further considerations when set in relation with others. Jean-Francois

Chevrier calls the curator a catalyst (rather than a manipulator) who sparks a process in others. He claims that the exhibition can be understood as a collage of these processes: where the space is not a universal one, but a space of collage-montage, containing situations elaborated in a relation of participation with the curator (Chevrier 1997, 643).

Remarking on the exhibition Animal, John McEwen observed that three important aspects were conjoined: a space for (curatorial) thinking, an equal space for the integrity of the artwork, and a third space wherein the artworks opened up (McEwen May 1,

2011). Enwezor states that this form of curating, that seeks to enact a multidisciplinary direction through which artistic practices and processes come most alive, belongs to the discursive rather than the museological domain. Enwezor continues by proposing that the exhibition is a diagnostic toolbox that actively stages the relationships, conjunctions, and disconjunctions between different realities: between artists, institutions, disciplines, genres, generations, processes, forms, media, and activities (Enwezor 2002, 54). I've xi

chosen to apply this approach to the dissertation as a whole where curatorial practices can be understood, in Enwezor's words, as multilateral networks of knowledge production that place themselves strategically at the intersection of disciplines, and systematically integrate themselves into mobile sites of discourse (Enwezor 2003, 73).

The dissertation consists of three equal and entirely curated components: the exhibition, Animal, the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, and three essays that approach the question of the animal through the selection and juxtaposition of artists' work and a number of theoretical, philosophical, and ethology-based writings. The exhibition includes ten artists, sculpture, installation, video, and photography, and investigates real and imagined relations between the human animal, the animal, and the natural world. It addresses ideas of natural history, museum display, the human endeavour to understand the natural world, our relation to animals, and the lived reality of animals in relation to us, the ecology, and the threat of extinction. An unexpected element, the idea of a series, became evident once the exhibition was installed: Arnaud

Maggs' photographs of each page of Werner's Nomenclature, the repeated forms of slip cast ceramics piled onto Dagmar Dahle's packing crates, the carefully collected and classified sea shells in Lyndal Osborne's Darwin and the Arc of Time, the roughly one hundred crows' heads that made up An Whitlock's installation Crow(d); the repetition of stars, and the matrix from which they had been stamped in John McEwen's Shunt (x), the doubling of images in Rebecca Diederichs' Carousel, the three dogs that made up Tom

Dean's Bitch Pack, the series of eyes photographed for Look Me in The Eye by Lois

Andison, and the multitude of Queen Anne's lace that made up Camouflage /; the xii

repetition of images and text in Kenn Bass's video Fugue, and finally, the seemingly endless series of SUVs that arrived at the garbage dump in Su Rynard's Bear. This unintentional surfacing of 'series' underscores Barthes' definition of the text as a network that extends itself as a result of a combinatory systematic (which he compares to a biological conception of a living being) (Barthes 1984, 172). This idea is made manifest in the project as a whole where a series of repeated attempts are made at approaching the idea of animal from different viewpoints. The exhibition does this with art objects chosen for their pertinence to the question, and their ability to come into dialogue with one another. The catalogue offers three written approaches to the animal: my text, which is a conventional curatorial essay, a short story by novelist Alissa York, in whose work animals continually appear, either obliquely, or foregrounded, as within her latest novel,

Fauna-, and an essay by artist, curator and doctoral candidate Sally McKay who is considering the animal by means of neuroscience and aesthetics. If curatorial practice is understood as a 'multilateral network of knowledge production' it seems important to include diverse, even opposing, viewpoints to investigate the central idea of animal. The inclusion of artist, novelist, and artist-curator-scholar, then works towards a form of curation where, as Barthes outlines, the field of the text is structured (around the animal) but decentered and plural. This approach is finally continued in the three essays that make up the written component of the dissertation.

Sarat Maharaj has written that an artwork might not be known or defined in advance. That, in the process of creation [and viewing] each time a new definition and new rules and systems are required to make sense of it. Here there is a close affinity between curatorial practice and the artwork, and a divergence from what Maharaj considers conventional knowledge systems where disciplinary boundaries, methods and procedures are used to gravitate around known and clearly demarcated objects of study

(Maharaj 2002, 78). Barthes' notion of the death of the author, and Foucault's similar speculations on the diminished role of the authoritative voice, both foreground text/discourse as a form of both acknowledging this 'death,' and a way to think through it in constructive and empowering ways. Foucault maintains that discourse is an act (rather than a product or a thing) that makes possible a number of analogies and differences or divergences (Foucault 1984, 114f), and Barthes that the text can be understood as a form of play, activity, production and practice (Barthes 1984, 173). Both challenge the validity of a central argument, emphasizing as they do the plurality of voices and practices that together produce (contingent) meaning. Both also point to the importance of practice:

Foucault by stating that ecriture, the fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing, are dominated by practice (Foucault 1984, 101), and Barthes by simply saying that the theory of the text is a practice of writing (Barthes 1984, 174). The exhibition,

Animal, could have included ten very different artists which would have resulted in both an exhibition about animal, and a radically different, albeit it equally relevant collection of works around the theme. A curatorial concept is at once informed and contingent; take one artist out of the structure and everything can change. Hence, each project is a proposition that attempts to consider specific ideas from a particular, and informed, point of view that is nonetheless open. My decision to approach the written component from three very different angles is an attempt at nearing the idea of the animal from three xiv

equally important considerations that demonstrate the breadth, and potentialities, of

curatorial practice where each different configuration can offer different insights. If a

curated exhibition is the result of thinking with objects, then the curatorial text is the

result of thinking with writing. The practice of writing an interpretive text can be read as

a way to tell a story. Terry Threadgold has pointed out that in a postmodern context

theories are stories, stories that can be rewritten, and hence stories are also theories. One

no longer analyses texts, one "rewrites them, one does not have an objective

metalanguage, one does not use a theory, one performs one's critique. Critique is itself a

poiesis, a making" (Threadgold 1997, 1).

Aligning thinking with seeing is integral to curatorial practice. In an exhibition

thinking stems from the artist, curator and viewer; in a curatorial text, the thinking

extends to include, in this case, historians, art critics, philosophers and ethnographers. If

we take, as equally relevant, art production, writing, thinking, observing, then the act of

bringing them together should have the potential to open up different ways of considering

the animal question, one that is not reduced to a single or discipline-based method of

exploring the question. Rob Mitchell has stated that the role of the art critic is to forge connections that ought to be there, or to forge different connections. Suggesting that we have to valorize rather than objectify artworks, he claims that while one should illuminate what is there, it is crucial to also illuminate what is not, and to thus allow other things to come into being (Mitchell October 28, 2010). Curatorial writing separates and juxtaposes a number of models within the domains of artistic production, as Enwezor claims curatorial practices do. It places ideas and artworks in relation to one another in order to follow the dialogue that opens up between them, and through this, forges connections that

extend beyond the initial works themselves.

If we take seriously the political dimension of Jacques Derrida's work, and claim

that his approach has the potential to push past the constraints placed upon us and change

both our thinking and behaviour, then bringing his work into dialogue with sculptor John

McEwen's should forge new connections, where art's relevance for discourse, and

philosophy's for practice, should become apparent. My intention here is not to use one

approach to interpret the other, but rather, to bring two modes of working together in

order to broaden the scope of considerations. Enwezor has written that art does not stay

'above politics' (an idea that he considers 'perversely conservative'), and that to think so

is to misunderstand the nature of the critical energy that drives the conditions of artistic

production, dissemination, and reception across a multiplicity of institutional and non-

institutional frameworks today (Enwezor 2002, 53). When I bring cognitive ethologist

Marc Bekhoff into dialogue with British philosopher Mary Midgley and the Canadian artist duo FASTWURMS I work towards breaking down discipline-based barriers on the one hand, and move towards thinking-in-relation, on the other. Like the exhibition, the curatorial text is a process that includes a proposition, an investigation, and a position that is informed but contingent. Bringing the very different approaches of Douglas Gordon and Frank Noelker into dialogue, against the background of nineteenth century collecting practices and current facts about performing animals in settings like Sea World, works towards a mode of storytelling that cuts across temporal and spatial barriers. The aim of thinking with objects, and thinking with writing, is to create a space that enables both xvi

viewer and reader participation, a space in which stories are told, stories that lead to theories that are contingent, and that invite further thinking. Introduction

A stuffed goat is special in the way that a stuffed goat is special. Robert Rauschenberg (Kotz 1990, 90).

Over the past fifteen years the animal has been given an increasingly central

position within research in areas that range from ethology to continental theory. The

proliferation of conferences, art exhibitions, and special edition journals focusing on the

topic of the animal reflects the urgency of the issue and its relevance to all disciplines

including geography, environmental studies, cultural studies, ethology, philosophy, and

the arts. The several 'posts' (postmodernism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, and

posthumanism) have paved the way for considering the animal as the last 'other,' where

this other is different in degree rather than in kind. Posthumanism particularly stresses the

imperfectibility and disunity of the human state, and emphasizes its different identities

and multiple perspectives, where context, heterogeneity and contingency become visible.

Posthumanism critiques human nature as a universal state where humans set themselves

against or above 'nature,' and human knowledge as the defining aspect of the world.

Instead, it suggests that the human animal is one of many natural species different from

the human animal in degrees albeit potentially the most radically other we have

considered in the context of philosophy: the animal includes mammals but also fish, amphibians, reptiles and birds. While these animals are more or less familiar and in varying degrees forms of life that we can sympathize with, insects pose some difficulty, and living beings like live tissue and minute organisms test the limits of our thinking around the other. It is at this point, when we come face to face with the radically other, 2

that the question of ethics, understood as our responsibility towards all living things, comes into play.

The underlining concern in all three of the following essays is informed by ethics which Jacques Derrida defines as 'our responsibility and obligation to the living in general' (Derrida 2002, 395); an ethics that requires us to 'confront our exposure to a permanent condition in which there is no way to settle our attitude' (Wolfe 2008, 16).

This inability to 'settle our attitude' is due to the ongoing dilemma of where to draw the line. We can feel for an elephant but what if a tiger is stalking us with the intent to kill, and how is it even possible to relate to a mosquito? Hence, Derrida questions whether justice (real ethical living) is even possible, and suggests instead that the best way to live ethically is to fulfill our obligation to think through each issue as thoroughly and with as much integrity as we can.

Each of the three chapters looks at the work of one or more contemporary artists and relates it to questions concerning the animal: the history of captivity, zoos, natural history, philosophy, ethics, animism and ethology. My interest is less in exploring what artists who deal with animals are doing than to take works where animals are present and investigate them within the framework of a larger animal discourse. Art production can be understood as a wholly cultural activity, but in alignment with philosopher Mary

Midgley I would like to argue that nature and culture do not stand in opposition, but rather, that culture is continuous with, and growing out of (human) nature. Culture is natural to the human, and serves our innate needs. We need it, and create it; it is appropriate to our way of life and how we make sense of the world (Midgley 1978, 289). 3

Understood this way, art practice is engaged in a social and cultural practice that

investigates, critiques, examines, responds to and challenges existing paradigms. Except

for the work of Frank Noelker, none of the artists I have chosen to discuss are overtly

tackling the question of the animal. Douglas Gordon has created a large body of work,

much of which explores the state of existence in the world. His work has focused largely

on the human and dynamics of power, perception, and embodiment. John McEwen's

animal vehicle is used to explore being in a world that is at once informed by and

independent of us. The importance of embodiment and living is given material weight in

installations that are equally a result of thinking and making. The entanglement of nature

and culture are also apparent in the works of FASTWURMS whose lives are informed by

an animist approach and whose art includes an amassing of objects culled from the

studio, cultural debris and surplus commodities. Their refusal to distinguish between

'natural' and 'cultural' objects, 'high' and 'low' art, the made, the found, and the appropriated, shows their commitment to demonstrating equal regard for all things. By aligning animal ability (echolocation) with human ability (telegraph and radio technologies), Kenn Bass uses cultural frameworks to explore the affinities and differences of human and non-human animals, and consider how each navigates and makes sense of the world. By bringing together natural phenomena like the weather with human technologies, he concentrates on intricate ecosystems that include insects and satellites as a way to bring animal behaviour into dialogue with human activities.

The pairing of FASTWURMS and Bass in one chapter, and Noelker and Gordon in another, is based less on the affinities of their approach than on the ability of their work 4

to trigger new insights when placed in relation. My intention is to locate the knowledge that can be produced when diverse approaches are juxtaposed around a central topic, and to foreground new perspectives that can be achieved through this. When viewed on their own, Noelker's zoo and chimpanzee portraits can be reduced to a single reading, one that focuses on the impoverished lives of animals in captivity, and the abuse imposed upon them in laboratories. When aligned with the work of Gordon, who is not primarily interested in the animal, Noelker's work takes on a different significance and enriches the discussion around captivity and coercion. It also begins to highlight the difficult issues of how to act in a society with a history of zoos, circuses and safaris, where animals are born and bred into captivity, and where there is no wilderness left into which they can be released.

The often deeply abstract thinking that stems from continental theory nonetheless makes the claim that it is concerned with real politics. Indebted to metaphysics and

Heidegger, Derrida often seems unable to actually make the leap beyond those philosophical debates into a realm where he can make a concrete argument, enmeshed as he is in linguistics and the history of Western philosophy. Yet Derrida has always claimed to be thoroughly occupied with the question of living in life itself. The juxtaposition of his writing with regard to the animal, and John McEwen's sculpture, which equally claims to be thinking about living in life itself, produces a space for reconsidering the interconnections between nature (who we are in a world not constructed entirely by or for us) and culture (how we articulate our place and position ourselves with regard to the world at large). Derrida, and other theorists, particularly Gilles Deleuze and 5

Felix Guattari, often use literature to explore ideas surrounding the animal. I propose to use the visual arts where language plays no role, or a lesser role, in order to come at the question of the animal from a new direction. If Cora Diamond's claim, that we have a rich discursive life outside of language, is correct (Diamond 2008, 58), than it seems apt to use art objects that first impact our bodies, and the space around them, before they spark a thinking process, to try to imagine what this discursive life might be like. By bringing the written work of Derrida into dialogue with the sculptural work of McEwen, new insights are produced because the limitations of both forms of production are lifted when considered alongside one other. The result is not so much conclusive as an opening up of a space for different modes of thinking and production.

Whereas Derrida and McEwen are constantly negotiating a space where nature and culture, the environment and technology overlap, FASTWURMS simply refuse the concept of one or the other. They do not blur the lines but override the line altogether, firmly placing rocks, plants, animals, technology, and commodity alongside one another.

Like Midgley, they believe in culture as an outgrowth of and supplement to nature and not as an alternative to or replacement for what ethologists call instinct. The separation between reaction and response has been widely challenged by philosophers and ethologists, and Midgley's claim is that both are inherent to living beings, one growing out of the other (Midgley 1978 319f). Barbara Smuts similarly points out that instinct is an action rooted in ancient knowledge of embodiment rather than a mindless, reflexive action (Smuts 1999, 111). FASTWURMS allow space for the specific abilities and ways of being of all living things; cats like to hunt and play, vultures like to eat dead meat. No 6

one is judged according to human legal or moral constructs. Noam Chomsky has written that if one wants to study an organism, one should study what it is good at (Fudge 2002,

138), and FASTWURMS highlight the predatorial skills of a tiger as much as its beauty.

Bass fulfills Chomsky's suggestion by attempting to do what he can do best, as a human having culture, in relation to the rest of the natural world. FASTWURMS break down existing objects in order to rebuild them in new configurations whereas Bass takes existing technologies (weather, telegraphs, video) in order to build on them. Whereas the artist duo place themselves 'on the ground' with all other living things, Bass juxtaposes human and animal cultures as a way to draw parallels between different modes of being within a shared environment.

Taken together, the three chapters are intended to align art, art production, history, poststructuralist critique, philosophy and cognitive ethology in new ways. They place particular artworks in relation to text, philosophy, and science, in ways not necessarily intended by the artists, in order to bring specific art production into discourse with other disciplines. Chapter one offers a postcolonial critique that outlines the historical evolution of captivity and laboratory experiments and discusses the ongoing need for re-evaluating current practices of captivity and laboratory experiments. Chapter two investigates the practical and political dimensions of philosophy and art, ultimately suggesting that these have the potential to be empowering and real socio-political practices. The final chapter places art, science and philosophy into relation with one another in order to challenge the traditional separation between disciplines and suggest that true insight, and subsequent change can be wrought only through collaboration. As Marc Bekhoff relates, it took 7

several attempts for him to find a graduate school where he could watch and record animals without having to kill them (Bekhoff 2000, 23). His ongoing experience in the field has driven him to view collaboration with philosophers as a critical next step in considering the behaviour of animals. Likewise, Mary Midgley has been compelled to explore the ideas of ethologists and the implications of neo-Darwinists like Richard

Dawkins from a philosophical standpoint.

By bringing many, and diverse voices into the discussion, my aim is to produce new knowledge on the question of the animal. Gordon's Play Dead, Real Time breaks open the didactic focus of Noelker's work and moves the discussion into a broader, and more complex area that reflects some of the realities we face today. McEwen's work offers one tangible way of imagining what Derrida's concept of an abyssal rupture and limitrophy might look like. And Midgley and J.M. Coetzee's writings take on a concrete dimension when considered alongside the work of FASTWURMS and Kenn Bass. Yrjo

Haila has written that every particular animal perceives its environment through specific sense organs different from those of other animals. That every animal is individual with a unique sequence of events that makes up its life. He has emphasized positionality over subjectivity, meaning that how every animal 'bounds' itself vis-a-vis its environment is of crucial importance, and that an ensuing boundary results in a continuous formation through the interaction of organism and environment (Haila 1998, 219). If we consider the human animal in this light, each perceiving her particular environment, each with a unique life experience, each an individual that finds specific ways to relate from her place in the world, than we have a collection of specialists who each excel in their own field. 8

But this field is always a limited one and if we want to gain insight, to survive, then, following Darwin, cooperation and diversity is the strongest tool we have.

My method is process-based, and my approach could be defined as a 'procedurist' one. By selecting two or more writers or works and positioning them within the critical animal studies debate, I investigate whether analogies can be made between their different processes, and if placing their different tangents in relation to one another, can be a way of knowing something new. The essays are structured within a curatorial framework where works are placed together in new configurations as a way to see things in new and different ways. Art does not exist in a void but is an active response to life, in all its cultural, political, social, and environmental implications. By focusing on specific artworks my aim is to broaden the discourse around critical animal studies by analyzing the unique contributions that artists make by working visually. My choices highlight how practice can be understood as a rigorously intellectual activity, one that adds to and broadens discourse. My position, finally, is reflected in the choices that I make, and the interpretations that I bring to the works. The question of the animal is being formulated in rich and diverse ways in all disciplines; the proliferation of work around the animal demonstrates the urgency around the subject. And artists are in a unique position to contribute to the discussion, rooted as they are in an unconventional way of making sense of the world. 9

1. Captive Animals. Human Control: Zoo in the Work of Frank Noelker and Douglas Gordon

The zoo constitutes a gallery of images constructed by man. The fact that he is able to arrange around him living creatures from all parts of the world, to make decisions with regard to the quality and conditions of their lives and to give shape to the world for them in terms of his imaginations and desire is, in the end, an expression of power (Mullan and Marvin 1987, 160).

The Menagerie and the Carnival

Animals have been captured and kept by humans throughout recorded history. In ancient Egypt, Ur and China menageries were owned by royalty and the wealthy; collecting expeditions returned to Egypt from Africa with inventories that included perfume, ebony, ivory, gold, spices, aromatic trees and wild animals. Between 1100 and

1000 BC similar inventories can be found in China, and in the thirteenth century Marco

Polo reports of large Chinese menageries and parks (Mullan and Marvin 1987, 9If). In

The History of Animals Aristotle writes about performing animals, and animals kept for education, and large animal reserves and sanctuaries were held in the Middle East, where falconry originated. The Romans kept animals for gladiatorial games and triumphal processions, while Charlemagne, in 797, Fredrick II, King of 2 Sicilies in 1235, and

Henry III of England in 1251 all owned menageries. While interest declined in Europe during the Middle Ages, it was renewed in the Renaissance when trade introduced exotic animals to private collectors and traveling showmen presented them to the public.

Eighteenth-century menageries were owned by affluent citizens and merchants, and demonstrated a growing interest in natural history (Mullan and Marvin 1987, 93ff). In the nineteenth century, under the guise of scientific inquiry, animals were organized into 10

zoos where they were classified, studied, and displayed to the public.

The motivation for collecting animals is varied, although human control reigned supreme in almost every venture. Commanding large, wild, or exotic animals was a sign of prestige and power for rulers and the wealthy; their collections were intended to awe visitors, and were used in processions to demonstrate their power over all living things. A good example is the menagerie in Versailles built by Louis XIV, which is often considered the first 'zoological garden' because all the animals were in one place. The king's menagerie was designed for optimal viewing: a structure with terraces was in the centre from which seven sections of cages radiated out. The kings' omnipotent position led Foucault to speculate that Jeremy Bentham's 1787 proposal for a Panopticon prison was inspired by Louis XIV's menagerie at Versailles (Mullan and Marvin 1987, 42f).

Animals were also kept as pets, for companionship as well as amusement, and figured significantly in some religious communities. In ancient Egypt we find the earliest examples of sacred menageries where animals were associated with worship; it is possible that ancient Greece, Babylonia and other ancient civilizations of the near east also kept sacred menageries. As late as 1859 there are reports of a Buddhist monastery in

Burma with acclimatization gardens, large aviaries, and enclosures for sixty species of mammals; another report from Thailand states that "pagodas are nothing but a refuge for animals" (Mullan and Marvin 1987, 90f). Animals were domesticated and used for food as well as kept in large reserves for purposes of hunting, a practice we find in early

Middle Eastern cultures that still exists today in many parts of the world. Animals were also used for entertainment, were trained and traveled to perform for the public. The 11

culture of the traveling showman developed into that of the circus, where performing animals were juxtaposed with humans to demonstrate the skills of both. The ability of the lion who jumped through flaming hoops was coupled with the ability of a trainer working in close proximity to wild animals; the performing elephant could be compared to the performing human acrobat, the monkey to the clown, and the strangeness of the exotic animal to that of dwarves, bearded ladies or Siamese twins.

The similar treatment that exotic humans and animal others endured was not new.

Nigel Rothfels traces this tradition in Europe back to the Romans. From the fifteenth century onwards, explorers like Columbus, Cartier, Champlain and James Cooke all returned to Europe with Native Americans, Inuit, and islanders from the South Seas

(Rothfels 2002, 87). Cardinal Hippolytus Medici (1511-35) had a large collection of animals and 'peoples' that included Moors, Tartars, Indians, Turks and Africans (Mullan and Marvin 1987, 93ff). By the mid sixteenth century, 'Indians' were the main attractions at theatres and processions in European cities (Rothfels 2002, 87). Outside of Europe,

Lord Montezuma of the Aztecs had a vast pleasure garden and aviary where his collection included animals as well as humans such as dwarves, albinos and hunchbacks

(Mullan and Marvin 1987, 32). The possession of these unusual humans and animals demonstrated power and means, as owning the rare, exotic, and colourful, exhibited one's control over a microcosm that represented the entire living world. In early examples, these collections can be understood as living curiosity cabinets, with an emphasis on rarity and strangeness rather than classification or scientific inquiry.

In the eighteenth century, Swedish botanist Linnaeus established a rank-based 12

taxonomy that informed subsequent classification systems. In the following century, naturalists and scientists developed an interest in collections of living specimens that supposedly demonstrated ideas of evolution and natural history. The discipline of

European natural history, and a growing interest in Darwin's theories of evolution, established classifications that conceptually, physically, politically and culturally enslaved human and non-human animals alike. While building on an existing tradition of vaudeville and spectacle, this new direction secured a foundation of scientific inquiry and institutional authority that was more sinister than simply exploiting the unfortunate. It could be argued that traveling showmen catered to the greed of a public eager for thrills, a greed that Foucault addresses in Madness and Civilization when he describes the

Narrtuermer (Medieval city gates) in Germany where the insane were imprisoned and could be viewed by the public. Foucault reports that this custom did not cease with the erection of asylums but that, until the nineteenth century, institutions opened their doors to the public for a penny on Sundays where the mentally ill, poorly clothed and caged, were viewed in the same manner as the wild animals held in cages (Foucault 1988, 68).

The carnival has a long tradition in Europe, originally allowing a tightly controlled lowest class (including labourers and women) to invert order and question dominant conventions. Bawdy, raucous, and anti-authoritarian, the carnival represented the subversive and offered a moment of agency for the generally dispossessed. Laughter and excess masked a more serious pursuit of freedom from norms and oppression. In

Bakhtin's words, the grotesque body enabled a new body to emerge in another form: this

"unfinished and open body (dying, bringing forth, and being born) is not separated from 13

the world by clearly defined boundaries; it is blended with the world, with animals, with objects (my emphases) (Bakhtin 1984, 26f). Unlike the spectacle of the nineteenth century, the carnival, and later vaudeville, catered to a knowing public that, while exploiting the strange, and willing to jeer at manifestations of the other, was nonetheless initially motivated by the desire to step outside the confines of a dreary existence and enjoy the experience. In contrast, the emerging nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, eager for recognition and entry into a higher class, were willing to elevate themselves above others, becoming spectators rather than participants, thereby demonstrating their superiority.

Parallel developments in natural history cemented hierarchical thinking with regards to the Other. Classification established what was normal and what was not, and members of the carnival were reorganized into anthropological exhibits with the white ruling class at the top of the evolutionary chain.

The Zoological Garden

In 1793 the Jardin des Plantes in Paris incorporated the animals rescued from

Versailles into their park and created a zoological garden that was essentially the first

'zoo' in Europe. In 1824 in England, landowners, scientists and naturalists, with an interest in domestic breeding and taxonomy, sought to acquire, maintain, and display animals. The London Zoological Society established their collection in the Zoological

Garden at Regent's Park, where living species complemented their already established collections of preserved specimens and library of comparative anatomy (Rothfels, ed.

2002, 205). The animals in the collection were bought and gifted from sources as diverse 14

as the Tower of London menagerie, private collections, princes, and consuls. In 1827 the zoological garden was open to members and guests, in 1840 it was open to the general public on Sundays, and by 1857 it was open to the general public. The zoo, which initially consisted of animals kept in small cages, was, in Harriet Ritvo's words, 'a triumph of reason over profusion and the disorder of nature': animals were held within a human environment that offered the public an animated representation of the entire animal kingdom organized into taxonomic displays. The Zoological Garden at Regent's

Park presented British preeminence (Ritvo 1987, 1996, 46). The association of zoological collections with natural history institutions inculcated a civic pride that resulted in the rapid expansion of other such constructions in Europe, spreading to the United States by the end of the nineteenth century (Mullan and Marvin 1987 11 Off). In quick succession, zoos were opened in Dublin (1833), Manchester (1836), Amsterdam (1839), Berlin

(1844), Rotterdam (1857), Frankfurt (1858), and Budapest (1866). European colonialism exported British style zoos to Melbourne (1872) and Calcutta (1876) and, in America, the first zoological society was established in Philadelphia in 1874, which was quickly followed by similar ventures in New York (1861) and Washington (1889) (Kisling 2001,

875f)).

The zoo in Regent's Park kept single specimens of large animals in small cages.

The bars underlined both their ferociousness and the human capacity to overpower such wild beasts. In the early years of the zoo, the big cats at Regent's Park had an average life span of about two years, which mean that one of them died each month (Ritvo 1996, 47).

A favourite bourgeois social event was feeding the animals, when the carnivorous and 15

vicious nature of large wild animals could be most thrillingly experienced. When the visitor's interest in the animals waned, there was always the amusement park, garden teas and concerts to enjoy (Rothfels 2002, 205ff).

Keeping animals in small enclosures was the norm in Europe until Carl Hagenbeck introduced his Tierpark and revolutionized the way that animals were displayed, thus establishing the model that would prevail throughout the twentieth century. Hagenbeck's exotic animal dealership was the largest in Europe, and with it he built a legacy that included a zoo with moated exhibits in landscapes simulating nature, animals kept in herds in large enclosures, and animal training based on conditioning and sensitivity

(Reichenbach 1996, 60f). In addition, Hagenbeck owned a circus where both animals and

'exotic peoples and tribes' performed for the public. While his Tierpark and circus incorporated methods that were allegedly more humane than those of his contemporaries, it is important to remember that his was foremost a commercial enterprise specializing in the capture, trade, and exhibition of animals and people (Rothfels, ed. 2002, 209ff).

Animals and Anthropology

There was a great deal of slippage between zoo, taxonomic exhibit, and spectacle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each in its own way manifested a colonial position of dominance over other species and cultures. Hagenbeck's Tierpark and circus were an immediate success, forcing almost every zoo to eventually adopt his model of panoramas in moated displays that created the illusion of animals at liberty in their natural environment. The Tierpark also offered a circus, and regularly imported 16

large groups of exotic peoples for display and entertainment. His first imports of 'wild

men' occurred in 1874, and over the next sixty years Hagenbeck's company brought

people as diverse as Lapplanders, Nubians, Eskimos, Somalis, Indians, Kalmucks,

Cingalese, Patagonians and Hottentots to Europe and America to entertain the public

(Mullan and Marvin 1987, 87). Ethnographic displays in Europe fulfilled the dual

mandate of entertainment and political agenda, as one can see in the case of the 1889

Exposition Universelle in Paris, which marked the 100th anniversary of the French

Revolution. Alongside technological achievements that included the now famous Eiffel

Tower, entire villages from French colonies were erected, complete with native people

demonstrating their crafts and cultural habits. The political message of French superiority

over the cultures of their colonies was underscored by new technologies, and softened by

the willingness of Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley to perform in the 'Wild West Show.'

Hence, the not-so-subtle colonial message could be delivered in the guise of

entertainment, a form of entertainment that blurred the boundaries between fact and

fiction, history and spectacle.

Hagenbeck was a large contributor to the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian

Exposition where he set up Hagenbeck's Performing Wild Animals, an arena seating five thousand, and an aquarium filled with flora and fauna from the Indian Ocean. His show was in close proximity to the numerous ethnic villages, complete with 'living specimens,' that were set up along the Midway Plaisance (Flint 1996, 107). The inclusion of non- white cultures in the World Fairs that proliferated throughout this period, as each city attempted to outdo the next, appears commonplace. While the colonial message appears 17

slightly more subtle in these, the St. Louis World Fair of 1904 was an exception with its

anthropological exhibit of live people demonstrating the chain of evolution. Although this

approach was not new, Hagenbeck himself preferred to distance himself from

'contemptible fairground swindles' and emphasized the seriousness and authenticity of

his exhibits which supposedly presented 'genuine' peoples who were not performing but

simply 'continuing to do what was natural to them.' His claim opened up the door for

anthropologists to support him and view his exhibits as scientific evidence (Rothfels

2002, 88ff). The ethnic groups gathered in St. Louis (all of whom would permanently live

on the fairgrounds during its duration) included 'wild men' such as pygmies, who were

considered examples of those permanently left behind in the chain of evolution. The

Anthropology Exhibit could be viewed alongside Hagenbeck's circus and animal exhibit,

where his collection appeared to roam at large in a natural panorama, emphasizing the

conceptual link between 'primitive' peoples and animals. The Anthropology Exhibit also

offered regular appearances by Geronimo, who had received special dispensation from

the War Department to travel to St. Louis (Bradford and Blume 1992, 4ff). W.J. McGee, a former employee of the Smithsonian and chairman of the Anthropology Department at the St. Louis Fair, was intent on separating the frivolity of sideshows from the seriousness of natural history. His ambitious plan for the St. Louis Fair was to display

"all the world's races" in an exhaustive scientific demonstration of all the stages of human evolution (Bradford and Blume 1992, 94f). He employed a number of men to help him with the acquisition of the required races, including Samuel Phillips Verner, who was given $1000 to bring pygmies from the Belgian Congo and return them to Africa after the 18

fair's conclusion. Although he failed to bring the eighteen required, and no women or children, Verner did arrive in St. Louis with eight African pygmies, including one Ota

Benga who, after accompanying Verner back to the Congo, decided to return to America with him in 1906 (Bradford and Blume 1992, 106f).

My emphasis on the human and non-human colonized subject is to demonstrate the closely intertwined politics of capture, display and coerced performance for the benefit of demonstrating Euro-American superiority and power. The subjects required to establish this dominance traditionally included both animals and people. It has often been suggested that the subjugation of animals can be traced back to Rene Descartes who claimed that an immortal soul was connected to consciousness, that both were given only to man by God, and, furthermore, that animals, governed by mechanistic principles, could not suffer pain and thus did not require the same consideration as man. While Descartes' thesis opened the way to practices such as vivisection, and provided an excuse to disregard animals, it is important to remember that this attitude was not limited to animals alone. People too who were culturally, physically, or mentally different, and deemed to have only the contingent possession of a soul, were closely equated with animals and thus treated like them. Postcolonial critique has dealt with this idea exhaustively, and I only mention it here because there is no way to address the power dynamics of animal exhibits or performances without also pointing to the subjugation of humans. Thus the outrage and abhorrence felt when viewing the subjugation of peoples should also be applied to animals. Why is it that displaying people, and placing some lower on the evolutionary chain than others, is instinctually considered wrong, while holding animals in modern 19

enclosures that resemble those from a hundred years ago, is still acceptable?

98% of Our DNA and Theirs

A photograph taken in 1910 in Hagenbeck's Tierpark shows two African boys with a small gorilla. Hagenbeck relates that a German lieutenant had adopted a young gorilla and kept him in good health while in Cameroon. Being attached to the animal, he brought him back to Germany accompanied by two young African boys who would, it was hoped, help the gorilla "overcome the difficulty of [the] lack of society." The gorilla seemingly adapted to the zoo well and would "sit and walk about on the lawn in company with his two play-fellows, apparently in the best of health and spirits" (Mullan and Marvin 1987,

86). It is unclear from this account what happened to the boys but they were surely on display as much as their 'play-fellow.'

Ota Benga, the pygmy Verner brought back to America from the Congo, also landed in a zoo, although this was some years earlier, and across the ocean in the Bronx.

Although they offer an excellent account of the life of Ota Benga, Bradford and Blume, in attempting to capture the personality of their subject, have surely taken some poetic license in recounting his perspective. While it is unlikely that Ota Benga would have returned to America had he been unwilling, once Benga was there, Vemer was faced with the difficult task of what to do with him. The character of Verner oscillates between that of a man with grand ambitions and that of someone sincerely interested in, and attached to, his African friends. Landing in New York, Verner was no doubt looking for both a suitable home for Benga as well as a spot that would win Verner recognition as an 20

ethnographer and expert on Africa. In 1906 the Director of the Museum of Natural

History in New York, Hermon C. Bumpus, agreed to take Ota Benga into his care. His charge was given a duck suit, a guest room, and allowed to roam the museum at will, but not leave it. Ota Benga was not put on display overtly, and only occasionally presented to particular visitors. An incident of 1897, when four of the six Eskimos deposited at the museum died, was too fresh to allow for another such mistake. The public, it should be noted, did not ask questions until the bones of the deceased were claimed, cleaned and mounted by the museum (Bradford and Blume 1992, 161ff). Ota Benga did not last long in the museum, and the authors of his life story allow their character an astute observation before he leaves: "The Museum reinforced that the muzungu swallowed other beings whole ... What they didn't digest they deposited in fairs and museums" (Bradford and

Blume 1992, 165).

The more suitable home that Verner found for his charge was the Bronx Zoological

Garden that had officially opened in 1899. Theodore Roosevelt, J.P. Morgan and

Madison Grant, all members of the exclusive Boone and Crockett Club, had worked for years towards its realization. The Club was in favour of big game hunting and conservation. In this case, the latter was understood as a conservation of big game for an elite group of hunters rather than for those trying to make a living from it, and who would destroy the U.S. wilderness (Grant had written a thesis outlining that Nordic races needed access to the wild in order to recharge their [superior] forces) (Bradford and Blume 1992,

175). The Boone and Crockett Club thus believed that the 'wild' had to be saved from

Natives and trappers so that it could be 'preserved' for white game hunters. As in the 21

museum, Ota Benga was initially allowed to roam freely around the zoo grounds. The

Director, William Temple Hornaday, had higher ambitions, however. Upon observing a

growing friendship between the pygmy and an orangutan, Dolong, he occasionally placed

the two together in the same cage. Dolong had been trained to ride a bicycle for the

amusement of the park visitors, and when Ota Benga shared his cage they performed for

large crowds who were drawn to the zoo for this very thing. Ota Benga had his own cage

too, where he was encouraged to weave baskets and shoot his bow and arrow. Bones

were strewn around the cage to heighten the idea of a savage on display. (It is worth

noting that pygmies had teeth filed to sharp points which had already garnered great

interest and horror in St. Louis). Hornaday erected a sign naming the African Pygmy, and

providing further information about his age, size, weight, and place of origin, just like all

the other species of animals in the zoo. Hornaday also mounted another sign outside of

the bull elephant Gunda's cage that stated, "whipping an elephant does not hurt him-, but

he thinks that it does." Gunda, like Dolong, could perform tricks. His was one that doubly

profited the zoo: when visitors dropped a penny into a box, Gunda would pull a cord, the

penny would drop, a bell would ring, and the elephant would receive a treat. But Gunda cheated. Also, Gunda went into musth when he became sexually mature and uncontrollable. The whipping was meant to remedy this, and when it didn't, despite

Hornaday's protestations, Carl Akeley from the Museum of Natural History was called in to shoot the elephant.

Looking at the picture of Hagenbeck's gorilla with his two 'play-fellows,' and reading about Ota Benga's display in a cage at the Bronx zoo instinctively elicits feelings 22

of extreme unease. No debate is required here to conclude that placing humans on display

is unacceptable, not to mention exhibiting them alongside and in the same manner as

animals. Why then is there less discomfort when one considers animals on display in a

zoo? And why are certain displays more palatable than others? On its webpage,

Disneyworld describes the Pangani Forest Exploration as follows:

One of the major highlights of the Pangani Forest Exploration Trail comes towards the end of the trail: an encounter with a troop of lowland gorillas. Did you know the lowland gorillas are vegetarians, non-violent and that 98% of their DNA is identical to human DNA?

This last fact at least should give us pause. It is striking that it is so blithely stated and does not push the human writer one step further to think about themselves on display. But the description continues thus:

View these magnificent creatures up close from one of the several viewing areas that overlook the multiple habitats for these endangered species. Be on the lookout for the massive silverback males and their families. As your visit to the Pagani Forest Exploration Trail draws to a close you will indeed have experienced a wondrous "place of enchantment Oittp:///disnevworld.disnev.go.com/parks/animal- kingdom/attractions/pagani-forest-exploration-trail/l.

As early as 1908 the German zoologist Alexander Sokolowsky published a small book entitled Beobachtungen uber die Psyche der Menschenaffen, in which he reported on the psychological, intellectual and emotional lives of gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans. He was particularly interested in the reasons for the demise of gorillas shortly after their arrival in Europe, and concluded that they "die of deep sadness, even melancholy, stemming from their tragic realization of their destiny" (Rothfels 2002, 1). In

1964 Ivan, better known as the Mall Gorilla, was a three old silverback gorilla captured in the Congo. All six of his companions died during the transport to the United States where 23

the owner of a Tacoma Mall took Ivan home with him. When, after two years, Ivan

became unmanageable, he was placed into a concrete cage with a viewing window in the

mall, where he remained in isolation for twenty-six years. When the mall closed in 1994,

Ivan, after much negotiation, was placed in the Atlanta Zoo (Malamud 1998, 100). Again,

a great deal of discomfort is felt when thinking of Ivan in the mall. The press celebrated

his relocation and slow socialization in the zoo, demonstrating that an enclosure open to a

human public is the nearest thing to a sanctuary that an animal such as Ivan can find.

From the animals that died, one a month, in the Zoological Garden at Regent's Park, to

Ota Benga in a cage, to Ivan in the mall, and finally to the magnificent silverback in

Disney's Animal Kingdom, the reality remains, as Mullan and Marvin claim at the

beginning of this chapter, that it is an appalling expression of power that man "is able to

arrange around him living creatures from all parts of the world, to make decisions with

regard to the quality and conditions of their lives and to give shape to the world for them

in terms of his imagination and desire" (Mullan and Marvin 1987, 160).

Hippopotamus. Washington. D.C.. 1997

The bars which pass and strike across his gaze have stunned his sight: the eyes have lost their hold. To him it seems there are a thousand bars, a thousand bars, and nothing else. No world.

And pacing out that mean, constricted ground, so quiet, supple, powerful his stride is like a ritual dance performed around the centre where his baffled will survives.

The silent shutter of his eye sometimes slides open to admit some thing outside; 24

an image runs through each extant limb and penetrates his heart, and dies. The Panther, Jardin des Plantes, Paris (Rilke, 1992, 61)

Between 1997 and 2002 Frank Noelker traveled throughout America and Europe to

photograph animals in zoos. The resulting fifty portraits are gathered in a series entitled

Captive Beauty, and address the great disparity between the power and beauty of the

animal itself, and the strict confines of an artificially constructed environment. Three

gorilla portraits are included, photographed in Erie in 2002, Toledo in 1998, and Texas in

1998. We know from Jane Goodall's foreword to the catalogue of works that Noelker

often spent many hours observing the animal and waiting for the precise moment to

photograph his subject. The resulting photographs are a carefully constructed depiction of

the artificiality of zoo enclosures, and the animals' ennui and isolation. The three gorilla

portraits are extremely different, and present the individual animals as subjects, while at

the same time, positioning them as anonymous specimens with no way out. In Erie

(figure 1), the gorilla stands on a large branch that juts up against a massive tree trunk; in the background we see a window-like construction that offers a view of trees and hills.

The animal's stance is proud and aloof: his stomach protrudes, one arm hangs, the other extends slightly into a fist, his head is held aloft and turned toward the photographer without looking at him. He has a deeply melancholic expression, one that suggests knowledge of his captivity and role as object on display. The fact that he refuses to engage, or perform, is countered by the additional fact that he cannot escape the lens of the camera or the eye of the voyeur. In his observations of gorillas, Sokolowsky wrote about 25

a total lack of engagement with their surroundings ... one notices immediately that the animals cannot get over the loss of their freedom ... They sit quietly in their den, without concerning themselves with anyone, and at the most toyed with a blade of straw. Their spirits became more and more gloomy; 1 could even observe how, in order not to be seen, they tried to keep the eyes of the viewer away by covering their own eyes with their hands (Rothfels 2002, 1).

Figure 1

There is no place for an animal to hide when placed in an enclosure whose only purpose is to exhibit the object within. In Toledo (figure 2), the gorilla appears to be smaller than the one in Erie, but this could be due to perspective, and Noelker's careful framing of his subjects in order to highlight the nature of their captivity must always be taken into account. In Erie, the branches and tree trunk are manufactured, but the artificial setting does not appear as stark as in Toledo, where the gorilla sits atop an artificial rock formation against a white wall. The stage set includes ropes that hang from the wall and extend slanted across the image; one frayed rope end hangs around the gorilla's shoulder.

The gorilla itself squats and looks straight at the camera, one hand held up, the other 26

dangling loosely alongside a knee.

Figure 2

This animal subject does not appear to resist as much as the other, but Noelker's strategy of emphasizing the bare surroundings makes the portrait appear nonetheless sad: there are no companions in sight (we know that gorillas live in families), and the stark confines of a cage are clearly visible. In Erie, the animal refused to look back; in Toledo, the gorilla returns the gaze of the camera but with no ability to engage. There is no curiosity, humour, play (the frayed ropes could be a result of both romping and frustration), or hope. It simply looks out, used by now, one assumes, to being the focus of the other's gaze. In his well known essay "Why Look At Animals?" John Berger states that it is impossible to have an encounter with an animal in the zoo:

The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animals' gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. They have 27

been immunized to encounter, because nothing can any more occupy a central place in their attention (Berger 1977, 1998: 161).

Prior to this passage, Berger claims that no natural action or reaction is possible for an

animal isolated from its environment because there is nothing to act upon (Berger 1977,

160), an opinion that is shared by many. An animal on display has no reason to look

back, it has no reason to seek an encounter because there can be no reciprocity between a

being with no recourse behind glass, bars, or fences, and one at liberty. A 1998 study

reveals that the average viewing time at the polar bear exhibit is between 52 and 93

seconds. That naturalism, realism, and exhibit size will hold the interest of the viewer for

a longer period of time (naturalism will get an extra 9.84 seconds, and exhibit size as

much as 45 seconds); an animal performing some activity, the novelty of the activity, the

energy expended by the animal during performance, and the entertainment provided by

the activity will also heighten visitor interest (Johnston 1998, 325ff). An animal that

spends all day on display, especially an animal as alert and intelligent as a gorilla, will

know that they cannot hold a visitor's attention for more than a couple of minutes. No

relationship, exchange, or encounter is possible with members of a public who are on the

other side of a cage, and who cannot sustain their attention for more than sixty seconds. It

is this knowledge that Noelker imbues his subject with in his photograph of the gorilla in

Toledo who simply sits and watches the crowd go by.

Noelker's last image of a gorilla (figure 3) shows his subject sitting in a large rock enclosure, less obviously a cage than the previous two, with a background of hills and a

beautiful sky that might just be a panorama. The large primate sits, arms resting on his knees, staring out. He is set back from the window, slightly camouflaged by the rocks, 28

caught in a moment of stoic resignation that again suggests that he understands his situation. The silverback in Texas, which Noelker photographs sitting squarely in the center of his exhibit, returns the gaze of the camera, thus stripping the voyeur of his power and leaving the viewer uncomfortably aware of our complicity in an invasive and aggressive act of looking. This discomfort can perhaps explain the numerous acts of aggression practiced by viewers on captive animals. Contemporary visitors to the zoo continue to feed animals unsuitable things, and in extreme cases seriously harm them physically.

Figure 3

As already noted, according to Berger, the zoo cannot but disappoint. What Noelker accomplishes with this last portrait is to demonstrate that even an animal in a large enclosure, seemingly at liberty in an environment that simulates nature well, has no recourse and hence will not engage. The gorilla is there for our viewing pleasure, but that 29

pleasure is impossible to achieve. Film and television have heightened human

expectations regarding what one might experience at the zoo with 'real' animals. Through

extensive editing, nature shows only present the dramatic highlights of animal life rather

than their routine behaviours (Kiley-Worthington 1990,130). Conditioned by media

representations, the viewer expects the animal to be always 'full on' as Rothfels

expresses it, and is disappointed when no action is performed at the zoo. The large

enclosures, and more recently developed immersive exhibits, like the Congo Gorilla

Forest and Jungle World at the Bronx Zoo, and Disney's Wild Animal Kingdom, pack

animals into an enclosure (so that viewers are guaranteed to see something), fill the space

with ambient sound, and create a complete environment that mimics television, not nature

(my emphasis) (Rothfels 2002, 20If).

Noelker is particularly adept at exposing this mimicry as false. In some cases, such

as the hippopotamus in Washington D.C., (figure 4) the giraffe in New York, or the tiger in Baton Rouge, he does this by highlighting the design elements of the enclosures, such as the painted panoramas. In his portrait in Washington D.C., the hippopotamus, at the far end of the wall, is coming out of a heavily barred black cage and descending tiny steps to a pool that takes up the central space. In the mural we see an odd combination of kitschy nature and culture, in the form of pillars that hold up a decorative structure, beyond which we see painted water, marshes, hills, fluffy clouds, event two birds in flight, and a central blocky structure in the far background. The panorama encloses the animal in a kind of strange exotic palace, and anthropomorphizes it by suggesting that faux effects and an indoor pool are sufficient replacements for the outdoors. Figure 4

The emphasis on the small interior space flanked with two heavy-duty cages enhances the contradictions that are at play. Enclosing animals within exotic architectural structures dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Berlin zoo erected a bear and carnivore castle, an antelope mosque, a pachyderm Indian temple, a Moorish- style birdhouse, an ostrich Egyptian temple, a Japanese enclosure for wading birds and a

Bison Russian manor house (Strehlow: 1996, 66f). The problematics with this kind of architecture is both physical and conceptual, it disregards the needs of the animal and demonstrates a colonial disrespect for other cultures. Amongst the mosques and temples,

Christian church structures are conspicuously absent, although European animals were also on display.

Hagenbeck's innovations forced zookeepers to reconsider landscaping and architecture, although, as we see in the case of the Berlin zoo, this did not necessarily improve actual living conditions for animals. Animals in small cages were given larger enclosures, but the primary objective was always to offer the human visitor the best 31

vantage point to view an animal. If the architecture was exotic in some way, then it provided an additional viewing experience. A strange example of the attempt to combine style, comfort, and ideology in zoo architecture is the Gorilla House and the Penguin

Pool, both designed by Berthold Lubetkin for the London Zoo in 1933 and 1934.

Adopting the 1930s modernist doctrine that form follows function, Lubetkin and his cooperative, Tecton, sought to design a naturalistic environment a la Hagenbeck that would allow a dramatic presentation of animals to the public. In preparation for his projects at the zoo, Lubetkin spent considerable time researching the habits and needs of the animal he would house, in order to understand it, and then coax it, through design, to display its characteristics (Gruffudd: 2000, 225). The gorilla house was a concrete cylinder with a cage frontage. Screens closed the front off during hot summer days, rain or winter, and a raised stage and 'recreation area' was in the centre of the enclosure.

Powerful electric lights simulated sunshine, and air purifying and humidifying systems were installed. A push button water fountain provided hydration to the gorillas and offered an opportunity for the public to observe the animal performing (Gruffudd 2000,

226). It should be noted that Lubetkin and Tecton's analytic techniques and practical solutions were also applied to buildings designed for humans. Tecton designed a TB clinic that was built with a maximum penetration of sunshine and air in order to create a more hygienic space (Gruffudd 2000, 233).

Lubetkin's Penguin Pool is considered one of the most significant modern structures in Britain. It is a mathematical concrete ellipse enclosing a shallow pool.

Concrete spiral ramps at the centre interlock into a double helix shape, and slope down 32

gradually from a platform into the water. Snow white concrete offsets the azure underwater floor. Lubetkin managed to address the challenge of combining a biologically efficient space with the functions of education and entertainment. Flat concrete areas, shelter and shade were provided; there was easy access to nesting boxes that were tucked away from public view; the enclosure offered maximum viewing possibilities and was easy to clean. While the structure was initially a success (the penguins played and bred well), a report in the 1950s called it a 'heat trap' that was only good for viewing the animals (Gruffudd 2000, 228f). In view of Lubetkin's careful research this seems strange.

Perhaps more bizarre, however, is the attempt to apply ideas of modernist design and social reform to the housing of animals. As Rothfels has suggested, "Tecton's Bauhaus

Internationalist inspired Gorilla House and Penguin Pool seemed to be taking animal exhibits more in the direction of a Stanley Kubrick space station than to recreations of life in the wild" (Rothfels 2002, 200).

Noelker's photograph of a seal in Germany (figure 5), taken in 2000, exemplifies this sort of discrepancy between human and animal habits. The seal is photographed lying on the curved concrete ledge of a pool. The bottom of the pool is painted a pleasing azure and a large white tarp provides a pleasing design element as well as partial shade.

Noelker's image highlights the affinities between the seal enclosure and a hotel resort that humans enjoy. Not unlike Lubetkin's Penguin Pool, the seal exhibit is designed to provide viewing pleasure for the human, and elicit the desire to languish in the luxury of a summer spa. By simulating an environment that provides pleasure for humans, the fact of confinement becomes less visible. 33

Lubetkin's dilemma - to find a way to house animals 'humanely' and simultaneously maximize human viewing pleasure - continues to be a significant factor today.

Figure 5

It can be argued that certain traditional enclosures have been replaced because they caused human unease and marred the enjoyable experience of a day at the zoo. Tight cages are no longer in fashion, and displays such as bear pits are almost completely obsolete. Considered now to be barbaric, pits were originally thought to provide the best enclosure for these mammals. Still, as we see in Noelker's portrait of a bear in Paris

(figure 6), taken in 1998, this form of display continues to exist. In Noelker's photograph we see a relatively small concrete rectangle, with a smaller elevated rectangle in the middle, part of which is a basin of water. Arches are embedded into the walls, the stumps of several trees are erect and laid out on the elevation where the bear lies alone, snout raised to the sun. The entire enclosure is cement, and there is no shade. The pit is open on 34

all four sides, and visitors can lean down along two of the walls. Noelker's photograph emphasizes the tight enclosure, concrete, and lack of natural elements. But it is difficult to imagine that these would not be starkly evident from every viewing angle. The quality of this wild mammal's life in such an environment is poor and could not seem otherwise to anyone witnessing it.

Figure 6

Zoos, with their reliance on a large paying public, and their claims of conservation, divert our attention away from the fact of captivity. The previously cited study repeatedly showed that the more realistic and naturalistic, as well as the larger the exhibit, the more people were drawn to it. Evidently people are uneasy when enclosures appear too much like cages, and environments are poorly replicated. It is questionable, however, if more

'humane' enclosures always benefit the animal, and clearly ludicrous to suggest that an animal feels at home in an environment that only looks natural. As Mullan and Marvin point out, even the best replicas and designs, such as Jungle World at the Bronx Zoo, are 35

stage sets and not functioning eco systems (Mullan and Marvin 1987, 78). In 1999 the

Bronx Zoo built the Congo Gorilla Forest, a six and a half acre rain forest that contains four hundred animals representing some fifty different species. The exhibit is closely connected to conservation. However convincing these exhibits might be, Rothfels nonetheless suggests that "deeply wooded "forests" and "jungles" simply replace the ornate buildings of the nineteenth century;" that immersive zoo environments are

"designed to mask the fundamentally and overwhelmingly human nature of the place"

(Rothfels 2002, 7).

Figure 7

In his series Noelker includes two portraits taken in New York: a giraffe and a deer.

The deer (figure 7) stands quite close to the camera; its head is tilted upwards and in sharp focus, as is the tree wrapped in wire mesh in front of it. The mesh can be interpreted as nature being saved from nature, and the fact that the area for the animals to forage in is limited, even if it is a small park. The giraffe is housed in a faux indoor 36

"world," complete with skylights, a cement floor covered in sand, and an awkwardly painted panorama landscape that is interrupted by joists in the wall that suggest disrepair and age. The giraffe (figure 8) stands in the back of the enclosure, close to the wall, and is strikingly out of place. The space looks like a child's playroom, with no visible source of food.

Figure 8

Giraffes are vegetarians that like to nibble on treetops, but this animal stands within concrete walls where the only available nourishment is an image painted on the wall.

Only a human viewer with a great deal of imagination can pretend that the animal is in some sort of landscape. What Noelker accomplishes with his careful framing of the animal in the enclosure is precisely the discrepancy between real and imagined. The giraffe appears patently alive but is presented like a taxidermied object in a museum diorama. Noelker's strategy of contrasting the living animal with the constructed environment calls attention to the contradictions inherent in all zoo habitats, including 37

projects like the Congo Gorilla Forest. Immersive environments are merely replicate habitats with accessories and landscaping. As persuasive as these may appear they remain, as Malamud states, alien compounds created for the spectator to gain an

'authentic experience' rather than providing the animal liberty (Malamud 1998: 197f).

Noelker's approach to the giraffe highlights Malamud's argument about the zoo:

"But what if Jacob never gets to Africa to see a real giraffe?" my mother asks, worrying that her grandson will be imaginatively deprived as a result of his parents' eccentric cultural dogma. If Jacob never gets to Africa, then perhaps indeed he will never get to see a giraffe. I don't know what's so horrible about never seeing a giraffe - throughout time, billions of people have endured that fate, with no evident detriment. Even if my son did go to the zoo, he would still not see what I consider to be a real giraffe, but rather a cultural stylization, simplification, distillation, of a giraffe; a sample of giraffe; a (situated) representation of a giraffe (Malamud 1998, 28f).

If an encounter with an animal is not possible in a zoo, what is its purpose? Who does the giraffe in New York benefit? Or the giraffe that Noelker photographed in Washington

D.C. (figure 9), where the enclosure is presented as even more bizarre than in New York.

Standing on an elevated platform the giraffe leans over the wire, its mouth open, perhaps making a sound. 38

Figure 9

The 'stage' is surrounded on three sides with a panorama that depicts an odd kind of

landscape that includes arches and a painted door, providing the giraffe, like the

hippopotamus, with a kind of palatial interior. Without the images on the wall we are left

with only a small painted room, where the only nod towards the physical needs of the

giraffe is a meager pile of what appears to be hay on the floor. The animal here is indeed,

as Malamud maintains of all zoo animals, embedded in a cultural construct that can only

represent a mute nature. Because of their mental and physical distance from nature, zoos,

for Malamud, are the antithesis of the microcosm they claim to represent (Malamud 1998,

30). Daniel Simberloff similarly claims that zoos and preserves are places for animals in

exile, and that conservations are places for refugees. Therefore studying animals outside

of their natural habitat is impoverished learning (Simberloff 1998, 239f). Noelker's

approach is to emphasize the role of exile and refugee. His photographs strive to

demonstrate that contemporary zoos continue to be no better than their counterparts in the

nineteenth century that claimed to present animated representations of the entire animal

kingdom. The purpose of this endeavour continues to be the capturing, enclosing, and keeping of animals for the purpose of amusement in the guise of education and conservation.

In 1907/1908 Carl Hagenbeck revolutionized the way that animals were kept in zoos, allowing people to overcome their discomfort around cages and enjoy animals at liberty. This model continues on in the form of larger enclosures and immersive exhibitions that offer increasingly 'authentic' experiences while heralding conservation. 39

As Rothfels maintains, Hagenbeck's real revolution was not the elimination of caged

enclosures but rather the narratives of freedom and happiness that he developed at his zoo

with these newer exhibits (Rothfels 2002, 199).

A Young Indian Elephant Playing Dead in Chelsea

the silently little blue elephant shyly(he was terribly warped by his journey from every to no)who still stands still as found some lost thing(like a curtain on which tiny the was painted in round blue but quite now it's swirly and foldish so only through)the little blue elephant at the zoo(jumbled to queer this what that a here and there a peers at you)has(elephant the blue)put some just a now and now little the(on his quiet head his magical shoulders him doll self)hay completely thus or that wispily is to say according to his perfect satisfaction vanishing from a this world into bigger much some out of(not visible to us whom only his dream ing own soul looks and the is all floatful and remembering (cummings 2001, 72)

In 2002 Douglas Gordon had a young Indian elephant, Minnie, and her

trainer, brought from Connecticut into the Gagosian Gallery in New York City's Chelsea

district. Here, in the large empty gallery space, she performed a series of tricks including

play dead, stand still, walk around, back up, get up, and beg. Play Dead, Real Time, the resulting installation, consists of projections onto two large screens set at odd angles to 40

each other, and a small television monitor placed on the floor (figure 10). The two large projections suggest that we are seeing the elephant in real scale and, as the title suggests, in real time. Clearly, however, the work is heavily edited, and the image closely cropped.

We rarely see the whole animal, but rather, the camera focuses on those body parts which are performing: the legs as she walks or backs up, the legs and trunk as she stands still, and the eye, which is always the first image shown on the monitor. The screens regularly fade out, although not necessarily between loops. For instance, we see an empty screen, and then a swaying trunk coming into view followed by the large feet of the elephant. We see her pacing, rotating, and walking into and out of the view of the camera. We are struck by the slow and laborious task of following instructions: walk around, stand, hold still.

Figure 10

Playing dead requires Minnie to lie down, stretch out and remain perfectly still.

Sometimes it appears to take some time; she lies very still, then the trunk moves first, 41

then all four legs stretch, and then she becomes still again, trunk outstretched this time. In

order to get up she needs to initiate a rocking motion until she can haul herself up.

Demonstrating the beg position entails raising herself up only halfway, lower legs

outstretched, front legs reaching forward; then more hauling until she comes up and is

back on all fours standing. The only time that we see the entire animal on the screen is

when she is playing dead, lying prone on the gallery floor. The viewer is held captive by

the pace, the step, step, step, of the slow choreographed movement, and the endurance of

standing still that is only gently interrupted when the trunk flexes, perhaps breathing, its

small movement appearing like a gentle revolt against the strict regime the body is

required to keep. But finally the trunk too ceases its movement, and rests on the floor,

slightly curled, and completely still.

As we watch we come to know the 'tricks' being performed. Walking in a circle,

walking backwards, standing still. This seems self-evident, but the very close cropping of

the body and the slow movement, as well as the regular fade-outs, give us mostly

fragments, just as the image itself is fragmented. We get a sense of the details of the

animal's wrinkly skin, the bottoms of its calloused feet, the embedded eye, but do not get

a sense of the whole animal. When she is playing dead we see her, when she has to get up we feel her effort, but throughout she remains focused, deadpan, and detached. We are not given any context, there is no sound or smell. The polished concrete gallery floor is barely even smudged from where she has walked or lain, so that, while the scale of the projection emphasizes her size and impressive physicality, she remains disembodied.

The editing carefully omits everything but the elephant's movement through the 42

space, so that no voice, no sound, and no reference to what surrounds her are given. We

know there is a trainer but we do not see her or him. We know that the trainer must be

crucial to the willingness of Minnie to perform, but we are given no indication of a

signal, a reward, or her relation to anything but the tasks she is repeating. After prolonged

viewing, the fact that she is repeatedly performing the same trick again and again

becomes evident. The trick is the same but the 'take' is not. Understanding that she is

performing playing dead several times, backing up, standing, walking, again and again,

adds to the strange duration and endurance that is being exhibited. The life of a circus

animal suddenly becomes almost unbearable because it appears to be without end.

Executing a task perfectly does not mean, for Minnie, that she can move on, but that she

merely has to do it again.

By completely decontextualizing Minnie (all that we know is that she was brought

in with her trainer from Connecticut, that she is a circus elephant, that she is from India,

that she lives on a game farm, Gordon highlights the pointlessness of her actions. Why

does she continue to play dead when she knows that getting up is difficult? Why does she

allow the playful wave of her trunk to be subdued, allowing no measure of humour, no

acknowledgment, no sign of independence? Even after an hour of watching both screens

and the monitor, I have no insight into the elephant Minnie, no insight into her nature,

relationship, being, motivation or character. She remains completely strange, and

completely entrapped in what appears to be a meaningless cyclical existence demanding her to play dead, get up, walk around, and stand still.

In her 1990 study of British circuses, Marthe Kiley-Worthington concluded that 43

many animals in circuses were better off than those in zoos. The animals had close

relationships to their trainers, they all had names, they were only infrequently treated with

drugs, and generally were retired rather than slaughtered. Longevity and health are

important economic factors for the circus, and therefore trainers work to ensure their

animals are well. In addition, animals perform better for a trainer with whom they can

develop mutual respect, which in turn leads to being well looked after in retirement

because of the emotional bond that has formed between the trainer and the animal (Kiley-

Worthington 1990, 53ff). It becomes clear, when reading Kiley-Worthington's account,

that the time she spent with circus people impacted her emotionally. Her account is

heavily weighted in favour of circuses over zoos. Nonetheless, her argument that animals

generally fare well when they are engaged, looked after, and able to form relationships

within a community, makes sense. Training, she maintains, creates positive emotional

relationships between species, and behavioural studies show that animals are extremely

adaptable, and can experience and learn (rather than merely display instinct). Training

fosters thinking, which animals display in working sessions where they are required to

put information together into some sort of pattern and use this knowledge to solve

problems. Animals can learn and remember (circus elephants have a vocabulary of at least fifty words, including right and left), and training allows for the creation of familiar and emotional bonds based on knowledge, respect and responsibility (Kiley-Worthington

1990, 146ff).

Throughout her writing, animal trainer and poet Vicki Hearne too emphasizes the importance of mutual recognition and respect, stressing that animals thrive when they are 44

engaged, which includes working. "Obedience," she reminds us, "comes from an old

French word that means "to hear" or "to heed," "to pay attention to."

The great trainers of every kind of animal, from parakeet to dog to elephant, have said for millennia now that you cannot get an animal to heed you unless you heed the animal; obedience is a symmetrical relation. In a given case it may start with the human, who perhaps says to the dog, "Joe, Sit!" Soon, however, the dog will take the term and turn it, use it to respond, to say something back, and it is at this moment that true training with any species either begins or fails. If the human being obeys, hears, heeds, responds to what the animal says, then training begins. If the human being "drops" the animal at this point, not realizing that the task has only begun, then the dog or orang (or for that matter, monkey) will not listen where there is nothing to heed (Hearne 1994,185).

Minnie is a circus animal, and what both Kiley-Worthington and Hearne are suggesting

here is that she is better off than her counterparts in zoos. Performing animals are

engaged and responsive to a human who demonstrates respect and willingness to forge a

relationship. Response to a command, and particularly a response as disciplined as

Minnie's, suggests that the elephant is willing to heed and is not coerced. Stripped of all

context, however, as Play Dead, Real Time is, makes the elephant's responses appear

unfathomable. Gordon uses a strategy that is similar to Noelker's with zoo animals, he

takes away the spectacle surrounding the object and leaves the subject bereft.

One can understand that an elephant working in a circus with her trainer, surrounded by other working animals, is motivated and can find some form of fulfillment. The same does not apply when Gordon edits the elephant's performance such

that it appears in isolation, repeating tricks for the camera in a converted warehouse in

Manhattan. What Minnie is required to do seems the opposite of engagement and mutual activity because we are not permitted to see anyone or anything that she might actually be engaging with. In the same way that Noelker's giraffe in a painted room exposes the 45

hypocrisies of Jungle World, Gordon's elephant installation make us question not training per se, but the circumstances, and motivations, surrounding it. Training a dog to search and rescue is vastly different than training an elephant to beg. That the feat is difficult, demonstrating ability, discipline, and intelligence is indisputable. The question is why these abilities have to be used on stunts that do nothing but entertain a human. Posing this question leads us to scrutinize other animal performances and the claims that they make regarding animal willingness, even eagerness, to work with humans for the purpose of amusing them.

At the San Diego Sea World, the orca whale Shamu is the central attraction.

Rushing into his pool he performs, plays, and at times seems to thwart his trainer in comical ways. An orca whale, like an elephant, is a very large animal that lives in water, and is known for its ferociousness. What feat, then, when a human trainer appears able to work with this animal, not in order to tame it, but to forge a relationship based on trust, respect, and willingness to play. In front of thousands daily, The Shamu Show, in Susan

Davis's words, aims to demonstrate that if only approached correctly, killer whales can be fearful and gentle, and though they may rebel they are ultimately willing to conform.

The goal of The Shamu Show is to show that the performance is not mere spectacle, but an example of mutual and voluntary 'learning from one another' (Davis 1997,230ff). Sea

World exceeds the zoo because here there is definitely something to see. Like the circus, animals and people perform side by side in a spectacular demonstration of inter-species cooperation and willingness to entertain.

If we juxtapose Kiley-Worthington's praise of circus animal trainers, and Hearne's 46

lessons on training, with the work of rescue dogs, Minnie in the gallery, and Shamu, we can trace the contradictions at work when similar accounts are given to justify actions whose motivations are very different. When Vicki Hearne discusses animal training and human-animal relationships, her examples are always based on mutual response and not conditioning or enforced tasks. Her stories highlight the fact that each animal is different, each has a distinct personality, and each deserves, like the humans we engage with, individual attention and regard. Building trust and teaching an animal a 'grammar' that enables serious work between humans and animals requires time. Not every dog, Hearne always insists, will respond to commands, no matter how well s/he understands her, unless they feel that the human is worthy. A case in point is a Bernese mountain dog named Sampson:

He seems to be very aware of his own dignity and particular about his friendships - he did not accept me as a pal until over a year into my weekly work with him and his handler when I handled him myself, the day we introduced him to a couple of basic search and rescue exercises. For a dog with the capacity for it, search work is thrilling, transcending, and Sampson's realization that 1 knew about such wonders finally prompted him to decide that I was worth the effort of further acquaintance (Hearne 1995, 31).

Sampson works at liberty, a sign that he is trusted by his handler to heed. Hearne relates that herding and search and rescue dogs, as well as hunting dogs, can be working a mile or more from their handlers without losing track of them or the task at hand (Hearne

1995, 31). Hearne points out two other important factors: animals motivated by food are not at liberty, and the capacity for work free from constraint can be weak, or sometimes absent, in many wild animals (Hearne 1995, 29f). Orca whales are wild animals, and the orca whales at Sea World are motivated by food, rewarded as they are after each trick is 47

performed. The duration of their performance is always short, and 'Shamu' are actually several whales that each comes onto the stage in rapid succession.

Shamu is a logo and a commodity, a living creature and a mass media image. He is not recognized as an individual the way that Sampson is. Not only is the image of Shamu a stand-in for all orcas, so in this sense standardized, but also the supervision of animal training techniques at Sea World is centralized. This ensures uniformity in animal behaviour; which means that because all the signals are the same in every Sea World orca-training program, multiple trainers can work with multiple whales on different sites

(Davis 1997, 58ff). Donna Haraway has claimed that we learn to be worldly by grappling with the ordinary, and not generalizing; she has emphasized the crucial ideal of becoming with (Haraway 2008, 3). Hearne emphasizes the importance of specific relationships between species. Training is based on the trust and mutual regard established over time between two individuals. Teaching a whale signals and then expecting it to respond to them regardless of where it is and who is giving the signs is to fundamentally misunderstand the idea of training.

Hearne's caution about the absence of the capacity for liberty work in some wild animals, and Sea World's habit of exposing whales to many trainers, might be one cause of the 'accidents' that occur regularly with performing orcas. Whales are unpredictable.

Their natural habitat is the ocean where they travel at random across huge expanses of sea to hunt and live. Tilikum weighs 12,300 pounds, is 22 feet and 6 inches long and, at twenty-nine years old, he has lived in captivity since he was two. Tilikum currently lives at Seaworld Orlando and has killed three people. 'Accidents' like this occur: Shamu's 48

mother Kandu bled to death in front of several thousand spectators at San Diego's Sea

World after she attacked another whale in a demonstration of dominance. The corporation

Sea World is quick to dismiss these incidents as isolated and tragic. Animals too can have a bad day. After Tilikum killed his trainer, Bernd Wursig, a professor of marine biology at Texas A&M University, who supports the idea of whales in confinement, explained that whales "can show aggressivity if they feel threatened or if they're in a bad mood"

(Kluger 2010). Prior to her death, Kandu had exhibited aggressive behaviour before, and

'aggressivity' resulting in death has been displayed three times by Tilikum over the course of twenty years.

Kiley-Worthington states that an animal's aggression is linked to psychological responses to stress induced by pain, fear, frustration, or conflict. Furthermore, isolation and restriction can increase aggression (Kiley-Worthington 1990, 73). Experts and activists repeatedly point to the extremely close confines of captive whales, and the simple wrongness of capturing them at all. The response of Sea World is to emphasize conservation, education, and research, and to present whale trainers as scientists, and captive reproduction as a mode of knowledge. According to them, the performances are a demonstration of humans unlocking the secrets of octacean communication (Davis 1997,

230ff).

Like zoos and the Disney Corporation, Sea World mobilizes conservation rhetoric into its image in order to pacify its audience and provide them with an enjoyable viewing experience free from uneasy feelings about animal captivity and coercion. After Kandu died, staff veterinarian Dr. James F. McBain told he New York Times that the whales at 49

Sea World do

a really important job. They're seen by young, impressionable children and people who would otherwise have no contact with them. They are ultimately important for their own kind in the wild because they make an important impression on humans, who are the ones who will make decisions about the environment (New York Times 08/23/89).

The implication that seeing an orca perform on cue in a small pool with a human

trainer will educate people about the environment should strain our credibility. People

concerned about the wellbeing of animals in the wild will not go to a corporate circus to

see them coerced into entertaining them. Suggesting that experiencing such a spectacle

will lead to empathy with the animal, and a desire to care about its cousins in the wild, is countered by responses such as those to the 1993 Warner Bros, movie Free Willy. The plot involves a boy training a whale in marine land to do tricks no adult trainer can teach it. When the whale fails to perform adequately, the park plans to get rid of him, and the boy plots to rescue and release him into the wild. So far so Disney. Response to the movie did successfully raise funds in an effort to return the whale (in this case Keiko) to the wild, but it also spurred the public's desire to see Willy. Keiko/Willy is, as Rothfels points out, a first rate animal star equipped with a Keiko-cam that millions downloaded while the whale was living at the Oregon Coast Aquarium. While the film raised a number of issues around orca captivity, this was countered by the fact that major commercial aquariums became more eager to have whales in their collections, because people wanted to "see Willy" (Rothfels, ed. 2002, 218). Empathy and interest does not translate into environmental and animal welfare concerns trumping the desire for spectacle. 50

Sea World, like Disney's Wild Animal Kingdom, like Jungle World at the Bronx

zoo, and many other zoos and aquariums, are commercial ventures. Because the 1972

Marine Mammal Protection Act limited permits to institutions that had an educational

component (Davis 1997, 164), select bits of information are inserted at Sea World to

demonstrate environmental awareness and concern, and 'educate' the public about the

life of marine mammals in the wild and in captivity. As Davis points out, these forms of

'education' include a benign control over nature in order to exploit it: the park saves

beached animals to study blood diseases; studies of diving seals help submarine crews;

the resources of oceans and Antarctica are charted so that they can be harvested in a more

orderly fashion to feed the general population. Thus animals serve at the pleasure of

humans. Animals are studied, dissected, bred, and kept in laboratories in order to prevent human disease. Animals are made killable so that the lives of humans can be prolonged.

The apparent willingness, play and humour displayed by the orca whale during the

Shamu Show suggests that humans are benign, that animals are willing, and that nature should be managed by experts (Davis 1997, 230).

It is interesting to note that the producers at Sea World do not consider incorporating truly educational insights into the Shamu Show, like the highly developed knowledge of trainers. The esoteric knowledge and passionate interest of those working most closely with the whales are not considered 'good theatre' (Davis 1997, 216). Good theatre offers what documentaries and nature shows do: animals in action rather than those behind bars.

The installation Play Dead, Real Time strips Minnie of any narrative. No claims are 51

made about the elephant, she is neither mythologized nor characterized; she is simply physically present, performing tricks. Stripped of the elaborate constructions of Sea

World or immersive exhibitions, we are left only with an animal performing meaningless tasks in complete isolation. The pedantic repetition of tricks demonstrates stoic endurance and elicits deep sadness. The elephant is trapped in an endless cycle of mere existence in an environment that is fabricated by and for humans. There is no place for her here.

Figure 11

Gordon's subjects are often protagonists who cannot determine their own fate, and earlier works have examined the psychology of perverse experiments done in the interest of medical research. 10ms-1 from 1994 is a video that shows a life-sized figure lying on the ground and struggling to stand up (figure 11). The loop ends before he can succeed, so that we are left with a series of attempts that always fail. The piece was based on early medical research films that documented nineteenth-century phenomena like hysteria, spastic paralysis and other psychopathological studies. 30 Seconds Text from 1996 shows 52

white text on a black wall describing the decapitation of a criminal in early twentieth- century France as recounted by a doctor as part of a medical experiment. The doctor repeatedly called to the decapitated head that responded twice before the life was fully extinguished after thirty seconds. The text is visible for exactly thirty seconds then disappears, leaving the viewer in complete darkness, having experienced the thirty seconds it took to go from life into death. In between these two works, Gordon produced three large-scale video pieces centered on a fly: Film Noir (Fly), Fuzzy Logic, and B-

Movie (figure 12).

Figure 12

A monstrous fly lies on its back apparently struggling, probably dying. Gordon has commented that:

This was an image of something that we killed every day. We see them dying in corners of rooms at home; we don't care about them. Some of us even tortured these things as part of a "game" to play when we were children. But seeing something like this in a museum becomes a much more distressing game to play (Andel 2003, 114). 53

The medical subject, the dying insect, and the elephant laboriously hauling herself up into a sitting position, are all caught in an existence not of their own making. They are forced to struggle merely to live but death inevitably looms large, suggesting an endless and pointless struggle that is life itself. All are put under a microscope and scrutinized to satisfy human curiosity. The figure in 10ms-l might remind us of what we may have seen in Foucault's Narrtuermer. Where this figure fails, Minnie succeeds; she gets up, but her success is short-lived because she is immediately asked to repeat her performance.

The inclusion of a small monitor playing a third loop seems odd at first glance. Its function however, is to introduce animals and natural history as they are produced for television and to bring these mass media images into dialogue with the large-scale and sepia toned images of Minnie on the oversized projection screens. The monitor brings the elephant down to a familiar scale, like any other wild animal in a nature documentaiy.

The dominating perspective of the camera, however, rebukes the suggestion that there is anything natural about its lens scrutinizing an animal at such close quarters. It mocks the claim that documentaries are shot in the wild without disrupting it. By bringing Minnie up close and isolating her from the appendages of spectacle, Gordon shows not only the poverty of her existence, but also the poverty that drives those who study, keep, and command living beings. 54

Ch-440

Regis was only two when he was treated for his first stress-related event - he chewed his finger nail completely off. The following year he was treated for depression and anorexia (he weighed less than 20 lbs at three years of age). He had still not participated in any study. During the three studies Ch-645 was involved in, he was lethargic, withdrawn and depressed. He refused to eat and drink. When he is particularly stressed he suffers from anxiety attacks during which he nearly stops breathing so badly that he begins gagging and convulsing. It took over an hour for this very stressed, very anxious chimpanzee to leave his transport cage and enter his sanctuary home. (http://www.franknoeIker.com/work/chimDs/18.phDl

One argument made in the favour of zoos is their ties to wildlife conservation and species survival programs. Zoos have extensive DNA banks of tissue samples, eggs, sperm, and frozen embryos that preserve genetic diversity, and certain accredited institutions breed endangered animals in the endeavour to release them back into the wild. While these efforts sound laudable, there are several serious issues that accompany them. Breeding in captivity is difficult, and mothers often reject their offspring. More importantly, breeding in captivity often involves artificial insemination, surgery, and drug treatment, which Kiley-Worthington compares to experiments with reproductive physiology rather than conservation (Kiley-Worthington 1990, 172f). Programs to reintroduce animals into the wild have low success rates since the animals bred in captivity are not always suitable for reintroduction. As Mullan and Marvin point out, increasingly, there is no wild left (Mullan and Marvin 1987, 158), so that what we are doing, in Malamud's words, is holding animals for a future that will never come

(Malamud 1998, 45). All of this raises another disturbing issue: if the stockpile of living animals in a zoo is depleted, or cannot reproduce itself, it can be recreated through artificial means, with insemination and DNA samples. In her analysis of Steven 55

Spielberg's Jurassic Park, Ursula Heise points out that:

The fantastic extrapolation of currently available genetic engineering techniques documented by the movie within the movie establishes a scenario in which species extinction is reversible and therefore no cause for concern: if minute amounts of DNA suffice to re-create a whole range of species, then no loss of biodiversity need be permanent, because extinct species can be brought back at will (Heise 2003, 63).

Thus we have a public that wants to free Willy but also see Willy exploited by zoos that

claim that they are keeping animals for the benefit of the species. The public's

consciousness is eased when they know that the animals are being rescued from the threat

of extinction and dangerous habitats, and are being preserved for now and for the future.

In short, serious environmental action is not required when technology can reverse

extinction.

Obviously, extinction, environmental damage, and ecological disasters are very real

factors. Ecosystems are delicate and require the active existence of many species.

Sustained action for the ecological well being of the planet is desperately needed to stave

off what is undoubtedly a doomed future. Zoos, however, are not the answer. Despite

their conservation programs, zoos inevitably compromise their wildlife goals in order to

fulfill their mission to entertain the public. Meeting the demands of their audience

requires cages, enclosures, and complete control of all aspects of their captive's lives. By

pushing ideas of conservation and breeding for re-release into the wild, zoos soften the threat of ecological disaster by appearing to be a place that protects and repopulates.

Malamud emphasizes the colonial message still deeply embedded in Western zoos whose existence insinuates that animals are confiscated from other places because the people in those places are incapable of sustaining them. "Here," he continues, "subsumes "there;" 56

from which he draws the conclusion that "we can represent them here, in ways that diminish or eliminate the necessity of there" (Malamud 1998, 71). This is convenient because, as Heise points out, the mainstream interest in endangered wildlife is only sustained as long as it does not interfere with human well-being. The extinction of other species becomes acceptable when they encroach upon human society (Heise 2003, 65).

Active engagement against poaching, for example, is not necessary if one has a few samples of the species and enough tissue to recreate it if that becomes necessary. In a recent article, the Telegraph reported that poaching elephants is on the rise all over

Africa. 220 were killed last year in Kenya alone, bringing the statistics up 400% in a single year (Harrison 2010). The same article shows a picture of baby orphaned elephants at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Mbagathi in Nairobi, demonstrating the attempt, if perhaps not the full capability of 'there' to attempt to combat poaching practices and find ways of sustaining their wildlife. Another example is the very successful Project

Tiger, established in 1973 in India, where nine reserves were created in order to allow ecosystems to develop by restricting all man-made influences. The program is environmentally oriented, favouring tiger and ecosystem, protecting flora and fauna, including deer, elephants, rhinos, and wild buffalo (Mullan and Marvin 1987, 153).

We do not know the story of Minnie, whether she was rescued or captured, but we do know that she came from India. Perhaps she would have been killed, decapitated and left dead apart from what meat could be sold; perhaps she would have been taken to

Project Tiger. By presenting her in the way that he does in Play Dead, Real Time, Gordon makes clear that a life in captivity is simply a struggle for existence. But there is a further 57

dilemma, because Minnie, like many wild animals, has no option of being returned to

India or any other 'wild.' What is the alternative, then, to life on a game farm or in the zoo?

Between 2002 and 2006 Frank Noelker photographed chimpanzees at the Fauna

Foundation sanctuary in Montreal, Quebec, and the Center for Great Apes in Wauchula,

Florida. The resulting eighteen portraits frame the head of each chimpanzee, and are accompanied by text panels detailing the lives of each animal. All have been 'retired' from biomedical research, the entertainment industry, and the pet trade, and sometimes a combination of all three. Sue Ellen (born in 1968) and her adopted chimpanzee brother

Billy Jo (also born in 1968) lived out their first fifteen years in the circus, during which time both had their teeth knocked out with a crowbar (figure 13).

Figure 13 58

When their owner could no longer afford to keep them they were sold to LEMSIP, the laboratory for experimental research and surgery in Primates at New York University, where they spent the next fourteen years of their lives. They endured liver biopsies, bone marrow biopsies, lymph node biopsies and were inoculated with HIV. Yoko (born in

1974) (figure 14) also began his life in the circus until, at the age of seven, he was sold to

LEMSIP where he was locked into a very small cage and suspended from the ceiling, tattooed so that he would be distinguished from the chimps on either side of him. For sixteen years he too had countless biopsies and was inoculated with HIV.

Figure 14

Donna Rae (born in 1966) spent her first twelve years working for the Animal Kingdom

Talent Service until she was walked into her cage at the lab, where she remained for the next nineteen years. After one particular intervention the pain put her into a state of 59

shock. Donna Rae perpetually mutilated herself. Toddy, Roger and Toby all spent time at roadside zoos. Toddy (born around 1974) was captured in Africa and sold to a family in

Florida as a pet. It was discovered that she had bullet fragments lodged in her brain (most likely this had occurred when her mother was shot), and eventually she was given to a roadside zoo, and then to a breeding farm where, after several years of living with a group of chimpanzees, she was separated due to health problems and kept alone in a small cage for four years. Roger (born in 1980) was born in a roadside zoo, pulled from his mother as an infant and sold to a family in Connecticut. When he was three the family sold him to circus trainers who traveled with Ringling Brothers Circus where he stayed until 1993 when his handler died. Subsequently he was placed in another roadside zoo, castrated, and separated from other animals. When he was rescued, the lock and door had corroded shut after being kept closed for such a long period of time. Toby (born in 1978) too was kept in a roadside zoo with two other chimpanzees, one of which died in 2000, the other in 2002 of heat stroke. The Fauna Foundation was established in 1997 on one hundred acres outside of Montreal. Until a city ordinance forbade it to take in 'exotics' and other new residents, it was a haven for animals that had outlived their usefulness as pets, farm animals, and animals from the entertainment industry and biomedical research.

Today around 100 animals continue to live in the sanctuary.

Noelker's strategy of personalizing these chimpanzees is to portray them as one would a human subject. Each photograph is a tightly cropped head-and-shoulders shot.

Every portrait strives to capture the individuality of each chimpanzee in such a way that the viewer is drawn to empathize, and even identify with the subject. Blinky looks out 60

under hooded eyes, Sue Ellen directly, like a wise matriarch, Tom seems reflective, and

Yoko looks down, avoiding the camera unlike Billy, who looks directly at the lens.

Noelker unabashedly anthropomorphizes these chimpanzees in order to elicit sympathy.

The accompanying text panels further humanize the animals, outlining the horror that

each chimpanzee experienced at the hands of humans. As much as Noelker uses the

technique of sparse language and an unadorned, frontal portrait to lessen the didactic

aspect of this work, there is little room for the viewer to challenge his absolute position.

The stories are too stark and too horror-filled. Noelker thus takes matters out of the hands of institutions like zoos, and makes his own direct appeal. Like Willy fans, fans of chimpanzees may want to see a real one after seeing Noelker's photographs, but no one will want to see one in captivity. By framing his subjects as he does, Noelker leaves the viewer no space to challenge his position. This is a strategy that shuts down dialogue, but that potentially sparks activism. For Noelker the time for nuance is past. Examining the chimp portraits, one can sympathize with the artist, and ask, like him, what other recourse is there? How hard must we be hit in order to change the circumstances of animals we use and abuse?

When Gunda, the elephant who lived in the Bronx zoo at the same time that Ota

Benga did, became too much to handle, he was shot. Racehorses are routinely killed after they have reached their peak performance. Circus animals like Sue Ellen, Yoko and

Donna Rae were deposited in labs. The roadside zoos where Roger and Toby had been housed nearly killed them. Minnie cannot be sent back to India, but a sanctuary would most definitely be a better place for her than a performance venue. Roadside zoos are not 61

regulated as well as large, accredited institutions, and are good examples of the worst things that can occur to animals who are legally held in captivity. The same zoo that features Jungle World also houses the giraffe and deer that Noelker photographed. The now much maligned nineteenth century zoos lined up single species as representative of their entire animal kingdom, while their counterparts in the twenty-first century continue to order nature, showcasing a single animal as a stand-in for whole species and families; each exhibit representing a taxonomic specimen of a broader category (Davies, 2000,

249). Every self-respecting zoo requires an elephant, a giraffe, a lion, a rhinoceros, a zebra, and a monkey (any kind of monkey, since the public cannot generally distinguish between them) (Mullan and Marvin 1987, 73). Zoos can be compared to museums where, as Hoage and Deiss point out, the acquisition of a newly discovered okapi is equivalent to the National Art Gallery acquiring a Da Vinci (Hoage and Deiss 1996, 136). Zoo stories,

Malamud points out in his extensive analysis of animals in literature, are metaphorical associations of depressed, unfulfilled people with a captive animal (Malamud 1998, 163).

Not for nothing does Gordon present us with Minnie alongside his mental patient trying to struggle to his feet. The hype zoos create around their attractions, and the token lip service they pay to conservation is mirrored in theme parks like Sea World or Disney pretending to educate and heighten awareness around the plight of animals in the wild. In a consumer society we are encouraged to spend money repeatedly. The incentive to return to the zoo, circus, or marine land is to know that something new will be offered, and the incentive is higher when we know that we will be amused and entertained, not chastised and made uncomfortable. Too much information will kill the enjoyment, and 62

zoos make no claims to be 'high' culture. Animals, as Mullan and Marvin point out, need no interpretation, they do not signify and hence mean nothing beyond what they are; they require no connoisseurship, their unproblematic display needs only a simple sign that designates what they are, where they come from, and what they do (Mullan and Marvin

1987, 123ff). And even then statistics show that less than 5% of the public read signs associated with the animal (Johnston 1998, 341). At a zoo Jacob would still not see what

Malamud considers a real giraffe; at Sea World we do not see a real orca, the way that it was meant to be, surging through the ocean; Minnie is not a real elephant, who lives in family groups and roams at liberty. A rhinoceros is not meant to be in a small interior surrounded by painted walls, and no chimpanzee should be captured, showered with attention and then cast away. Zoos now, as they always were, are there for humans to have something wondrous to look at, despite the fact the animals exhibited do not capture our attention for very long, and seldom heighten our awareness of ecology. If the description that Disney offers about its Pangani Forest does not make us suspect, then

Noelker's portrait of a silverback in Texas should, as should all of his animal portraits, not to mention Minnie's excruciating display of endurance.

Noelker and Gordon give us familiar animals stripped of all the usual accoutrements, and simply and clearly show their plight. Captured, bred, housed and kept in environments completely controlled by humans for no apparent purpose beyond entertainment and spectatorship, these artists' simple strategy of focusing in on an animal in this sort of human environment exposes it as impoverished and the animal as bereft.

"What if Jacob never sees a real giraffe?" might be countered with 'what if Minnie never 63

got to see the inside of a Chelsea gallery?' 'What if Sue Ellen did not get to perform in a circus?' or 'What if that Bear in Paris never got to live in a cement enclosure with a tree fabricated to withstand its strength?' 64

2. Looking Back: John McEwen and the Force of the Encounter

As a sculpture the dog remains mute and motionless but as a subject it looks where animals look. The animal as represented is both there and not there. The most significant reminder that results from this is that the life of the world is independent of the projections of the humans psyche. John McEwenJMcEwen 2010, 2).

At the end of his lecture "The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow)"

Jacques Derrida concludes

The animal in general, what is it? What does that mean? Who is it? To what does that "it" correspond? To whom? Who responds to whom? Who responds in and to the common, general and singular name of what they thus blithely call the "animal?" Who is it that responds? The reference made by this what or who regarding me in the name of the animal, what is said in the name of the animal when one appeals to the name of the animal, that is what needs to be exposed, in all its nudity, in the nudity or destitution of whoever, opening the page of an autobiography, says, "here I am." (Derrida 2002,418).

In this paragraph, Derrida questions the adequacy of language and the name, he raises the issue of response, regard, and appeal, and the need to expose how the reference 'animal' is used. This lecture is as much about the animal as about the human, philosophy, language, and the limitations of knowing oneself.

Canadian sculptor John McEwen's investigation into similar ideas and relationships has been both erratic and elliptical. The clearest manifestation of his response takes the form of what he terms the animal vehicle. From the very first inception of this vehicle, Marconi in 1978, McEwen has demonstrated that thinking and making are inextricably linked. In stating that he thinks with objects, specifically with animals which he deems 'healthier,' McEwen echoes Erika Fudge's claim that "thinking changes when it includes animals" (Fudge 2008, 2). Like Fudge, McEwen believes that thinking with 65

animals works against anthropocentricism, and towards a recognition that the world is complex, and made up of a vast number of interrelated elements, including non-human beings and other living organisms.

To understand both the nature of McEwen's approach, as well as the arc of his particular, sustained pursuit that spans some thirty-seven years, it is useful to take a cursory glance at the kind of art production and discourse that was occurring in the late

1960s and early 1970s. McEwen graduated from the Ontario College of Art in Toronto in

1970, where he became friends with Ian Carr-Harris and Stephen Cruise. In 1971

McEwen was a co-founder of A Space Gallery, one of the oldest artist-run centres in the country focusing on contemporary critical art and culture. In 1972 he bought a blacksmith shop in the small town of Hillsdale, two hours north of Toronto, after having first worked with a vet in Cookstown before attending trade school to become a welder fitter. In 1973 he established himself in Hillsdale full time. McEwen subsequently taught in the Metal

Shop at OCA from 1978-1985.

In the 1960s OCA was based on a Bauhaus derived studio system, and offered no theory courses. The predominant discourses around contemporary art took place in publications like Artforum and Parachute, as well as in and around exhibitions. When

McEwen came across Minimalism as a student, the movement was driven by artists like

Donald Judd. After he graduated, the growing emphasis on Minimalism found in art magazines, exposure to Richard Serra's process and steel works, and the work of Royden and David Rabinowitch, who worked in Toronto throughout the 1970s, all contributed to 66

McEwen's process of defining which elements of Minimalism would become important

to his approach. The 1978 Art Gallery of Ontario's exhibition Structures for Behaviour

(with Robert Morris, David Rabinowitch, Richard Serra and George Trakas) further

helped him to determine which aspects he would pursue, and which he would not,

confirming the direction that he had already begun with Marconi. What was paramount

for McEwen was that the body of the viewer had to move through the work in order to

experience it. The relationship he was interested in was one that connected the movement

of the viewer to the work, and the process of thinking imaginatively that this sparked.

This process entailed approaching a sculpture, which was at once a familiar canine figure

and a solid steel sculpture, its duality pointing to a conceptual field that opened up

considerations around the larger aspects of the natural world and our relationship to it.

While (classical) Minimalism was important to McEwen, the emphasis on

discourse, apparent in the publications of the time, made him wary, and placed him at

odds with an intellectual climate where ideas seemed reliant on language (see Morris

1973, 43ff), which, in the words of Carr-Harris, caused the artist to become suspicious of

the nature of ideas due to their 'insubstantial facility and easy manipulation' (Carr-Harris

1979, 15). The weight and material of Minimalist objects influenced McEwen's approach

to sculpture, but the formality of these elements created a rift between his own interests and those of other artists. As he has more recently noted, the horizontal nature of Carl

Andre's work had 'to do with being dead,' whereas McEwen's 'impure Minimalism' re­ animated the material by pulling it off the ground into a vertical position (McEwen April

26, 2011). 67

A certain distancing from classical Minimalism had started for McEwen as a student, when he spent his last year living on a farm in Stouffville. Finding a disconnect between language/discourse and making, between formal approaches and ideas, the artist worked first with a vet (with living animals) and then became a welder fitter (working with materials). His resolution to return to art was about finding a way to reconcile work

(sculpture) with "a search for knowledge about experience, a search which inevitably must be based on ideas" (Carr-Harris 1979, 15). While McEwen maintains that during this time he was 'living in his head,' the crucial difference that he perceived between his work and the intellectual climate at the time was that the latter was too discursive. Hence,

'living in his head' manifested itself in a process of thinking that involved working with steel and other materials that translated into sculpture. Carr-Harris describes this as follows:

McEwen resolves the dilemma by enhancing the status of the works as a tangible model of reality in order to restrain the more mercurial tendencies of ideas and provide a solid vantage point from which to consider their validity. The work must operate, in other words, not so much as structured idea [sic] but as restrained ideas, and art-making for McEwen becomes a means of considering what he doesn't know from the basis of what he does know. The model is manageable if the ideas are not (Carr-Harris 1979, 15).

In 1978 Marconi was created equally in, out of, and against the intellectual and cultural climate. The move towards verticality, was, in the artist's words, 'hopeful,' because it raised the Minimalist steel slab off of the ground in an act that expressed a desire for embodiment (McEwen April 24, 2011). With this, he both established a practice, and the idea of the animal vehicle, which offered the bare bones of a narrative structure understood as contingent and constrained. 68

McEwen describes his as an 'impure Minimalism' that best works in an in- between space where ideas, materials, the imagination, and the concrete merge. The result is never didactic or fixed: the real animal is implied, the actual animal is steel. The quickening that the viewer experiences when approaching the animal is halted by the hardness of the inert material, but the animal continues to live on in the imagination of the viewer who has engaged with the sculpture. Due to the formal properties of the steel slab animals he produces, the work has no fixed point, appearing and disappearing depending upon the position of the viewer. Hence, this impure Minimalism deconstructs fixed points and opens up borders.

Coined by Jacques Derrida, deconstruction is a critique of all existence that is structured into dichotomies and hierarchies. His relentless splitting apart of language is an attempt to find a way to think outside of the terms that have come to define us, and others, for thousands of years. Derrida's vast project of deconstruction is rooted in his commitment to ethics, and devoted to a pursuit of justice, in a movement towards the ideal of 'unconditional hospitality' extended to all living beings (Westmoreland 2008, 4).

Within this project his attention to the animal is notable. The Animal That Therefore I Am is a text of his ten-hour address to the 1997 Cerisy conference entitled "The

Autobiographical Animal," and The Beast and the Sovereign is a transcript of his 2001-

2002 seminar dedicated to thinking about the animal. Matthew Calarco confirms that from the mid 1980s to his death in 2004, Derrida pursued two strategies: the decentering of human subjectivity, and the bringing of animals into ethical and political considerations (Calarco 2008, 106). Derrida's approach centers on language such that, 69

even if his intent is to deconstruct it, we are often faced with a daunting and dense textual mass. That said, I believe that first, his intention is not to remain abstract but to address concrete issues, and that second, by way of the 'trace,' 'limitrophy,' and the insistent contamination of (rather than mere play with) language, he offers us one way to try to rethink the all too often fixed, anthropocentric structures of thought that Western philosophy has perpetuated.

When Derrida proposes terms like 'differance' or 'trace,' he offers us a place for imaginative thinking that has consequences for real living. A space in-between that can be cracked open and enable us to think outside of the confines of closed concepts, and even language itself. Tracing the "Derridean" threads in McEwen's work, I explore whether analogies can be drawn between the ways that their two projects function, on levels that are both concrete and intuitive. While the audience and environment that

Derrida and McEwen speak to, and are situated in, are vastly different, I believe that juxtaposing their work can help break down boundaries between the human and the non- human animal, in ways that raise a number of important ethical questions.

In what can be read as a critique of the kind of theory that Derrida propounds,

Charles Taylor states that certain contemporary modes of postmodernism deny, attack or scoff at the claims of self sufficient reason but offer no outside source for the reception of power. They are as determined to undermine and deny romantic notions of solace in feeling, or in recovered unity, as they are to attack the Enlightenment dream of pure thinking; and they seem often even more eager to underscore their atheist convictions. They want to make a point of stressing the irremediable nature of division, lack of centre, the perpetual absence of fullness; which is at best a necessary dream, something we may have to suppose to make 70

a minimum sense of our world, but which is always elsewhere, and which couldn't in principle ever be found (Taylor 2007, 10).

Due to its elusive nature, the idea and the place of Derrida's 'trace,' can arguably be

situated in the postmodern elsewhere that Taylor describes. And yet I would argue that by

challenging conventional notions of unity, deconstruction leads us to consider

entanglement and relations. A lack of center does not necessarily imply a void but rather

an interconnection of many parts. And, as Taylor also notes, we "draw empowerment

from the sense of our courage and greatness in being able to face the irremediable, and

carry on nonetheless" (Taylor 2007, 10). To consider at all the (ideal, and certainly

unattainable) idea of an 'unconditional hospitality,' openness, or a process of opening, is

required. Thus we can view Derrida's intentions concerning the animal as quite concrete.

'The question of the animal' "concerns the ethical and political stakes of human relations

with non-human animals, as well as the very possibility of making and sustaining the

human/animal distinction" (Calarco 2007, 27If).

The Animal Vehicle

By 1977, McEwen, aware of the complex floor arrangements that David

Rabinowitch was making, appropriated the steel plate and made it his own.1 Uninterested

in the issues of perception that Minimalism foregrounded, and questions regarding the

1 While Rabinowitch's thick steel slabs ranged from 3" to 6," McEwen chose a thickness of 2.5" for Marconi, a measure that he has, with few exceptions, continued to use to date. 71

Minimalist assertion that the single parts of sculpture cannot be incorporated into a relationship that is whole (see Monk 1977, 22ff), McEwen focused on the material itself.

He used the steel plate to advance the important premise that sculpture could consist of mass without volume. It was this fact that would form the philosophical core of

McEwen's approach, which was to produce an object, variously described as refractory, reflexive, or reflective, that resisted one's gaze and turned it back on oneself (McEwen

April 22, 2011).

While the idea of cutting a single figure from plate steel had been drawn from

David Rabinowitch (the brothers were the first artists McEwen became aware of that had their work manufactured), the stripped down narrative for Marconi stemmed from an experience at a scrap yard where he observed how the guard dogs (German Shepherds) were positioned to be both mobile and contained. Each dog was linked to a sliding chain that was in turn linked to steel wire cables that snaked along the roadways amongst the huge piles of scrap. What struck McEwen was the imposed constraint: the dogs were free to run but only within a one-foot margin of the running cable. Hence, the dog could move one foot on either side of the cable and anywhere along the cable, which was anchored at both ends so that the chain would not slide off. This state of imposed constraint drove

McEwen to consider the distinction between site contingency and site specificity

(McEwen April 22, 2011).

Marconi is a silhouette of a full-sized German shepherd seated in the middle of a steel cable run that encircles him (figure 15). The cable is anchored at one end, and 72

connects with a chain leash attached to a leather collar at the other. As McEwen points out, the steel silhouette becomes either subject or object, depending on the viewer's position (McEwen 2007, 56).

Figure 15

The viewer's participation, her movement within the space, is vital to the work not only because the sculpture changes radically depending on whether we look at it frontally, in which case it becomes a line, or from the side, from where it appears to be fully three- 73

dimensional, but also because as the viewer nears the piece she feels there is the

possibility of grasping its essence, or being. Derrida's description in The Animal That

Therefore I Am, of his cat entering his space, a place where the cat can encounter him,

where he is stopped short by the gaze of this cat other, is reversed here for Marconi

requires us to enter into the space of the object in order to encounter the figure which,

however, eludes us. Unlike Derrida's cat, McEwen's dog does not look back. Hence it is

we who seek an encounter that the animal resists, just as the cable that encircles it is

tentative, incomplete and not ultimately confining, our attempts to grasp the animal figure

are frustrated.

The challenge for any artist working with the figure of the animal is that the

animal (the real, the image, the sign, the metaphorical) is always already over-

determined, always recognizable and knowable. The animal figure is problematic because

it is so familiar, and hence can often be equated with 'my dog' or 'that wolf who we live

with or have seen in so many pictures. The appeal of McEwen's dog, seen from a

distance, is the promise of the fulfillment of our desire for kinship: this is the animal that

we long to encounter, the animal we think we know, the animal we imagine. But when

we enter the space of the sculpture, the dog is revealed as a steel slab, the subject that we

want to know becomes inert, hard material (figure 2). In the words of Derrida, it is an

example of "an unsubstitutable singularity," a being that refuses to be conceptualized. In

Derridean terms, we are confronted with an 'abyssal rupture,' of "any happy domestic conceptualization" (Wood 2004, 129). Instead of nearing the animal, we encounter ourselves, the limitations of the concepts that define the animal, our own relation to the 74

animal, and ultimately, the concepts that define us. I'm equating the impenetrable figure in Marconi with the opaque and 'bottomless gaze' of Derrida's cat about which he writes,

"As with every bottomless gaze ... it offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human"

(Derrida 2002, 381). The force of the encounter with the cat causes Derrida to consider the limitations, even inability of human concepts and discourse to name this Other, and himself, with language.

In addressing this 'shame of philosophy before all cats' Donna Haraway has pointed out the failure of Derrida to take this consideration one step further. Instead of being stopped short, instead of merely contemplating the abyssal limit of the human, the philosopher does not seriously consider an alternative form of engagement, does not risk knowing something about the cat and about how to look back. In essence, Derrida does not become curious about what the cat was thinking, feeling, or doing (Haraway 2008,

20). In contrast, McEwen uses the 'gaze of the animal' to direct our attention away from ourselves and onto another plane, to the world beyond the confines of philosophy and language. McEwen has installed Marconi in different configurations: with the steel cable fully encircling him, with the cable partially encircling him, or with the figure of the dog seated entirely outside of the cable. The collar attached to the cable in itself evokes restrained movement, as does the fact that the cable is always looped over two 'anchors,' that ensure the chain cannot slide off. In one installation, when the artist was absent, the collar was attached to the animal figure, an image that made McEwen 'almost sick'

(McEwen April 22, 2011). The issue of restraint is always present, whether or not the animal is positioned in or outside of the cable. But the animal vehicle also has the ability 75

to momentarily stand in for a vast world beyond us, and to point to the animals that live within our imagination. The power of the animal vehicle is precisely that it has this ability, hence, literally chaining the animal figure by placing the collar around its neck, overturns the very nature of the vehicle.

Rather than focusing on an abyssal rupture, McEwen invokes Paul Shepard's ideas that allow for knowing something of this other, and that this knowing, this interaction with otherness, helps us to become human. Shepard writes that "by presenting us with related-otherness - that diversity of non-self with which we have various things in common - they further, throughout our lives, a refining and maturing knowledge of personal and human being" (Shepard 1978, 249). While Shepard clearly states that this form of 'minding animals' (particularly larger mammals that we can relate to) is about human development, I would assert that 'becoming human' with McEwen's animal vehicle includes certain ethical considerations. Thinking with animals demands that we look outside our own desires and needs, that we risk knowing something about the animal that is other than ourselves, which requires generosity and imagination. Along with other philosophers, Derrida defines ethics as an obligation towards the radically other. H further observes that ethics, with respect to the recognizable subject lay dormant until confronted with radical alterity (Derrida 2009, 108). Pushing beyond an 'abyssal rupture' entails thinking through the perceived barriers separating us, and this has the potential to bring us closer to the animal, and, more importantly, closer to acknowledging the interconnections of human, animal, nature, culture and technology. The gap between the two ends of the cable surrounding Marconi allows for the confinement of the animal and 76

of the imagination to be contingent. McEwen has written that the imaginative vehicle (the animal) carries our thoughts outward, becoming (like working dogs) our agent in the field

(of vision) (McEwen 2007, 56). Hence, the resistant gaze of the animal (and this gains greater emphasis with the pointing canine figures) directs our look beyond the material figure and towards 'the life of the world independent of the projections of the human psyche' (McEwen 2010, 1).

The collar does not attach to the canine figure, leaving room for that which cannot be articulated, that core of being that exists outside of semiotic systems, a core of being, it is important to note, that is common to both the human and non-human animal. As Cary

Wolfe writes in reference to Derrida, "language is always on the scene before we are, as a precondition of our subjectivity;" the limits human language imposes on animal being are also imposed on human being (Wolfe 2008, 27).

Marconi is the first in a series of three 'animal vehicle' works; the following two,

The Distinctive Line (1980) and Western Channel (1980) continue to utilize the animal to refer to a world of sentient life outside of ourselves, while momentarily standing in for it

(McEwen March 26,2010). These two installations both work towards destabilizing the relationship of viewer to object, and viewer to concept. The Distinctive Line does this by bringing together two animal figures, steel-cut wolves who stand across from one another, Western Channel complicates the relationship of viewer to object by encompassing her, blocking her because, due to the scale of the work, and the incorporation of wall-like structures, one cannot visually capture the entire piece except 77

through an aerial view (the activity of a fully embodied subject, as McEwen points out, cannot be reduced to an abstract eye) (McEwen 2007, 79).

Figure 16

The two steel wolves in The Distinctive Line stand across an expanse exactly opposite one another, their stance is still and alert with their necks stretched out and their noses pointing in a manner that signals focused attention (Figure 16). The 'circle' seems closed.

As we approach, the silent but intense interaction between the two figures appears to be impenetrable. McEwen points out that as a work (a picture) the two figures are always in 78

perfect tension, but that this tension (between one subject and another) collapses when one interrupts it; becomes ragged, upset or lost when the viewer moves or enters the space (McEwen Jan. 12, 2011). The silhouettes that so clearly promise the animal once again become line, as in Marconi. More importantly, when interrupted, the seemingly impenetrable relationship between the two subjects disappears, resulting in a loss of fixed perspective (McEwen 2007, 56). What was a distinctive line becomes blurred when the viewer interacts with the space of the sculpture. The line is broken and our perspective becomes a multiple one denying us and the steel figures a singular position.

Discussing Walter Benjamin's reference to the 'saved night,' Giorgio Agamben describes a nature characterized by transience and beatitude. A nature that man, as a part of nature, continually discerns and separates (observes and classifies) but that itself continues to exist despite his projections. The 'salvation' implied in the 'saved night' is that this nature is not in need of saving at all but is sufficient unto itself (Agamben 2002,

8 If). The 'loss of a fixed perspective' that McEwen thrusts upon his viewer as they interrupt the space of the distinctive line, viscerally illustrates this aspect of a natural world that refuses to give the human a defining role. It includes the human but does not defer to him. Its elusiveness challenges the human, like the steel slab that turns into animal subject and then back again into material object. The human becomes a small part of a larger world that refuses his attempts to physically or conceptually encapsulate it.

What is required from the viewer is 'an act of faith' as John Murchie wrote in his 1980 review of The Distinctive Line, because the viewer cannot see both dogs at once, and because the figures, although exactly the same, do not appear to be the same due to our 79

position, resulting in a perception that is limited and incomplete. Murchie suggests that we are confronted with two distinct facts: dog and steel, image and reality, where the latter are fused into one, and hence confounded. The viewer is the animating force of the sculpture and responsible for deriving the implied relationships (dog to dog, dog to environment, viewer to dogs etc.), but can only do so within a limited and incomplete field of vision. Hence, "knowledge is forced upon us but only by means of an act of faith moving us from what we cannot see to what we wish to think we know" (Murchie 1980,

46f).

This push beyond the human (viewer) and the object itself is made most manifest in the third 'animal vehicle,' Western Channel (Figure 4). The realization that McEwen reached with Marconi, namely, that confinement to the internalized was or could be contingent, is most fully made material in this work. Western Channel is installed outside the University of Lethbridge on two large outdoor platforms. The main sculpture site is cliff-like, situated above the parking lot, while the second is connected, through a series of steps, to the coulees beyond. Made up of two long wall-like structures, echoing the shape of the landscape, that are connected at the center with an open doorway, the installation extends 162 feet and, at its highest point, is almost eight feet tall. Coming out of the atrium one is confronted with this wide steel sculptural wall; when one passes through the archway two figures, a wolf and a German shepherd are revealed, the former moving towards the doorway, the latter stopped in an alert stance across from and watching the wolf. A second wolf, identical in form to the first, stands at the very edge of the smaller platform where steps lead into the landscape. Thus, as the title indicates, the 80

work is quite literally a channel that leads out of the institution and into the coulee beyond.

Figure 17 and Figure 18

The sculptural wall functions as an intermediate space between the architecture of the institution and the open coulee landscape, echoing the formal shapes of both. As a viewer, we are caught in a sculptural space that blocks the view of either the one or the other, unless we stand in the doorway, in which case only partial views are allowed. In 81

sculptural terms, the viewer's experience of both space and material is measured with her body coming into contact with the large expanse of steel that encloses on one side and opens on the other. The side facing the university creates a manageable space, one where no additional sculptural figures stand. The other side reveals the wolf and the dog, and finally, the second wolf at the very edge of the steps leading us beyond both institution and sculpture (Figure 5). This second side is where myriad relationships and possibilities present themselves: there is the relationship of animal to animal, animal to viewer, form to material, sculpture to architecture, and sculpture to landscape. The connection between human, dog, and wolf suggests ideas of culture, domestication and the wild all momentarily existing on a single plane.

What Derrida describes as the limitations of language and conceptual thinking,

Agamben calls the 'anthropological machine' (theology, philosophy, politics, ethics and the law) that decides and produces both 'man' and the differences between the human and non-human animal. This machine operates by assuming an absence of a nature proper to Homo who has neither essence nor vocation, but has, like a chameleon, been conceptually defined by a meta-physico-political operation (Agamben 2002, 2Iff).

Agamben's project, not unlike Derrida's, is to find a way to stop the anthropological machine, to recognize the history and limitations of assumptions around both human and non-human beings, and to find a way to retrieve the whole human, who has been artificially separated from the world. His evocation of the 'saved night' offers a (deeply abstract) philosophical idea that challenges Martin Heidegger and imagines that a "life - neither open nor undisconcealable - stands serenely in relation to its own concealedness; 82

it lets it be outside of being" (Agamben 2002, 91)2. In order to understand what Agamben means by 'being' it is important to recall that he closely analyses how, from Aristotle through to Heidegger, Western philosophy has shaped the human's understanding of him/herself, and that especially Heidegger is at pains to outline how being in the world as human is radically different from being in the world as animal. According to Heidegger, the human is world-forming whereas the animal is merely 'poor in world,' one is being, the other simply existence. Prior to the above citation, Agamben explains that the Latin verb ignoscere should not be confused with ignorare (not to know), but rather understood as "to forgive." Ignoscenza, he points out, refers to a-knowledge and offers a way to understand the relation between something unsavable and something forgivable: to let something be, to leave something outside of being, to render it unsavable (Agamben

2002, 91). In order to address life outside of human life, and the place of the human as one living being among many, Agamben proposes that he must find a place within the

'saved night' to imagine alternative relationships and ways of being, both in the world, and of the world. Here, the artificial separation of man and animal, which was produced through an exclusion of the inside (the 'animality' of the human was isolated and replaced by reason alone), can be mended. The need for this mending is based on human ethical considerations, as the separation has resulted in an absence, a lack, and a

2 Heidegger uses the term 'concealedness' to refer to the unknown, and 'unconcealedness' to refer to 'truth.' His project is one of investigating Being as such, and in his writings he confirms that only the human can apprehend beings as being whereas the animal, in his 'undisconcealedness' is not open to the world nor is the world open to it. Rather, it lives embedded within the world but cannot apprehend it as such. 83

production of a subject for reasons that have to do with power and subjugation. It is man who has to heal, not animal, who, within the natural world is, like his environment, self- sufficient and in no need of salvation.

Standing on the one side of McEwen's installation, between the institution and the sculptural wall, one is held within a cultural-technological environment comfortably inhabited by the human viewer. We are protected and shielded from what lies beyond.

However, stepping to the other side, our bodies are no longer shielded by the architecture and we become small beings amongst many others. We are momentarily among animal subjects, and also among cultural objects, where, at the horizon, the landscape and silhouette of a wolf might offer us an imaginary entry into the space of a 'saved night.'

Agamben's idea might be translated into the much more pragmatic notion of an idealized ecosystem, which Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan describe as "a web of beings-in- relationship that emerges as a whole far greater than the sum of its parts, and which cannot be reduced to its parts without destroying its integrity" (Adams & Donovan 1995,

180). Understood this way, Western Channel allows us a glimpse into the web of beings; into the cultural, natural, and technological, the human, non-human, and organic in- relation to one another. McEwen writes that "as a sculpture the dog remains mute and motionless but as a subject it looks where animals look" (McEwen 2010, 2). The multi­ directional look of the animals (at the doorway, at the wolf, and finally out, at the landscape) allows the viewer to follow the various directions of the animal's attention from animal to sculpture, from animal to animal, and from animal to coulee. The direction of this last look (and lope) signals a departure from both a fixed perspective and 84

a conceptual barrier between different ways of being. It allows one to be capable, as

Shepard imagines it, "to a limited degree and with great effort, of stepping out of the stream of events for a moment, even of his skin, and looking at the whole fauna and flora as a composite of his own possibilities" (Shepard 1978, 139).

Where Western Channel offers us a way to think through and beyond an 'abyssal rupture,' Still Life and Blind (1988-89), installed on the grounds of Oakville Galleries, confronts us with the painful consequences of not regarding the animal (Figure 19).

Figure 19

Like the wolf at the edge of the steps, the deer in Oakville is also pushed to an edge, but here she has no recourse because beyond her figure there is only water. Calarco writes,

"the Other leaves a trace of the shock of encounter within, and how I respond to that trace

- whether I affirm or negate, avow or disavow - constitutes ethics, properly speaking"

(Calarco 2008, 126). Still Life and Blind is installed right at the edge of Lake Ontario. We see a series of grid-like structures on either side of the river with a steel silhouette of a 85

deer behind the lone grid. The animal figure is being pushed beyond the shore and is standing on a plinth that extends into the water. Seeking a beyond, its head is turned away from the blinds and away from us, the viewer. Hunting blinds are camouflaged in trees or fields, and here, the structures also recall fishing nets. The French term for still life,

McEwen reminds us, is nature morte (McEwen 2007, 37). What the artist gives us here is the trace: the trace of ensnaring devices that hunters have left behind, although the subject referred to as "still alive and blind" is a human one (McEwen 2007, 37). It brings us to what Calarco terms the 'ethical force' behind the encounter, to the question at the very core of Derrida's project: "what are our responsibilities and obligations with respect to the living in general" (Derrida 2002, 395)? Derrida draws our attention to the unprecedented subjection of animals in the last two hundred years, equating this to genocide, and points out the resulting (and warring) forces of compassion and disavowal.

He asks Jeremy Bentham's question, "can animals suffer?" and concludes that "can they suffer?" amounts to "can they not be able?'''' (Derrida 2002, 396). This inability is a powerlessness that makes for vulnerability, and, in turn, for anguish in the face of this vulnerability. This is a mutually experienced vulnerability for we share with animals the capacity to be powerless; share "the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life"

(Derrida 2002, 396).

According to Heidegger, only man dies while the animal merely perishes. For the human 'death presences' as the mystery of being, and only the human has the capacity to name the disappearance of being in the world. Whereas the human alone 'has world' the animal is poor in world and hence does not have the awareness of losing it (Lippit 2000, 86

60ff). By maintaining that mortality is indeed something that we share with animals,

Derrida rejects Heidegger's notion that the animal cannot know death. The stance of

McEwen's deer, trapped between the shoreline and the blind, its gaze directed in the opposite direction of its movement, suggests that the animal is conscious of world, of vulnerability and of end.

Language

The relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. Neither can be reduced to the other's terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say. Michel Foucault (Foucault 1970, 9)

Whether as single objects or large installations, the very manifestation of John

McEwen's sculptures stop us short. While they may move in and out of the landscape, his silhouettes always, at some point, appear to be three-dimensional, and catch our eye.

They insist on blocking our paths and yet resist appropriation. They call for consideration and they ask for regard. Derrida does not resolve the question of the animal as his project is independent of the one of animal rights. Derrida, while clearly concerned with the concrete as demonstrated not only by the references to his cat, but also to scientific research, experimentation, and factory farming, asks us to think through philosophy, to

'go through the undecidable,' to push our conceptual limits past traditional approaches towards a mode of deconstruction that is mindful of the Other. Mortality is only one thing that we share with animals. Language is another, language that restricts not only the animal but also the human. 87

McEwen's Buck (Figure 20) from 1978/82 also grapples with the limitations of language. Two steel tables face each other across the gallery separated by a wide expanse of space. On the far table, a small steel silhouette of a buck with forged antlers stands in a way that signals either an abrupt stop or an alert stance. A small hole that enters one side and exits the other has pierced the chest. Across the room, the corresponding table is engraved with the word 'Buck.' The abyss separating the word from the figure is painfully obvious.

Figure 20 88

Like the gap in the cable surrounding the dog, the distance between the word, Buck, and the figure represented, is an attempt, at best, to somehow name this Other. What is interesting in this work is the stance of the buck itself, which, unlike the dog in Marconi, is not only a silhouette. Its three-dimensional antlers are a physical attribute that will not collapse into an abstract line from any viewing position. These antlers have been forged from a single piece of steel, and signal the cyclical nature of life (a buck sheds and regrows its antlers annually), as well as the complexity of living organisms and the interrelated materials that feed this life. This boney growth from the skull draws protein, calcium and other minerals from the body. The healthy growth of bone relies on a good source of nutrients and forage. Hence, the life of a buck (strong antlers are required to fight off other bucks for territory and attract does in order to survive), which is dependent on its environment, is an example of the being-in-relationship with a complex and holistic ecosystem.

In terms of the sculpture and the inscribed text, I want to suggest that the halted, alert stance of the buck is not only a reaction to the word but also a reaction to us as the viewer, signaling an "interruptive encounter." Unlike the dog, this buck might appear to be looking at us as it is most certainly looking above and beyond the word engraved on the table opposite. The look penetrates the entire space between the two tables that can be inhabited by us as the viewer, becoming a shared space where the encounter between us and the animal figure is staged. An exchange takes place between us, with the word behind us, at our back. The alert stance of the buck towards both us and the word can be understood as the 'testimonial dimension' Derrida refers to in And Say the Animal 89

Responded which is "what subtends the problematic we are dealing with here. Who witnesses to what and for whom?" (Derrida 2003, 129). By placing the viewer between the buck and the word, McEwen places us in the space in between, a space where certainty, truth, and the reliability of the name applied to the Other is called into question.

Sharing the space, and being within the sightline of the buck, begs the questions: who is looking at whom? Who is witnessing? Is it me, disconcerted at the rupture between word and image, or is it the animal, disconnected from the concept that inscribes it, observing my disconcertion? Derrida writes that the first component of his thesis is that "This abyssal rupture doesn't describe two edges, a unilinear and indivisible line having two edges, Man and Animal in general" (Derrida 2002, 399). Rather, Derrida directs us to limitrophy, which he claims is his subject. Limitrophy doesn't do away with the idea of limits, but allows slippages, and hence draws attention to the fact that clear demarcations are rarely possible: 'Whatever I will say is designed, certainly not to efface the limit, but

... [to complicate] the line precisely by making it increase and multiply" (Derrida 2002,

399).

The distance between the word and the buck in McEwen's work reveals the name as inadequate, just as the three-dimensional antlers prevent the animal from becoming merely a line, counteracting the 'there/not there' qualities that were apparent in the steel silhouettes. It is important to note that it is the antlers, signaling a larger cycle of life, that refuse to become a line. The animal (small in scale and not life-sized) disappears, but the world that it signals remains material. Derrida claims that the all-encompassing term

'animal' for all living beings that are not human is not simply inadequate but violent and 90

willfully ignorant (Derrida 2002, 416). To offer a word more appropriate, that allows "the plural to be heard in the singular" (Derrida 2002,415) Derrida gives us animot which, among other things, brings us back to the word named a noun (nomme nom), that "opens onto the referential experience of the thing as such, as what it is in its being." (Derrida

2002, 416). Thus, standing between McEwen's buck and the word, I the viewer, experience a kind of quickening that recalls the trace that the encounter with the animal has left in me. In this space I am forced to consider not simply who or what the animal is, but who or what I myself am if the language and concepts that define us are brought into question under the gaze of this animal Other.

Figure 21

The idea of limitrophy, which thickens and complicates, is apparent in Babylon

(1991-98) (Figure 21), first installed at the McMichael Collection of Canadian Art. In

1991 McEwen was invited to create a work that would bridge the traditional landscapes of the collection with the contemporary world of sculpture. The piece was installed over 91

the course of the next several years. First, the word BABYLON was spelled out on a series of seven cubes, with a bottomless toppled urn lying on top of the third cube, and a wolf standing at the edge of the sixth one, looking down. A final component, a wolf next to a steel satellite dish, viewable upon leaving the art gallery grounds, was installed in

1996 (Figure 22). The initial inspiration for Babylon was the "Rivers of Babylon" soundtrack sung by the Melodians, from The Harder They Come, the 1972 Jamaican crime film that gave birth to reggae. The Melodians' lyrics were based on Psalm 137, in which those exiled in Babel mourn the loss of their freedom. The second inference in the piece is taken from Genesis 11: 5-8, which relates the story of the tower of Babel where one people, unified by one language, were thwarted by God who, judging that those so unified could accomplish anything that they set out to do, confounded their language and forced them into separate communities.

Figure 22 92

A multiplicity of ideas comes together here: three stories which are not connected either morally or chronologically, text, image, wolf, satellite dish, landscape, culture, nature, technology. The ensuing controversy, particularly the fury of Robert and Signe

McMichael, is on public record. What is more interesting, however, is what this controversy (and accusations of a breach of contract) suggests about how the 'landscape tradition' and 'contemporary sculpture' are understood. In retrospect it is clear that the

McMichael Collection expected a work composed of steel animals that might aesthetically complement the long driveway leading to the parking lot in front of the galleries. The animal sculptures in this context would contribute to what was already an unproblematic rendering of an idealized natural world, reinforced by the landscaping of the grounds. This carefully cultivated environment can be seen from within the galleries through strategically placed windows. These views are supposed to reflect the 'real' landscape that is portrayed in the exhibited paintings of the Group of Seven. The idea of raw nature, however, was already problematized in the paintings of the Group, particularly in the works that depicted Algonquin Park where clear-cutting was well underway and documented in numerous Tom Thomson sketches and paintings. Despite this, however, the McMichael Collection has successfully propagated close and uncritical ties between the landscape and Canadian identity.

By incorporating language and the art object, the animal and a 'working minimalist' sculpture, as well as nature, technology, the natural world and civilized society into a single installation, McEwen raises the spectre of complexity and multiplicity. While ideas of wilderness have always been embedded in the Canadian 93

identity, McEwen points out that it was as much technology as nature that formed this country: rivers traversable by canoe determined settlements that in turn were reinforced by technologies such as the railway, the highway and the telephone line (McEwen 2003,

30). Hence, Babylon challenges our ideal of Canada as a wilderness and offers a more complex reading of our place within it, and our relationship to it. Mourning the loss of innocence, loss of place, and loss of a unified vision of the world are now understood philosophically as forms of romantic longing for something that never was. The confusion that the 'confounding of language' brought to the builders of the tower of

Babel does not necessarily imply loss but can also be understood as diversity and difference, allowing for the coexistence of otherness. The separation is one between beings who are different in degrees, not different in kind. This suggests affinity rather than unity, and allows for the extension of this affinity to include non-human animals.

There are several ways to read this work. I offer the following as one interpretation: the toppled urn, representing the failure of civilization to build a better world, is coupled with the word BABYLON that points to loss of origin; the animal vehicle, standing on the cube both seeks belonging and stands apart, situated above the text but nonetheless a part of the nature-culture construct. Understood as a vehicle representing a wellspring of sentient life, McEwen notes that placing the animal on a pedestal was a way of holding onto its potential (Jan. 12, 2011). (This idea was made manifest earlier with Marconi, whose potential was intact until a collar was placed directly around its neck). By integrating the animal vehicle into the installation of letters,

McEwen's intent was to give the animal the weight of dialogue (understood here as one 94

of the many different voices that emerged after the 'confounding of languages'), and to remind us that language includes community as well as constraint (McEwen 2003, 33).

The satellite dish, finally, is the sculptor's version of the tower, a communication device that binds a global community but does so precariously. If Canada is as much a multicultural country as one defined by notions of landscape and wilderness, the satellite connects us geographically, and points to a myriad of identities that have come together in one place to forge some kind of nationhood that is nonetheless defined by 'foreign' cultures. The wolf (as a steel sculpture whose stance implies movement) is an additional subject in this nation, both as icon of an imagined wilderness, and a sign of a world where many individuals coexist.

Mark Dion has noted that nature is one of the most sophisticated arenas for the production of ideology (Kwon 1997, 9). Similarly, Donna Haraway stresses that a desire for an innocent relationship with nature is not a secure ground for politics (Haraway

1991, 152f). Working in this terrain by articulating the contradictions at work in the areas of the Canadian landscape tradition, more recent understandings of landscape, and contemporary issues in sculpture, McEwen imagined that Babylon could take the idea of the animal into the landscape of politics and language. He could do this, and use this particular word, because he understood his own complicity in a certain unproblematic rendering of the ideal (McEwen Jan. 12, 2011). McEwen saw this form of practice as something both critical and healing, that, formally, like Western Channel, turned both inward and outward (McEwen Feb. 21, 2010). The challenge of pinpointing and visually displaying contradictions, and confronting the linear way that the Group of Seven have 95

become stand-ins for a national identity, and for Canadian landscape painting per se, calls for a deconstructive approach to thinking through this ideology and its constituent elements. It also asks what alternative stories can be told about historical and contemporary culture, where we are now, and how we move forward.

The 'impure Minimalism' that informs McEwen's approach to sculpture is most apparent in ideas of visual reduction, elimination of the illusion of depth, the primacy of the object, the importance of site, the psychology of perception, and audience interaction.

If Babylon is also an investigation into contemporary sculpture, then one has to approach the work both formally and conceptually. What we see is a site specific installation that changes (and reveals itself) as the viewer moves past it. One by one the letters spell a word, and along the way, one encounters steel objects that appear and disappear (the urn is recognizable as such from one vantage, and abstract form from another. The wolf is silhouette and line). The objects are placed in a specific place (the drive leading to the

McMichael) already endowed with the promise of a Canadian cultural experience. Trees and parkland lie behind the drive. The wolf and satellite dish are placed towards the exit, viewable upon leaving the collection. The 'tower' and the wolf (who is there and not there, line and form, material and idea, inert and moving) form the end of a trajectory, beginning with entering the drive, visiting the galleries, and leaving the grounds. Each component in the installation interrupts the existing space and requires the viewer to move through it in order for the complete work to be experienced. The role of sculpture is to interrupt space in a way that both redefines an existing site, and physically impacts the body of the viewer. The objects work on our perceptions, both literally and conceptually, 96

so that the sculpture itself becomes a vehicle for thought. Furthermore, the scale and multiplicity of views complicates the position / place of the spectator, as well as the narrative that, like the gaze of the canine, points in a certain direction but does not define it. McEwen's hope is that visual things have the potential to hold contradictory ideas in one place (McEwen Aug. 20, 2010). In this case, what emerges is an uncertainty about the balance of power between nature and culture. In Babylon the dissolving border that points to the instability of the condition of landscape in our time, becomes visible

(McEwen 2003, 32).

Jonathan Burt has written that 'how we address the animal figure, how we speak to it, from it and of it, parallels the question of how we speak of the artwork' (Burt 2008,

4). The animal figure is not mere representation, nor is the work of art: both are an integral object that becomes a subject when we speak to it, from it and of it. To deny the aptness of a communication device and the animal vehicle juxtaposed with text is to deny the animal subject a place within a contemporary world that is made up of complex relations of living beings. It denies the animal agency and place, and reduces the potential for humans to relate to the other, which here includes both the animal and technology. As

McEwen writes, "we are inclined to think of the environment as outside but with each cycle the animal as though a moving shadow flickers inside the human. What if the environment is both inside and outside? What if mind and nature are inextricably linked and the world is not simply a stage for its actions but the wellspring of its being?"

(McEwen 2003, 34). Alexander Wilson has written that: 97

current biological theory holds that animals sense themselves to be part of the larger world. Sense that their selves extend beyond their skins to encompass an invisible region that includes the whole integrated web of relationships that they are a part of (Wilson 1992, 130f).

Hence, rather than destroying the idealized landscape, Babylon offers a way to think through the interconnections between human, place, animal, technology, the natural and the civilized. It brings these together in a single place rather than leaving them to reside in the artificially constructed spheres of the anthropological machine, of'nature,' 'culture,'

'wilderness' and inhabited space. Rather than build a dichotomy between what is lost, raw, and unreachable, and progress, Babylon suggests that we have always inhabited a tainted world and that we need not mourn loss as much as strive to understand complex interrelations, and the connections between wild and domestic, real and imagined, idea and form, as they become manifest in sculpture.

The call is to think through the undecidable in order to look at ourselves, our self- understanding, our discourses, our language and the concepts that inform our actions.

Derrida forcefully claims, "to think the war we find ourselves waging is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity, a constraint that, like it or not, directly or indirectly, everyone is held to. Henceforth and more than ever. And I say "to think" this war, because I believe it concerns what we call "thinking." The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there" (Derrida 2002, 397). 98

Stars

What is our relationship with the earth and with its correlative, stellar and imaginative space? Antony Gormley (Hutchinson et al, 1995, 151)

The shift of focus from animal to star, McEwen writes, begins with absence

(McEwen 2007, 2). For McEwen, the animal vehicle functioned as a potential bridge between body and mind. The viewer's movement towards the sculpture leads her to finally follow the animal's gaze and complete the work by imagining a larger world beyond. The use of stars signals both a move towards introspection (thought) and one that reaches beyond sentient life to reflect on the long span of evolution, the immense journey from star dust to mammalian form. McEwen first produced stars at the beginning of

January 1992 for Eclipse of the Unborn, an installation that consisted of a wall of steel star outlines with positive stars scattered on the floor. In September of that same year this wall was reconfigured into a cage or box, enclosed on four sides with a gap at the top and a partial lid. Two neon words, Jealousy, in red, and Jalousie in blue, were attached to the box (Figure 23). McEwen maintains that the origin of the English word, jealousy, is the

French jalousie, which was derived from slatted screens that kept harem women secure while allowing them light and air. For McEwen, then, the box became less of a cage than a sanctuary, a state of mind, "sheltering our ongoing vigilance for our very own paradise"

(McEwen 1999). 99

Figure 23

The gaze of the animal vehicle directs us towards sentient life and a world beyond human conceptualization. The stars point to a far larger universe and an intricate and lengthy

(hundreds of millions of years) process of evolution understood as a complex interaction between organisms and their environment in mutual, perpetual flux. The human becomes, once again, simply one element in a world 'independent of the projections of the human psyche.' Elizabeth Grosz points out that Charles Darwin's ideas were a critique of 100

essentialism and teleology with their emphasis on fundamental indetermination and a dynamic understanding of the intermingling of history and biology. In her estimation,

Darwin's focus on difference, bifurcation and becoming was an essentially anti-humanist one (Grosz 2005, 15ff).

The early, abstract star works, still, or perhaps more than ever, demonstrate a

'working Minimalism' with their emphasis on reduced form and changeability based on the viewer's position in relation to the work. Conceptually, McEwen considers the stars to both be, and represent, a mode of 'thinking about thinking.' By creating works that neither pointed to anything nor take on a recognizable living form, the abstract star work represents a way of 'separating the world from the grasp of my psyche' (McEwen Jan. 6,

2011). Jealousy/Jalousie has the most basic form, a cube. This geometrical form is not mammalian, but is, importantly, one that continues to be measured against the scale of the human body (the sides of the cube measure approximately 7.5 feet, and the walls are 8.75 feet tall). As a space for thought it allows sufficient room for a body to move comfortably, while also letting in light and air from the outside world. As a shelter it is a container capable of enclosing a human body and of holding thought. Although philosophically we are one small part of a larger and changing universe, we are not disembodied. Here, we experience the world from the site of our body through a mesh of stars that are both ephemeral, shifting and changing their pattern as we move, and permanent hard steel forms, stamped from a coil. 101

In the 1993 installation, The Tower Bilders, McEwen brings the animal vehicle back into dialogue with both language and architectural forms made of stars. The tower itself consists of stacked cylinders that become narrower as the tower rises up 28 feet. A second, small 'tower' spells the word Babel, with the last two letters acting as a base for the B at the top and the AB in between. A dog situated nearby looks up at the star- perforated tower. Both towers are precarious. Critic John Bentley Mays points to two sources for McEwen's installation: Pieter Bruegel's The Tower of Babel and Vladimir

Tatlin's Monument to the 3rdInternational (1919), and interprets McEwen's work as one where "our tragic human yearning to master the future seems fused" (Bentley Mays

1993). McEwen has written of this tower that, 'with the lens buried in the ground, the tower is both observatory and blind instrument' (McEwen 2007,62). The endeavours of humanity to reach the stars (as in Babel) and understand them (as in an observatory) are made manifest in the sculpture. Always careful in his choice of title, McEwen chooses the German word Bilders to reference image-makers, i.e. to suggest that what he has created is a picture rather than a literal artifice.

Bentley Mays considers the dog "a recollection of what is patient and what endures" (Bentley Mays 1993). McEwen has repeatedly maintained that "solid steel animals as objects remain mute and motionless but as subjects they look where animals look" (McEwen Jan. 24, 2011). Alice A. Kuzniar, who has traced interpretations of animal muteness in Agamben, Derrida, Vicki Hearne and Emmanuel Levinas, notes that

Agamben maintains that by identifying himself with language, man places his own muteness outside of himself, while Derrida has contrasted the straight jacket of language 102

with the liberty of the cat. Hearne has claimed that rather than languageless, the lion is self-contained and reticent, calling upon us to reconceptualize the absence of language as reserve, as a renunciation rather than as lack (Kuzniar 2006, 27ff). In his oft quoted passage on the dog Bobby, encountered during his time as a prisoner of war in a Nazi camp, where he and his fellow prisoners were treated as 'less than human,' Levinas claims that it was the dog who greeted them every evening upon their return to the camp, that affirmed their humanity: "for him, there was no doubt that we were men" (Calarco

2008, 57f). This despite Levinas's claim elsewhere that the animal has no face, no will, no reason, no language, in essence, that the animal is not a part of the ethical community of 'reasonable beings,' and that the dog cannot bear witness (Wolfe 2003, 17ff). In this respect, Levinas's recollection of Bobby hence stands apart from his other writings, for, if not witnessing, what was Bobby doing when he affirmed the humanity of the prisoners?

In a detailed analysis of this problem, David Clark reminds us that the last sentence of

Levinas's essay, which reads that Bobby's "friendly growling, his animal faith, was born from the silence of his forefathers on the banks of the Nile," refers to Exodus 11:7 where

"not a dog shall growl" but bear silent witness to the righteousness of those who belong to the living God of Israel (Clark 1997, 191). Kuzniar takes Clark's argument one step further by suggesting that rather than subscribing to the tradition that animals are without ethics or logos, Levinas testifies to their command over both because they choose silence while the Jews safely flee Egypt. In other words, their silence provides testimony and witness to God's will, and that Levinas's invocation of Exodus reminds him of our debt to animals (Kuzniar 2006, 34). 103

In sum, being dumb does not necessarily imply ignorance, but can be a choice not to speak. In addition, the notion of bearing witness requires silence. By suggesting, as

Agamben and Derrida do, that language enforces limitations, and, as Heame does, that silence implies reticence, the muteness of animals is reinscribed as the choice not to speak, the choice not to align oneself, the choice not to judge but to witness. By tracing the origins of Bobby back to Exodus, Levinas reminds us that the animal has existed alongside humanity since the origins of history. McEwen invokes this presence, and the action of witnessing, when he places a dog or a wolf alongside a sculpture that raises the spectre of culture and technology, for the animal is both mute witness and independent subject. It does not judge because it stands outside of the anthropological machine that includes philosophy and the law. Its vulnerability, as subject, in the face of this machine, is always held at bay by the sculptor who makes his objects out of steel. For McEwen, the animal as vehicle is one that is distinct, marked by the fact that it is very present and very still. His sculpture remains impervious because the perspectival change that occurs is due to the movement of the viewer, not that of the animal (Feb. 21, 2010). In (working)

Minimalism, the sculpture assumes a viewer but does not represent him, just as the animal vehicle speaks to the idea of Benjamin's 'saved night,' that place constantly defined by, but never usurped by, language and philosophy.

For McEwen, the tower in The Tower Bilders is situated between rootedness and movement, the perforated walls, visually vibrant and pierced with stars (or rather the negative space that forms a star) are absent ghosts of a quest for knowledge, and reminders of the infinite space that we have traversed to be here, from dust and carbon to 104

fully formed mammal (McEwen 2007, 62). The animal has accompanied us in this journey, regardless of the place that humans have relegated to him. And he stands there still, alongside the tower and the word, silent, but obdurate.

The idea of a sustained presence, time, and an enduring existence culminate in two works, both from 2008, which bring forth the animal vehicle in the form of a bear.

Star Dust and Time and Ragged Ass Bear can be seen as two counterparts engaged in a similar dialogue. The former underwent a series of transformations as it was installed in different sites, with different titles, but its form remained constant. From Lachine Bear to

Black Bear to Star Dust and Time, the sculpture shows a large black bear standing atop an open plinth, head raised as if catching a scent or observing something above and beyond him (figure 24).

Figure 24 105

What is striking here is that the bear has a solid, three-dimensional, bronze form. Its mass is counterbalanced by both the open structure supporting him, and the fact that it is raised up so far above the ground (the pedestal measures some 14 feet in height). The permanent place he has found is in Toronto's railway lands at Spadina and Lakeshore, a densely built-up urban environment that perhaps requires a plinth of such height to sustain the integrity of the animal vehicle. It is not the artist's intention to suggest that a Canadian black bear, symbolic of some kind of wildlife experience, has appeared in a downtown district, but rather, that this animal, its heavy mass inexplicably supported by thin posts, stands between us and star dust. The evocation of a 15 billion year evolutionary path is situated in this urban space amidst the 'evolution' and rapid growth of information technology. The capacity of technology, McEwen points out, produces information that grows exponentially (doubling doubles) at such a rate that 'doing the math boggles me'

(McEwen Jan. 21, 2011). Moore's Law refers to the growth of computing hardware, specifically, that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has doubled every 1.5 years over the past fifty years, with no end in sight. Systems analyst Nadim Ghaznavi comments that, whether we call it a social organization, or social organism, it can neither be stopped nor derailed. He points to what the really complex aspect of this phenomenon is: that while information is easy to get, and there is a lot of it, the difficulty is how to manage it. The key here is the difference between hardware and software, where the latter, human part, is not undergoing the same explosive paradigm shift as the former. In essence, while the hardware capability is doubling every 18 months, the capacity to actually harness it in intelligent ways is going 106

at a human pace (Ghaznavi Jan. 29, 2011). Hence, the decentering of the human subject

(a mote in the long story of evolution; a constructor of a 'saved night' that remains sufficient unto itself) is reinforced by a torrent of hardware productivity that overruns the pace of the human.

The height of the bear and the open plinth perform another, formal, function by creating a physical space that becomes sculptural. This space is one that is carved out between things, a real space, which McEwen provides as a possible site for imaginative thinking. Just as the space between individual stars can be considered a mental one, so too, the structural one created here allows room for thought. The art and life process,

McEwen maintains, is one that includes but is beyond oneself. A process that structurally begins with a gap: a gap between things, people, and animals, so that what becomes important sculpturally, is how a model can best navigate this gap and offer both a site to think from and a site to inhabit (McEwen Jan. 6, 2011). The scale of the bear is a real one, one that we can find in the wild, and one that we can measure with our own body.

Raised above us, it remains invulnerable, fixed and fluid at the same time.

The counterpart to this work, Ragged Ass Bear (Figure 25), inhabits a quite different site than Star Dust and Time. Where the latter is firmly embedded in the context of human, technological, social, and urban space, the second bear stands on top of a piece of the Canadian Shield at the mouth of a river leading to Georgian Bay, Ontario. This bear stands directly on the ground. Also three-dimensional, it is not solid but made of stars. The there/not there that McEwen accomplishes with the silhouette animal vehicle is 107

attained here through the material that, depending on angle and light, enables the bear to subtly shift from solid to immaterial.

Figure 25

It becomes part of the landscape, moving in and out of its shadows, and yet, as a steel sculpture, remains apart from it. The raised space required for the urban installation is not necessary in the bush where instead a 'natural' platform is utilized. The bear is positioned on the top of an island, one that those wanting to dock approach at water level by means 108

of a boat, so that the movement around the bear and rock creates the shift from solid to transparent. In order to get to eye level, one has to actually climb onto the rock. Hence the sum of bear and rock are greater than the individual parts. The concept of star dust and time, given in the title of the former, is made manifest in the very material, form and site of the latter. Michael Mitchell, the owner of the land where Ragged Ass Bear is installed, suggests that animal images are 'fossil thoughts' representing human fears and triumphs, life and death, encounters with great mysteries. He further argues that it is these fundamental images, belonging to our collective psyche, and, this "dark, non-verbal part of our consciousness" which McEwen is trying to understand when he makes sculpture"

(Mitchell 2009,41). However, I would contend that Mitchell is too quick to reduce animal images to representations of the human psyche, and would instead suggest that such 'fossil thoughts' and 'this dark non-verbal part of our consciousness' can be found in all living beings, and that it is this connection, perhaps across an abyssal rupture, that

McEwen is trying to understand. From the ancient images of animals in paleolithic caves that Mitchell invokes, to McEwen's own images of animals, these works are ways of thinking with animals as we contemplate history, contemporaneity, time and being both philosophically, and from a specific place. A place from where we experience, feel, and live in the world. 109

The Open

The Dog

A world of image is what counts - up there - and is continually renewed by sight.

Yet sometimes some thing secretly comes near, stays by him as he seeks to penetrate

beyond the image - like himself, apart, inferior and, fundamentally, though not excluded yet kept separate.

Unsure, he gives the image his reality

and then, forgetting, none the less holds up his face to it beseechingly and, nearly satisfied, nearly accepts but still rejects it - for [then] he could not be.

(Rilke 1992, 275)

Internal Logic (Figure 26) is an installation shown at the Olga Korper Gallery in

2009, where McEwen had the opportunity to present myriad sculptures that together created a narrative, albeit it an open-ended and ever shifting one. Six different tableaus made up the installation: a bronze 'egg', an 'egg' made up of laser cut steel stars, a birch burl suspended above a flat steel circle, a steel wolf stepping off of a granite slab, a

German shepherd moving towards a steel ring of fire, and three thin curled components laid out on the floor in front of partially closed shutters behind which a small wooden 110

horse stands. The last work is entitled Tell Me a Story, the oval forms Refuge and Perfect, the birch burl Heart, Fist & Tunnel, the wolf Striking Stone and the dog with the ring of fire Rilke's Fountain. The 'impurity' of McEwen's approach can be seen most succinctly when one views these different works together: we have mass, in the rock beneath the wolf and in the bronze egg (where volume is unknowable); volume in the star egg, cancer in the burl, and finally, an allegory about trust in Tell Me A Story.

In the Eighth of the Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke writes:

With all its eyes the natural world looks out into the Open. Only our eyes are turned backward, and surround plant, animal, child like traps, as they emerge into their freedom.

We know what is really out there only from the animal's gaze; for we take the very young child and force it around. So that it sees objects - not the Open, which is so deep in animals' faces.

(Rilke 1982/2009, 49) Ill

Figure 26

In McEwen's installation we can find all the ideas previously discussed: aspects of the

'saved night,' the long span of evolution and a world that proceeds without us, stories that we create in order to make sense of the world, and the animal vehicle as it both accompanies and transcends these stories. In his review of Internal Logic, critic Gary

Michael Dault writes that "If the Greeks and biblical concept of the word Logos see that creating word as the animating principle pervading the universe, and later, as meaning

"discourse," then it is McEwen's work that it strike back to this misty, fecund, pre- 112

linguistic, pre-Logos time [sic] " (Dault 2009, 10). Derrida reminds us that, because of an ontological affinity, both the word zoe and the word bios were translated from the Greek into 'life' (Derrida 2009, 305). Agamben maintains that with the Greeks and Aristotle, zoe (understood as 'bare life') and bios (contemplative life, the life of pleasure, political life) gradually become indistinct, while the division of life into vegetal and relational, organic and animal, animal and human is firmly established (Agamben 2002, 15).

Agamben's project is to reinstate bare life as distinct and fundamental to being, on the one hand, and to "investigate the practical and political mystery of separation" rather than

"the metaphysical mystery of conjunction" that is man. For if man is both living thing and logos, natural (animal) and supernatural or social, and one of these is always silenced or suppressed in favour of the 'higher' order, then man is always the result of ceaseless division and caesurate (Agamben 2002, 16). This collapsing of two terms (bare life and contemplative life) and the simultaneous division of animal and human life both result in man separating himself from all other living things. Bare life has been usurped by political life, and the non-human animal has been banished to that vegetal, organic, animal space from which man has severed himself, emphasizing the human-animal distinction on the one hand, and relegating the animal to a place of mere existence on the other.

In his own analysis of the problem of language and translation, Derrida accuses

Agamben of making a distinction (between bare life and qualified life) although these have never been either clear or secure. Derrida further notes that Agamben should have, but did not, refer to Heidegger's consideration of a similar problem, namely that, 113

according to Aristotle's definition, zoon logon ekhon, man becomes that 'living being

endowed with reason'. What Heidegger asks here is how the originary unity of Being (the

Latin translation of natura into physis has turned away from the originary sense of the

Greek physis, as ethics) and thinking becomes the unity of physis and logos'? And, most

important for Derrida, how does this logos (reason and understanding) come to dominate

Being at the beginning of Greek philosophy? (Derrida 2009, 317f). Hence, while Derrida

rejects Agamben's claim that a secure distinction between bare life and political life ever

existed so cannot be reinstated, he questions the separation of logical reasoning and

Being, and, more specifically, the fact that reason always predominates. Rilke describes

this as follows:

Never, not for a single day, do we have

before us that pure space into which flowers endlessly open. Always there is World and never Nowhere without the No: that pure unseparated element which one breathes without desire and endlessly knows.

(Rilke 1982/2009,49)

In a beautiful inversion, Rilke suggests that in the Open there is always Where, always more, always endless, eternity, and timeless. That this stands in contrast to the reductive, encapsulating conceptual drive of human language and representation. One can argue, and Heidegger did, that Rilke merely continues the tradition of separating human and animal being, albeit favouring the animal. Accusing Rilke of both anthropomorphism and 114

placing the animal above man, Heidegger essentially takes the poet's vision and reverses it, suggesting that only man, endowed with the 'essential gaze of authentic thought, can see the Open which names the unconcealedness of beings' (Agamben 2002, 58f).

Heidegger's argument is that no plant or animal has the 'word,' and that where the stone has no world, the animal is weltarm, poor in world, and only the human is weltbildend, world-forming. The animal is offen (open), but not offenbar (disconcealed, lit. openable)

(Agamben 2002, 5Iff).

In slightly different terms, Derrida describes Heidegger's position as remaining a humanist one, where the Being of the [animal] entity is crossed out in advance. The animal is closed to the very opening of the entity and hence cannot have access to the difference between the open and the closed. What modality of being, then, Derrida asks, is reserved to the animal? (Derrida 1989, 53ff).

Taken together, (notwithstanding that Derrida highlights Agamben's argument only to rebuff it), we have the reoccurrence of a central problem, namely the splitting of thinking and being, mind and body, human and animal. A splitting that seems to have occurred with the Greeks and most clearly with Aristotle. A splitting that concerns

Derrida and Agamben equally although they propose to think through this issue differently. The former using deconstruction to bring animals into the scope of ethical and political considerations, and the latter suggesting that by re-imagining zoe as bare life, we reinstate both an important link between the human and non-human animal, and 115

allow a passage through which we can glimpse the Open and find there a new space for being.

For the Open in Rilke (whom Agamben cites) is more than simply naked life, it is pre-conceptual (that "misty, fecund, pre-linguistic, pre-Logos time"), and therefore the same place that Derrida's cat might inhabit, the same place that Agamben sees in

Benjamin's 'saved night.' Rilke writes that in the Open

... A child may wander there for hours, through the timeless stillness, may get lost in it and be shaken back. Or someone dies and is it.

For, nearing death, one doesn't see death; but stars beyond, perhaps with an animal's vast gaze.

(Rilke 1982/2009, 49)

To oppose the abstraction that is implied in Agamben, Okwui Enwezor points to the philosopher's insistence that it is never possible to isolate even naked life, that bare life can never be separated from its form. This then is Agamben's project, to reunite that which has been separated, for "a life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself. It defines life ... in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life" (Enwezor 2002, 54).

When McEwen juxtaposes oval forms with the animal vehicle, a birch burl, and a steel ring of fire, he creates a single plane of existence for his objects as well as his 116

viewer. The horse, carved from wood like a toy, half-shuttered, stands separate as a kind

of allegory rather than a reflection of being, and as such is at odds with the rest of the

installation. The separation between being, and contemplative/political being, is made

manifest here in the potential story that has a toy horse at its centre, but is made to stay

back, behind steel shutters, from the animal vehicles themselves. Laid out in front of the

half-shuttered wooden horse are three flat forms made of perforated stars that have

seemingly fallen and lay now, half curled, upon the ground. If we read these forms as bits

of fallen star dust that serve as a reminder both of our origins as well as foundation upon

which all living things are formed, then, like the silent animal witness, they exist as mute

counterparts to the stories that remain attached to words and allegories.

McEwen's ovals are at once a refuge (a smooth and completely closed oval with a

small simple 'tail' or embryonic coil) and open: made of laser cut steel stars. This latter is

topped by a pump handle that evokes some sort of human intervention or hand. Both

forms coexist within the same space, offering a natural world that is both self-contained

and open to transformation and the fluid evolution of time, and of technology. The birch

burl, Heart, Fist & Tunnel is a found object that has resulted from a tough cancerous growth that encircled the tree trunk like a saddle or fist. The 'tunnel' is a result of carpenter ants moving in to work on the rot, which follows quickly once the birch is cut and left with the bark on. The title refers to this cancerous fist that will extinguish the heart through which, once dead, ants will tunnel and create a refuge (they nest in but do not eat dead or damp wood). A heart pumps blood and keeps us (all) alive, a tunnel defines passage and a fist indicates a hand. Heidegger maintained that the animal has no 117

hand and hence, it can neither grasp nor give. Putting aside the physical absurdities of this

argument, the philosophical point is that the animal lacks the consciousness that would

enable generosity or the ability to sense the need of another. In McEwen's installation,

the animal steps outside of this human conception and stands there/not there alongside the

viewer, impervious to the philosophical space allocated to it. In her response to Rilke's

Eighth Elegy, Ursula LeGuin has unnamed the animal. In the guise of Eve she observes

the animals, one by one, rejecting the names that have been given them until she too

rejects hers. As the animals 'give back their names to the people to whom they belong' so

Eve too recognizes that 'words must be slow, new, single and tentative' so as to neither reduce nor imprison those they attempt to encapsulate (LeGuin 1989, 196).

No words are present in McEwen's installation, but rather forms that, taken together can be interpreted, due to the variation in form, material, and content, as exploring Derrida's ideas of 'limitrophy' where a limit is not a single indivisible line, but a space, on the edges of a limit, that is fed and that grows to complicate the idea of a limit. Where figures aligned along it are multiplied so that the limit is delinearized, folded and divided, thickened and increased (Derrida 2002, 398).

The German shepherd is named for Rilke's fountain:

.. .the free animal has its decline in back of it, forever, and God in front, and when it moves, it moves already in eternity, like a fountain.

(Rilke 1982/2009, 49) 118

Jonathan Burt has written that images are halfway between "the thing" and the

"representation." That the 'detrimental ways in which the attempt to describe the gap between animal and image relies too heavily on theories of the sign (linguistics) rather than the visual' (Burt 2008, 4ff). Using Henri Bergson's ideas about perception, particularly the difference between conscious (specific) perception and unconscious

(continual) perception, shows us that only certain aspects of an object can be perceived and, that conscious perception is initiated only when a reaction or need appears. From this vantage point, we can see that the animal image can have the same significance as living animals within the biodynamic networks of animal-human relations because images have the same kind of structuring influences on our perceptions and practices

(Burt 2008, lOf).

McEwen understands sculpture as a visceral embodiment rather than a graphic representation (McEwen Aug. 20, 2010), and steel as a way to handle the issue of representation for his objects are not signs, but steel animals. Steel animals that are resistant, their material separating and protecting the real animal (hence they should be whole and not cut into) (McEwen April 1, 2010). Derrida has claimed that it all comes down to 'the immense question of the living and the relation between what is proper to the so-called animal living being and what is proper to the so-called human living being, namely, the experience of language, sign or speech, the manifestation, comprehension, interpretation, etc.' (Derrida 2009, 176). McEwen's work is located here in the interplay between 'world and imagination.' It is here, in the artists' words, "the earth, our imaginative space, and its corollary of stellar space linked in a process that (Paul Shepard 119

describes) points to "the only world we've got' (McEwen 2010, 1) that we can attempt to deconstruct the anthropological machine, to cut through the 'thickened, delinearized folds' of the abyssal rupture, to think and feel our way through to the Open. Pointing to

Temple Grandin as an example of someone who counters the idea that 'thinking or being in language never ceases,' McEwen believes that making things (and by extension, experiencing objects) locates us in between the rigour of thinking and the wide latitude of experiencing the world. Objects can mediate between different perspectives and realities

(McEwen Jan. 24, 2011). In the process of this mediation we can perhaps approach what

Derrida describes as "living in life itself' which outplays the opposition between the animal and its supposed contrary (Derrida 2009, 176). 120

3. Animism and Entanglement in the Work of FASTWURMS and Kenn Bass

If a bird, whose kind are headed to extinction given current rates of human trespass and insanity; a bird that will outlive most individual humans; one whose intelligence far surpasses most ungainly, carnivorous, indifferent Homo Sapiens; can nonetheless find humour in the madness of the world, share joy with the few people it trusts, then we must take heed before the awesome innocence that the rest of creation is endeavoring to offer up by way of example. If we fail to appreciate, even worship the laughter of macaws, or to engage in the dialogue that the animal kingdom is extending to us; or, finally, to be quiet, humble, and serene before the sheer miracle of life, then we will indeed go down in biological history as the worst, meanest, shortest-lived failure in the history of evolution. We will be wise indeed to take the lesson of a forgiving macaw to heart, and none too soon. Michael Tobia (Bekhoff 2007, 60).

Figure 27

The entrance to the semi-circular driveway of the Metro Toronto Convention centre is guarded by two unlikely figures: called Snom 'n the sculptures are fashioned from three spheres set on top of one another, like a snowman. Unlike snowmen they have 121

corncob noses and are soot black. Beyond them stands a steel column on which two birds, a pileated woodpecker and a yellow-bellied sapsucker peck away at the 100-foot high

'tree' (figure 27). Inside the foyer, a terrazzo floor creates a Turtle Pond, (figure 28), filled with intricate designs that represent animals and plants swimming in an azure-green world. This three-part commission, which cultural critic Robert Enright has called "one of the finest public art projects in this country" (Enright 2006: 41) pulls together many of the concerns of the artistic duo FASTWURMS including intricate ecosystems, the transformation of cultural icons, site specificity, animals, plants, community, subversion and witchcraft. The Snom 'n with their rounded forms and pointy noses reference the pop icons of Canadian winter activity, playfully built by people of all ages who find creative ways to ward off the long winters. Native cultures are referenced in the comhusks and snow itself, which is used by the Inuit to build housing. The black colour substantiates the forms by solidifying their silhouettes, as if this dark marker has risen from the ground and obstinately weathered the summer sun. The colour further underscores the black humour that the artists bring to Canadian icons and identity. The land on which the sculptures stand was once swampland; the Snom 'n and the woodpeckers signal the past, transition, and endurance. In what is now a dense urban district of office and hotel towers, the Snom 'n are dwarfed but obdurate, whereas the two birds are massive sculptures (weighing 250 and 500 lbs) that adhere to the giant soaring column. The scale of the work plays on real and metaphorical ideas of the natural and cultural world. The

Snom 'n can be measured against a human body while the birds loom large, their imaginary hammering for food, territory and mates ringing out across the cityscape on 122

one side and the lake on the other. The woodpeckers represented are one of the largest

(the pileated woodpecker is almost the size of a crow), and one of the smallest (a yellow- bellied sapsucker measures less than a robin). The former excavates dead trees in search of carpenter ants and beetle larvae, making loud ringing calls by hammering. The drumming sounds also attract mates and mark territory. Pairs of these woodpeckers establish territory and live on it throughout the year. Despite the fact that deforestation has endangered them, they have proven themselves adaptable to the changing conditions.

In contrast, the yellow-bellied sapsucker bores shallow holes into trees to get the sap inside. They are considered a 'keystone' species because their ability to create these holes

(something that cannot be replicated by humans) is exploited by other wildlife species, who depend on the sapsucker to maintain their community. Their presence in

FASTWURMS' work references an ecology that depends on many aspects to remain healthy. The woodpeckers provide for themselves and open the tree for other birds to find nourishment; their 'hammering' can be understood as animal agency since it is also a mating ritual and the way the birds mark territory.

This can be observed too in the Turtle Pond which houses not simply sea turtles but also frogs, plants, and good luck pentagrams. Turtles are ancient reptiles that date from 215 million years ago. Their lifespan ranges from that of an average human to 150 or more years. They are ectotherms, which means that their internal temperature changes according to the environment in which they find themselves. Sea turtles spend large amounts of their life underwater although they can breathe air and lay their eggs on the 123

ground. When they do, they cover their eggs up and leave them to hatch and the young to fend for themselves.

Figure 28

Researchers have discovered that the organs of turtles do not degenerate or become less efficient with age, imbuing them with a sense of timeless- and agelessness. The serenity 124

of the sea green and blue colours, the concentric circles that mark the imagery, and the large decorative animal forms all contribute to the harmonious atmosphere of the pond, by referencing a healthy and holistic habitat where different species, plants, rocks

(referenced in the terrazzo marble chips), and cultural signs coexist. The Turtle Pond honours this ancient animal and brings its habitat into contact with the business of commerce that is the Convention Centre. Filled with good luck pentagrams, the pond stands in for an older order of harmony and nature that is spawned by a habitat of cooperation, sustenance, and intact ecologies. As such it stands in stark contrast to the activities of the Convention Centre , by suggesting cooperation rather than competition as a better means of survival. Yet the FASTWURMS never preach, and hence, the visual luxury of the pond seduces rather than coerces the viewer into desiring this place of cooperation. A floor spans the space between reinforcing structures. The Turtle Pond is the foundation that supports those who stand and walk through the building. As such the work offers a base that is much more solid and enduring than the fickle and commerce- driven activities that take place above and around it.

Witchcraft is an old resistance and liberation theology, an ancient cultural nation that shares with the modern hip hop nation a creative "Can't Stop, Won't Stop" compulsion to exceed boundaries and limitations, to move beyond the narrow constraints of nation, race, etc. towards the diverse, plural, and hybrid, the bountiful and beautiful, polymorphous and polycultural Avalon. FASTWURMS: Witch Nation: Directive from the Ministry of Information (Papararo 2008, 25).

FASTWURMS embrace diversity and resist reduction. The common name fuses the identities of Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse who work, teach, and live together. Not only do the artists form a collective, they also regularly collaborate with other artists and their 125

cat familiars, to create installations that call upon the active participation of their audience. They use multiple approaches to making work, including sculpture, video, photography and installation. Their materials are as diverse as their approach: found and made objects, film sampling, string art, peg boards, and mass-produced as well as flea market items are some of the things that appear in their work. Preferring the storefront to the white cube, they demonstrate not only their working class background, but also shatter the prevailing expectations surrounding art, accessibility, and culture. As members of what they call the Old Religion, they believe in the interrelationship of all things and live by the credo "do what you will, harm unto none." As Witches, they worship and live in communion with the natural world, belonging to a long tradition of resisting authority and condemning the exercise of power over other people or creatures (Davies 2010, 49).

As the work at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre demonstrates, they resolutely reject dichotomies and firmly place the natural world alongside the cultural one in an intermingling of both that challenges the conventional division between rational and emotional, mind and body, human and non-human animals. Rejecting any clean distinction between humans and other animals, and between response and mere instinct, cultural critic Mary Midgley claims that culture is not an alternative, or replacement for instinct but rather, its outgrowth and supplement. Serving our innate needs, culture is the completion of the developing [human] creature and as such is natural to the human, and necessary to his appropriate way of life (Midgley 1978, 289). As such, a sense of culture that manifests itself in things like speech, writing and art might be specifically human, which is not to say that other animals lack cultural forms of expression. In fact, human 126

and animal expressions of culture can be seen to constantly meet and overlap. The work of FASTWURMS, which Jon Davies describes as 'uniting every creature, cultural detritus, [and] social scene,' and which gives expression to subcultures as varied as

'working class, youth, stoner, witch, goth, queer, cat-fancier, pirate, country, and anarchist' is just one such site where neat categories give way to a multiplicity of expressions, materials, sources, and ideas.

Alongside humans, other animals abound in the urban spaces to which they adapt and contribute. The Canadian experience includes coyotes in the Don Valley, turtles burying their eggs alongside rural roads, the hammering of woodpeckers, vultures circling above road kill, and large numbers of feral cats. For FASTWURMS representations of non-human animals do not serve simply as symbols but rather as agential forces demonstrating their own culture and living alongside human animals. The pileated woodpecker in the Woodpecker Column was inspired by an article in Time

Magazine that reported on three NASA ornithologists in Florida. One of their assignments involved dealing with woodpeckers who were pecking the fuel tanks on the

Challenger. Finding that the fuel tanks created an impressive echoing sound, the woodpeckers co-opted the tanks into a projection piece, presumably to attract a mate and to mark territory (Enright 2006, 51). This is precisely the kind of story that

FASTWURMS revels in: the ability of animals to co-opt human constructions and transform them into powerful tools, often in ways that are problematic for humans as the

NASA episode indicates. The Woodpecker Column is a reminder that animals adapt, co- opt and persist. They are creative, joyous and stubborn. 127

The inter-relationship of nature and culture is not merely suggested in the duo's work, but is embodied and experiential. As Sally McKay writes, human and human cultures exist in nature too. Nature and culture are not separate spheres in witchcraft

(McKay 2010, 87ff). Humans enact culture naturally, just as non-human animals have cultures, rituals, and expressions that have nothing to do with survival. The public commission in downtown Toronto exemplifies this, refusing, to set up a dichotomy and instead presenting a three-part installation that is cohesive, albeit complex. The many layers address things as different as adaptation, community, cooperation, pop culture and technology (the perforated tree column lights up at night, becoming a multi-coloured beacon that rises into the night alongside the office towers of the financial district). In this respect, the commission is typical of FASTWURMS' installations, which usually contain a vast number of objects, drawings, videos and images that initially bombard and sometimes confound the viewer. Theirs is not merely an inclusive aesthetic but one where art, craft, camp, and performance are brought together in a joyful accumulation of images, happenings and stuff that refuse neat categorization or a linear viewing experience. As the artists point out, 'monocultures don't work, and five languages are better than one' (Drobnick and Fisher 2008, 32), hence it is best to include as much of everything to ensure that the multiplicity of world and beings in it are adequately addressed. As McKay writes, for FASTWURMS witchcraft and science are analogous, and magic (understood in the sense of 'gnosis', becoming wise) and knowledge are interchangeable. In their work, forms of knowledge associated with witchcraft and 128

science are derived from nature and a belief in the complex interactions of matter. In art, matter and the complex interactions of culture are conjoined (McKay 2010, 84).

As opposed to the clinical observations that occur in laboratories, where environments are sterilized, and only a single aspect scrutinized, FASTWURMS practice an on-the-ground kind of science where direct observations and interactions with Others inform their knowledge. This might involve tracking otters, watching the vultures on their farm, or taking a daily 'inventory' on walks accompanied by their cat familiars. The artists emphasize that negotiations with animals are very specific: something might start off as a research project but experience during the project may produce something else.

For instance, tracking otters while winter camping might lead them to beavers. Openness to this experience and how it might play out in their spiritual lives produces something specific, albeit unexpected, that one has to be open to (Enright 2006, 50). Giant Beaver

Charm, 1999-2000 (figure 29) is a large steel and bronze charm bracelet that is installed around a tree. Pentagrams, a horseshoe, and a giant beaver tooth are some of the charms that hang from the bracelet. The duo notes they became fascinated with giant beavers after reading that a single chisel-shaped tooth from this mammal was found in a stratum of the Don Valley Brickyard. Giant beavers were almost equal in size to black bears, measuring up to eight feet in length and weighing between 130 and 200 lbs. They became extinct during the last Ice Age. As impressive as the image of "bear-sized beavers felling huge trees in minutes" was, it is the tree that the work finally honours. As the artists write, "Luck and charm: the beavers lost it, the old willow by the Gairloch pond still has it. Our sense of loss for the fantastic spectacle of the big beavers in action is replaced by 129

an identification with the power of living on. Blessed be the beautify of being and lasting" (Fleming 2000, 38).

Figure 29

This form of honouring the power of survival is manifest in the Turtle Pond and other work, particularly when it includes cats. There are numerous cat portraits, drawn, photographed and filmed, that centre on the artists' familiars, those cats who live with them, in the house and the barn, or on the wider territory surrounding both. Iconic cat drawings and sculptures of the Egyptian cat goddess Bast attest to the power of this species who were significant in Ancient Egypt, and continue to be revered by 'cat people' everywhere, who provide for and live with them. While some of the portraits, particularly the photographs, are distinctly endearing, others are powerful and even frightening. In a series of postcard images that the artists have produced, the portraits are accompanied by text on the back, which attests to the humour of the artists: a fuzzy close-up of a panting 130

cat named Bunny describes her as 'enjoying killing voles and sleeping in the washing machine.' An image of two cats' predatorial intent on something beyond our view (figure

30) is described as "Spoticus and Taalon are brothers who share a passion for the pastoral!"

Figure 30

And the image of the feral cat Dr. Dre (figure 31) needs no caption at all: black and longhaired he looks out through small green eyes and clearly demonstrates the sharpness of his teeth. In these portraits, FASTWURMS capture their familiars as they play, hunt, scout, and rest. The captions play with and overturn our expectations, at once anthropomorphizing the animal while also laughing at the anthropomorphization; enjoying the pastoral can easily translate into relishing the taste of freshly caught mouse or vole. 131

Figure 31

Hence, the artists deliberately manipulate notions of the pastoral to challenge the single human definition of what it might mean. In this way they use anthropomorphism to bring us closer to understanding an animal, while simultaneously opening up language to include an animal's perspective. Cognitive ethologist Marc Bekhoff explains that using human language to communicate what we observe is not the same as suggesting that animals are like humans (Bekhoff 2000, 43). Sandra Mitchell similarly points out that the 132

prevailing critique of anthropomorphism underestimates our abilities to discriminate and refer to multiple states (Mitchell 2005, 103). By using human concepts to describe the activities of their cats, FASTWURMS display their ability to discriminate, on the one hand, while making a space for cat-being within language on the other.

Applying human terms to animal behaviour is one way to connect animals with concepts that humans understand and experience, just as anecdotes, when related critically and in context, expand our understanding of others. Bekhoff states that anecdotes based on observation and experience are central to the study of animal behaviour and emotions. The difficulty that scientists have had in reconciling home (their experience with a companion animal) and work (where they practice an objective analysis of animals) forces the cognitive ethologist to admit that s/he relies on stories as well as 'hard data,' which is leading to a practice where anecdotes, analogy and anthropomorphism are slowly becoming more acceptable. As Bekhoff maintains, much theorizing regarding the evolution of behaviour rests on stories (Bekhoff 2007, 112ff).

One of Bekhoff s chief concerns is demonstrating that animals have rich and deep emotional lives, which counters the conventional understanding of animals as merely displaying instinctual drives. There is a marked contrast between how animal subjects in science are described and how animals in culture are reduced to characters, icons, and metaphors, to name only a few prevalent functions. This contrast is an example of what

Anselm Franke calls 'the Great Divide' that occurred in Modernism where culture and nature, stories and facts, and humans and animals became separated (Franke 2010, 12).

But as Midgley maintains, science cannot be defined by contrasting it with art because 133

practicing any science is an art, a position that echoes Bekhoff s assertion that science is never value free. What we mean by 'scientific,' Midgley writes, is 'what increases our understanding of the world', and she calls attention to the neutral term Wissenschaft, used in German to describe all serious studies (Midgley 1978, 84). In a similar vein,

FASTWURMS describe spirituality as a change in consciousness: "The function of why people study or participate in cultural activity, or any activity is to apply what you've learned, and to seek out what you have yet to learn." This, for the artists, is a spiritual quest: to find the knowledge that is latent in everything (Drobnick and Fisher 2008, 36).

In McKay's words, the artists do this by investigating and representing embodied experience without the need to universalize it, by working with science without subscribing to 'scientific objectivity,' and by being subject to local conditions which are partial and contingent (McKay 2010, 86).

FASTWURMS' practice of using 'five languages instead of one' and rejecting linear, dichotomous, or simple explanations, results in art that is as rich and deep as the emotional lives of the animals, cultures, and environments that they invoke. Often, this demands a lot of objects, images, and videos, found and made, crafted and photographed.

Gusset Nation (2004) (figure 32) is just such an installation made up of giant spider webs, an immense ball of yarn, a large round cushion possibly filled with catnip, catnip toys, a soft climbing column, drawings, string art, and the video, Pussy Necropolis. The room could be understood as a veritable cat paradise with its oversized toys, stimulants and overt invitations to play and luxuriate. 134

Figure 32

Play, desire, and some degree of healthy wantonness also figure in the installation where the spider webs are made from black panties and bras, and the yarn is hopelessly tangled.

Cats, implied and also visible in the video, are the stars of this installation that offers them a place to romp and live within a culture that is created for them based on close observations of their behaviour and desires. A gallery is a space visited by humans and so this installation might also be interpreted as a place for humans to experience the world as cats; yet the artists' consistent devotion to their familiars suggests that it is more apt to view this installation as an over-the-top homage to the animals. Rather than offering the viewer a cat experience, the work invites her to participate in honouring cats, while drawing parallels between human and non-human desires to play and indulge. 135

Figure 33

Pussy Necropolis (figure 33) is a tightly packed video that includes found and shot footage that focuses on the illusionists Siegfried and Roy and their white tigers3, as well as FASTWURMS and their cat familiars, footage from the 1954 film, The Egyptian and the 1999 movie The Mummy, and the Egyptian cat goddess, Bast. Interspersed with images of Roy being wheeled to the hospital after being hurt by the tiger Monticore, Roy recovering, playing with cubs, and the White Tiger Habitat in the Mirage hotel in Las

Vegas, are cuts from the two films, many images of the artists' cat familiars playing, sleeping, waking, running in the snow, and the witches themselves, dressed in striped

3 Siegfried and Roy performed at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas between 1990-2003 until an injury ended their careers. They presented themselves as magicians and incorporated live tigers into the show. The injury occurred during a live performance when Roy was bitten in the neck by a 7-year old male tiger named Monticore. 136

capes and tall pointy hats walking through the Rockies. Stark contrasts are set up between the glitz of Vegas and the vast emptiness of the mountain landscape, between tigers performing and cats in a rural environment, between Hollywood kitsch and domestic space. Yet the editing of the video resists dichotomies and, as much as the contrasts are apparent, the images coexist. In the video shot by FASTWURMS, the magnificence of the white tiger in the Mirage cannot be diminished despite the palatial (rather than natural) setting and the strange Rousseau-like panorama. The throngs of tourists who move through the viewing area amongst the posters of Siegfried & Roy ("Magicians of the Century") in the Mirage Hotel appear tawdry in view of the power of the animal behind the glass. What FASTWURMS offers are alternatives or potentialities. Juxtaposed with the white tigers in the hotel we see footage of a cat in what first appears to be a monitor, but then turns out to be merely a box with only three walls from which it easily escapes. This small moment in the video is highly significant as it focuses on release and liberty. The ability to live freely, and the rights of animals to self-determination, is a central tenet of the artists' beliefs, which is demonstrated when the cat leaves the box.

Although the Vegas celebrities are touted as 'sorcerers,' their act is exposed as a simple spectacle with a misguided philosophy that includes bringing large tigers to small stages under bright lights, and 'saving' them from extinction by enclosing them in a cultural construct set up for human tourists. The falseness of their engagement with tigers is juxtaposed with the caped witches who also cast spells, but in this case spells to spread good luck and to commune with the natural world rather than bedazzle audiences with illusionistic tricks. In an interview, FASTWURMS explain that for Witches, the ultimate 137

trauma is alienation from the natural world (Drobnick and Fisher 2008, 34). The trauma is signaled by the poverty of the crowds with their cameras passing through the Mirage walkway, and by the tiger who nonetheless moves majestically, aloof and seemingly untouched by such pitiful surroundings. Placed there, he has been wrested from his own environment, tough as it may have been, alienated and left in Vegas to merely exist.

Throughout Pussy Necropolis the name 'Manticore' is evoked, we hear lyrics and bits of film dialogue that speak of her strength and call upon her power. Monticore is the name of the tiger that mauled Roy or, according to him, made a misguided attempt to save him. The name with an 'a' refers to an early middle Persian entity similar to the

Egyptian sphinx, a being with the head of a human, the body of a lion and the tail of either a dragon or a scorpion. Among the phrases we hear are that Manticore has the ability to change shapes and that she became a being even greater than Zeus. There are also references to the ancient Egyptian House of Bast, directly in the form of souvenir statues of the cat goddess found in the Mirage gift shop, and indirectly in all the footage of the artist's familiars who play, sleep, stretch and run through snow. Bast is depicted with the head of a cat and the body of a woman, she is protector and avenger, and as such is an important part of the complex tale that Pussy Necropolis (note the reference to this

'city of the dead') weaves: as protector she stands guard over those she feels allegiance towards and, as avenger her wrath will find those who break sacred laws, such as confining a large wild white tiger in a hotel-cum-conservation habitat. Bast appears repeatedly in other FASTWURMS work, referencing a culture where cats were treated with respect and where those who killed them were held accountable (Enright 2006: 50), 138

reminding us that the sacred can be vested in animals. As the artists point out, cat owners today participate in an ancient culture of rapprochement with other species (Drobnick and

Fisher 2008, 38). The feline-human hybrids might also be understood as metaphors for the coming together of different species, and the relationship that is possible between them.

FASTWURMS understand familiars literally as family, and that living with them leads to breaking down the supposed emotional and psychological barriers that exist between self and Other (Drobnick and Fisher 2008, 38). The extension of their family and community to include animals involves close attention, affection and observation, as well as a willingness to allow their familiars a maximum amount of freedom. There is a wild play session between two cats in Pussy Necropolis involving a paper bag in which one cat is trapped and the second ferociously intent on keeping it there by pushing it back in, standing on top of it and biting its head. Just when our pity wells up the trapped cat escapes only to return within seconds to resume the game. Play among Others can be hard, and the trick is to understand when play becomes serious and when cats are merely having (ferocious) fun.

The cats playing in the video are tame and live indoors with the artists. Other cats do not enter the house and are, in the artists' words, "fabulous killers' ... who remind you about what it's like to be on a direct food chain" (Drobnick and Fisher 2008, 38).

FASTWURMS live on a farm surrounded by tame, semi-tame and barn cats; mice, voles, sparrows, bats, cultures, raccoon and porcupines. Living alongside these many animals 139

reconnects them to their own 'animal-ness' (Vaughan 2007, 74). Recalling five years spent in a remote setting, Neil Ansell writes that, while one would expect a life of solitude to lead to introspection, it led him instead to forget himself and focus almost entirely outwards, on the natural world (Ansell 2011). A crucial part of Witch culture is to live in communion with the natural world, and if Ansell's experience applies, then living with Others, be they cats or vultures, not only enhances one's sense of the things one shares with them, but also allows the [human] self to enter into an inter-relationship with those living along oneself, to reconnect to one's 'animal-ness,' and to find that experience more powerful than an introspective disembodied narrative. Alexander

Wilson argues that scientists now agree that the central tenet of ecology is that everything is interrelated, and that one cannot know with any certainty where to draw a line between one organism and another or whether it is possible to study humans outside of the context of the natural world they live in (Wilson 1992, 130f). The same logic could apply to non- human animals. One cannot properly understand animals outside of the context of their environment, and studying them in laboratories will only yield impoverished results.

Wilson further maintains that within current biological theory, the argument has been made that animals sense themselves to be part of the larger world in that "their selves extend beyond their skins to encompass an invisible region that includes the whole integrated web of relationships they are part of' (Wilson 1992, 130). This is also a central tenet of Witch being. Midgley similarly observes that "engagement with difference enriches us," and that the Western tradition of attempting to prise individuals loose from their surroundings to 'liberate' them has resulted in an isolation that will not support 140

human life (Midgley 1978, 343). This isolation can be understood as extending beyond the clan to include an alienation from one's wider environment and the natural world.

Through his protagonist Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee insists that philosophy misrepresents our reality. The desire for 'liberation' results in a severing of ties that are as central to our nature as culture is. The justification for this desire lies in a strain of

Western philosophy that establishes the human as superior to all other living things. Yet setting up such (intensely human) frames of reference leads, in Erika Fudge's words, to an incapacity to look beyond them. We do not recognize the skills of animals because we judge them according to human abilities and interests (Fudge 2002, 139). The test that animals have failed is to become more like us (Midgley 1978, 157). Both Midgley and

Fudge are skeptical about the human capacity to recognize and judge intelligence and abilities in animals, and both emphasize that humans are not the only makers of meaning

(Fudge 2002, 136), nor did they invent every aspect of humanity which, Midgley stresses, is also drawn from a common source and overlaps with dolphinity, beaverishness, and wolfhood (Midgley 1978, 153). This kind of statement is reminiscent of Charles

Darwin's emphasis on the connection between communities of different species, and the difference between species that is not one of kind but of difference in degree (Bekhoff

2007, 32f). Furthermore, it invokes Animists who resisted the discontinuity between humans and nature in order to think their entanglement and unity (Franke 2010, 22).

Animism was coined by the nineteenth-century social scientist Edward Taylor to describe the beliefs of 'the primitive other,' who was unable to properly distinguish 141

between object and subject, reality and fiction, and inside and outside. In a move he

describes as 'colonial subjugation,' Franke explains that Taylor viewed animism as an

'epistemological error' because it did not make the same categorical distinctions between

nature and culture that enlightened Western thought did. Through this move, that at once

appropriated and misrecognized animism, modernism reinforced what Franke calls 'the

Great Divide' (Franke 2010, 12f). Franke points to examples of the Great Divide in

modernism's construction of culture as separate from and superior to nature. He invokes

Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour as thinkers who investigate and question this divide,

citing Foucault's interrogation of the clean separation between madness and reason, and

Latour's critical analysis of what counts as nature and as society, as nonhuman and

human. Franke notes that the persecution of animists as evidenced in Christianity, the

witch hunts, the inquisition, and later Enlightenment and secular modernity (Franke 2010,

18), was a way of ensuring that the boundaries between different worlds remained stable.

According to Franke, this Great Divide was replicated at different points in order to hold the overall organization together. Demarcations between nature and culture were permanently negotiated and reproduced on each subject, body, family and nation, as well as on culture and humankind at large, thus the division came to seem implicit in how the world was mapped (Franke 2010, 19f). Against this new order, animism represented what

Franke calls a 'wildness' that threatened the carefully constructed unity by creating uncomfortable points of slippage. Animism represented the vestiges of a reconciliatory and transformative force that worked against the alienation that the caesura of modernism had created (Franke 2010, 35). 142

When pressed on the subject of what kind of Witchcraft they practice,

FASTWURMS simply maintain that they are 'self-initiated solitaries,' and members of the Old Religion, defined as a nature religion of rocks, plants, animals (Enright 2006, 49).

The history of Witchcraft that they embody includes acts of resistance, subversion, a dialectical opposition to Christianity, and a respect and inclusive attitude towards

'Others.' In his discussion, Franke differentiates between a modernist animism, which was both defined by and resistant to predominant western philosophy, and a 'new animism' that considers forms of relational knowledge. This form of contemporary animism bases itself on an age old (pre-modernist) one, and self-consciously and self- critically reinvents it. This 'new animism,' while acknowledging and practicing some of the spiritual aspects of pre-modernist animism, also uses it as a form of critique. It does so by way of imagining alternatives using commonsense schemes, recognizing other subjectivities, and reflecting critically on (imposed and implied) boundaries (Franke

2010, 13). Critic R.M. Vaughan has described the work of FASTWURMS as 'creating spaces outside of the acculturated, literary signifying' (Vaughan 2007, 74), which, together with the artists' statements about relationality and postproduction, places them, contingently, within this area of a 'new animism,' while continuing to remain affiliated with the an older form that practiced subversion by challenging 'relations that constitute experiences of difference unmarked by the Great Divide' (Franke 2010, 22).

"In Witch culture personal freedom is a participation [sic] and positive economy, enhance the liberty of Others and you prosper, constrain free will and you suffer"

(McKay 2010, 92). In this manifesto FASTWURMS outline one aspect of what can be 143

understood as an 'animist' approach: respect all things, enable them to live, but leave them free. Pussy Necropolis includes images of cats sleeping, playing and perhaps fighting. Cats are indoors and outdoors in deep snow, they are cared for as kittens and let free to live as they please. FASTWURMS have a cat door that allows their familiars to come and go at will. They feed their housecats as well as barn cats who live there according to seasons and need. The sweet tumbling kittens that we see in the video were rescued from the barn after their feral mother had been severely injured, presumably while defending her litter against a raccoon. Kozzi and Skuse took Petunia, the mother, to the vet where she was treated and eventually recovered well. The kittens became part of the 'house cat crew' although they continue to hunt and accompany the duo on their countryside excursions. Petunia opts to live in the barn and summer in her home territory some distance away. Although they feed her when she is in the barn, the artists respect the choice of the cat to live outdoors, despite the extreme weather, disease, and predators like coyotes and foxes that barn and feral cats have to contend with. Although they raised her kittens, they did not seal their cat door, leaving the animals to choose where they eat and bed down. Their cat portraits celebrate the beauty and also the toughness of barn cats, like Dr. Dre, a torn they describe as 'crafty, wild and wary' (Fastwurms April 10, 2011).

Although the artist's farm is part of Dre's territory and he moves through it regularly, it was four years before he felt confident enough to sneak into the house when they were gone, and another year before he entered the house when people were present to ask for food. He comes and goes, occasionally asking for food, before continuing on his forays.

The most elusive, and recent, cat to appear has been named 'Jazzy.' Spied only from afar, 144

this cat has learned to communicate his desire for food. When he realizes he has been

understood, he goes into hiding only to emerge and eat the food when the artists have

completely vacated the area (FASTWURMS April 10, 2011). This manner of interacting

with Others in their environment is one of respect and engagement. When help is asked

for, it is given. In a particularly dire circumstance a cat was lured into a crate and taken to

the vet, but, for the most part, every animal is left free to live as they choose, whether or

not their chosen path results in a life that may be short and harsh.

Siegfried and Roy's much touted 'conservation' agenda, part of which involves

having a large number of tigers live with them in Las Vegas, stands in stark contrast to

the credo that the Witches practice. The habitat of tigers ranges from hot jungles to

freezing conditions; they have a range of 10-30 square miles, and they generally live alone. While they are indeed threatened, breeding them in Las Vegas and housing them in a glass enclosure exposed to countless tourists drifting through the hotel, is not a solution to their looming extinction. Poaching, habitat loss, and an ever-expanding human population are what threaten tigers, and much wildlife at present. While consistent attempts are made to shut down poaching, habitat loss is rarely considered and only inadequately addressed by creating 'conservation areas' if they do not encroach on human needs. Tigers are considered a keystone species; where there is sufficient land, cover, water and game, all species beneath them are present and accounted for.

Environments where tigers have been wiped out are left damaged, showing loss of both game and forest (Vaillant 2010, 300f). 145

In the manifesto, Creation Machines, FASTWURMS states:

Darwin is the prophet, Witch Nation genetic algorithms are the product. ... FASTWURMS postproduction narrative ecology mimes the natural evo-advantages of sexual reproduction, cross-fertilization, random error mutation and innovation, hybrid vigour and evolutionary optimization.

There is also a call to liberate Monticore and the rest of the white tigers imprisoned in the

Mirage Casino by Siegfried and Roy (Papararo 2008,44). Darwin observed that optimal conditions for the proliferation of species occurred where abundance and variation were strong. An intact ecosystem works, monocultures do not. And "those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish and rear the greatest number of offspring" (Bekhoff 2007, 85). In his detailed account of a tiger attack in Russia's far east region of north Primorye, John Vaillant notes the difference between the indigenous approach and the Russian settler mentality: for the Indigenous

(who include the Udeghe and Nanai), there were two hunters in the Taiga, man and tiger; in order for them to both survive, mutual respect was required. For the Russian homesteader, the assumption that the human held dominion over the land overturned a natural order that resulted in ecological damage and death on both sides (Vaillant 2010,

150). The last words that we hear in Pussy Necropolis are "sooner or later, even a cat tires of its game." This can be interpreted as a fight for survival, or that rest is required after play, or that Roy's tiger Monticore simply lost patience with the endless performances he was required to endure. It also draws our attention to the fact that there are consequences, and Vaillant's account of a tiger pushed too far tells us how very dire these can be. 146

The seemingly insatiable appetite of the Chinese for all parts of the tiger is the main reason for the demise of this animal in Russia's far east. Fines for poaching are high, but the extreme poverty of the region leave some feeling that there is no other means to survive. Aside from poaching, an uneasy truce has always existed between the human and the tiger populations in the taiga. Native and Russian peoples both tread warily albeit for different reasons. Vaillant recounts the story of a tiger's focused vengeance against one man, Vladimir Markov, who crossed the tiger by taking his food, or shooting at him, or both. When the tiger was finally tracked down and killed, it was found that he had absorbed bullets "the way that Moby-Dick absorbed harpoons;" dozens of bullets, balls and birdshot were found in his body, and the tip of his tail had either been shot off or frozen, indicating that perhaps the man Markov had simply been the last straw

(Vaillant 2010, 282). Vaillant focuses on the immense intelligence, memory, and sense of justice demonstrated by the tiger. Survival in the taiga is as challenging for the tigers as it is for the humans living there. The Natives believe that if they respect them, stay out of their way, and occasionally leave them a cut of the spoils from their hunt, they can coexist with the tigers in relative peace. Despite the horrific nature of his death, there does not seem to be anyone within the community who believed that the tiger that killed

Markov was unprovoked. Tales of tiger encounters abound, including ones of cooperation where a tiger would occasionally leave some meat for the Native hunter Ivan Dunkai

(Vaillant 2010, 1 lOf), or ones of vengeance. Two hunters, careful to leave the larger share, once took meat from a tiger who subsequently prevented them from hunting for an entire year by destroying their traps, scaring off approaching animals, and roaring when 147

animals came too near (Vaillant 2010, 136). The vengeance of a tiger is thoroughly feared in the region, and many are careful not to provoke it. Native hunter Mikhail

Dunkai claims that whatever Markov did, he was doomed the moment that the tiger had set his sights on him. And that the tiger's actions were about payback: "If the tiger had felt like it was his fault - if he had killed a dog or done something else wrong - then he would have gone away" (Vaillant 2010, 174f). Everyone agreed that Markov had crossed a line.

Eugene Linden tells us that zookeepers believe that big cats can read minds, and that they choose their words carefully when they are around these animals (Linden 2000,

100). Vaillant points out that humans and tigers are alike. That they both demand large territories, have a prodigious appetite for meat, require control over their living space and are willing to defend it, have an enormous sense of entitlement regarding the resources around them, and will poach if they can. The difference he emphasizes is that tigers will only take what they need (Vaillant 2010, 297). Humans, long before Franke's 'Great

Divide,' have set themselves above their environment, choosing first to conquer it, then to domesticate it, and finally to destroy it in the belief that they are capable of replicating whatever 'nature' has created. While one should mourn the loss of habitat and wildlife, the issue that will affect everyone is the destruction of an intricate evolutionary system that will ultimately destroy the human race alongside that of all other species and plants, as well as the earth itself. Against this reality, the lessons of animism do not seem tied to new ageism as much as to a healthy approach to restoring a life-sustaining ecology upon which all of us rely. 148

FASTWURMS' respect for Others extends to all living things. Their attitude is part of a traditional veneration of animals that is rooted in real experience. Until 1930 the bulk of effigies in Buddhist temples in Korea, Manchuria and southeast China were for protection against tigers. While they were feared, they were also esteemed because the monks recognized that tigers too made their own sacrifices, something that was deduced from the fact that they often left the severed heads of their prey. The reluctance to retaliate against the tiger was rooted in the fear that they would take offence and extract revenge (Vaillant 2010, 91). Vaillant's story is one of the harshest forms of vengeance possible: tracking down a man and killing him, then tracking down those who came into contact with him. But there is another story too which is one of tiger infection. Badly bitten by a tiger in heat, Sergei Sokolov relates that for months afterwards he was stirred by powerful sexual impulses (a potency that drives much of the illegal trade in tiger- based supplements) (Vaillant 2010, 211). The belief that a tiger attack leaves discernable traces in a human is widespread : Yuri Trush, who was also bitten by a tiger, relates that some Native people would not allow him to sleep under the same roof as them, believing that he had been marked, and that other tigers could sense this and the bloody story behind it. Eight years after his attack, observing tigers in a wildlife rehabilitation centre,

Trush was fixed upon by a tiger who tried to leap over the fence to attack him. Trush cannot account for this, but believes that perhaps "some sort of a bio field exists," that

"maybe tigers can feel some connection through the cosmos" (Vaillant 2010, 290f). As

FASTWURMS have declared, one prospers when enhancing the liberty of others, but 149

suffers when constraining free will. For Markov, for Trush and also for Roy, the consequence of disregarding this sentiment has become perfectly clear.

Part of the cycle of life in the natural world is experiencing the 'direct food chain,' as FASTWURMS do. Giving way to it, respecting the lives of others, and bringing to a full circle the cycle of life and death, are all aspects addressed in the 2001 video Red of Tooth and Kaw (figure 34) where the Witches enact a 'sky burial' ceremony.

Figure 34

Preparation for this requires close observation of their surroundings: the Witches, in capes and pointy hats, walk the landscape followed by a myriad of running and playing cats. They scour the country through telescopes to find vultures perching on the roof of a barn. They wait, they rest, they watch, they walk, and finally they undergo a cleansing ritual and sharpen their axes. Having taken inventory, prepared themselves for the 150

moment, closely observed their surroundings, the Witches finally cart a corpse down their country pathway; as the music rises to a crescendo, a flock of vultures gathers and soars.

The Witches wield their axes and bring them down onto the human corpse, leaving it finally to be devoured by the birds. Film clips from the 1973 film Soylent Green are interspersed throughout the video, offering a dystopian alternative to the replenishing and revitalizing one that FASTWURMS propose. In Soylent Green pollution, over­ population, depleted resources, poverty, dying oceans and a hot climate have resulted in a world bereft of wildlife, plant life, and any sort of meaningful human life. The sample from Soylent Green included in Red of Tooth and Kcrw is the moment when one character goes to an assisted suicide facility where mass euthanasia is performed. What is horrifically revealed in the film is that the corpses from this facility are secretly processed into 'soylent green,' the 'high energy plankton' that is the main source of nourishment marketed for the human population.

The creepiness of this conversion of humans into food is transformed into a healthy ecosystem in Red of Tooth and Kaw. FASTWURMS are not proposing human meat for consumption in a bereft world, but rather, literally returning earth to earth and dust to dust by giving scavengers food and returning human bodies to the ground in a way that is most natural and least harmful. Today green burials are gaining more adherents due to the harmful emissions caused by cremation and space restrictions in cemeteries. Returning the unembalmed body to the earth represents a real alternative.

FASTWURMS's proposition, based on a ritual that was common in Tibet where the bodies of the dead were offered to birds of prey, the elements, and the earth, is one that 151

recognizes that a healthy ecosystem requires a cyclical flow of resources. For the artists this is not gruesome but pragmatic; their ritual preparation honours the dead and their actions honour the living. Living on land that houses a variety of animals, some of which prey on others, and making the ultimate gesture of offering up a human corpse for consumption, the artists demonstrate their devotion to the concepts of a united world where all things stand in relation. For Tibetan monks part of a sky burial is to give alms to the birds, and FASTWURMS do the same for the vultures who they consider to be a part of their community (since they return to their land year after year), in a gesture that accepts and celebrates the cycle of birth and decay natural to all things living.

The tearing at flesh that we observe on the part of the vultures, or the pleasure of a cat catching and devouring a mouse are the less palatable images that FASTWURMS share with us. While these moments are examples of their dark sense of humour, they also serve to bring several issues to the fore, including the beast that echoes the human carnivore, mortality, and the fact that the survival of certain species depends upon their preying on others. The Great Divide furthered the idea that the human had to sever 'the beast within' and renounce bodily desires. Yet humans are perhaps the most beastly species of all, a warring, murderous, treacherous and greedy race that requires legislation to curb its insatiable appetite for meat, oil, material possessions and power. As I have already observed, Vaillant stresses that the significant difference between a tiger and a human is that the former will take only what he needs. Ethologist Konrad Lorenz long ago recognized that people are inclined to disapprove of carnivores, even if they eat meat themselves (Lorenz 1978, 29f). Midgley reiterates that wolves tend to be 'blamed' for 152

being carnivores although social carnivores all exercise restraint. In evolutionary terms,

where murder is easy, a species must have adequate inhibition against it or perish

(Midgley 1978, 26). Despite the recognition that predators only take what they need,

open season is declared if they threaten human needs or desires.4 This leads to tampering

with ecosystems such that extinction and destruction of habitat result. Part of the problem

is an inability on the part of many humans to take the long view: Tsavo National Park in

Kenya is a case in point. In the early 1960s elephants had destroyed almost all the trees in

the large woodland park that had been created in 1948, leading the trustees to decide that

2000 of the animals had to be culled. The warden of the East district, David Sheldrick,

was initially in favour of the cull. However, when the rains returned he observed that the

region was transformed into lush, open grassland perfect for grazing wildlife, leading him

to wonder if the area was marked by a repeating vegetation cycle, from woodland to open

savanna, aided by elephants (Mitman 2005, 179).

As Midgley points out, the human is only one part of a larger whole, greater than

himself, in which other members excel him in numerous ways (Midgley 1978, 346).

Replacing natural elements with technological ones does not always produce better

results or solutions. As I have written elsewhere,

Progress has often been linked to developments in science and technology, both of which are fuelled by curiosity and human ingenuity, but are also subject to economic and

4 In 1927 a mass killing of coyotes in Kern County California resulted in a mice epidemic (Kaloff 2007, 15Iff); in 2004 Wildlife Services in the United States killed around 83,000 mammalian predators despite the fact that only 1% of livestock losses were due to predation (Bekhoff 2000, 14). In Grey County Ontario, and likely much of rural Canada, wolf (and coyote) killing is legal all year. 153

political interests. Progress in science and technology can be understood as 'culture' improving on the raw material of 'nature,' as an attempt at human intervention to eliminate the flaws he perceives in the natural world. Monocultures support the market not the environment: they are designed to ensure large harvests requiring minimum labour. However, this form of fanning produces crops that are susceptible to disease because they lack diversity. This in turn requires more pesticides and the use of genetically modified, disease-resistant crops, which appear to be contributing to the decline of the bee population. Advances made by science and technology cannot be divorced from the intricate interconnections of the natural mechanisms of ecosystems (Ghaznavi 2010).

As Mary Midgley writes, competition is not the basic law of life. No social group is so isolated and independent that it can write off everyone outside of it for we are incurably members of one another (Mary Midgley, 1983. 21.) Frans de Waal echoes this idea when he asserts that biologists portray the natural world as a place of combat rather than one of social connectedness (de Waal 2006,25).

This is not to say that the lion will lay down in peace with the lamb. Part of the world is that there are cycles of life and death, extinction and endurance, predator and prey. The crucial point is to understand the interrelationality of all things living, not to strive for a technological dominance that privileges the human. In the fall of 1996, Kenn

Bass pulled up two floorboards in an abandoned apartment building in Soho and filled the space beneath with swamp water and plants. Over the course of twenty-one days, a horde of mosquitoes were bred and released through an open window onto the streets of New

York. Throughout the installation, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration) weather radio streamed continuous real time information regarding tides and other maritime weather data. Visitors to the installation were protected from the mosquitoes by a wire mesh, yet the damp atmosphere and insect life behind the screen 154

caused sufficient imaginary itching and discomfort in some viewers. Mosquitoes do not initially appear as beneficial in any way. The females require a meal of blood to produce eggs and are vectors for infectious diseases. They thrive in damp, swamp-like conditions, and are a constant irritant to humans and other mammals. A swamp is uncertain terrain.

Neither land nor water it hosts a range of life and is regularly used as site of horror in fiction. While mosquitoes may not appear to be anything but a nuisance, and in certain circumstances even life-threatening, they are part of the diet of dragonflies, themselves a valuable predator, and mosquito larvae feed, among others, copepods, freshwater crustaceans considered essential for the global ecology and carbon cycle. Copepods are a major food organism for fish, whales and seabirds. Understood this way, the mosquito becomes more than a pest that is widely combated with DEET, a toxic solvent that can dissolve materials like plastic and nail polish.

In the same year, Bass used the moth, another creature usually considered a pest, to produce Moth Coats, which he made by placing moth larvae into woolen coats hung from a wooden frame enclosed with a screen and lit with fluorescent lights. Moths are a major source of food for bats, who are crucial for insect control and pollination. While we recognize that bats play a vital ecological role, they often represent an eerie other being, one associated in popular culture and mythology with the vampire. The small flying mammals, who hunt at night and sleep upside down with their wings folded around them like a cloak, unsettle and fascinate us. Although mammals, the bats that Bass has chosen are again animals not closely aligned with human-beings, but rather creatures far removed, physically and in their behaviour and abilities. 155

To be a living bat is to be full of being; being fully a bat is like being fully human, which is also to be full of being. Bat-being in the first case, human-being in the second, maybe; but those are secondary considerations. To be full of being is to live as a body-soul. One name for the experience of full being is joy.

Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee 1999, 33).

In his 1974 What Is It Like To Be A Bat? Thomas Nagel claimed that the subjective experience of a bat is so specific and so "other" that the limits of our own nature make it impossible for us to fully understand bat being without relying on the imagination (Nagel 1974). Nagel's point is that we are not able to enter into the consciousness of another although it is plausible that this other does have a consciousness. According to conventional western philosophy and science, if something is not verifiable (although it might be plausible), it cannot be considered. But as cognitive ethologist Donald Griffin asserts, the difficulty of conveying the nature of something does not rule it out of existence or deprive it of significance (Griffin 1992, 6). Griffin was one of the first in his field to recognize that this taboo on considering subjective mental experiences in animals posed a serious impediment to scientific investigation. An impediment that Midgley addresses from the philosophical side when she asserts that privileging descriptions of outer manifestations fail because effective descriptions have to also refer to the agent's experiences. Actions also convey feelings and intentions, not simply reactions (Midgley 1978, 102f).

Franke reminds us that the word anima is translated from the Latin word for soul.

Yet because the soul had no material reality and could not be objectified, science was left to explain life without making reference to an immaterial force, concentrating instead on 156

the mechanical, biochemical processes and their laws (Franke 2010, 25). This reductive approach forces one to assume something isn't there simply because we have no access to it. Griffin, Bekhoff, Midgley, Fudge and other theorists all argue that although there is a point beyond which we cannot see, measure, or know, we cannot negate the interior life of another being (Bekhoff 2007, 117); that if the animal other might be so different as to be incomprehensible, this is due to the limits of human understanding, and that educated guesses about animals' inner lives bridge the gap between us (Fudge 2008, 60). Fudge believes that accepting limitations yet continuing to attempt descriptions and representations of animals is crucial because the alternative is to accept the limitations and stop considering animals at all (Fudge 2002, 159). The importance of representation is clear, as Nigel Rothfels writes, "who controls that representation and to what ends it will be used will be of profound importance in the coming years as arguments over global climate change, disappearing and disfigured frogs, razed rainforests, hunting rights, fishing stocks, and the precedence of human needs continues to build" (Rothfels 2002, xi).

Since 1996 Bass has explored animal being through sculpture, installation and video art. In his earlier work he 'collaborated' with mosquitoes and moths to create breeding grounds for both, and a space of uneasy interaction for the human viewer. His work has focused on wasps, larvae, butterflies and bats rather than on the more

'knowable' animals like mammals. By making these choices, he investigates a much larger, and more alien, form of life, one that anchors biodiversity. Wildlife foundations regularly promote themselves with images of large and impressive mammals. Yet insects 157

play an even more crucial role in the health of ecosystems. While anthropomorphic approaches to insects have been rare, one has to wonder nonetheless, as Masson and

McCarthy do, whether they don't have their own experiential life. A spider dropped in alcohol with her twenty-four babies reached out her legs and folded her offspring beneath her, clasping them until she died. Masson and McCarthy ask why this should not be considered parental love, and further, if a hormone was discovered surfacing when the spider saw her young, even if the hormone was specific to spiders, would that mean it wasn't love? (Masson and McCarthy 1995, 67ff). Bass's interest has never been in portraiture but in imaginatively recording animal behaviour. By bringing his images, or objects, into a state of crisis he asks the viewer to pay closer attention to them and their content.

Figure 35 158

Three recent video installations, Ear to the Ground, 2001, Fugue, 2004, and

Hypnagogue, 2010, all attempt to visualize what it might be like to be a bat, although

their intent cannot be reduced to this single idea. The earliest piece (figure 35) showed a

large video projection of a bat in a wind tunnel; fourteen glasses with transducers were

adhered to the wall and through these, with their ear to the wall, the viewer could hear

fourteen different travel narratives commissioned by the artist. The act of pressing one's

ear to a glass connected the viewer's body to the audio, while the large image of a bat

captured her visual attention. Together, they transported the viewer into a world outside

of her body, imagining what it might be like to be another (traveler or aviator). The use of

human narratives to think through the flight experience of a bat was Bass's first attempt

to superimpose recognizable human/cultural aspects onto bat-being. Bridging the gap, as

Fudge might write. This is his most overt cross-referencing of cultural and natural states.

For his subsequent work, Bass focused on the echolocation metaphor as a way to

contextualize animal experience within a cultural framework.

Fugue (figure 36), a three channel video originally installed to encompass the

body of the viewer, shows fleeting images of a coyote, a polar bear, bees in a hive, and

briefly, pine trees, as well as text that pulses in a rhythm designed for the viewer to barely

read the words before they vanish. The fugue state is one where an individual suddenly loses time, sometimes weeks and months, during which s/he can travel extensive distances without being able to recollect them later. Textual phrases such as "evading obstacles without conscious observation," "feeling drawn toward a particular place without explanation," or "being accused of lying when one is telling the truth," reflects 159

this state and connects the alien experience of a fugue journey with the complex being of

an animal that we can never fully know.

Figure 36

Bass is interested in the fact that certain moths and butterflies evolved a particular mode of evasion. By putting their wings together, they will free fall, dropping suddenly while emitting a pitch that blinds the bat who is pursuing them (Bass 2010). While Fugue addresses the duration of an uncharted journey erased from memory, it also envisions what it might be like for a bat circling in on its prey, picking up an audio signal, coming closer to it, pinpointing it, suddenly losing it and then realizing he has missed it (Bass

2010). Bass refers to a 'signal-to-noise' problem inherent in echolocation, and the jamming of signals, as well as the phenomenon of navigating an experience that is lost

(Bass 2010). In Fugue, he uses text as a bat signal, the pulse that emits language is 160

fleeting, appearing and disappearing with a consistency that is always the same (in its rhythm) and always different (in content). The images, like the text, are fragmentary.

Frames are repeated but not sequentially, offering the illusion of a continuity that is then disrupted. His images are disparate: a polar bear rendered abstractly, butterflies colliding

(as if the jamming of their predator's signals also disoriented them), a coyote making eye contact, an African dog digging dirt, and hornbills flying. Bass admits that at first glance, these very different animals have no relationship to one another, but by juxtaposing them he is seeking a common thread, a conduit that lies underneath (Bass 2010). The common thread can be understood in ecological terms in that all these animals from different habitats including North America, Asia, Africa and Europe are brought together in a way that references an interrelated global ecosystem. By invoking the ability of moths and butterflies to jam signals, Bass also introduces ideas of chaos theory, where a small difference in an initial condition can render widely diverging outcomes. The moth interferes with signals, which in turn influences a larger system or field of signals. We are reminded of the poetic image of a butterfly flapping its wings and influencing the weather, which is actually drawn from chaos theory that, like Fugue, aptly poses the question of interrelationality. As Bass suggests, a bat in pursuit may cause a butterfly to fold its wings, which in turn may change the outcome of an atmospheric event.

Pointing to Darwin and the early Naturalists' approach to field study, where animals were understood (due to careful observation) as acting subjects who experienced the world and authored their actions, Eileen Crist emphasizes the importance of naturalists' writing for imagining the potentially real that is not witnessable. What ties 161

together the realities of the unknowable and the familiar world, she writes, is a common universe of significations, although not on the same ontological plane (Crist 1999, 200).

The 'butterfly theory' suggests the most minute action might have momentous impact, and even the smallest of animals, and their lives, signify not only for themselves, but also for every other living being and element on earth. Seen in this light, Bass's translation of bat, moth, and fugue being is both specific and universal, tying each individual into the significance of their lives and connecting these to a greater whole, of which humans are merely a part. A bird's existence is not devoid of meaning simply because it doesn't serve man's end (Midgley 1978, 346). Bass takes this one step further by connecting the actions of an animal to the larger environment. The delicate balance implied in this environment is illustrated by Alphonse Lingis when he points out that the brazil nut tree can only be pollinated by one species of bees who require the pollen of one species of orchid, and the kernels enclosed in the husk can only be accessed by one rodent who, after feeding, leaves some of them on the ground to re-fertilize. Lingis concludes, "there is perhaps no species of life that does not live in symbiosis with another species" (Lingis

2003, 165f).

Bass uses human language in the form of text to bridge the gap between a

(human) fugue state and a bat in pursuit. Just as his work is not portraiture this use of language is not a translation of bat-being into human-being, but rather is an imaginative approach to different ways of being in the world. Vicki Hearne notes that humans' reliance on language makes it difficult to conceive of themselves and others without it. In language's absence, humans imagine themselves to be emptied of understanding and 162

impose this emptiness on animals who possess no human language (Hearne 1994, 171).

But Hearne also maintains, as do many others, that animals do have language, albeit not a human one. Bekhoff relates that in Arizona prairie dogs have different warning signs indicating hawks, coyotes, domestic dogs and humans. Vervet monkeys also have different calls for snakes, leopards, and martial eagles and solicit appropriate responses to them (heading for trees, small branches, or thick vegetation) (Bekhoff 2000, 52ff). Fudge asserts that to dismiss animal sounds that are intelligible in meaning to them assumes that humans have a monopoly on meaning (Fudge 2002, 136), just as Midgley points out that if language were the only source of conceptual order, all animals would live in chaos.

Much of the world's order, she continues, is pre-verbally determined, suggesting that concept and understanding are not only linguistic (Midgley 1983, 56). Diamond echoes this thought when she states that even when words fail us, an experience is powerful all the same (Diamond 2008, 67). Understood in this framework, Bass's use of language in

Fugue captures an experience, a moment of being, by providing an imaginative interpretation of someone moving through an atmosphere thick with noise (both literally and metaphorically).

Hypnagogue (figure 37) similarly uses a 'pulse' to determine the rhythm of appearing and fleeting images, and to moderate the audio that is derived from radio signals. But in this installation there is no text. Rather, Bass uses sound to come closer to the idea of echolocation which, he points out, is understood in principle although there are still many questions as to how it is processed in the bat's neural system (Bass 2010).

Interspersed with images of wind blowing through tall grass, butterflies, hornbills, a 163

jellyfish and hands digging through dirt, is an industrial landscape marked by telephone poles.

Figure 37

Mechanical communications, specifically the telegraph, have particular significance for

Bass, who aligns the rapid translation and conversion of electrochemical responses with the clicking sounds that generate echolocation calls, and the ultrasonic counter clicks made by a species of tiger moth (Bertholdia Trigona) to jam the signals. This ability, not inherent in all varieties of the moth is a significant evolutionary development in the organ called a tymbal that allows tiger moths to emit noises in the ultrasonic range used by many species of bat to locate potential prey. Bass notes parallels between the activity of the bats and moths, and the circuit that takes place within the human body as applied to telegraphy, reading and transmitting a signal from the eye to the finger to the ear (Bass 164

Feb. 20, 2011). The audio track consists of short-wave radio recordings and radio astronomy signals. These signals are derived from objects in the universe emitting electromagnetic energy, which sound like static and are analyzed visually. Again, the signal-to-noise issue is brought to the foreground. As the artist writes, "both radio signals and butterflies come through the air. When radio broadcast signals are generated, how does that impact the course of the moth or bat's ability to navigate their environment?

Human-generated radio has only been around for about 110 years, so although its impact may not yet be knowable, it seems important to pose the question" (Bass November 15,

2009). The word Hypnagogue refers to an agent that induces drowsiness or sleep. Sleep spindles, or 'sigma waves' appear during stage two sleep, which is associated with the integration of new information into existing knowledge. It may also represent periods when the brain is inhibiting processing to keep the sleeper in a tranquil state. Sleep here can be associated with the fugue state and is, importantly for Bass, the time during which one processes information, knowledge and experience. This simultaneity of the conscious and unconscious state, both of which inform experience, action, and thought, is an important link between the human animal and other animals. Navigating the world through echolocation is natural to a bat, but for this behaviour to be successful, it also has to be purposefully linked, as Midgley points out, to character traits expressing priorities, not mere stimulus-response patterns (Midgley 1978, 268). For in any complex creature, action must involve other traits besides impulse. The whole character permits action, meaning that behaviour does not stand alone (Midgley 1978, 128). For the human, typing out code or text might be understood in similar terms. There is a certain automatism in 165

how we approach a keyboard, where we are in a sense unconscious of the activity our fingers are involved in, while our conceptual thoughts are being put down on a page. This simultaneous state of awareness and response is brought into alignment in Hypnagogue.

Through his protagonist, Elizabeth Costello, J.M. Coetzee claims that Thomas

Nagle's response to the question 'what is it like to be a bat?' is tragically limited. Nagel,

Costello says, is wrong. We do not need to experience bat-life to understand it, for bats, like humans, are living beings, and to be a living being is to be full of being. All of us are animals, and as such, embodied souls (Coetzee 1999, 32ff). Coetzee introduced Elizabeth

Costello in a Tanner Lecture at Princeton University with a paper entitled The Lives of

Animals. The Tanner lectures are dedicated to ethical and philosophical topics, and instead of delivering a conventional talk, Coetzee chose to read a narrative that involved

Costello, an aging novelist, giving a lecture at a fictional university, Appleton College, where she too disregards convention and speaks not about her novels or literature, but about animals. Coetzee's lecture, which includes a thinly veiled critique of Western philosophy and other academic approaches, was met with some discomfort. The four responses published together with his Tanner lecture address the animal question but seem to skirt around a more central theme in the work, which is the limits of a philosophy that tends to rely on reason, principles or experiments alone. As Elisa Aaltola points out,

Costello insists on a personalized ethics rather than on detached theory (Aaltola 2010,

124). In what is an intricately designed text, Coetzee charts responses to the animal question that have formed our thoughts about them from Aristotle and St. Thomas, to

Descartes, Bentham, Tom Regan and Thomas Nagel, to name only a few. Costello also 166

makes reference to Kafka's Report to An Academy and Wolfgang Kohler's experiments

with chimpanzees. Her inclusion of these demonstrates her 'personalized ethics' that

willfully rejects the standard rules of philosophical argument by blurring the lines

between sympathetic imagination and objective critique. These lines are further blurred

when she describes herself to be 'wounded' in the same way that Kafka's fictional ape,

Red Peter, is. This position finds no resonance in the fictional audience at Appleton

College, and causes embarrassment for her son, an assistant professor of physics and

astronomy, who observes that argumentation is not her metier, and that "she should not

be here" (Coetzee 1999, 36).

Costello's crime is that she is a fictional writer taking on a real-life cause on the

one hand, and using academic discourse for her own means on the other. This makes her

appear 'jejune and sentimental' (Coetzee 1999, 17), something that is reinforced rather

than challenged when she claims that she is not a philosopher, but "a person who writes

stories about made-up people" (Coetzee 1999, 22). For Coetzee, who is also a person who

writes stories, there is no life without thinking our way into it and responding to it. No

life, as Geiger maintains, without reading and writing (Geiger 2010, 163). Costello claims

that animals are our silent captives who refuse to speak because we do not listen. By

comparing herself to a wounded animal she makes the additional claim that academics

similarly do not listen to poets (Aaltola 2010, 121).

Donna Haraway has claimed that Costello's equation of the Holocaust with mass animal slaughter in the meat industry is reductive, overlooking a difference in atrocities 167

that each deserve their own language (Haraway 2008, 336). Elsewhere she has used stronger language to condemn "the outrageous equating of the killing of the Jews in Nazi

Germany, the Holocaust, with the butcheries of the animal-industrial complex" (Haraway

2003, 51). Haraway's careful examination of what she terms the 'knots of animal and human killing and killability' (Haraway 2008, 336) is more nuanced than Costello's, but her critique misunderstands Costello's aim, which is first and foremost to make animals and their lives real to us. While Haraway works hard at analyzing the complicated 'knots' she refers to, certain predominant animal rights theorists such as Peter Singer have rejected the suggestion that human and animal lives have equal value. Responding to

Coetzee's Tanner lecture, he explicitly noted that "there is more to human existence" than to animal existence (Singer 1999, 90). Hence, the shock that the analogy elicits in the fictional audience reveals a real desire to maintain the difference between humans and animals (Aaltola 2010,132). It is the shock, and the reasons for it, which Coetzee seems to be interested in investigating. As Geiger notes, Costello is asking us "to be moved by the demand made upon us by the animal life of another, and to move another in turn"

(Geiger 2010,157f). Costello uses philosophical precedents to challenge a discourse of reason, and thus, the Holocaust analogy is in actual fact a reference to Martin Heidegger, who compared mechanized agriculture to the technology of the gas chamber. Rather than taking a "powerfully wrong approach to the knots of animal and human killing" Coetzee is testing Heidegger's idea through Costello, is testing philosophy against reality (Cavell

2008, 112f). By evoking Heidegger, Coetzee interrogates a philosophical position that claims that the animal is poor in world, with no potential for revelation (Agamben 2004, 168

5Iff). Costello's claim to 'know what it is like to be corpse' references Heidegger's argument that an animal cannot know death. "Anyone who says that life matters less to animals than to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for his life" (Coetzee

1999, 32f) is a direct response to Heidegger's claim that man dies and animals perish

(Lippit 2000, 60ff), and Bataille's that animals do not fear death because they do not know it (Marsden 2004, 42). Thus what initially seems to be a somewhat random and emotional response to animal issues, in the form of Costello's talk, is a strategically structured critique that uses a personalized ethics to interrogate a philosophy that has informed an understanding of animals that allows for their abuse. Coetzee, through

Costello, privileges poetry and the voice of fiction over theory. In Aaltola's interpretation, poetry "opens up perspectives for criticism of standard cultural meanings

(such as rationalism or speciesism) and for clarification of sentiments (such as emotion and equality) muddled and forgotten under the weight of those meanings" (Aaltola 2010,

12 Iff). Poetry enables us to imagine ourselves in the skin of another. If philosophy claims that reason limits this ability, than philosophy has to be augmented with storytelling. As

Costello points out, if we are capable of thinking our own death, then why not capable of thinking our way into the life of a bat? Finally, imagining oneself 'dead and alive at the same time,' also references Schrodinger's cat, and suggests that this degree of abstract thinking, physics, quantum mechanics and ideas of entanglement, should enable us to imagine, to think ourselves into the life of a bat, especially if we share that crucial aspect of being 'fully alive.' (Coetzee 1999, 32f). 169

Figure 38

Entanglement emerges at the forefront of Bass's video installations that focus on the convergence of bat and human being. In Daylight Will Not Be Noticed, 2011 (Figure

38), the audio consists of subdued radio signals and interference. Each signal has been assigned a colour so that, as the sound plays, the colour constantly shifts in the image.

Since the piece is primarily auditory, sound is the most important factor. The colour shifts also refer to Doppler shifts and their use in determining how fast an object is travelling in astronomical measurement. Bass has stated that the piece may be "as close to bat vision as I may ever get" (Bass November 2010). As with the previous work (excluding the early Ear to the Ground installation) the bat is implied and not presented visually. The butterflies are fighting, colliding, and constantly visible as the prey upon which the bat is focusing, and represent bat perception, signal disruption, antennae and interference all at once. "To be a living bat is to be full of being," as Costello claims. 170

It has been suggested that Elizabeth Costello's conception of ethics is similar to

Midgley's with whom she shares a sympathetic identification (Lamey 2010, 172).

Midgley also points to the vulnerability and the potential for joy in humans who are "a

vulnerable species easily destroyed by an avalanche," who are "receptive, imaginative,

and celebrate and rejoice in the existence of things and other creatures independent of

ourselves." Echoing Costello's insistence that we are capable of thinking our way into the

being of another, Midgley concludes that humans have a natural sympathy, one that

"reaches beyond our own species to plants and lifeless bodies" that include sunsets and

oceans (Midgley 1978: 348).

Noam Chomsky has written that if you want to study an organism, you should

study what it's good at (Fudge 2002, 138). Echolocation is an ability specific to bats, and

they excel in it. Humans also have things in which they excel, including the invention of

the telegraph, exploring the world, and creatively imagining other-being, through living,

writing, and making art. Investigating the being of others cannot always be made on

human terms. As Bekhoff points out, mice and chimpanzees each do well within their own worlds and neither would do well in the other's habitat. Monkeys are 'monkey- smart' and dogs are 'dog-smart,' the difference in intelligence is not always comparable

(Bekhoff 2000, 55). Midgley maintains that while apes and other creatures can count a little, they do not care to do so (Midgley 1978, 217). Discussing Wolfgang Kohler's experiments with chimpanzees between 1912-20 (experiments that Elizabeth Costello also refers to when she suggests that Kohler's Sultan was the model for Kafka's 'Red

Peter'), Midgley points out that the tests done on the chimpanzees were based on human 171

expectations. Not knowing why their human companion suddenly placed their food in a place hard to access, they demonstrated not stupidity, but puzzlement (Midgley 1978,

221). Costello drives this point home by suggesting that Sultan wondered "why is he starving me?" and that Kohler's "carefully plotted psychological regimen conducts the ape away from ethics and metaphysics towards the humbler reaches of practical reason"

(Coetzee 1999, 28f). If the researcher who designed the maze to test animal intelligence, she later points out, were to be parachuted into the jungles of Borneo, he would be dead within a week (Coetzee 1999, 62).

In the short video Telepathacats (figure 39) we see the Witches, FASTWURMS, outside in the snow 'directing' their cat familiars with slow hypnotic hand and arm gestures. The cats appear to respond to and yet ignore the signals, so that while we watch, the question of who is responding to whom becomes increasingly unclear. The gentle tongue-in-cheek piece is not merely playful, however, since it suggests real symbioses exist between species, and particularly between familiars. McKay points out that while

'telepathy' has a supernatural connotation, mind reading is a perfectly ordinary term in the neuro- and cognitive sciences (McKay 2010, 84). Masson and McCarthy stress that suggesting that the mental lives of animals are forever unapproachable or imponderable, is merely a sign of intellectual helplessness (Masson and McCarthy 1995,223). People who live with animals, Midgley points out, know that animals interpret human behaviour, understand words, and are hard to deceive (Midgley 1978, 302). 172

Figure 39

Animals in the wild to whom we have much less access have been found to demonstrate empathy. For instance, whales have more spindle cells than humans. These are cells that are located in that part of the brain that is linked with social organization, empathy, intuition regarding the feelings of others, and rapid gut reactions (Bekhoff 2007, xix).

FASTWURMS tell us that there is no limit to how we can connect to the world if we approach it with respect, while Bass reveals that even the smallest of beings should not be dismissed if we are to sustain some form of a healthy economy. "Ethics," Albert

Schweitzer wrote, in our Western world has hitherto been largely limited to the relations of man to man. But that is a limited ethics. We need a boundless ethics, which will include the animals also ... The time is coming when people will be amazed that the human race existed so long before it recognized that thoughtless injury to life is incompatible with real ethics. Ethics in its unqualified form extends responsibility to everything that has life (Bekhoff 2007, 133). 173

Bibliography

Aaltola, Elisa. "Coetzee and Alternative Animal Ethics." In Anton Leist and Peter Singer. Ed. J.M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 119-144.

Adams, Carol and Josephine Donovan. Ed. Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995.

Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004 (2002).

Andel, Jaroslav. "Still is Moving." Douglas Gordon: Superhumanatural. Edinburgh: The National Galleries of Scotland, 2003. 113-121.

Ansell, Neil. "My Life as a Hermit." The Observer March 27, 2011. http://www.guardian.comuk/environment/201 l/mar/27/neil-ansell.

Associated Press. Performing Whale Dies in Collision with Another." The New York Times. August 23, 1989. February 13, 2010. http://www.nvtimes.com/1989/08/23/us/performing-whale-dies-in-collision-with- another.html?pagewanted= 1

Atterton, Peter and Matthew Calarco. Ed. Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity. London and New York: Continuum, 2004.

Bakhtin, Mikhael. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965, 1984.

Baker, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals. Identity, and Representation. Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 2001.

—. The Postmodern Animal. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.

Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text." In Brian Wallis. Ed. Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984. 169-174.

Bass, Kenn. Email Interview. February 20, 2011.

—. Personal Interview. November 15, 2009.

—. Personal Interview. May 14, 2010.

Bekhoff, Marc and Jessica Pierce. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. 174

Bekhoff, Marc. The Emotional Lives of Animals. Novato. California: New World Library, 2007.

—. Animals Matter. Boston: Shambhala Publications Inc. 2000, 2007.

Bentley Mays, John. "Tragic Human Desire to Master the Future." The Globe and Mail. May 1993.

Berger, John. "Why Look At Animals?" in Marketta Seppala, Jari-Pekka Vanhala and Linda Weintraub. Ed. Animal. Anima. Animus. Pori: Pori Art Museum Publications, 1998. 148-161.

Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1912, 2004.

Biesenbach, Klaus. "Sympathy for the Devil." Douglas Gordon: Timeline. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2006. 10-31.

Borsa, Joan. "Nomadic Locations, Travelling Subjects: Affirmations of Autobiographical Acts." In Peter White, coordinator. Naming a Practice: Curatorial Strategies for the Future. Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery Editions, 1996.

Bradford, Verner Phillips and Harvey Blume. Ota Benga: The Pvgmie in the Zoo. New York: Delta, 1992.

Broeker, Holger. "Cinema is Dead! Long Live Film! The Language of Images in the Video Works of Douglas Gordon." Douglas Gordon: Superhumanatural. Edinburgh: The National Galleries of Scotland, 2003. 61-80.

Brooks, Sharon. "Productive Affinities, Singular Differences." In Peter White, coordinator. Naming a Practice: Curatorial Strategies for the Future. Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery Editions, 1996. 97-104.

Burt, Jonathan. "The Aesthetics of Livingness." Antennae. 5 (2008): 4-11.

—. "The Illumination of the Animal Kingdom: The Role of Light and Electricity in Animal Representation." Society and Animals 9:3 (2001): 203-228.

Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Calarco, Matthew and Steven DeCaroli. Ed. Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty & Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.

Carr-Harris, Ian. "John McEwen/Recent Work." In Real Sculpture: John McEwen. Lethbridge: Southern Alberta Art Gallery, 1979. 175

Castricano, Jodey. Ed. Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in the PosthumanWorld. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008.

Cavell, Stanley. "Companionable Thinking." In Stanley Cavell et al. Philosophy and Animal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 91-126.

Chevrier, Jean-Francois. "The Political Potential of Art." Interview with Benjamin Buchloh and Catherine David. In Politics - Poetics Documenta X - The Book. Kassel: Cantz Verlag, 1997. 374-403, 624-643.

Clark. David. "On Being "The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany": Dwelling with Animals After Levinas." In Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior, Ed. Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History. New York & London: Routledge, 1997. 165-198.

Coetzee, J.M. The Lives of Animals. Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Crist, Eileen. Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999.

Daston, Lorraine and Gregg Mitman. Ed. Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

Dault, Gary Michael. "Internal Logic - John McEwen - The Olga Korper Gallery." The Globe and Mail September 5, 2009: R10.

Davies, Gail. "Virtual Animals in Electronic Zoos." In Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert. Ed. Animal Spaces. Beastly Places. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. 243-267.

Davies, Jon. "Props to the Fairy People." In DONKY@NINJA@,WITCH: A Living Retrospective. Toronto: The Art Gallery of York University, 2010. 46-55.

Davis, Susan G. Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: The University of California Press, 1997.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible." In Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 232-309.

Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign Volume I. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallot, Ginette Michaud. Ed. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009.

—. "And Say The Animal Responded?" in Cary Wolfe. Ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 121-146. 176

—. "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)." Trans. David Wills. Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002), 369-418.

—. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Diamond, Cora. "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy." In Stanley Cavell et al. Philosophy and Animal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 43-89.

Drobnick, Jim and Jennifer Fisher. "HEXhibitionism." In Jenifer Papararo et al. DONKY NINJA WITCH. Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery, 2008. 27-42.

Enright, Robert. "Crafting, Every Witch Way." Bordercrossings 25.1 (2006): 40-51.

Enwezor, Okwui. Ed. The Unhomelv: Phantom Scenes in Global Society. Barcelona: Biacs, 2006.

—."The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition." Research in African Literatures. 34. 4 (Winter 2003): 57-82.

—. "The Black Box." In Documenta 11 Platform 5: Exhibition. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002. 42-55.

Evans, Martin. "The story behind Tilikum the killer whale." Telegraph. February 26, 2010. April 16, 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/7322889/The-story- behind-Tilikum-the-killer-whale.html

FASTWURMS. Email Interview. April 10, 2010.

Fischer, Barbara. "A Ground for Negotiations." In Peter White, coordinator. Naming a Practice: Curatorial Strategies for the Future. Banff: Walter Phillips Gallery Editions, 1996. 171-180.

Fleming, Marnie. Beaver Tales. Oakville: Oakville Galleries, 2000.

Flint, Richard W. "American Showmen and European Dealers." in R.J. Hoage and William A. Deiss. New Worlds. New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. 97-108.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Random House, 1994, 1970.

—. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books, 1965, 1988. 177

—. "What is an Author?" in Paul Rabinow. Ed. The Foucault Reader. New York: Random House, 1984. 101-120.

Franke, Anselm. Ed. Animism. Volume I. Bern: Sternberg Press, 2010.

Fudge, Erika. Pets. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008.

—. Animal. London: Reaktion Books, 2002,

Geiger, Ido. "Writing the Lives of Animals." In Anton Leist and Peter Singer. Ed. J.M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 145-169.

Ghaznavi, Corinna. "Mutation, Transformation and Pollination: The Failure of Exclusion and the Potential for Entanglement." April 13, 2011 http://www.stride.ab.ca/arc/archive_2010/nicole_rayburn_project/nicole_ravburn project •html#text.

Ghaznavi, Nadim. Personal Interview. January 29, 2011.

Goodall, Jane. In the Shadow of Man. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971.

Griffin, Donald R. Animal Minds. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism. Nature. Power. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005.

Gruffudd, Pyrs. "Biological Cultivation: Lubetkin's Modernism at the London Zoo in the 1930s." in Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert. Ed. Animal Spaces. Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. 222- 242.

Haila, Yijo. "Listening to Animals, Learning from Animals." In Marketta Seppala, Jari- Pekka Vanhala and Linda Weintraub, Ed. Animal. Animal. Animus. Pori: Pori Art Museum Publications, 1998. 216-232.

Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

—. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs. People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.

—. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." In Donna Haraway. Simians. Cvborgs. and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York and London: Routledge, 1991. 149-181. 178

—• Primate Visions: Gender. Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York and London: Routledge, 19B9.

Harrison, David. "Agony and Ivory: The Chinese lust for ivory has led to the vast killing of Africa's elephants. Is it too late to save them?" Telegraph. March 17, 2010. March 23, 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/7429847/Agony-andIvory.html

Hearne, Vicki. Animal Happiness. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1994.

—. "A Taxonomy of Knowing: Animals Captive, Free-Ranging, and at Liberty." In Arien Mack, ed. Humans and Other Animals. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995, 1999.

Heise, Ursula K. "From Extinction to Electronics: Dead Frogs, Live Dinosaurs, and Electric Sheep." In Cary Wolfe. Ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 59-81.

R.J. Hoage and William A. Deiss. Ed. New Worlds. New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Hutchinson, John et al. Antony Gormlev. London and New York: Phaidon Press, 1995, 2010.

Jardine, N., J.A. Secord and E.C. Spary. Ed. Cultures of Natural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Johnston, Robert J. "Exogenous Factors and Visitor Behavior: A Regression Analysis of Exhibit Viewing Time." Environment and Behavior. Vol. 30 No. 3, May 1998: 322-347.

Kaloff, Linda. Looking at Animals in Human History. London: Reaktion Books, 2007.

Kiley-Worthington, Marthe. Animals in Circuses and Zoos: Chiron's World? Glasgow: Little Eco-Farms Publishing, 1990.

Kisling, Vernon N. Jr. Ed. Zoo and Aquarium History: Ancient Animal Collections to Zoological Gardens. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2001.

Klepac, Walter. "Royden Rabinowitch." Parachute 2 (February 1976): 7-12.

Kluger, Jeffrey. "Killer-Whale Tragedy: What Made Tilikum Snap?" Time February 26, 2010. April 16, 2010 http://www.time.eom/time/printout/0.8816.1968249.00.html

Kotz, Mary Lynn. Rauschenberg: Art and Life. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1990.

Kuzniar, Alice A. Melancholia's Dog: Reflections on our Animal Kinship. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. 179

Kwon, Miwon. "In Conversation with Mark Dion." In Lisa Graziose Corin, Miwon Kwon, and Norman Bryson. Mark Dion. London: Phaidon Press Ltd, 1997. 6-33.

Lamey, Andy. "Sympathy and Scapegoating in J.M. Coetzee." In Anton Leist and Peter Singer. Ed. J.M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 171-193.

LeGuin, Ursula. Buffalo Gals and Other Presences. New York: ROC, 1990.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Linden, Eugene. The Parrot's Lament and Other True Tales of Animal Intrigue- Intelligence. and Ingenuity. Middlesex: Plume, 2000.

Lingis, Alphonse. "Animal Body, Inhuman Face." In Cary Wolfe. Ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis, London: The University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 165-182.

Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis and London: The University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Lorenz, Konrad. King Solomon's Ring: New Light on Animal Ways. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, 2010.

Mack, Arien. Ed. Humans and Other Animals. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995, 1999.

Maharaj, Serat. "Xeno-Epistemics: Makeshift Kit for Sounding Visual Art As Knowledge Production and the Retinal Regimes." In Dokumenta ll Platform 5: Exhibition. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002. 71-84.

Malamud, Randy. Reading Zoos: Representations of Animal and Captivity. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff and Susan McCarthy. When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals. New York: Delta, 1995.

McEwen, John. Public Thoughts. Hillsdale: John McEwen, 2010.

—. Artist Talk, Museum London, May 1, 2011.

—. Email correspondence with the author. January 20, 10 - May 2011.

—. Personal Interview. January 21, 2010. November 12, 2010. April 22, 2011.

—. "Notes - Towards a Working Minimalism." In Mary Reid. Ed. Marconi in the Sculpture of John McEwen. Winnipeg: The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2007. 53-72. 180

—. "Bridges to Babylon - On the Shoreline between Art and Nature." In William Moore et al. Shore/lines: Responding to Place. Barrie: MacLaren Art Centre, 2003. 29-35.

—. 1999. Hillsdale: John McEwen, 1999.

McKay, Sally. "Nature in the Network." In [email protected]@WITCH: A Living Retrospective. Toronto: The Art Gallery of York University, 2010. 83-96.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. "The Philosopher and His Shadow." In Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Signs. Trans. Richard C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. 159- 181.

Midgley, Mary. Best and Man: The Roots of Human Nature. London and New York: Routledge, 1978, 1995.

—. Animals and Whv Thev Matter. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1983.

Mitchell, Michael. "Boss Bear." Canadian Art. 26. 2 (Summer 2009): 40-41.

Mitchell, Rob. "Bioart and the Vitality of Media." SLSA conference. October 28, 2010.

Mitchell, Robert W., Nicholas S. Thompson and H. Lyn Miles. Ed. Anthropomorphism. Anecdotes, and Animals. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Mitchell, Sandra D. "Anthropomorphism and Cross-Species Modeling," in Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman. Ed. Thinking With Animals: New Perspectives in Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 100-117.

Mitman, Gregg. "Pachyderm Personalities: The Media of Science, Politics and Conservation." In Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman. Ed. Thinking With Animals: New Perspectives in Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 175- 195.

Monk, Philip. "David Rabinowitch: Recent Sculpture." Parachute 8 (Fall 1977): 22-24.

Morris, Robert. "Some Splashes in the Ebb Tide." Artforum XI. 6 (February 1973): 43- 49.

Mullan, Bob and Garry Marvin. Zoo Culture. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987.

Murchie, John. "John McEwen: The Distinctive Line Between One Subject and Another." Parachute 21 (Winter 1980): 46-47.

Nagel, Thomas. "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?" October 2, 2010. http://instruct.westvallev.edu/lafave/nagel_nice.html.

Noelker, Frank. Captive Beauty: Zoo Portraits by Frank Noelker. Foreword by Jane Goodall. Introduction by Nigel Rothfels. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois 181

Press, 2004.

—. http://www.franknoelker.com/work

Papararo, Jenifer et al. DONKY NINJA WITCH. Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery, 2008.

Philo, Chris and Chris Wilbert. Ed. Animal Spaces: Beastly Places: new geographies of human-animal relations. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

Pollock, Ann. "Reflections on Trajectories ... the curve that a body describes in space ... a path, progression, or line of development." Marconi in the Sculpture of John McEwen. Mary Reid, Ed. Winnipeg: The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2007.

Reichenbach, Herman. "A Tale of Two Zoos: The Hamburg Zoological Garden and Carl Hagenbeck's Tierpark." in R.J. Hoage and William A. Deiss. Ed. New Worlds. New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. 51-62.

Reid, Mary. Ed. Marconi in the Sculpture of John McEwen. Winnipeg: The Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2007.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Neue Gedichte/New Poems. Trans. Stephen Cohn. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1992, 1997.

—. Duino Elegies: The Sonnets to Orpheus. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Vintage International, 1982,2009.

Ritvo, Harriet. The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997.

—. "The Order of Nature: Constructing the Collections of Victorian Zoos." in R.J. Hoage and William A. Deiss. Ed. New Worlds. New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. 43-50.

Rogers, Lesley J. Minds of Their Own: Thinking and Awareness in Animals. Boulder: Westview Press, 1997.

Rothfels, Nigel. Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

—. Ed. Representing Animals. Bloomington, Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 2002. 182

Rowlands, Mark. The Philosopher and the Wolf. London: Granta, 2008.

Ryder, Richard D. Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes Towards Speciesism. Oxford: Black well, 1989.

Seppala, Marketta, Jari-Pekka Vanhala and Linda Weintraub. Ed. Animal. Anima. Animus. Pori: Pori Art Museum Publications, 1998.

Shepard, Paul. Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence. Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1978.

Simberloff, Daniel. "Animals and Their Habitat." in Marketta Seppala, Jari-Pekka Vanhala and Linda Weintraub. Ed. Animal. Anima. Animus. Pori: Pori Art Museum Publications, 1998. 233-242.

Singer, Peter. "Response." In J.M. Coetzee. The Lives of Animals. Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. 85-91.

—• Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. New York: Random House Inc., 1975.

Smuts, Barbara. "Reflections." In J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. 107-120.

Spivak, Gayatri. "Righting Wrongs." The South Atlantic Quarterly. 103.2/3 (spring/summer 2004). 523-581.

Strehlow, Harro. "Zoos and Aquariums of Berlin." in R.J. Hoage and William A. Deiss. Ed. New Worlds. New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. 63-72.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Threadgold, Terry. Feminist Poetics: Poiesis. Performance. Histories. New York and London: Routledge, 1997.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984.

Vaillant, John. The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

Vaughan, R.M. "Bell, Book and Camera: A FASTWURMS Grimoire." Canadian Art 24.1 (Spring 2007): 72-78. 183

Vermeulen, Pieter. "Being True to Fact: Coetzee's Prose of the World." In Anton Leist and Peter Singer. Ed. J.M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 269-289.

De Waal, Frans. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober. Ed. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006.

—. Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Wardrop, Murray. "Whale kills trainer at SeaWorld in front of audience." Telegraph February 25, 2010. February 25, 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/7311140/SeaWorld-whale-kills-trainer-

Westmoreland, Mark W. "Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality." Kritike 2.1 (June 2008): 1-10.

Wilson, Alexander. The Nature of Culture: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992.

Wolfe, Cary. "Introduction: Exposures." In Stanley Cavell, et al. Philosophy and Animal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 1-41.

—. "In the Shadow of Wittgenstein's Lion." In Cary Wolfe. Ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. 1- 57.

—. Ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis and London: the University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Wood, David. "Thinking With Cats." In Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco. Ed. Animal Philosophy: Ethics and Identity. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. 129- 144. http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Yellow_bellied_Sapsucker/id April 3, 2011. 184

Curriculum Vitae

Education University of Western Ontario Visual Arts Department: Curatorial Studies and Art History PhD 2007-2011

Heinrich-Heine University, Duesseldorf, Germany 1994-1996 Studies in Art History, Germanistic and American Studies Master Degree (1996)

Albert-Ludwigs University, Freiburg i. Breisgau, Germany 1990-1994 Studies in Art History, Germanistic and American Studies Bachelor level degree (1994)

Selected Curated Exhibitions 2004-09 Adjunct Curator: Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, Owen Sound 2011 Animal (catalogue)

Museum London Robert McLaughlin Art Gallery, Oshawa University Galleries, U. of Saskatchewan

Doug Walker co-curated with Peter Dykhuis (catalogue)

Robert McLaughlin Art Gallery, September

The Kelowna Art Gallery

The Dalhousie Art Gallery

2009 Sciencefictionsciencefair: Denton Frederickson, Brian McKenna and Robyn Moody (catalogue) Robert McLaughlin Art Gallery, Oshawa, November KWAG 2010

2008 Pulp Fiction Museum London, September MOCCA, Toronto, June 2009 St. Mary's University Gallery, Halifax, 2010 2005 The Conative Object

York Quay Gallery, Toronto, January

The Wonderland: Claudia Klucaric and Kate Wilson

Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, Owen Sound, July Neutrinos They Are Very Small; Rebecca Diederichs, Gordon Hicks, Sally 185

McKay (catalogue) Art Gallery of Sudbury, September Agnes Etherington Art Gallery, Kingston, June 2006

18 Illuminations, co-curated with Carla Garnet (catalogue)

Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, Owen Sound, November Touring thru 2009 2004 SuperNatural.* Anna Maria Parolin and Natsuko Nakata

Open Studio, Toronto, June ReCollect; Mary Kavanagh and Carol Sawyer

La Centrale, The Powerhouse, Montreal, January A Space Gallery, Toronto, September 2005

2003 InkLination.v. Canadian Dutch Drawing Exhibition

York Quay Centre, Toronto, November

2002 Happy Valley: David Acheson and Lorna Mills Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, October

Tekeningen III: co-curated with Alithe Thijsen Canadian Dutch Drawing Exhibition

Quartair, The Haag, Netherlands, June Wish; Mona Kamal, Pamila Matharu and Tara Sabharwal WARC, in conjunction with SAVAC, Toronto, January 2001 Poiesis.* Marianne Lovink and Sheila Moss

Mercer Union, Toronto, June Kenderdine Art Gallery, Saskatoon, April 2002

Made in Banff: Selections from the Collection, co-curated with Melanie Townsend and Charlene McNichol. Responsible for video selection.

Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, February 2000 Crawford Street: New Work by Carolyn White (catalogue)

Toronto Photographers Workshop, Toronto, September

1999 Feminist Practices: Lateral Moves: Jamelie Hassan and Leila Sujir

A-Space, Toronto, September

Lightweights; Sandra Gregson and Sandra Rechico

Pari Nadimi Gallery, Toronto, July Gallery 96, Stratford, June 186

Illegitimate: David Acheson, Janet Bellotto, Lisa Klapstock and Jill Stock

Archive Inc., Toronto, May

1998 Bawdy: Michelle Gay, Vessna Perunovich, Jill Stock

Angell Gallery, Toronto, July

Publications Selected Exhibition Catalogues/Essays "Looking for Cohesion in a Broken World." Abiect Nature: Duke & Battersbv. Union Gallery, Kingston Ontario, 2011.

"Curious Lights in the Eye of the Storm." Kate Wilson: Curious Lights. Union Gallery, Kingston, 2010.

"Yoshiko Shimado." Print Studio Hamilton, 2009.

"18 Illuminations: Contemporary Art and Light," Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, Owen Sound, 2008. "Joseph Hubbard: Of Insidious Intent: WMDs and Paranoia," Mcintosh Gallery, London, 2006. "Phil Irish: Paths We Have Taken," Robert Langen Art Gallery, Waterloo, ON, 2006. "Persona Volare: Canadian Club," Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, 2005. "Probing into the Distance," Contemporary Art Forum, Kitchener, 2004. "Lorna Mills: Reality Show," Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, September 2003. "Catherine Heard: Effigies," Cambridge Galleries, Cambridge, April 2003. "Robert Markle: A Retrospective," Durham Art Gallery, December 2002. "Gathering Shades: Catherine Heard and Ed Pien," Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, January 2002. "Computer Voices: Speaking Machines," David Rokeby and Jocelyn Robert, The Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, May 2001. "Fragile Distinctions: Staging the Real," Carolyn White, Toronto Photographer's Workshop, Toronto, September 2000. "What About the Materiality of the Body, Judy?" MEAT, 107 Church St., Toronto, November 1999. "Feminist Practices: Lateral Moves," A-Space Gallery, Toronto, September 1999. "Ernest Daetwyler: DELETE? Fragments of Memory," Gallery 96, Stratford, Ontario, July 1998, Pekao Gallery, Toronto, August - September 1998, Library & Gallery, Cambridge, Ontario, October 1998 - October 1999. "Vessna Perunovich: Of Passion and Rage," MEG Gallery, Toronto, April 1998, Arts on King, Toronto, June 1998.

Selected Articles and Reviews "Same Difference," Parachute, Winter 2003. "Curatorial Roadtrip," Blackflash, Winter 2002. "Venice Biennale 2001," Fuse Magazine, Winter 2001. "David Acheson: Honey in Paradise," Canadian Art, Winter 2001. 187

"An Whitlock C(rowd)," Espace Summer 2001. "Interview: Janet Cardiff," Artpress, Summer 2001. "Art Forum Berlin," Canadian Art, Spring 2001. "Interview: Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak," Canadian Art, Winter 2000. "Marianne Lovink," Espace Fall 2000. "Divers and Difference: Nina Levitt," Parachute Fall 2000, Special issue. "Stan Douglas/Douglas Gordon," Parachute Winter 1999. "How To Photograph...Becky Singleton," D'Art International, Winter 1999. "Richard Stipl," Canadian Art, Summer 1999. "Vessna Perunovich: RED-E-SCAPES," Vie des Arts, Spring 1999. "Disjunctures: The Conversational Community," Lola, Winter 1998. "Jillian McDonald's Christening Gowns," D'Art International, Fall 1998. "Doug Stone," Flash Art, October 1998. "Space Invaders: Max Streicher," Canadian Art, Fall 1998. "Baudrillard: Shooting in the Sandbox," co-written with Felix Stalder, Lola No. 2, Summer 1998. "The Cultural Surrogates of Laurie Simmons," D'Art International, April May June 1998. "Michelle Gay," Flash Art, March April 1998.

Selected Public Presentations

2011 Being Animal, Being Human, Being Bat: The Video Installations of Kenn Bass.

ASLE Bloomington

2010 Captive Animals, Human Control: The Zoo and the Circus in the work of Frank Noelker and Douglas Gordon

SLSA Indianapolis

2008 Looking Back: the Animal Subject in Contemporary Art

UAAC, Toronto

2006 Some Musings on Contemporary Canadian Landscape Painting Symposium, Kennedy Gallery, Nipissing University, North Bay 2005 Thinking Through Curating Curatorial Conference organized by OAAG, Banff 2004 The Current State of Feminism in Art Panel Discussion, Toronto Alternative Art Fair International 2001 Poiesis: Marianne Lovink and Sheila Moss

Second Skin Teachers' Think Tank, The Museum for Textiles, Toronto.

2000 Moderator: Voyeurism and the Work of Carolyn White, Panel Discussion with Sharon Brooks, Judith Doyle, Carolyn White at The Toronto Photographer's Workshop, Toronto, October. 188

Teaching and Related Experience

2010 VAH2280F Introduction to Modernism: 1900-1945, University of Western Ontario

Critiques: MfA students, University Of Guelph

2009 VAH2291F Introduction to Modern Sculpture, University of Western Ontario

2008 VAS 2274a: Art Now, University of Western Ontario 2007-08 VAH VAS 285: Gallery Practices, University of Western Ontario 2006 Critiques: Thesis Class, Ontario College of Art And Design Critiques: New Media thesis class, Ryerson

2005 VISC B303: Contemporary Canadian Art, Ontario College of Art and Design Critiques and Guest lecture (Graduate students): University of Saskatoon, January.

2004 Critiques and Guest lecture (Thesis year): Curatorial Practice, OCAD, Toronto, February.

2003 Curatorial Presentation, University of Toronto, Continuing Education, March. Critiques and Graduation Exhibition, Georgian College, Barrie, February. Guest Lecture Curatorial Practice, Sheridan College, Oakville, January.

2003-07 Communications 4069: Communications' Cultural Foundations, Sheridan College

2000 Guest Lecture: Curatorial Practices, Ryerson, Toronto.

1999 Guest Lecture: Re-Presenting Woman: The Photography of Cindy Sherman, Ryerson, Toronto.

Residencies 2003 Atelierraeume Krems, Austria 2001 Work/Study Residency, Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre for the Arts

Grants and Awards 2010/11 Ontario Graduate Scholarship

Western Graduate Studies Scholarship

2009/10 Ontario Graduate Scholarship

2009 MIT ACS Accelerate 189

2009 Ontario Graduate Scholarship 2007-09 Western Graduate Studies Scholarship 2007 Canada Council Special Projects Grant 2003 Toronto Arts Council, Project Grant (City Limits Contemporary Art)

Ontario Arts Council, Project Grant (City Limits Contemporary Art)

2002 Canada Council Travel Grant

Canada Council Outreach Program: International Marketing and Promotions

2001 Canada Council for the Arts, C Grant 2000 Canada Council for the Arts, C Grant

Juries and Selection Committees 2006 Juror, Ontario Arts Council: Project Grants for Visual and Media Arts 2003 - 2006 Board of Directors, United Media Arts, Durham 2003 Juror, Canada Council for the Arts, Independent Critic and Curators

Juror, 40th Annual Juried Exhibition, Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound

2002/03 Board of Directors, A Space, Toronto 2001/02 Open Studio Selection Committee

Languages English German

Bibliography Murray Whyte, "DIY Projects: Artists push past limits at eclectic exhibition now at MOCCA" The Toronto Star, June 28, 2009

Sarah Milroy, "Don't Be Fooled By the Sweetness and Light." Globe and Mail, August 15, 2009.

Greg Burliuk, "Art and Science Fuse in Neutrino Exhibit," The Ticket, Kingston, October 14, 2006. Julia Dault, "A Celebration of Colour and Light Greets the Arrival of Winter: 18 Illuminations: Contemporary Artists and Light," The National Post, November 24, 2005. Lara Bradley, "When Science and Art Meet," The Sudbury Star, September 22, 2005. Jake Moore, "ReCollect," Canadian Art, Spring 2004. Catherine Osborne, "Drawing Shows Push Limits of the Genre," The National Post, November 29,2003. Dana Samuel, "Poeisis," Canadian Art, Fall 2002. Dault, Gary Michael, "The Thinking Man's Bouquet," Gallery Going, The Globe & Mail, July 7, 2001. Smith, Heather J., "Carolyn White," Lola 8, Winter 2000-2001. 190

Hirschmann, Thomas, "Caught you looking!" Gallery TPW - Carolyn White, Crawford Street, At the Galleries, The National Post, October 7, 2000. Dault, Gary Michael, "Capturing the poignancy of time's swift passage," Carolyn White, Gallery Going, The Globe & Mail, September 30, 2000. Bellotto, Janet, "Sandra Gregson and Sandra Rechico Lightweight," Lola 5, Winter 1999-2000. Dault, Gary Michael, "Sandra Gregson and Sandra Rechico at the Pari Nadimi Gallery," Gallery Going, The Globe & Mail, July 17, 1999. Dault, Gary Michael, "Illegitimate at Archive Inc.," Gallery Going, The Globe & Mail, May 22, 1999. Hanna, Deirdre, "Bawdy fetes carnival, In Lieu takes on loos," (Image), NOW, July 2-8, 1998. Dault, Gary Michael, "Works of the Cloth and Works of the Body," Gallery Going, The Globe & Mail, July 11, 1998.