IssueAntennae 26 - Autumn 2013 ISSN 1756-9575
Painting Animals II Chris Musina – Towards a New Animism / Christohpher Reiger – A Modern-Mystic Look at Animals/ Jessica Holmes – Animals as Wallpaper / Sunaura Taylor – Witnessing Animals / Rene’ J. Marquez – Decolonizing Dog Painting / Isobel Wood – Animals in Low-Res / Olly and Suzi - Picturing the Beast / Vanessa Barbay – Becoming Animal: Matter as Indexical Sign in Representation / Cecilia Novero – Posthuman Animals and the Avant-Garde: The Case of Daniel Spoerri / Roland Borgards – Fish: Singly, and in Shoals / Petra Shilder – The Art of Farming / Eileen Yanoviak – More Than Marginal: Insects in the Hours of Mary of Burgundy 1
Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture
Editor in Chief Giovanni Aloi
Academic Board Steve Baker Ron Broglio Matthew Brower Eric Brown Carol Gigliotti Donna Haraway Linda Kalof Susan McHugh Rachel Poliquin Annie Potts Ken Rinaldo Jessica Ullrich
Advisory Board Bergit Arends Rod Bennison Helen Bullard Claude d’Anthenaise Petra Lange-Berndt Lisa Brown Chris Hunter Karen Knorr Rosemarie McGoldrick Susan Nance Andrea Roe David Rothenberg Nigel Rothfels Angela Singer Mark Wilson & Bryndís Snaebjornsdottir
Global Contributors Sonja Britz Tim Chamberlain Lucy Davis Amy Fletcher Katja Kynast Christine Marran Carolina Parra Zoe Peled Julien Salaud Paul Thomas Sabrina Tonutti Johanna Willenfelt
Copy Editor Maia Wentrup
Front Cover Image: Olly and Suzi, Red Tiger, Karnali, Nepal, 1997 © Olly and Suzi
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EDITORIAL ANTENNAE ISSUE 26
This and the previous issue of Antennae have been entirely dedicated to the practice of painting. The aim of this exploration is not that of attempting to draw conclusions on the matter of animal representation through the medium of painting itself, but to focus on the specificities of the medium in order to understand how these can aid, address, envision or suggest new human-animal relations. In the case of painting, both issues do not present a conceptualised selection of contributions but instead aim at maintaining a very open mind about the intricacies that painting animals may unveil. Resisting a thematic curatorial approach, both issues, however provide a departure from classical representational tropes in which the non-human has for centuries been symbolically objectified. How objectification is prevented, exploited, or subverted in panting is something the selected works and texts featured in these instalments aim at mapping. As per usual, this is a very rich issue gathering a number of contributions from established and emerging academics, researchers, curators and artists. Special thanks go to all those who have contributed to the making of this ambitious project.
Giovanni Aloi Editor in Chief of Antennae Project Lecturer in Visual Culture: Queen Mary University of London Sotheby's Institute of Art Tate Galleries
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CONTENTS ANTENNAE ISSUE 26
5 Towards a New Animism Drawing from a deep phylogeny of cultural cues, Chris Musina references historical painters, contemporary animal cultures, kitsch and museum dioramas in an exploration of the represented relationships to the animal world. Musina addresses the animal not as symbolic object, but as subject, yet a subject aware of its own powerful symbolic nature; painting is interesting to the artist precisely because of this reason and its effects. These paintings are populated with “knowing animal protagonists” who stare back at the viewer with an uneasy gaze; aware of that uncomfortable places they occupy in our cultural histories--asking for compassion, mercy, or simply to be put out of their misery. Text by Chris Musina
11 A Modern-Mystic Look at Animals Growing up on the rural Delmarva Peninsula, I became acquainted with the local flora and fauna at a young age. Working at field chores, hunting, fishing, and especially when playing, my outdoors experiences were akin to the Wonderland exploits of Lewis Carroll's Alice. Carroll's premise, that "things get curiouser and curiouser," guided me through many a childhood adventure. I anthropomorphized animals and cast them as key players in an epic production of which I, too, was a part. For me, as for Alice, the natural world was enchanted and ethical in an unsentimental way. Text by Christopher Reiger
15 Animals as Wallpaper London-based artist Jessica Holmes makes mixed media paintings, where elements of collage create fields, planes and confusions of perspective that are mirrored in an inverted view of the relationship between humanity and animals. Text by Jessica Holmes
18 Witnessing Animals I am moved to paint because I am moved to see. “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing that one sees” is a quote from the philosopher Paul Valery. This quote resonates deeply with me. To me this process of seeing is at once political and profoundly personal. It is political in its slowness, in its individuality, and its absurd inefficiency. It is personal as trying to see without “names” is deeply subjective. In painting, the time spent seeing and paying attention is important to me, especially when it is a paying attention to things that are hard to look at, things that we as a culture would rather not see. Text by Sunaura Taylor
30 Decolonizing Dog Painting I would argue that painting (object and practice) and animal representations both suffer from associations—or even as perceived expressions of—sentimentality. Why is sentimentality such a bad thing, I wonder? The modernist heritage of western societies seems certainly to have vilified all that is non-rational, un-Enlightenment, and, especially, sentimental. Text by René J. Marquez
37 Animals in Low-Res My mother talks to her cats like they’re guests at a dinner party. The first mistake was letting them sit at the kitchen table, the second was buying a potty stool to ‘help them reach the cat flap better’. She is in absolutely no doubt that each cat has its own opinions and political leanings, its own food brand preference and that they are a few consonants short of sounding out the days of the week. . Text by Isobel Wood
44 Picturing the Beast – A Portfolio by Olly and Suzi We paint together. Ours is a total collaboration. We paint hand over hand on the same painting at the same time. All our work is created in this way. Our art-making process is concerned with our journey; a collaborative, mutual response to nature at its most primitive and wild. Text and Images by Olly and Suzi
52 Becoming Animal: Matter as Indexical Sign in Representation My practice-led PhD research project in the Painting Workshop at the Australian National University challenges what it means to be a painter of animals. The treatment of animals by my Hungarian born father, Tibor, an amateur naturalist and taxidermist, is fundamental to the motivations driving my painting practice and its development. Equally, formative and ongoing exposure to Australian Aboriginal visual traditions, popularised in a style known as x-ray, inform my exploration of animal representation. Text by Vanessa Barbay
59 Posthuman Animals and the Avant-Garde: The Case of Daniel Spoerri Cecilia Novero’s essay situates Daniel Spoerri’s 1995 series of assemblages Carnival of Animals within the legacy of the historical Avant-Garde. In taking a close look at Carnival’s ingenious recourse to non-organicity, through Spoerri’s reworking of chance, and the readymade, but also “frottage,” the essay argues that the Avant-Garde helps to envision human and non-human encounters outside anthropocentric and representational frameworks. At the same time that Spoerri’s assemblages leave behind the frameworks of representation, they do not configure a new space of action or being for non-humans. Rather, they point to multiple lines of escape, including the carnivalesque. In short, the essay maintains that Spoerri’s work offers a valuable example of how the Avant-Garde indeed contributes to the discussion about con-figurations of human and non-human animals. Text by Cecilia Novero
78 Fish: Singly, and in Shoals Every animal that is shown can always signify something, or, to be more precise, it can mean more and something other than merely the animal as shown. This is in the nature of human artifacts, attaching meaning to which is common practice in our culture. This is especially apparent in literature: one cannot read of animals without construing their literary occurrence. Roland Borgards discusses the paintings of fish by Vroni Schwegler. Text by Roland Borgards
82 The Art of Farming I live on a small family farm in North Holland where I exercise my two greatest passions in life: art and nature. My artwork emerges from my experiences on the farm creating a dialog between my two occupations one as a farmer and the other as a working artist. Text by Petra Shilder
85 More than Marginal: Insects in the Hours of Mary of Burgundy A book of hours was an intensely personal devotion book in the Middle Ages. Used daily to direct the prayers of the owner, these illuminated manuscripts, or hand-made illustrated books, were lavishly decorated to the taste of the patron. In the late fifteenth-century Hours of Mary of Burgundy, also known as the Vienna Hours, every folio is richly decorated with window scenes of religious subjects surrounded by extravagant foliage. This decoration of the margins includes, among other animals, an array of insects including bees, moths, flies, and grasshoppers. Text by Eileen Yanoviak
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TOWARDS A NEW
ANIMISM
Drawing from a deep phylogeny of cultural cues, Chris Musina references historical painters, contemporary animal cultures, kitsch and museum dioramas in an exploration of the represented relationships to the animal world. Musina
addresses the animal not as symbolic object, but as subject, yet a subject aware of its own powerful symbolic nature;
painting is interesting to the artist precisely because of this reason and its effects. These paintings are populated with “knowing animal protagonists” who stare back at the viewer with an uneasy gaze; aware of that uncomfortable
places they occupy in our cultural histories--asking for compassion, mercy, or simply to be put out of their misery. Text by Chris Musina
ascinated by the inherent beauty of our visual culture since then. In dissecting animals, I explore their populating of these cultural animals and animal histories, F human culture, through a deep painting automatically connects both the phylogeny of cultural cues. My work viewer, myself and the animals into this long investigates how animals are looked at, becoming. Painting’s time on this planet and represented, and understood by different place within our culture is a fertile ground cultures and different parts of culture. Be it within which I am able to traverse and Eastern medicine, American sports, Greek connect historical and contemporary mythology, or evolutionary biology, animals depictions, ideas, and events. I comb the figure heavily across almost all realms of past, and probe the present, through other humanity, relegated often to commodity, artists’ paintings and other sources for specific logo, metaphor or mascot. I want to bring the animals representations as have existed and animal forward addressing many means of exist; animals that have shaped and continue animal understanding, though the medium of shaping our view of not only ourselves but also painting. Painting is as old as human history that of our interactions with them. itself, and can be a rich and wondrous I construct my paintings as a dioramic examination of our history over vast millennia. space. There is a sense of depth, but one that Digging back tens of thousands of years is rather shallow, loaded with enough details before recorded history, our ideas of the world and enough information to suggest a narrative around us were recorded, and that mainly without ever completing one: they are concerned the local fauna, as painted on the paintings after all. The animals in my work are wall of cave walls. Animals have populated in direct confrontation with humans/humanity. 5
Chris Musina The Wolf of Ansbach (To Our Dearly Departed Burgermëister), 2011, acrylic on canvas 48" x 66" Chris Musina 6
Chris Musina La Mort et la Béatification de St. Guinefort, 2011, oil and gold leaf on canvas 40" x 30" Chris Musina
This preys on a sense of contemporaneous creating new and unpredictable mythologies unease surrounding us, specifically in our that draw attention to a culture that is only a relationship to nature, and its seeming break product of our animal nature, and a nature down in the time in which we live: a time that is a notion developed by our place within increasingly being dubbed the Anthropocene. culture. In uneasy times, we search for In an attempt to elicit powerful visceral certainty in science, stories, histories and reactions, I merge the power of spectacle with myths, places ridden with represented humor and horror, all the while examining animals. I don’t work to aid this comfort, but to those natural histories and representations, capitalize on it, to appropriate, problematize their pasts, presents and possible futures. This and exacerbates its representation. chimeric amalgamation elicits a sense of I love painting fur, the repetitive mark connection and familiarity, unsettled by an making and brush strokes, the paint rolls softly, uncertainty caused by loaded obscure as luxurious as the real thing, guiding your eye, references. I borrow from places where I see as if your hand, down through a soft silky coat. the animal as central, where the viewer will I want the viewer to feel that desire, that recognize the syntax, even if they are animalistic want to touch that fur, to stroke it unfamiliar with the specifics. I am calling upon gently, running their hand all the way down the the human-animal relationship by animal’s body until they encounter something 7
Chris Musina Still Life with Deer in a Garbage Can, 2013, oil on canvas 66" x 48" Chris Musina 8
Chris Musina Rape of the Taung Child, 2012, oil on canvas "48" x 66" Chris Musina 9 else, something that should elicit a strong addresses the other, to understand that which sense of repulsion, yet the fur is painted so is non-human. In my practice, to understand lovingly that one can’t help but look at it. this huge set of others in any meaningful, To understand what is human, one heartfelt, way, the only option is must understand that which is non-human. It is anthropomorphism. We can only understand an attempt to understand the other; the the universe through ourselves. Carl Sagan ultimate other, the animal. In the vein of said that we are a way for the universe to Derrida’s ‘The animal that therefore I am’, my know itself, and I use that sentiment in stating work is also a recognition that not only do we that we are a way for ourselves to know the look at the animal, but the animal looks at us. universe, and the first step is to understand our From my research into animal cognition closest relatives within its vastness, the animals. studies, I believe that animals “understand” Anthropomorphism, I would argue, still that we see from our eyes, and that they do represents a valid stewardship and as well, evident in the importance of eye understanding of our planet and its co- contact (and its avoidance) in the animal inhabitants. When you look at the other, the world. It is generally saved for gestures of animal other, and recognize that they are violence or sexual pursuit (not too different looking back at you, that they have agency, from us). These paintings are filled with animals and can possibly consider them as yourself, that, regardless of their state of pain, pleasure, and then an entirely new, yet incredibly or even death, return the viewer’s gaze. A ancient, view of our beastly brethren unfolds – gaze that is confrontational, knowing, longing, towards a new Animism. and directed, in an implicating stare. As you ogle at their broken bodies, they look you square in the face. In this returned glance we are denied the very otherness of the animal that we need to exist comfortably outside of. We come face to face with another being, one that is sentient, that knows we’re looking at it, and is looking back. We can project ourselves into that animal and its position. The viewer sees not only the animal, but possibly themselves in these violent situations. In the medium of painting these figures are permanently locked into this state, they can never heal, they can never die, these interactions that, in nature, would be rather momentary. We are implicated by these object/subjects; they are looking back, making us uncomfortable, blaming us, asking us for mercy. This is some sort of anthropomorphism, which can be, like painting itself, a pejorative term, a negative paradigm in contemporary art-making; another reason that I approach painting from this angle. Through this challenge some very difficult questions are posed. If we are to live non- anthropocentrically, how is one to do it? – especially when the only thing we really know is not only human experience, but specifically Chris Musina is a Canadian born artist (1979) who earned a BFA from the University of South Florida and a MFA from the our own personal human experience. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. For more information other option is empathy, projection, trying to please visit chrismusina.com
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A MODERN -MYSTIC LOOK
AT ANIMALS
Growing up on the rural Delmarva Peninsula, I became acquainted with the local flora and fauna at a young age.
Working at field chores, hunting, fishing, and especially when playing, my outdoors experiences were akin to the
Wonderland exploits of Lewis Carroll's Alice. Carroll's premise, that "things get curiouser and curiouser," guided me
through many a childhood adventure. I anthropomorphized animals and cast them as key players in an epic production of which I, too, was a part. For me, as for Alice, the natural world was enchanted and ethical in an
unsentimental way. Text by Christopher Reiger
s I matured, however, my childhood complete appreciation of nature requires us love of nature evolved into a fascination to interweave cognition with imagination; A with biology and ethology, a process specifically, we must ground ourselves in akin to the broad philosophical and reality while remaining open to the mystical or intellectual developments impelled by the immaterial. European Enlightenment. In the 16th I consider myself a natural history artist, century, educated Europeans began to but my drawings and paintings are outside the distinguish between fantasy and fact, and traditional bounds of the genre. They between myth and history. They gradually celebrate particular animal species (and abandoned enchantment and magic in favor sometimes landscapes) and draw inspiration of analysis and rigorous experimentation, from my outdoor experiences as well as the hallmarks of the scientific method. latest research, but they are also mystical in Four hundred years later, we’ve inclination. constructed a great wall between the Mystics survey and respond to the same supposedly adverse realms of imagination earthly, material realm that the rest of us do, and reason. This segregation helps prevent but they locate the extraordinary in the modern man from indulging in superstition mundane. As the modern mystic Henry David and championing ignorance, but it also Thoreau lamented, “All this [splendor] is diminishes our comprehension of the perfectly distinct to an observant eye and yet world. The 19th century English poet and critic could easily pass unnoticed by most.” Mystics John Ruskin alluded to this undesirable reawaken their capacity for reflective wonder secondary effect when he wrote of "the and, in so doing, experience a kind of rebirth broken harmonies of fact and fancy, thought into a vaster dimension of human experience. and feeling, and truth and faith." Indeed, a Scientists are essentially doing the same thing
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Christopher Reiger Constellation (Canis Rufus), pen and sumi ink, gouache, and watercolo r on Arches paper, 12 1/2 x 10 inches, 2010 Reiger
-- inspiring awe and wonder -- albeit using a that the spiritual impulse is at the root of both very different toolkit. Astrophysicist Adam religion and science (i.e., that religion is a kind Frank, in his book, The Constant Fire, argues of proto-science). Frank writes, 12
Christopher Reiger Submerged in His Erotic Mystification, watercolor, gouache, sumi ink, and marker on Arches paper, 32 x 32 inches, 2009 Reiger
"science […] makes life's sacred science make the world stand out, character apparent to us. [...] This illuminated and luminous. […] It is transformation comes about when a result of an encounter with the the observer cares enough to world when it is allowed to speak notice the world's details. The for itself. In hearing its voice we experience […] comes in the see the world as new and worthy moment when we encounter a of awe.” new image or recognize the key pattern in a new dataset. It Still, not all scientists or spiritual leaders accept comes whenever the pathways of Frank’s framing. The late evolutionary biologist 13
Christopher Reiger Slow Motion, Falling Through the Ylem, pen and sumi ink, gouache, and watercolor on Arches paper, 13 x 13 inches, 2009 Reiger
Stephen Jay Gould called the realms of membrane. At points of contact, then, there science and religion “nonoverlapping is a bleeding of one realm into the other. My magisteria,” arguing that there is no pictures are the observations of a naturalist convergence of the two because science working at this intersection. trades in facts to explain material Christopher Reiger is a writer, artist, and curator living in San Francisco, California. He graduated from the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts (NYC) in 2002, and his paintings phenomena, whereas religion traffics in the and drawings have been included in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Christopher has contributed art criticism to a number of print and online journals, unverifiable and the unobservable. I think and his essays and short-form pieces about art, natural history, and miscellany are published in books, art and culture magazines, and online journals, as well as on his long-running blog, Gould’s model is useful, but I believe that the Hungry Hyaena. In 2011, he and artist-curator Selene Foster co-founded BAASICS (Bay Area Art & Science Interdisciplinary Collaborative Sessions), a series of San Francisco-based two magisteria are separated not by a great evening programs that bring together local visual artists, musicians, choreographers, scientists, and interdisciplinary thinkers to present engaging, multi-media lectures and wall, as so many insist, but by a permeable performances that explore a given theme. 14
ANIMALS AS WALLPAPER
London-based artist Jessica Holmes makes mixed media paintings, where elements of collage create fields, planes
and confusions of perspective that are mirrored in an inverted view of the relationship between humanity and animals. Text by Jessica Holmes
nimals form a non-human commentary No glass can reach! from on abandoned places, where the Infinite to thee. A natural world is haunted by ghosts and fragments of domesticity. Her current series This was the Enlightenment conception that are painted on canvas and cheap human and animal are middle links on a Homebase wallpaper. The tired and peeling natural scale with inanimate objects at its wallpaper is dashed and stained, a resentful base and the divine at the top. The luxuriously and fading memory of something once painted corpses of animals in Vanitas valued, now lost. Holmes’ work sits on the cusp paintings were both a reminder of our own of exterior and interior, as desolate landscape mortality, and of our correct place in the and enclosed homeliness queasily occupy chain, where these beasts exist to serve our the same space. needs. Of course, were the chain to be These painstaking depictions of broken, chaos would be the only possibility: anonymous domestic wastelands and the animals that inhabit them are influenced by The least confusion but in one, the uneasy relationship between opulence not all and morality in Dutch still life – the Vanitas That system only, but the whole paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries. The must fall. place of animals in Dutch still life was partly Let Earth unbalanc'd from her defined by their role in the ‘Great Chain of orbit fly, Being’, as described in Pope’s Essay on Man. Planets and Suns run lawless thro' the sky. Vast chain of being, which from God began, As Jessica Holmes’ animals explore the Natures ethereal, human, wasteland of human comforts, the chain has angel, man clearly fallen. However, this is a post- Beast, bird, fish, insect! what no apocalypse without drama – it is the entropy eye can see, of human interaction that has done the damage, a theme that links into earlier site- 15
Jessica Holmes A device which is exploding, 122cm x 153cm, mixed media, 2011 Holmes
specific works: a high-street shop, closed by face of nuclear holocaust. The Birds and the the 2008 recession, where deer plummeted original 1950s version of The Fly are classics of from the sky (We Cannot Say What We Cannot a genre that inverts man’s relationship with Think, 2009); a community centre that was nature to show that humanity at its most shortly to be demolished to make way for familiar is utterly vulnerable. This debt to B- Olympic construction, where the walls were movie chills and nuclear paranoia is papered with pages of share indices from the acknowledged in the titles of the works, all of Tokyo stock exchange (If the Sky Were to Open which are quotations from 1950s American Up, 2006). In these works, the animal and the bomb shelter manuals. inanimate have turned the great chain of being on its head, taking possession of a post- human world, and becoming unthinking masters. These scenes of absence and loss draw on a variety of other intellectual and artistic sources, in particular the psychological techniques of Cold War Hollywood horror films.
These films also used animals to represent insecurity about the fragility of modernity in the 16
Jessica Holmes Hours or even days of warning, 122cm x 153cm, mixed media, 2011 Holmes
Jessica Holmes was born in 1980. She completed her BA at Wimbledon School of Art and then went on to the Postgraduate diploma at the Royal Academy Schools. Since graduating, Holmes has appeared in exhibitions at Collyer Bristow, the Parlour Gallery and Project Space, the Royal Automobile Club and Spitalfields Church, and been shortlisted for the prestigious Clifford Chance Postgraduate Printmaking Award. Other recent exhibitions include Gilding the Lily , Transition Gallery, March 2011, The Lunar Society, Guillochon Gallery (Art Projects, London Art Fair) January 2012, Shelter – Up My Street, Conningsby Gallery, March 2012 and Throwing Perfume on Violets, Blyth Gallery at Imperial College, June 2012 17
WITNESSING ANIMALS:
PAINTINGS AND THE
POLITICS OF SEEING
I am moved to paint because I am moved to see. “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing that one sees” is a quote from the philosopher Paul Valery. This quote resonates deeply with me. To me this process of seeing is at once political and profoundly personal. It is political in its slowness, in its individuality, and its absurd inefficiency. It is
personal as trying to see without “names” is deeply subjective. In painting, the time spent seeing and paying attention is important to me, especially when it is a paying attention to things that are hard to look at, things that we as a culture would rather not see. Text by Sunaura Taylor
few months before I moved to the factory farms and slaughterhouses were California to begin my MFA at UC located. I was surprised to learn there was a A Berkeley, I decided I wanted to start my chicken processing plant located only a few largest painting to date – a 10.5’ x 8’ painting blocks from me in a more industrial and less of hundreds of hens on a chicken truck. These gentrified part of my neighborhood. As so trucks are a common sight in my home state often happens, this massive industry was of Georgia and they had always been deeply somehow invisible to most moderately well-off troubling to me. As children, my siblings and I people in our city, tucked away on strange out would hold our breath as they drew near to us of the way roads, where the pollution, the when we were driving down the highway. This smell and the terribly paid, largely immigrant began as a response to the smell – hundreds workers, would be out of sight. Armed with a of dying birds and their feces cooking in the camera, I set off with my brother and my sweltering summer heat - but soon it became boyfriend on what turned out to be a something else: a way for us to acknowledge remarkably short walk from my house to the the suffering that was beside us. To not breath plant. However, within a few short minutes of for the moments that these hens were near taking pictures we were kicked of the was our way of empathizing with them. premises. The problem with my plan to paint one As luck would have it, I found out a few of these trucks was that they never stop in days later that an acquaintance of mine public locations. As an artist who works from worked at another local chicken factory and photographs I needed to find a spot where was willing to take the photos for me. He took these trucks would stop for long enough that I the photographs, but to the surprise of all of could snap some usable pictures. The solution us, was fired the very next day for doing so. to my problem turned out to be only a few This painting began a series of works of blocks away. Like most relatively well-off animals in factory farms. Although I had been people in my city, I was unaware of where a vegetarian nearly my whole life, working on 18
Sunaura Taylor Chicken Truck, oil on canvas, 2008, 10.5' x 8' (126" x 96") Taylor
these paintings profoundly changed the way I complex relationship I had as a disabled thought about animals – specifically the way I person to my own body. It is easy to make the thought about eating animals. Within six leap from my body to my seeing. From my months of starting Chicken Truck, I was a wheelchair I learned how to see, how to watch committed vegan. In an interview I recently the world. Since my tactile skills are weak, my did with legendary artist Sue Coe, she called body made up for this by constantly exercising art about animal cruelty “the kiss of death” for my eyes. I watched the things that others one’s art career. As a new graduate student in touched. I watched as I waited, as I moved. I an MFA program, I was admittedly a bit do everything with my mouth – I cook, clean, horrified of my newfound obsession with kiss, sing, carry, and paint through my teeth, animal exploitation.[i] jaw, tongue and lips... and my mouth is very What has always moved me to paint is close to my eyes. I see so many things most the act of seeing itself. In many ways I am people don't get the opportunity to really see. someone who is obsessed with seeing. And by When something is carried between one's this, I mean very literally looking. As a painter, I teeth, it means it must have at one point been have spent countless hours of my life staring at staring them in the eye. Every shadow, every canvasses, at colors, at pictures, at blank color change, every shape and piece of walls, at photographs of exploited grime is there. This is how I learned to see animals. Like so many other artists, I have detail, to pay attention to my visual world; to in been deeply influenced by philosopher Paul effect, fall in love with the act of seeing. My Valery’s much referenced words: “To see is to mouth taught me. forget the name of the thing that one sees.”[ii] But this is too easy; only partly true. As a My earlier work had mostly been disabled person, it is too simple to bring portraits of individuals who were close to me, everything back to my body. I very likely would as well as self-portraits that dealt with the have loved seeing if I were able-bodied. 19
Sunaura Taylor Downed Dairy Cow, oil on canvas, 2008, 5" x 4" Taylor
In fact, perhaps I notice the things that are their brief lives, these animals are seen only as close to my eyes in my daily life because of a units of production in the ever increasingly love of seeing that I would have had efficient machine that is the meat industry. regardless of disability. Perhaps I love to see I often paint from photographs, my because seeing is political. Who and what we own and those taken by others, including choose to see, when we choose to see – imagery that comes from various animal these are political choices we are constantly advocacy organizations. Photographs of making. animal cruelty are usually taken by activists Animals, and especially animals in from various organizations who go undercover factory farms, are an unfortunate example of to expose the atrocities that exist behind the the ways in which what we choose not to see slaughterhouse and factory walls. However, profoundly affects the lives of others. The these images are often never seen by the private suffering these animals go through is public, or if they are seen, they are largely an extremely important place to explore the dismissed as manipulative animal rights act of paying attention. In modern day CAFOs propaganda. (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations), I am incredibly grateful that images of animals are subjected to terrible violence and this sort are taken, as they are vastly important are never recognized as living beings. During documents of violence and wrongdoing that 20
Sunaura Taylor Dead Calves on a Conveyor Belt, oil on canvas, 2008, 5" x 4" Taylor
have lead to various successes in punishing images is best expressed in a question many specific instances of cruelty, as well as raising artists have asked – what are one’s awareness about animal exploitation more responsibilities when representing exploitation generally. Various “ag-gag” bills, which and death? criminalizes shooting this sort of footage, are I have tried to answer the concerns so scary precisely because of how important these images raise for me, by transforming this this imagery is in the campaign to end animal imagery into paint. What happens to images cruelty. Nonetheless, despite how valuable when they transform from something that took these images are, there is also something that an instant to be captured by a camera, into has always troubled me about how these something completely inefficient, something images are used in campaign literature. that can take months of individual labor and Perhaps the trouble comes from the time spent looking to create? (The dilemma of accompanying text with the persistent bold course is that here, as they appear in this words pleading “Go Veg!,” which seems to article, the images are once again photos – simply turn these dying or dead animals into photos placed beside words and thoughts). By slogans. Or perhaps the bad flavor of many of painting these photographs I hope to PETA’s media antics has rubbed off on these transform these images into memorials. They images. Or perhaps the problem of these are works of portraiture. Through looking, 21
Sunaura Taylor Downed Pigs, Oil on canvas, 2008, 5" x 4" Taylor
through paying attention, I mourn these partly joking here, but also serious. Efficiency individual animals. The process of seeing is at oppresses both nonhuman animals and once political and profoundly personal. It is human animals: the exhausted and disabled personal, as trying to see without “names,” as dairy cow is made into meat when she no Valery describes, is deeply subjective. It’s longer efficiently gives milk; the political in its slowness, in its individuality, and slaughterhouse worker is laid off when he its absurd inefficiency. There is something begins to show signs of disability from the powerful to me about the slowness of repetitive stress of the job. I like that my body painting. It took me more than a year and a does not follow the laws of efficiency. I will half to paint the 102 chickens that make up never be the most efficient employee or chicken truck – longer than the actual efficient consumer. I’ll take my time – use my chickens were alive. mouth or feet instead of my arms – spend a Painting is an utterly inefficient way of year on a painting that many will say looks like creating a representational image in the a photo, instead of taking a photo. twenty-first century. But that is why I love it. It's Where agricultural animals are rarely inefficiency. That is one of the most seen as anything other than products, remarkable things about disability too – how disability is rarely viewed beyond stereotype fantastically inefficient it is! Of course I am and metaphor. 22
Sunaura Taylor Baby Lamb Undergoing Mulesing, oil on canvas, 2008, 5" x 4" Taylor
Hackneyed and problematic representations abused, and on top of these things, it is legal of disability are consistent and pervasive to keep us from participating in many social around us. The politics of seeing (in other spaces due to physical and attitudinal barriers, words, of representation) is profoundly to segregate us into institutions and “special” important in regards to disability. programs, and it is seen as acceptable to talk Disability is a social justice issue, but it's for us instead of to us (or in the case of those a social justice issue that Americans, and who are nonverbal and profoundly even very progressive Americans, often don't intellectually disabled, to those who know really understand. The way most people view them best and have their best interests at disability betrays a deep misunderstanding of heart). what it means to be disabled. Being disabled Historically, and throughout the world, is seen as an individual tragedy. The problem people with physical and mental differences is seen solely as a medical one, versus a have been marginalized in one way or social, political and economic one. another – whether through extreme and Disabled people confront stereotypes, violent measures such as sterilization, stigmas and major civil rights infringements infanticide, eugenics, and institutionalization or daily due to disability. We are some of the through more systematic inequality like world’s poorest peoples, some of the least impoverishment, institutionalization, educated, some of the most likely to be imprisonment, and lack of access to housing, 23
Sunaura Taylor Culled Male Chicks in a Dumpster, oil on canvas, 2008, 5' x 3.5' (60" x 42") Taylor
work and education. Given all this, our actual As an artist, I am fascinated by visual physical or cognitive impairments are often discourses of disability: the talented and agile the least of our worries. sideshow freak, who uses her mouth or feet to According to the Convention on the play the guitar or light a cigarette. The invalid Rights of Persons With Disabilities, “10 per cent in a wheelchair who is surrounded by doctors of the world’s population, or 650 touching and prodding. The smiling child millionpeople, live with a disability.” Disabled under a rainbow, who is about to drop the people are actually the world’s largest crutches he holds because he believes in a minority.[iii] However, most people are still cure unaware that disability is more complex than My other visual work explores these a personal narrative. narratives, especially sideshow imagery and Disability scholars realize how ableist medical photography, which are some of the stories reinforce how we are treated socially most persistent and enduring discourses of and politically everyday, but we also realize disability. These representations construct the same is true of other kinds of disability as exotic, freakish, and horrifying, as representations, images, and cultural well as pitiable, tragic and in need of cure. By perceptions. There are countless ways from altering this imagery with paint, I hope to pity mongering charity drives to sappy “super- disrupt these narratives and present disability crip” characters in movies to representations in as something else –a political issue. political discourse of disabled people as With this imagery, it is not the time spent scroungers, fakers or economic burdens, in looking that is important to me (these images which the lived lives of real disabled people are actually paint on top of digital prints of are replaced with metaphors and stereotypes. photographs), but rather the immediacy of 24
Sunaura Taylor Animals With Arthrogryposis, oil on canvas, 2009, 6’ x 9’(72“ x 108”) Taylor
visual intervention. Through painting directly cropped, numbered and labeled –not unlike onto the images I alter their meaning, a butcher’s diagram. I often erase or white-out transforming the way disability is seen. the individuals in the medical images in a In some of my images my subversive gesture towards returning privacy to these mission is clear –the freaks are “pissing on pity” individuals, but also as a way of removing or flicking the gazers off, but in others my disability from the gaze of medicine and marks are less obvious, asking my audience to pathology. critically reflect upon their own assumptions Animals and animality are central and projections as viewers. I often try to bring themes in this work. By bringing animals or the attention to the thing that isn’t exposed in the suggestion of animals directly into this imagery image, but that is most desired, most curiously I hope to raise questions about our relationship considered and yet left covered: Did a half to their bodies as well. What does it means to man have a penis? How hairy was the hairy be compared to an animal? How and where woman? In my sideshow work, the marks I do the oppressions of animals and the make often already exist within the fantasy of oppressions of disabled people intersect? As a the gaze and its conflations with the image. freak, as a patient, I do not deny that I’m like While I expose the freak, I often (but not an animal. Instead I want to be aware of the always) cover up the individuals in the mistreatment that those labeled animal medical photographs. The medicalization of (human and non) experience. I am an disability forms the ways in which disabled animal. bodies are understood. Doctors probe, Painting has allowed me to see and measure and stare, but as the joke often goes focus on animal and disability oppression for “at least the Freaks got paid. The medical hours every day –to spend time seeing, both gaze is calculated, measuring, labeling and politically and personally. Through this work I dissecting. The patient becomes a body to be have become increasingly aware of the 25
Sunaura Taylor Self-Portrait as Butcher Chart, oil paint on photocopy on paper, 2009, 11” x 9” Taylor
interconnections between the oppression of Animals are also affected by ableism in the animals and the oppression of disabled form of our cultural opinions and values: our people. These connections center on a notions of what it means to be independent; corrupt value system that declares some of how to measure productivity and efficiency; bodies normal, some bodies broken, and our notions of what is normal; even our notions some bodies food. of nature. These values not only affect our Animals are continually judged by notions of disability, but, the point is, they also ableist human traits and abilities. We affect the nonhuman animals we share this understand animals as inferior and not planet with.[v] valuable for many of the same reasons In Animals With Arthrogryposis, a large disabled people are viewed this ways—they painting I did a few years after I finished are seen as incapable, as lacking and as Chicken Truck, there is an image of me different. They are affected by the privileging standing naked, with two pigs and a calf. In of the able-bodied human ideal, which is the the painting, yellow medical arrows point to constant standard against which they are each of us. The image is reminiscent of a judged, justifying their exploitation and abuse. medical photo and we are numbered A-D. Our anthropocentric worldview can be The full name of my disability is Arthrogryposis understood as supported by ableism. The Multiplex Congenita. The animals in this abled body that ableism perpetuates and painting also have my disability. In cows the privileges is always not only nondisabled but condition is called Curly Calf, but it can occur also non-animal. in various animals including pigs and lambs. It 26
Sunaura Taylor Lobster Girl, oil paint on digital print on paper, 2010, 5.5’ x 3.5’ (66” x 42” ) Taylor
is a condition that is common enough on writes, "Thich Nhat Hahn tells students that factory farms to have been the subject putting images inside our heads is just like of Beef Magazine’s December 2008 issue. eating. And if ‘you are what you eat’ it is It strikes me as important that the equally true that to a grave extent we are animals we eat are themselves disabled — what we see."[vi] This ingestion of seeing what I have called “manufactured to be strikes me as related to Valery's "naming." To disabled."[v] Industrialized farm animals live in name something is to have that something filthy and unnatural conditions that lead to already inside of you. And if it has been illnesses and disabilities, but they are also bred named wrongly, then the consequences can and physically altered to physical extremes, profoundly damaging. where udders produce too much milk for a Judith Butler writes, “One is, as it were, cow’s body to hold, where turkeys cannot brought into social location and time through bear the weight of their own giant breasts, and being named... The name constitutes one where chickens are left with amputated beaks socially, but one’s social constitution takes that make it difficult for them to eat. In the place without one’s knowing. Indeed, one face of such brutality, it is hard to view may well imagine oneself in ways that are painting and art making as substantial tools of quite to the contrary of how one is socially resistance. In many ways they are flimsy and constituted; one may, as it were, meet that problematic interventions…and yet I am still socially constituted self by surprise, with alarm drawn to making them. The images we are or pleasure, even with shock.”[vii] confronted with may not be the most violent Names are oppressive because manifestation of the human tendency towards “Injurious names have a history, one that is exploitation, but they no doubt impact our invoked and reconsolidated at the moment of world, our decisions, and our very beings, in utterance, but not explicitly told.” Images, of ways that effect who we will be as individuals course, utter as well. and what values our world will hold. Bell Hooks To see to the extent that animals 27
Sunaura Taylor
Intersex, oil paint on digital print on paper, 2010, 6’ x 3.5’ (72” x 42”) Taylor
are no longer trapped in names, no longer caught in labels such as "livestock," or "meat,'' and to see disability without words like “pity,” “cure” or “freak” – this is my goal.
Endnotes
[i] http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/6696 accessed September 11, 2012
[ii] Weschler, Lawrence, "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing That One Sees", p.203
[iii] http://www.un.org/disabilities/convention/facts.shtml Sunaura Taylor is an artist, writer and activist. Taylor's artworks accessed Feb 22nd 2011 have been exhibited at venues across the country, including
[iv] the CUE Art Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution and the Taylor, Sunaura, "Vegan, Freaks and Animals: Toward a New Berkeley Art Museum. She is the recipient of numerous awards Table Fellowship", American Quarterly, Volume 65, Number 3 including a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant and an (September 2013), “Species/Race/Sex,” edited by Claire Jean Animals and Culture Grant. Her written work has been printed Kim and Carla Freccero. 757-764 in numerous edited collections as well as in publications such
[v] as the Monthly Review, Yes! Magazine, American Quarterly Taylor, Sunaura, "Beasts of Burden: Animals and Disability" and Qui Parle. Taylor worked with philosopher Judith Butler on Qui Parle, volume 19, number 2, (Spring/Summer 2011), Astra Taylor’s film Examined Life (Zeitgeist 2008). Taylor holds Special Issue: At the Intersections of Ecocriticism , 191-222 an MFA in art practice from the University of California,
[vi] Berkeley and is a Ph.D. student in American studies in the http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2012/09/bell-hooks-no- Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. Her book love-in-wild.html?spref=fb accessed September 11, 2012 Beasts of Burden, which explores the intersections of animal
[vii] ethics and disability studies, is forthcoming from the Feminist Excitable Speech, 36 Press.
28
Sunaura Taylor No Arms! (Self-Portrait), oil paint on digital print on raw canvas, 2010, 4’ x 6’ (48” x 72”) Taylor 29
DECOLONIZING DOG
PAINTING
I would argue that painting (object and practice) and animal representations both suffer from associations—or even as perceived expressions of—sentimentality. Why is sentimentality such a bad thing, I wonder? The modernist heritage of western societies seems certainly to have vilified all that is non-rational, un-Enlightenment, and, especially, sentimental.
Text by René J. Marquez
s an artist of a colonized persuasion— Rather than get involved in the many from a non-modernist heritage—I take implications defining, I focus on the second A issue with modernist attacks on definition in thinking about my work with dog sentimentality. I especially take issue with paintings. The primacy of “reason” here attacks on painting and paintings of animals, smacks of the Enlightenment values that dogs in particular, as somehow illegitimate govern our western cultures. But what about forms of contemporary art that simply feeling? Is feeling (intuition?) completely function—if we can use that word—as illegitimate in establishing knowledge? Animal Greenberg and his ilk would charge, as kitsch. trainer, poet, and philosopher Vicki Hearne If, however, we do live in an era of describes the intangible as it relates to deconstructed and discredited modernism, animals: “in animal work… there is the strong what exactly is the problem with sense of something else being recovered, not sentimentality? And, by extension, from an innocence, but knowledge that is unmediated artist who paints dog portraits, what is wrong and therefore not so nervous.” A fundamental with making paintings of dogs? criticism of painting and animal work both is the exploration and expression of the “Sentimentality,” as defined by the Oxford intangible and unmediated. I would argue, English Dictionary
René J. Marquez Aspen, oil on canvas, 36in x 48in, 2008 Marquez
questions. Ontologically, the dog portrait where the substrate is formed by inter- proposes a radical reconsideration subjectivity, and which takes being-together reminiscent of Donna Haraway’s cyborg: “The as a central theme, the ‘encounter’ between cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. beholder and picture, and the collective The cyborg is a condensed image of both elaboration of meaning.” For the encounter imagination and material reality, the two with a dog painting to be meaningful, joined centres structuring any possibility of however, the dog must be recognized for her historical transformation.” (Cyborg) or his own subjectivity and what that Imagination and material in dog portraiture is subjectivity brings to the experience of the a practice of collaboration: dog and artist. viewer. Steve Baker, contemplating Deleuze This practice embraces disavowal of certainty and Guattari’s “becoming animal,” considers and a “differentiated field of experience” what “becoming animal” looks like: “Art’s (Derrida) through visual—and decidedly non- work—moving the human away from verbal—collaboration in the truest sense of the anthropocentric meanings and subjective word. The conglomeration of dog and artist, identity—is presented as much the same thing and even pet keeper, offers a relevant, as the animal’s work. It is the work of figuring contemporary model of hybridity. out how to operate other-than-in-identity. The As hybridity implies an intertwining of various arts ‘have no other aim’ than to original forms, the question for art, humans, ‘unleash’ becomings.” Popular understanding and non-humans is one of subjectivity: what of painting and animals rests on tenets so are the forms under consideration? In deeply ingrained as to inhabit the pantheon contemporary art, Baurriaud offers “an art from of so-called knowledge. But both painting and 31
René J. Marquez Blotter (2008), oil and acrylic on canvas, 20in x 16in Marquez
animals find re-invention through critical re- Guattari in his exhibition Becoming Animal evaluation of how we construct knowledge. (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Recognizing animal subjectivity in the 2005-06), surveying animality as otherness in reconsideration of knowledge, curator Nato models for critically evaluating human social Thompson further nods to Deleuze and structures, dynamics, and (potential) progress. 32
René J. Marquez Untitled (puppies in sweaters), acrylic on canvas, 18in x 24in, 2011 Marquez
Thompson presents the ideas of Giorgio England with an Iraqi Prisoner on a Agamben: leash or the caged enclosures of war prisoners reminiscent of a Investigating the creation of zoo. camps for those deemed not part of society (such as Although the exhibition does not offer pet concentration camps or the portrait objects per se, it is replete with the camps developed in 1896 by the practice of pet portraiture. Artists such as Ann- Spanish in Cuba), Agamben Sofi Sidén, Kathy High, and Mark Dion raise locates and analyzes separated ontological issues that give rise to political territories that delineate a strategies. The human and nonhuman population outside the usual rules animals comingle in “becoming.” of governance. A current corollary With regard to painting specifically, the might be Abu Ghraib or material of paint is both a site and means of Guantánamo Bay where political collaborative practice designed to transgress. prisoners are no longer offered Revisiting Hearne, paint invites understanding common access to the law. that can be unmediated and intangible. Imagine the photograph from Thoughts of material collaboration, Abu Ghraib of Private Lunndie comingling, and inter-subjectivity all invoke 33
René J. Marquez Studio, oil and acrylic on canvas, 36in x 54in, 2003 Marquez
yet again, Haraway’s ideas around modern idea of the image, it is “companion species;” all are reflected in painting that allows us to painted dog portraits, which, like dogs internalize it. It’s a question of themselves, “are about the inescapable, touching and being touched. contradictory story of relationships—co- constitutive relationships in which none of the “Touch,” the mark of the hand—as modernist partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating a value as it might be—clearly retains some is never done once and for all.” (Companion) currency in the contemporary context. “Being The sentimentality of human-dog relationships touched,” however, sounds remarkably compares to that of artist-paint and sentimental. And yet it is valued? Perhaps we encourages a contemporary functioning of can consider touch in its various radical pet portraiture. In his catalog essay for manifestations as a beacon of ontological the Triumph of Painting, Barry Schwabsky writes: presumptions of what it means to be human as well as nonhuman. The fascination with craft has the The question I am always asked—and same source as the more often ask myself—is “But they just look like widespread attraction to regular, old dog portraits… how are they painterliness among today’s different?” The difference lies not in the object younger painters… a but in the subjects, both human and non- fundamental concern with the human. In his Becoming Animal exhibition, physical involvement with the Thompson rejects invigorating traditional image. For although it was categories in favor of what he calls a “radical photography that taught us the space of empathy.” Haraway extends that 34
René J. Marquez Sophia, oil and acrylic on canvas, 24in x 24in, 2000 Marquez
space as a site of action and portends the possible but absolutely necessary subversive potential for dog portraits: joint futures. For me, that is what significant otherness signifies. How can general knowledge be (Companion) nurtured in postcolonial worlds committed to taking difference The “emergent practice,” in my case, seriously? Answers to these intertwines the personal history of a colonized questions can only be put culture, an immigrant, and person of color together in emergent practices, with that of a western-trained, visual artist and i.e., in vulnerable, on-the-ground dog trainer. Inasmuch as none of these work that cobbles together non- identities can be extracted from one another, harmonious agencies and ways neither can the history of painting or dog of living that are accountable portraits be extracted from their contemporary both to their disparate inherited iterations. Hybridity hardly seems an apt term, histories and to their barely however, when the coming together of all 35
René J. Marquez Tina, oil on canvas, 24in x 18in, 2005 Marquez
36 these histories and identities constitutes a new subjectivity. For example, in our relationship with dogs, the subject is just that: the relationship. The human and non-human are superseded by the unit they become. In painting and in the painting of dogs, reliance on conventional understanding of what constitutes either, must give way to what they become together as a subject. And in new and unexpected subjectivities we engage the hopelessly radical and transgressive sentimental.
References
Baker, Steve. “What doe Becoming-Animal Look Like?”
Representing Animals. Ed. Nigel Rothfels. Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 2002. 67-98.
Bourriaud, Nicholas. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Presses du réel, English version, 2002.
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David Wills. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. New York: Fordham University
Press, 2008.
Haraway, Donna J. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs,
People and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm
Press, 1993. Born in the Philippines and raised in the U.S., Marquez is a
painter, drawer, and video maker whose research interests ------. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, include postcolonial and animal identities and subjectivities. and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, from His studio investigations brought him to found and run Free to Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Be Dog Haven, a sanctuary for dogs, the focus of his studio London: Free Asssociation Books, 1991. Rpt. in Ed. practice. He is documenting his work in an in-progress Badmington, Neil. Posthumanism. New York: Palgrave manuscript titled Sanctuary: Dogs, Art, and Collaborative Macmillan, 2000. Being.
Past exhibitions include the Cultural Center of the Hearne, Vicki. Animal Happiness. New York: HarperCollins Philippines, Bronx Museum of the Arts, the International Center Publishers, 1994. of Photography, the Banff Centre, University of California-Irvine,
and the Delaware Art Museum. Marquez received his MFA in Schwabsky, Barry. “An Art that Eats its own Head.” The Triumph Painting from the University of Pennsylvania and also holds an of Painting. Saatchi Gallery. London: Jonathan Cape Random MA in Asian Studies from Cornell University. He resides in the House, 2005. 8-9. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania metropolitan area where he serves
as faculty and Interim Chair of the Department of Art at the Thompson, Nato. Becoming Animal. Boston: The MIT Press, University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware. 2006. 37
ANIMALS
IN LOW-RES
My mother talks to her cats like they’re guests at a dinner party. The first mistake was letting them sit at the kitchen table, the second was buying a potty stool to ‘help them reach the cat flap better’. She is in absolutely no doubt that each cat has its own opinions and political leanings, its own food brand preference and that they are a few consonants short of sounding out the days of the week. .
Text by Isobel Wood
isturbingly, she is not alone in these guts. Marcus Coates wore a stuffed stag on his indulgences: I can name at least ten head in Journey to the Lower World and Dutch D people who’ve developed unhealthy art group Idiots seem to have a veritable relationships with their pets, who’ve rushed to menagerie of dead beasts to play with. Each the rescue centre after a messy divorce or a work communicates its message powerfully - death in the family. In today’s Western culture the concreteness of the three dimensional we ruthlessly farm, abuse, exhibit and draws a reaction from the viewer like blood consume animals in staggering quantity, and from, well, a dead animal. But there appears while I am far too young and naive to present to be very little animal-inspired painting any kind of an argument for or against these gaining as much recognition. I wanted to take activities, I can certainly assume the role of my new zest for oils and this animal aesthetic bemused onlooker. This is where my art and create an original series of paintings that practice comes in. would carry more weight than mere animal I took an interest in both painting and studies. I wanted to turn the nauseatingly animals simultaneously and have spent the sentimental pet portraits that engulfed turn-of- last four months delving furiously into the two the-century Victoria England on their heads, with equal fervor. From the writings of Steve simultaneously paying homage to and Baker on The Postmodern Animal and mocking the Kennel Club art of Edward ‘Botched Taxidermy’ through Deleuze and Landseer and John Emms. Pet pride turned Guattari to David Sylvester’s interviews with postmodern. Francis Bacon, I have managed to compile a I stumbled upon Lynne Roberts- somewhat disheveled timeline of how the Goodwin’s “Bad Birds” whilst rootling around in animal (or rather mans view of the animal) has Cabinet magazines 2005 archives. A Sydney- shaped both our thinking and, by default, our based photographic artist, Roberts-Goodwin art. sought the assistance of a head veterinarian The amount of taxidermy in at the Australian Museum’s Department of contemporary ‘animal art’ is difficult to ignore: Ornithology and produced a series of portraits mention Thomas Grunfeld or Angela Singer of long-dead birds from their collection. The and the mind immediately races to ostrich- budgerigars and parrots face away from the legged cows and rabbits spewing red button- camera against a black backdrop. 38
René J. Marquez Tina, oil on canvas, 24in x 18in, 2005 Marquez 39
René J. Marquez Tina, oil on canvas, 24in x 18in, 2005 Marquez
40
René J. Marquez Tina, oil on canvas, 24in x 18in, 2005 Marquez
41
René J. Marquez Tina, oil on canvas, 24in x 18in, 2005 Marquez
42 As Cabinet’s writer Charles Green rightly states,
“The absence of the face confounds our anthropomorphic projections, frustrating our tendency to want to read certain kinds of temperament or character into the faces of animals”. The only information the viewer can glean from such portraits is that regarding markings, plumage and color. The lack of facial features was, indeed, frustrating. Eager to emulate this, I collected photos of pet cats from both the Internet and from friends. I used my very limited photoshop skills to pixelate the eyes of some, the entire face of others. Pixel size was important here: too large and the illusion of the features weren’t clear, too small and the enigma was lost. I had no idea whether the paintings would work as I hoped, and approached the first one with a sort of half-arsed abandon (if it turned out badly, at least I hadn’t wasted hours of precious Frieze magazine perusal and Facebook chatting). However the first feline was a success, and those goose bumps I’m sure any fellow painter can relate to when a series is imminent, started appearing.
The process of pixelation, a technique only familiar to those of us living in a Westernized 21st century, partnered with the centuries-old oil painting made for an interesting juxtaposition. Craft will always be integral to my artistic endeavors and therefore to simply pixelate a JPEG file was not enough. The painting itself offers a tentative hand to those Victorian pet portraits before yanking them toward the millennium. Most intriguing were the reactions of my friends and peers to this series - a few asked
“what have these cats done wrong?” most likely associating pixelation with the petty criminals seen beating up shopkeepers on
Cops With Cameras. Some commented on the beauty of the colors used for the squares and complimented my ability to get the hues
‘just right’. Steve Baker, when I nervously emailed him some of the pictures, brought my attention to the fact that where the noses and mouths had not been pixelated, it was still quite easy to read the cats as conventionally ‘cute’. Isobel Wood lives, works and studies in London. She is twenty years old and does not own any cats. My mother has yet to comment.
43
PICTURING THE
BEAST
a portfolio by
Olly and Suzi
"We paint together. Ours is a total collaboration. We paint hand over hand on the same painting at the same time. All our work is created in this way. Our art-making process is concerned with our journey; a collaborative, mutual response to nature at its most primitive and wild. The majority of our art is conducted in diverse and remote environments both on land and in the sea. We paint on location and in close proximity to animals, which are often endangered, because they are still here. They are our primary subject matter. Where possible we use natural pigments and materials. In this way the wild is our studio. The painting is primarily about representation and symbolism. Whether we place the "animal as icon", singular, primitive and large upon the paper or paint the landscape, herd, migration, or movements of the predatory pack we attempt to integrate clarity and ambiguity in the same painting. Conceptually we aim to raise awareness and an understanding of our subject matter. When possible we incorporate the track, print, spoor or bite of the animal in our work, documenting the habitat or the passing of a creature that is here now but may not be for much longer.
This interaction can be viewed as evidence to an event, a form of primal investigation; a physical performance of the senses. We show our painting and drawing in installation alongside photographs and film to communicate and document the art making, and our subsequent interaction with nature, as an ongoing process.
"All primitive expression reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear, a recognition and acceptance of the brutality of the natural world as well as the eternal insecurity of life." Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko
44
Olly and Suzi Bull Moose, Syracuse, New York, 1989 Olly and Suzi
45
Olly and Suzi
Red Tiger, Karnali, Nepal, 1997 Olly and Suzi
46
Olly and Suzi Cheeta Gang Inspecting, Namibia,1997 Olly and Suzi
47
Olly and Suzi 7 Wildogs, Mkomazi, Tanzania, 2007 Olly and Suzi
48
Olly and Suzi 3 Ravens, Northern Minnesota, 1998 Olly and Suzi
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Olly and Suzi Musk Ox, Ellesmere Island, Arctic Canda, 1998 Olly and Suzi
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Olly and Suzi Deer for Beuys, Northern Minnesota,1998 Olly and Suzi
For 27 years collaborative artists Olly and Suzi have dedicated their lives to tracking, painting and raising awareness for endangered animals and the fragile habitats in which they live. They have conducted over 70 field expeditions into the wild documenting predators in remote Arctic, desert, ocean and jungle environments. In 1994 Olly and Suzi met legendary East African conservationist Tony Fitzjohn and began their work with African wild dogs. A passion that is ongoing today. Olly & Suzi exhibited a large wild dog installation in 'Nature of the Beast' at the New Art Gallery Walsall in 2013. In 1997 they made interactive work underwater with great white sharks and then embarked on a three-month expedition to track and co-exist with Arctic wolves on Canada's remote Ellesmere Island. In 2001/2002 'Olly & Suzi Untamed', their year long retrospective, took place at the Natural History Museum in London. In 2003 their book, Arctic, Desert, Ocean, Jungle was published in the USA by Abrams. In February 2009 their documentary 'Wild Art - Olly & Suzi Paint Predators' was screened on the BBC's 'Storyville' strand. In 2012 Olly & Suzi embarked on a new body of fieldwork aimed at raising awareness for the Kora national park in51 Northern Kenya.
BECOMING ANIMAL:
MATTER AS INDEXICAL
SIGN IN
REPRESENTATION
My practice-led PhD research project in the Painting Workshop at the Australian National University challenges what it means to be a painter of animals. The treatment of animals by my Hungarian born father, Tibor, an amateur naturalist and taxidermist, is fundamental to the motivations driving my painting practice and its development. Equally, formative
and ongoing exposure to Australian Aboriginal visual traditions, popularised in a style known as x-ray, inform my exploration of animal representation.
Text by Vanessa Barbay
hrough my image-creation experiments due to the combination of an emblematic that bring decomposing creatures into silhouette that denotes the animal subject T contact with canvas, I interrogate the and a vibrant abstract patterning nature of representation within a traditional called rrarrk that divides the body into painting format. Painting as a medium makes segments filled with multi-coloured cross- a significant contribution to contemporary hatching. Key internal organs usually also representations of animals through its potential feature in X-ray painting hence the term, and to harness materials as carriers of meaning, it denotes the subject as a food animal exercising their power as an indexical [1] sign or mayh. The painting can then be instructive of animal. While taxidermy and its on a more practical level, describing the modifications blatantly provided such an dividing up of the animal body for encounter on the material and subjective consumption. Landscape features can also level, as a form of representation it must be considered body parts of ancestors and, contend with the weight of its own history. inversely, body parts of animals in paintings Investigation within painting process offers a can be interpreted as landscape features.[2] subtler alternative in its ability to weave Rrark operates simultaneously as a screening materials seamlessly into a metaphorical device and an indicator of ancestral power, space of contemplation. A significant power [3] the full comprehension of which is revealed painting has its ability to create illusions, incrementally to initiates through ceremonial whether to overtly deceive or initially beguile in revelation. The ochres used to paint with are order to enable often latent revelations to also potent carriers of meaning deriving from occur in the spectator over time. the mythological beings at the sites where In paintings of animals by Aboriginal they are collected, which are interwoven artists in Western Arnhem Land, Australia for within personal identity through links to kinship example, the representation of any life form classification systems or moiety shared by also evokes ancestral narratives and animals and people of the region. associations, which allude to an artist’s The rich complexity of Aboriginal culture responsibility for clan lands. The X-ray painting in Western Arnhem Land enables a seamless genre enables an artist to conceal maps of interplay between metaphysical and dreaming or djang sites within animal bodies practicable purposes within paintings of 52
Vanessa Barbay Lamb of God (Spring Lamb), Lamb, delek, silk stitch and rabbit skin glue on canvas, 2011-12 Barbay
animals that has not received the level of he lives.”[4] My focus was on the biggest critical scrutiny it deserves within the outdoor painting gallery in the world where contemporary animal art context. The genre’s animals are the main subjects, the stone clever use of illusion, the importance given to country of the Western Arnhem Land plateau. painting materials as indexical signs, and the These extensive galleries informed my elevation of the animal as a significant subject understanding of the animal painting for art, has influenced my commitment as a produced by artists at the local art centre, painter to the representation of animals. As a Injalak (named after nearby Injalak Hill, a rock part of my research I chose to live in art gallery site). Archaeology has had a Gunbalanya, a Kunwinjku speaking pervasive role in placing rock art within the community in Western Arnhem Land, for three imaginations of a contemporary Euro- months after an initial ten-day visit as part of Australian audience attuned to linear histories. an archaeological Rock Art Field School. I In an attempt to overcome the unfathomable offered myself as a body and mind requiring aspects of the passage of time that may enculturation, “the process by which a person undermine the appreciation of a rock adapts to and assimilates the culture in which painting’s innate qualities, I regard paint as 53
Vanessa Barbay Display (Spring Rosella), Rosella and rabbit skin glue on canvas, 2011 Barbay
54
Vanessa Barbay Resurrection (Spring Lamb), Lamb, delek, silk stitch and rabbit skin glue on canvas, 2011-12 Barbay
material, activating “a being of sensation.”[5] bright yellow and deliciously rich I seek to “draw [the spectator] into the like ngalmangiyi or freshwater longneck turtle’s compound”[6] that is, the actual matter of fat. Ngalmangiyi painted on Injalak Hill in the which rock painting consists. A key aspect of rich yellow pigment karlba produced in me a my research in Western Arnhem Land was to sensation distinctly coloured by my understand the significance of paint as a experiencing of pigment and fat. Fat turtles transforming substance, or “materia are extracted from the thick mud of extensive prima,”[7] within animal/human cultural swamplands in Gunbalanya around Injalak Hill. interplay. The golden mud karlba is an unpredictable On a trip through the bushland of substance, sandy grit penetrates its otherwise Maburrinj, collecting pigments with traditional smooth golden body, moisturised in a liquid owners, we came to the karlba or yellow atmosphere. On textured variable rock ochre site. I dug karlba underwater from the surfaces, the initially fluid pigment becomes a banks of a deep pool fed by a small waterfall. powdered stain precariously exposed to the I was amazed at the clay’s golden colour in hot tropical air. I have used my share of the the sunlight and filled two flour tins, staining my ochres collected in Arnhem Land in my hair and face with a golden glow. Karlba is animal paintings, but it is the involvement with described as the fat of ngurrurdu or emu, animal bodies informing the link between linking the pigment to an emu dreaming site painters, their materials, and their animal in Maburrinj. Ngurrurdu have the same skin subjects that I was anxious to explore. name as I was given: Ngalkangila. Emus’ fat is There are unquestionable familial forces 55 that also contribute to my desire to involve and I set up an installation for the purpose of animal bodies in their own representation. placing dead creatures on canvas, fixed to a When my father migrated to Australia, he sprung bed base, to decompose over several brought with him the Eastern European months, in order to produce a print or shroud- tradition of domestic self-sufficiency centred like impression of the body. The purpose of the on breeding animals for food, which he shroud component of my practice-led combined with participation in local hunting research was to take responsibility for the traditions. As a child I would crawl into the bodies of animals discarded as road kill or breeding pens and spend all day in a pests. My collection and placement of the beguiling world where I could taste and smell dead in state is analogous to a mortuary ritual, as an animal. Target practice and hunting and the outdoor decomposition platform with my father incited a mixture of fear and parallels the first mourning stage of mortuary competitiveness, while watching him kill ritual once practiced in many Australian animals and prepare their bodies for eating Aboriginal societies, including blended horror with anticipation. My father the Kunwinjku language group. Essentially, I collected specimens and began practicing conceive of entering my subject through the taxidermy and tanning at home during the shroud process and through doing so 1980s. His unusual activities began in the “become”[8] the subject, in order to embody 1970s with butterflies and beetles that I would a transformation that reveals this genuine watch him catch and pin alive onto foam, “mutant”[9] self, constituted by me: the arranging legs and wings symmetrically. Then painter; and my subject: the dead animal. he sustained an interest in arachnids and Becoming is a dynamic term that embodies began breeding the deadly funnel-web to mixtures and mergers but does not seek the observe their behaviour before drowning them unifications inherent in fixed terminologies. The in methylated spirits and preserving their shroud-producing phenomenon I enabled bodies in resin. Soon he was inside large avian also engages notions of “abjection”[10] and and mammalian bodies (usually road-kill), “pollution.”[11] removing organs and injecting formalin and Taxidermy is a chemical process with foam. In later experiments during the 1990s he an unnatural logic, which the shroud made plaster casts of fish so an extensive deconstructs from the inside out. Taxidermy array of local creatures multiplied inside my mends the borders of a body already beyond childhood home. My family became used to itself, while the shroud image captures this unexpected visits by strangers bearing gifts of “beyond self.” The image produced by the the dead or random conversations describing decomposing dead presents matter ordered the location of a body. Thus, the collection of according to the inside as it exits the dead animals and the subsequent use of their convulsing border of the subject. My father bodies for creative work remains a familial taught me the practice of taxidermy, although activity. I preferred the appearance of other naturally During my painting practice I have mummified bodies he collected caught in developed what I call the shroud process, the their own death-positions. His arrangement of harnessing of decomposition in the creation of dead animals for display was intended to animal images. I find and collect the reanimate them, while simultaneously deceased bodies of animals, including birds, inhibiting the corporeal afterlife of the body usually road-kill. Each season I would build up through maggot, beetle and moth “sets” of bodies and store them in a chest “infestation.” My inability to perceive the freezer (ironically acquired from a deceased animal corpse as objectified remains is the estate). The animals found were usually formative psychological affect of my species thriving in the urban Canberra experience living among animals first as environment. Employing the assistance of my cohabitants, then as mounted specimens. In partner, Adam Bell, I transported them to a my “paintings,” the ambiguous and polluted paddock on a sheep farm distant from the aspects of decomposition capture entropy, farmhouse under a eucalyptus tree. Adam record erupting boundaries, ensuring the 56
Vanessa Barbay Eruption (Spring King Parrot), King Parrot and rabbit skin glue on canvas 2011 Barbay 57 inside is visible and sustained. The indexical Bibliography reality generated by the resulting image is Cartwright, Marita Sturken and Lisa. Practices of Looking: An startling and confounds aesthetics expanding Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford, New York: beauty into previously abhorrent sensory Oxford University Press, 2001. realms. Each shroud and its membership in Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London, Boston, Henley: the corpus embody this paradox, while Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966. simultaneously asserting the inexplicable force Elkins, James. What Painting Is: How to Think About Painting of an individual entity. Using the Language of Alchemy. New York: Routledge, 1999. I feel this force during the instigation of Guattari, Gilles Deleuze and Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: the shroud’s transition from funerary cloth to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, London: painting. Entering the woodwork shop with University of Minnesota Press, 1987. What Is Philosophy? New York: Colombia University Press, partially deodorised, unsealed canvas, 1994. encumbered with detritus, I prepare the Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. animal offerings for the attentive Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Colombia University Press, 1982. Reprint, Pouvoirs de l'horreur contemplation awarded the order of painting. 1980. Making taut the supple woven medium whose Kuspitt, Donald. The Rebirth of Painting in the Late Twentieth subject has long since lost its elastic integrity, I Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. am careful to ensure the process is precise Morphy, Howard. "From Dull to Brilliant: The Aesthetics of and orderly. The untidy nature of the shroud Spiritual Power among the Yolngu." In Man, 21-40: process is thereby countered by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1989. compartmental nature of the indoor Taylor, Luke. Seeing the Inside: Bark Paintings in Western workshop. Paradoxically, it is at this point that Arnhem Land. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. the subject is in affect “threatened” by its new The Gale Group, Inc. "-Ologies and -Isms." The Free Dictionary objectivity as a painting. It is apparent that the by Farlex, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/enculturation. stretcher operates as a surrogate for the body object that is the corpse. All the animal’s subjectivity, its living “essence” that has seeped out during decay, is transmuted into the solid, liquid and gas particles that make up the shroud stain. The painting object, its skin of canvas, bones of wood, and staple sinews house the subject: the self that is, in this case, the individual animal. As a portrait of the animal made by its own dead processes the Vanessa Barbay is an exhibiting artist who has recently shroud painting is an expanded portrait, completed a practice-led PhD research project upon which a memento mori, giving agency and, to an this contribution to Antennae is based. Prior to her candidature extent, authorship, to the subject. Yet my at the Australian National University her practice involved both individual and community based projects focusing on development of an intimate relationship to animals in painting and their role as cross-cultural facilitators in each individual shroud painting cohabiting in the context of visual culture in Australia between Aboriginal the studio often results in post-shroud and non-Aboriginal communities. This work was based in her home communities within Yuin country on the south coast of interventions or creative communications with New South Wales and communities within Wiradjuri country the subjective animal stain using the collected inland in New South Wales where she completed her Visual Art ochres, silk or cotton stitching, and recently oil degree. She is currently a visiting artist in the Visual Anthropology Unit within ANU’s School of Archaeology and paint and bitumen. Each shroud is an entity Anthropology focusing on collaborating with Yuin artists, many constituted by the inside of a dead animal with whom she grew up with, in the creation of story paintings and my transformation of it into a painting, connecting animals, ancestors and place. In future she hopes to collaborate with Kunwinjku artists in the creation of paintings which, like in Western Arnhem Land, is in our that implicate animal specimens taken from their country culture, “the ideal medium in which to during the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem articulate true selfhood.”[12] Land in 1948 now held at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C.
58
POSTHUMAN ANIMALS AND THE
AVANT-GARDE: THE CASE OF
DANIEL SPOERRI
Cecilia Novero’s essay situates Daniel Spoerri’s 1995 series of assemblages Carnival of Animals within the legacy of the historical avant-garde. In taking a close look at Carnival’s ingenious recourse to non-organicity, through Spoerri’s reworking of chance, and the readymade, but also “frottage,” the essay argues that the avant-garde helps to envision human and non-human encounters outside anthropocentric and representational frameworks. At the same time that Spoerri’s assemblages leave behind the frameworks of representation, they do not configure a new space of action or being for non-humans. Rather, they point to multiple lines of escape, including the carnivalesque. In short, the essay maintains that Spoerri’s work offers a valuable example of how the avant-garde indeed contributes to the discussion about con-figurations of human and non-human animals. Text by Cecilia Novero
his essay has two major goals. The first is to human, for they break with notions of human show that the avant-garde contributed – creativity, especially with notions of originality T and still contributes – to the emergence and autonomy. In particular, the critical of posthumanist thinking through its recourse to appropriations and adaptations of the post- posthuman animals.[i] Posthuman animals are aesthetic tactics of Dada and its adaptations those that leave the realm of representation, since the Sixties reveal that animals are the and in doing so, indict canonical regimes of blind spot of human vision, specifically of human vision. Accordingly, the essay argues, artistic vision. In a section below I briefly show when animals appear in the avant-garde they that the avant-garde, taken as a complex do so only as yet-to-be imagined. Through this agglomerate of temporalities and tactics, assault on human vision and representation, critiques the connection between a humanist the avant-garde points to possible ways out of (anthropocentric) vision – presented as anthropomorphism. The second major aim of “transparent” – and knowledge, as the purview this essay is to reappraise the avant-garde for of a rational, hence objective, “I.” Focusing on today. The possibility of such a reappraisal animals in the avant-garde not only helps to appears if one considers the avant-garde as a re-think animals, but also helps to value the point of emergence of posthumanist thought. effects of the critique, which the avant-garde Specifically, the essay argues that the avant- practiced and continues to pursue. garde destabilizes the human as subject I shall engage the points adumbrated acting in a world that it separates from itself above through a case study, namely, the art and considers its object. Avant-garde devices, of Daniel Spoerri (b. 1930). Spoerri, an such as montage, readymade, objective eclectic artist, remains very active in Europe. chance, et cetera, are then essential tools in He participated in several avant-garde this act of unhinging of the centrality of the movements in the 1960s and 1970s, most 59 notably New Realism.[ii] I analyze, specifically, machinations and entrapments. By jamming Spoerri’s series of assemblages the machine, Spoerri’s avant-garde animals entitled Carnaval des Animaux (Carnival of invoke a space of non-knowledge, where Animals, 1995).[iii] Spoerri’s 1995 assemblages existence may be conceived outside the offer an apposite example of the implications human field of vision and with an eye, as it for animals of both humanist representation were, to other forms of life.[v] and the post-humanist avant-garde gaze. Carnival thus expands the critique of The Avant-Garde and Its Posthumanist ”conventions” (in both art and life) and brings Gaze these to bear on animals. To foreshadow, Why and What Avant-Garde? in Carnival representation coincides, broadly speaking, with the history of vision as a When using the term avant-garde, in which I discursive field. That Carnival ’s favorite avant- include the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s, I garde device is the readymade or found rely on Hal Foster’s counter-history of these object accentuates that vision is discursive, movements. Simply put, I refer to the avant- i.e., an always already filled field. By garde as the large set of artistic practices that assembling myriad readymade animals, became influential around the beginning of Spoerri’s work displays the entrapment of the twentieth century but came to fruition with “conventional” animals in this filled-field of the critical neo-avant-garde in the vision, and the humans that keep thinking of 1960s.[vi] Such practices broke the them conventionally. He also gestures disciplinary boundaries of art and, in Spoerri’s towards “ways out” as, indeed, the own language, spread, contaminated and title Carnival itself suggests. were permeated by the impact of discourses The essay has three parts. The first, on taking place in vast areas of culture, the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde, consequently generating post-aesthetic art. introduces, in general terms, the use of the Accordingly, while the avant-garde term avant-garde in this essay and then turns embraced contemporaneous discourses to the question of posthuman animals. The “horizontally,” it also moved unpredictably second part attends to optics. Here I show along several temporal axes. Indeed, how, in order to indict the illusions of optics – sometimes against the avant-garde’s own an indictment that Spoerri carried out declarations in the various manifestoes, the throughout his career and most forcefully avant-garde enterprises rejected temporal in Carnival – that this artist consciously returns linearity and any sense of pre-determined to classical avant-garde devices. Spoerri progressivism. This occurred even when the deploys these devices and tactics to display goals of the avant-garde movements of the the lethal effects that the making of the early twentieth century – Italian futurism is human has on animals. This is most evident emblematic — were set on the new; i.e., on when the series of assemblages exhibits the future. Even in the latter cases, as I argue animals as the silent victims of human elsewhere, history becomes a terrain where representation, as the victims of what the causal links between past and future are philosopher Giorgio Agamben has identified disregarded, and the new is seen to arise out as an optical “anthropological of assemblages of different figurations, or machine.”[iv] The machine is an optical constellations, in the Now.[vii] Read through device for the constant production of the this lens, the avant-garde is evinced not just in recognition of the human in the other, its critical engagement with socio-political namely the animal. The animal thus appears discourses but whenever art becomes the site as a distorted image of the human. Part three for the emergence of new temporalities; examines two assemblages in Carnival, the temporalities which it then elaborates, fox-man and the wolf-man. I suggest that investigates and (through its own means) calls Spoerri’s avant-garde animals manage to into question or even disrupts. render inoperative the optical I am aware that the cursory account anthropological machine, suspending its above risks eliding key distinctions within the 60 avant-garde. Still, for my purposes here, what Benjamin points out that animals – whether is important is seeing the avant-garde for its figured as animals or otherwise – are at the temporal effects. Taking a “temporally shifting” roots of modern allegorical production: from and mobile look at the practices of the avant- Dada to Surrealism, from Kafka to Kraus garde in and through time offers a unique (whom he identifies with the In-human), perspective from which to view the enduring including Proust. In fact, Benjamin may have effects and variegated readings that such been the first to make this point. practices generated well beyond their original Here I point, only in passing, to the links intentions, programmatic declarations, and among Benjamin, the avant-garde and time-spaces. Foster calls this look a parallactic animals. Although Benjamin’s theory of the view.[viii] From this perspective one might see, avant-garde was the springboard for the anew, the avant-garde “idea” as the return of present inquiry, my central aim is to show how practices that — in their deferral and Spoerri’s Carnival of Animals (i) problematizes displacement beyond set times and places, the representation of animals as the outcome but originating in the very same — produce of a belief in a transparent vision and (ii) novel, actual, critical configurations. The capitalizes on the inconspicuous animals of avant-garde presents the critic with the the avant-garde. After all, it is their very non- occasion to energize — to reactivate and representational quality in the avant-garde rearticulate for the present — the critical that offers the opportunity for another kind of impulse in art. This gesture involves an figuration, one that indicts human vision for its evaluation of the complex effects of historical anthropomorphic imagination. And it is here, relations which supersede or unhinge specific at this theoretical juncture, that Agamben’s historical locations and (especially) notion of the “Open” – of a suspension, a connections; an evaluation, that is, which dialectical standstill — becomes salient, as seeks to account for what Foster calls the turns discussed below. in the re-turns of the avant-garde, and the As noted earlier, Spoerri’s oeuvre has (dis)articulation of certain practices, devices or often recycled and reinvented Dada’s tactics. Since this essay focuses on the impact techniques. As Leah Dickerman points out, of the avant-garde’s critical investigations of because Dada was a conglomerate of the “human subject” on the representation of groups, tendencies, practices etc., it animals, when I speak of avant-garde, my becomes important that one both be main point of reference is Dada and its discriminating and historical in the analyses of various reappraisals. the works considered, and be able to pinpoint My approach also draws on Walter some of the key strategies or the tactics Benjamin’s anti-historicist method in reading shared by most if not all Dada “cultural phenomena.” It is not a coincidence practitioners.[ix] These tactics emphasize how that Benjamin speaks of the avant-garde in Dada’s interest in the non-organic involved a terms of allegory, which for him, is an direct attack on “identity,” specifically on the eminently temporal figure. For him, allegory “human” as “total self,” above all; on “being” finds its actualization in the avant-garde, to as the purview of humans distinct from things, which it brings the force of forgetting and animals, and machines. Dada’s attacks on oblivion. By juxtaposing allegory and avant- “organicity” invariably include collage, garde, Benjamin situates “temporality” (the montage, readymade, chance and other ephemeral, but also the relays of the forms of automatization that are, in unconscious, of involuntary memory etc.) as Dickerman’s words, “so foundational for the counterintuitive operations at the heart of the rest of the century that we have to struggle to most critical avant-garde production. These recognize their historical novelty today.” [x] It is operations are best exemplified, for Benjamin, the effects of the art produced through these in Kafka’s writings, where, importantly, the means, means which challenged the figures of oblivion (i.e., the forgotten) appear essential qualities and faculties ascribed to as, or in conjunction with, animals. Through his human kind, that retroactively point to this art allegorical reading of the avant-garde, as one site of emergence of a thought that 61 subtracts itself from speciesism, and that is painting, figure/nature and open to cyborgian forms of living. foreground/ground both appear fractured In sum, in this essay the term “avant- along the same geometrical shapes. Yet they garde” refers to (i) a congeries of critical don’t cohere: no shape dominates; they are engagements with established paradigms of all imbalanced, disproportioned, unmatched. seeing, especially with regard to The beholder must renounce his or her representation; (ii) artistic engagements or customary human perspective when looking endeavors that break with a “historicist” view of at these human figures in which he (or she) temporality, in which the only agents are resists recognizing himself (or herself). In the human actors and narrators, in order to start painting, both humans and nature could be thinking of different ways to account for the said to be surveyed by an inhuman gaze. multifaceted stories of life co-authored with Through this other cross-eyed gaze, da Vinci’s and featuring both human and non-human – and humanism’s — idea of a universal set players (as Bruno Latour would have it); and (iii) of proportions for the human figure is exposed the effective use of tactics such as the as human illusion and self-projection. readymade and chance to gesture to these Picasso’s painting exposes this reference to other lives and stories – as in Spoerri’s Carnival, universal, sovereign subjectivity as the product where animals (in all shapes, guises, ideas of a narcissistic gaze in which humans and figures) are the players. produce and reproduce themselves and the world around them in their own (putatively The Dawn of Posthuman Animals in the better) image. Avant-Garde Picasso’s painting exemplifies the avant- garde’s early impulse to critique the humanist Upon seeing Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles worldview. This critique entailed a d’Avignon at Le Bateau Lavoir in 1907, confrontation with artistic conventions. As the Georges Braque (1882-1963) felt as if he had attack was on the human image, however, it been forced “to eat rope and drink had repercussions beyond the canvas and paraffin.”[xi] The painting, which confronts the into ways of interpreting human life more viewer with five feminine nudes with flat and broadly. In this sense Picasso’s painting – and disjointed bodies, opens the road to Cubism. the avant-garde movements of the early As one critic put it: “The dislocations in this 20th century, each in their own way —moved picture are the result of aggression, not beyond (mere) formalism and aesthetics. aesthetics; it is the nearest you can get in a Indeed the avant-garde shows life and art as painting to an outrage…”[xii] This rabid work agglomerate; in other words, as inescapably aims its outrage at the iconic human figure ensnared. All knowledge, the avant-garde that had dominated the arts and sciences claims, is actually produced by a human since humanism. One could indeed contrast subject that is no less constituted by the world the angular female bodies in Picasso’s as is any other being in it. The avant-garde painting with the iconic image of Leonardo thus experiments with viewing the human da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (c. 1487). Da Vinci landscape from provisional and quite draws man as ideally proportioned, as a carnivalesque points of view – albeit with the micro-cosmos taken to be the measure of all self-reflexive awareness of their undeniably things, and the perfect incorporation and human positionality. I discuss the example of an ideal relation between man carnivalesque in the essay’s conclusion. and nature. Picasso forces the viewer to feel As much as Demoiselles suggests, it is the dissolution of the boundaries between a Dada and Surrealism that exposed the belief centered self and the world such a self in the autonomy of both subject and art alike oversees. as an ideological construct. One finds the The Demoiselles d’Avignon breaks with following statement in a Dada established boundaries between the human manifesto: “Wer Dada isst, stirbt daran, wenn figure and nature and – in pictorial terms — nicht Dada ist” (“whoever eats dada, and is between foreground and ground. In this not dada, dies of it.”)[xiii] Here no distinction is 62 made between the art object and its of the avant-garde, identifies the avant-garde “creator;” between artist and art, on the one artist as a new Barbarian/Cannibal, with what hand, and between the art-world and the he calls a “destructive character,” on the one mundane life-world on the other. Similarly, hand. On the other hand, he identifies these cause and effect become for Dada a artists as “naked and screaming … newborn construct that does not explain historical babes in the dirty diapers of the events, but mirrors an “illogical” and illusory present.”[xvi] The two images are juxtaposed human narrative. History, for Dada, dissolves as in a montage: here, the baby’s promise is into a story of human self-presentation and not that of just any human baby, destined to chimerical representation. Humans do not grow into a common man or woman. Rather control history, or nature, but nature and the juxtaposition between the baby and the humanity, as species, move together in Barbarian/Cannibal interrupts the possibility of unaccounted and unaccountable ways. The human development.[xvii] The baby-cannibal Surrealists, for their part, introduce “automatic is an image of another (in)human in the Now, writing” to undermine notions of human and this image carries posthumanist power. agency as inextricably linked with free will. This new power derives from the avant- In short, the avant-garde casts a gaze garde’s destructive wish to wipe out the traces on humans from the “outside” and of humanist “Man” – what has become of da accordingly asks humans to recalibrate their Vinci’s Vitruvian Man in modern bourgeois function in the world. For the avant-garde, the history — and from its acknowledgment of “work of art” is less a human work, that is, the human animal vulnerability. The baby crying expression of a creative mind, than the in the dirty diapers of the present suggests product or effect of something external that, such a reading. In Spoerri’s work, in particular in Matthew Biro’s words, left its imprint: both art one that features a fountain sculpture to and humans are a trace “of an other [that is] which I will return in the analyses of Carnival, variously understood to be objective, natural, the human is both the devourer (the cannibal) unconscious or divine.” [xiv] And this other that and the left-over – a limb, in its own non- leaves its imprint on humans is what humans speciesist machine. cannot see. Spoerri’s Carnival, as suggested above and elaborated below, shows that Against Optics: The Roots of Spoerri’s animals lie in the blind spot of human visual Avant-garde Animals technology. Animals constitute the ontological instability of human vision. Spoerri’s series of assemblages, after being For the avant-garde practitioner, a world partially exhibited in various locations, is now that does not distinguish between animals, permanently on view in a former monastery objects and (decentered, flattened) humans that the artist acquired and turned into a provides an opening for constructive museum, in 2010, in the picturesque Austrian empowerment. In such a world, humans are village of Hadersdorf am Kamp. The series of not meant to create but to assemble, in assemblages plays with unbridgeable addition to being “assemblages” in contrasts: it juxtaposes animal objects, themselves.[xv] Though they do not see folkloric masks, avant-garde mementos, and humanity as whole (and wholesome) or as scientific instruments directly onto, or near, the able to order the world, humans can enlarged reproductions of Charles Le Brun’s “constellate” things and thoughts. From and canonical seventeenth-century drawings of for this lack of grounding, post-humanist animal and human physiognomic creatures can view the Now as filled with resemblances.[xviii] Individual plates from Le possibilities, both old and new. Old Brun constitute the ground of each possibilities, as Surrealist outmoded objects, assemblage of “animal” figures in the are the forgotten futures of the past. Coming series.[xix] Occasionally, freestanding objects from the past, old possibilities can play out are part of Spoerri’s interventions on Le Brun’s anew in the present. In this regard, it is plates. Some freestanding objects also significant that Benjamin, an acute observer appear as separate from the feral-men 63 depicted there in the plates. There is, for At this early point in his career, Spoerri instance, a coat-rack with a wolf-fur coat that uses Duchamp’s work as “readymade” itself. is adjoined to the wolf-man depicted on Le Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs furthermore, are no Brun’s plate; or a wooden rococo pedestal more than little and funny inventions that, as with lion carvings surmounted by a skull, which Rosalind Krauss recounts, were to be shown at accompanies the lion-man. a fair, and made common cause with Carnival refashions important devices popular culture.[xxi] Most important is that in from Dada and Surrealism, which have to do Spoerri’s MAT Edition Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs re- with Spoerri’s continuous, indeed relentless, activate the submerged carnal desire in critique of optics. These devices, in addition optics that Krauss identifies in them. In her to the readymade, include objective chance description, the Rotoreliefs were: (or hazard) and the principle of détromper. Both feature prominently in his Optical phonograph records… work. Through the détrompe-l’oeil, Spoerri cardboard disks printed with spiral shows representational art, especially ordinary designs on both sides, for a total of realistic and often “romantic” paintings, to be twelve different patterns. Mounted the product and reproduction of banal on a record player’s turntable, the illusions. For example, he takes a banal disks revolved soundlessly, the landscape and adds to it an ordinary water product of their turning a series of faucet estranging the view of nature. Through optical illusions, the most gripping both these devices, Spoerri further radicalizes of which transformed their two the avant-garde’s critique of autonomy, and dimensionality into an illusory the alleged objectivity of the (human) gaze. volumetric fullness that appeared Spoerri’s critical evaluation of “modern to burgeon outward, toward the optics,” as he titles one of his works, shows viewer.[xxii] that humans are the effect of their own “troubling” vision. Already in the works Krauss adds that one had “a goldfish set inside preceding Carnival, vision is charged with a series of eccentrically placed circles which, murder or, in Spoerri’s words, as corpus when turning, appeared to cup the little delicti (for example in the series of swimmer within an ephemeral, transparent assemblages Criminal Investigations, 1972- bowl.”[xxiii] With the sexual component, the 1991). Before Carnival, where animals are animal (the fish) also comes to flicker through identified as the major victims of human the pulsatile movements of the disks. Krauss vision, his art had blocked such vision in speaks of this non-presence as the other within various ways: (i) through highlighting the role vision. Vision is thereby revealed less as that bodily apprehension and memory play in punctual than as temporal, “filled” rather than the act of seeing (Anecdoted Topography of pure and blank. The Rotoreliefs restore to the Chance, 1962); (ii) through the other senses – eye that eye’s condition as a bodily organ. especially touch and taste -- and through the And the beat of desire – which loses the disorientation of spatial coordinates (Dylaby, object it makes, and finds the object that it 1962); and (iii) by attacking the belief in has already lost — is shown to work deep transparent vision (Optique moderne, 1961- within vision. Vision is no longer separable from 62 and Triple Multiplicateur d’Art,1972). The the other senses.[xxiv] readymade appears in Spoerri’s work by The animal (the fish in the ephemeral including, significantly, one of Marcel bowl in one Rotorelief) flickers in the field of Duchamps’ minor works (Rotoreliefs, 1935) in vision of the observer of Duchamp’s reliefs, the Edition MAT of 1959 – here, I would argue, suggesting vision as an already filled field. in conjunction with animals as an “optical Likewise Duchamp, as this fleshy animal – a unconscious.” MAT presented Spoerri’s idea of precipitate of the avant-garde — flickers art as multiplication or, at most, art as the through Spoerri’s Carnival, interfering with the production of originals in series.[xx] Let me apparent “objectivity” and “art-historical” elaborate. significance of Carnival’s own ground; namely 64 Charles Le Brun’s plates of animal and human accumulated found and readymade objects resemblances, which return here as Carnival’s that accompanied Spoerri’s life for 35 years. readymade, and as representation’s “optical The human genome is applied here to the life unconscious.” The plates are a milestone in of objects – non-human entities. art history, hence a conceptual readymade. In Carnival, the animal-objects Spoerri But they are also physical “found” objects juxtaposes over, or positions near, Le Brun’s (found again by Spoerri and via Spoerri’s plates of human and animal avant-garde art); as such, the readymade resemblances multiply these resemblances becomes “the ground” for Carnival. Le Brun’s beyond the human and the physiognomic resemblances indeed function animal. Carnival includes fetish-objects in the assemblages as the idée among the multiplied resemblances and reçue (readymade) of vision in and beyond uses them as yet other uncanny hybrids of the arts, in which animals are trapped, both human and animals, e.g., animal mortified and reproduced. statuettes, knick-knacks, masks et cetera. Spoerri’s Carnival offers less an escape Almost paradoxically, this multiplication of the from readymade “discourses” of/on vision, resemblances beyond those suggested by Le which it rehearses and displays, than a subtle Brun also interrupts the illusionistic aspect and disclosing and then jamming of these alleged transparency of physiognomy. discourses. Out of this jamming, sparks of Physiognomy is, arguably, a discipline that is different beings become imaginable. rooted in the belief of an ideal, rational vision. Through its use of readymade, So is representational art that is rooted in the Spoerri’s Carnival of Animals offers a critique perspectival gaze, i.e., in a gaze that masters of philosophical, scientific and especially art- its field. If perspective, already in the historical discourses on animals. Through the seventeenth century, was mostly thought of in multiplication of the trappings conjunction with physical, architectonic, that Carnival displays – namely through immobile space, the body itself – depicted in their mise en abime — the work also attempts its static posture — was also viewed and to set the imagination free from the human spoken of as part of the architecture of optical machine.[xxv] In Carnival, thus, we nature.[xxvii] Through the physiognomic lens, witness both the production of those the face could become the surface where to anthropocentric and anthropomorphic observe instantaneous movements of the symmetries and their distortions. Indeed, in soul, movements that would inscribe relying upon objective chance, the themselves as traces on that assemblages abolish any hierarchical surface. Carnival pokes fun at, and then distinction between, for instance, the exhibits, the implications that the logic of sciences and art, or the pursuit of resemblance has on animals. “mathematical” truth in one case and the Because they challenge hierarchies, exploration of unbounded imagination in the Spoerri’s animal assemblages aptly take the other. Likewise – but in contrast to the title of Carnival, a title that immediately brings theological image of the Great Chain of to mind popular disorder and the festive Being still active in the worlds of Le Brun, subversion of (modern) classification, Linnaeus and even in Darwinian evolution – subversions in which animal figures have Spoerri’s Carnival presents a “chain” of non- always played a notable role – as masks, hierarchically ordered elements, of historically costumes, avatars, totems, caricatures, unnecessary “connections” not only among etc. Carnival takes our common knowledge all living beings but also non-sentient beings of carnivals as readymade too and raises (objects, fetishes, idols).[xxvi] A later work doubts about the carnival as subversive, i.e., makes this point explicit: Catena genetica del the latter as a received (readymade) idea. mercato delle pulci (“Genetic Chain of the Because Le Brun’s resemblances – as they re- Flea-Market,” 2000, also on view in Hadersdorf emerge in Spoerri’s assemblages — suggest am Kamp) presents a sixty-two-and-a-half- that animal cross-dressing in carnivals may meter-long and one-meter high frieze of not destabilize the human gaze, but instead 65 appropriate the animal as always-already in form of living – which life-form and form of that gaze, masquerading may provide a living is rich with its temporary mask or cover, an alternative or own singular potentiality.”[xxx] additional personality. Beneath the animal Indeed Agamben’s “Open” reprises clothing, however, the eyes that see remain Benjamin’s idea of “dialectic at a standstill” human. Carnival is able to invoke the and interprets it both as space – an interval or multifarious, sporadic, and ridiculous --- yet caesura between two terms or coordinates -- equally mortal -- effects of such logic and an operation that is able to stall and precisely through the used readymade quality render inoperative the “stable” (reiterable and ofxhuman-animal resemblances.[xxviii] reiterated) distinctions between subjects and Against this human vision, Spoerri’s objects, self and other, humans and non- assemblages exhibit other, artificial eyes, e.g., humans, and even within humans. For the “fox-man” examined below in part three. Agamben the standstill of the dialectic Juxtaposing and multiplying these fake and corresponds to what he also terms the overtly blind eyes, “division of the division,” an operation through Spoerri’s Carnival intentionally confuses the which the rifts that split communities, natural with the artificial, human vision with identities, humans and animals are held in animal vision, the live gaze with the immobile suspension, exposed without being effaced. gaze, each and all hinting at other invisible De la Durantaye remarks, “this dividing of a possibilities of existence. division, or bringing to a standstill of the dialectic, would also, for Agamben, be the Carnival of Animals freezing of the ‘anthropological The Anthropological Machine: Figuring machine.’”[xxxi] In Agamben’s words, ever Animals since the Ancien Regime:
Carnival’’s target is the “impure” human gaze Homo sapiens is neither a clearly on, and the ensuing human construct of, the defined species nor a substance: it animal. Carnival is an appropriate illustration is, rather, a machine or device for of the workings of the modern producing the recognition of the “anthropological machine” that is eminently human. In line with the taste of the optical, as Agamben demonstrates in The epoch, the anthropogenic (or – Open. Agamben’s eponymous essay is taking up Furio Jesi’s expression – important here for at least two reasons. First is we might say anthropological) his philosophical elaboration of Heidegger’s machine is an optical one. … It is concept of “the Open” – which could be an optical machine constructed of compared to the anti-representational a series of mirrors in which man, (illusionistic) practices and visions of the avant- looking at himself sees his own garde. Second is Agamben’s insistence on image always already deformed in the “optical” aspects of the anthropological the features of an ape. Homo machine that incessantly engages in making sapiens… must recognize himself in and remaking the human. a non-man in order to be As Leland de La Durantaye explains, human.[xxxii] Agamben conceives of “an openness of inactivity, of disengagement from one’s Agamben’s inclination to jam this optical environment and, perhaps, one’s machine that reproduces the human, and to world.”[xxix] Inactivity – or désœuvrement, as expose (hold in suspension) the divisions that referred to in French by Agamben — involves perpetuate the making of the human, an energy that cannot be exhausted in the corresponds to the breaking of passing of the potential to the actual. “representation” of either humans or animals Between the two, in such passing, a space of in Carnival. By attending to the specular indeterminacy opens “where formless life and operations of this machine, Carnival highlights lifeless form meet in a distinct life-form and the persistence of its mechanisms, namely 66 the production of distinctions between human at the center of the brain as the seat of the and animal; as well as of articulations with soul. The soul controlled the reactions of the animality, articulations that, as Agamben body through the movements of the pineal points out, are as much internal to the human gland. As Montagu reports, “if the passions as they are external to it. Yet Spoerri’s series of were controlled from the brain, then the face, assemblages, through its disfigurations and being the nearest part of the body to the gaps, its erratic and discontinuous brain, should be the most accurate index of temporalities, does not allow the viewer to the mind, and all of the soul.”[xxxiv] The (re)compose any integrated or total image of movements of the eyes and mouth towards or the human self. In this respect, Carnival takes away from the seat of the soul in the pineal flight from its readymade ground, i.e., Le gland guided Le Brun’s drawings, as his Brun’s plates of resemblances, without diagrammatic [human] heads show. These effacing such ground, or forgetting it. Two heads –traversed by straight lines -- transform assemblages in the Carnival series, the fox- into geometrical maps when Le Brun portrays man and the wolf-man, help me to show how animals. Indeed Le Brun devised a system of Le Brun’s readymade resemblances first return triangles which he used to draw the animals’ and then are (dis)articulated in Spoerri’s heads and to determine the characters of assemblages. This return and (di)articulation each species. Triangles drawn with lines leaves us with the possibility to “imagine” connecting various parts of the face – the animals outside of a humanist perspective, organs of smelling, seeing and hearing — and to set them free as posthuman animals. were to visualize degrees of power and It is especially Agamben’s focus on the intelligence in animals. Le Brun dissected operations of the anthropological machine as animal heads to demonstrate scientifically the “optical” device that makes his theory – his veracity of his geometrical mapping. As “Open” – so compelling for the analysis of the Montagu says, “animals depend principally on avant-garde’s critique of human vision and the sense of smell, and secondly on that of specifically representation. sight … Le Brun was …aware that this was not so of man…”[xxxv] Accordingly, Le Brun Le Brun’s Drawings: Mapping Animals compared his animals’ heads with the sixteenth-century physician Andreas Vesalius’s As Jennifer Montagu points out, Le Brun’s anatomical studies of the human head. In the drawings of animals and animal latter Vesalius had outlined the pineal gland in resemblances are indebted to the scientific / red. Montagu adds: “For this reason Le Brun philosophical paradigms of his day, while at drew the triangle on the human head as the same time present important innovations based on a line running through the eyes, for the study of expression in art in an age which precludes the possibility of drawing the when naturalistic representation was the aim other lines which incorporate the ears, noses of high art.[xxxiii] Three key elements arise here and mouth into the system, and which with regard to the function Le Brun has in revealed the characters of the beasts.” That Le Spoerri: (i) the relevance of Descartes for Le Brun drew triangles on animals’ heads, and Brun and Le Brun’s fondness for classification; only on the heads, reveals his aim of (ii) the structural connectedness between art accurately portraying the differences between and science, in that both pinpoint and humans and animals. While the connections rehearse the distinction between humans and between the pineal gland and the eyes animals and (iii) the didactic objective of Le through the longer optical nerve in humans – Brun’s drawings in matters of as Vesalius’s studies indicated – generated “expression.” Carnival tackles these three straight lines across the human eyes, the lines points at the origins of modern thought, which connecting the sensory organs of animals Spoerri both ridicules and shows as “lethal” to produced triangles. The line through the animals. The impact of Descartes on Le Brun human eyes pointed to the direct connection is especially important in the case of Carnival. of vision with the brain, thus enforcing the Descartes had located the pineal gland belief in vision as the ontological ground of 67 human being. Hence the brain and the eyes “ground” and knowledge, namely the human almost come to constitute a perspectival field wish to “capture” and “grasp” the animal. In particular to the human; its depth is indicated this laughable absurdity, Carnival’’s animals by the extended length of the optical nerve find their “line of flight,” as Deleuze and itself, hidden from view; for their part, the Guattari would have it.[xxxviii] animals’ heads (and expressions) appear to be all foreground, nothing but a depth-less Triangulating the Fox face.[xxxvi] The animal is the pure exteriority – or In the fox assemblage [Figure 1] a dead visible mask — of the more complex interior specimen hangs from a common hanger, mechanism that generates the human, who below a lady’s hat: a middle-class woman’s masters not just emotion but also vision. trophy of elegance. The specimen’s eyes are Externally, the animal and human face may dead, yet piercing, staring straight into the mirror one another (albeit always through beholder’s. Another fox is glued horizontally deformation, as per the eighteenth-century across Le Brun’s drawings. The corpse, Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus). Ultimately, exposing its triangular jaw-bones, occupies the however, animals lack the depth that makes intermediary space between Le Brun’s humans – and human vision— not animal. animal’s visage and the fox-man’s face. Le Both interior and exterior seem necessary to Brun’s fox-man is the product of the open the vista on human / animal relations resemblances between foxes (cunning) and (resemblances), with the human taking the clever men. Multiplied fake eyes and jaw- position of the fundamental “ground” – the bones are scattered across the support, as ontological foundation of being, and vision; unused tools, jaws de-fanged and shown in the animal instead is the mirror or mask of that the geometrical shape that Le Brun adopted core, the figure in the foreground, lacking to map the animal’s passions. The fox’s tamed foundation. Deploying devices that decenter -- disembodied -- teeth are, in this the human Carnival complicates the assemblage, the accusing body of evidence physiognomic perspectival game of mirroring of an unfair struggle. at work in Le Brun’s drawings: Spoerri As already mentioned, in obfuscates the transparency of this mirroring its other détrompe-l’oeil (e.g., Spoerri’s Criminal violence thus exposed if not escaped. Like Investigations, 1970s and 1990s, or other détrompe-l’oeil, Carnival performs vision his Anatomical Cabinet, 1985-2001) the as itself a mise-en-abime of vision’s own objects juxtaposed to the images’ ground mechanics. Carnival multiplies resemblances. either break the ideal landscape represented It does so first by proliferating animal objects, there by debasing it or, alternatively, transform representations and their functions throughout themselves into weapons or surgical the series. Second, animals recur through their instruments that provide the depicted body constitutive physical absence: the animal with an all-too-real substance: the body as objects etc. in the series are supplements that injured.[xxxix] Similarly, in the fox assemblage, point up the erasure of living the jaw-bones transform the geometrical animals.[xxxvii] The field of vision triangles of Le Brun’s rational calculations into that Carnival opens appears to be already a corpus delicti. The triangle, a tool for saturated by cultural icons and totems. It is calculating resemblances and for performing replete with the ethnographic, scientific and unequal exchanges between humans and artistic mappings of the animal. These never- animal, returns here as a weapon that, having ending representations interfere with Le Brun’s killed the animal, changes the fox into yet resemblances, distorting and quite literally another, i.e., social, supplement, into the mortifying, i.e., tearing asunder, their visible – commodity fetish of bourgeois class society. recognizable, obvious — mathematical These physiological fragments randomly relations. As Spoerri’s foxes exemplify, this superimposed on Le Brun’s drawings, however, infinite redoubling shows the laughable mark the furs with the heavy deadness of the absurdity – emptiness — of the human foxes. The animals’ absent life makes itself felt 68
Daniel Spoerri Fig.1 Carnival of Animals: Reproductions of Humans Compared with Those of Foxes, 1995. Assemblage on enlarged scan, after Charles Le Brun (1670), 185 x 100 x 30 cm. Courtesy of Kunststaulager Daniel Spoerri
69 in their three-dimensional corpses. These claim Multiplied Wolf-Men: Le Brun, Beuys, the space between Le Brun’s drawings of the Freud and… The Meat-Grinder fox and his fox-man: if the illusion of three- dimensionality was the purview of the human In another of Carnival’s assemblages [Figure face in Le Brun’s studies of human heads, the 2] Spoerri adds a hanger with a wolf-mask three-dimensional animal corpses starkly and wolf-coat to Le Brun’s ground depicting contrast with the actual flatness of the human the wolf and the wolf-man. Real traps also face and human gaze. The corpse stands for bite into the fur-coat. The coat echoes some the only site of resemblance between human mythic hunt while explicitly quoting and animal. Between two fox-muzzles at the contemporary art, i.e., art’s making and top and three fox-man-faces at the bottom of remaking, and its myth-making characters. the canvas hangs a fox, horizontally. Its Indeed, the wolf-fur coat invokes, somewhat lifelessness is the third element –the third fox-- ironically, a legendary figure of contemporary in the comparison. In addition, the triangular art, Joseph Beuys. The irony lies in Spoerri’s jaw-bones envision an escape. As suggested remake of Beuys’s legend through Spoerri’s by Deleuze and Guattari, trapped, own unverifiable account of the wolf-coat in domesticated animals (first among them the the assemblage. Although Spoerri and Beuys domesticated, Oedipalized subject) can were friends, and Beuys collaborated with escape territorialization and take flight.[xl] The Spoerri more than once, their art speaks triangular jaw-bones also look like arrows different languages. In Carnival the coat pointing in all directions: up, down, inside, exemplifies the “fetish-character” of the outside and away; they seem to address, that name-of-the-Father Beuys: Beuys’s name is is, animals as precisely those beings that always and immediately associated with his escape immediate visual grasping or totemic attire, his famous attachment to felt representation and that, thereby, remain clothing, to his hat and to his vest. Spoerri outside the frames of human oxymoronically invents “readymade” Beuys, knowledge.[xli] They appear as a kind of non- while he also empties the name mimetic writing, emblems of some other in Carnival through the unworn, hung wolf-fur writing – distinct from sensuous resemblances coat. Beuys’s “originality” is lost. and the immediate recognition that According to Spoerri, he had purchased resemblances produce. As such, they reveal a the Siberian wolf-fur coat but then lent it to “hole” in vision: Carnival suggests that vision Beuys. The latter used it in one of his works has only been able to produce a series of and Spoerri was thus never able to retrieve it. recognizable images, i.e., fetishes, whether in Later Spoerri bought a similar coat, this time science, art or commerce. made with Alaskan wolf-fur, while in New Finally, by occupying the blind spot of York.[xliv] The coat thus moves from symbol, to vision, the jaw-bones in this assemblage also commodity, to loan, to work of art, and back morph into other incommensurate animals again to commodity (or copy). Spoerri used that suddenly and unexpectedly flicker the Alaskan wolf-fur coat in the assemblage through the still present resemblances. Little under discussion, where the coat is set eyes are placed on two jaw-bones in a against the readymade resemblances of Le manner that sketches the profile of two Brun, serving as the physical (but still empty) ducks.[xlii] Again these ducks undermine the embodiment of Le Brun’s wolf-man via its classificatory system of resemblances (ducks subtle reference to Beuys. The coat suggests equal foxes or ducks differ from foxes) at once early culture – the presumed totemic produced by Agamben’s “anthropological power of wolf-fur for early human society – machine.” With their flickering presence within and contemporary relations among animals, the jaw-bones, these strange and funny ducks commerce and art. Specifically it juxtaposes intimate the possibility of unforeseeable, Le Brun’s resemblances with Beuys’s animal unenvisioned becomings.[xliii] performances (impersonations, conversations etc.) and, more precisely, Beuys’s 1974 cohabitation with a coyote, also held in New 70
Daniel Spoerri Fig.2 Carnival of Animals: Reproductions of Humans Compared with Those of Wolves, 1995. Assemblage on enlarged scan, after Charles Le Brun (1670), with one additional object, 140 x 100 cm and 140 x 50 x 50 cm. Courtesy of Kunststaulager Daniel Spoerri.
71 York (I like America and America likes me). In as human. In order for humans to commenting on the coyote action, Beuys domesticate their fear and to satiate their explains his work with animals as an attempt own and their civilizations’ wolfish voracity, it at recuperating the power (energy) of their seems that they make themselves into the spiritual existence. On his account, he tries to wolf which they can admire only as trapped – “speak” with animals in order to enter another possessed through the logic of the same -- kingdom, a realm that people have into a human or vertical, bipedal stature, itself forgotten.[xlv] He hopes to make contact with empty. America through the re-enactment of the Yet the wolf takes its vengeance: traumatic encounter between Native Spoerri’s wolf-man elicits memories of Americans, whom the coyote represents, and Sigmund Freud’s famous Wolf-Man case, only the “Western Man.” Arguably, Beuys presents to indict psychoanalytical interpretation. The himself, the artist, as the shaman endowed indictment seems to follow Deleuze and with healing powers: his contact with animals, Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis: namely, although revealing a traumatic repression, psychoanalysis aims to free the human from aims at a mystical union, of which he its “wolf.” In Freud’s Wolf Man case, the wolf becomes the initiator and medium. Indeed coincided with the father caught in the act of Beuys’s action exemplifies the unequal sex by the son who, in his adult life, suffered relation between human creativity -- the from the repression of this event. Freud had human hand and “impulse of consciousness” hoped to help the son cope with this initial — and the un-freedom of the coyote, traumatic act of seeing with the aid of reduced to total animal energy which psychoanalysis. Yet as Deleuze and Guattari ultimately only the shaman artist can liberate. point out, psychoanalysis only seemingly In this regard, Beuys’s communications with liberates humans. In fact it domesticates animals, and his guises, are just another facet them and, in the Wolf Man case, it of physiognomics, as it filters through Le Brun’s domesticates the wolf as well.[xlvi] For Spoerri, drawings. Spoerri appropriates both to the human may have temporarily escaped counter their effects. the wolf-man assemblage; yet it has left In Spoerri’s assemblage, the coat hangs behind the injured wolf-fur: the wolf has on a rack where, instead of a hat, we find the definitely been trapped. But Spoerri’s trapped mask of a wolf, itself in lieu of the wolf’s head. and injured wolf (man), whose eyes remain The wolf’s head – absent from the rack -- is empty in the mask that is on display, may still represented flat by the drawing on the wall, find its (his) pack by rejecting the human which is further compared to the head of the figure/body all together and by fleeing wolf – human sketched directly below it. The elsewhere. wolf is chopped into pieces in keeping with Indeed, Spoerri exhibited an imposing both human instrumental reason and fountain for the Sevilla exposition in 2000, commodity-fetishistic desire: indeed, Spoerri entitled Fleischwolfbrunnen, which is now on bought the coat, while Le Brun, in intellectual view at his sculpture garden in Seggiano (Italy) fetishistic manner, fragmented animals and [Figure 3]. For this fountain Spoerri used people in focusing only on heads, as the hundreds of meat-mincing machines. The most important (expressive) part, for humans, German word Fleischwolfbrunnen is a of the body’s relation to the soul. common one that literally translates as meat- Spoerri’s wolf-fur is then shown as wolf-fountain(ing), and that denominates this ferociously caught and injured by several ordinary kitchen tool. Where at first the wolf traps. Propped up vertically, as if it were a appears to return in the fountain as a human figure -- its head could be the domesticated meat-mincing machine, upon wolf/human muzzle also depicted by Le Brun reflection, one sees it is liberated from the and displaced on paper -- the wolf is injuries it had suffered in Carnival. inhumanely wounded, killed and impaled, as Thexxsubstantive xxxFleischwolfbrunnen a trophy first of commerce and, second, of sounds as a verb in German; in a way, it art. The wolf returns reincarnated grotesquely changes into an action, something like: “to 72
Daniel Spoerri Fig.3 Fleischwolfbrunnen [Meat-grinder-fountain] / Fontana Tritacarne (also known as Gocciolatoio [Drip Stone]), 1961-1991. Bronze sculpture, 3.25 m x 2.10 m. Courtesy of Kunststaulager Daniel Spoerri. 73 fountain mincing-machines.” Through a was familiar with the element of terror and “meaningless” non-existent verb, fear “only as represented by comic monsters “fountaining,” the wolf multiplies into an that were defeated by laughter. Terror was incessantly pouring pack of wolves, a pack of turned into something gay and wild devouring animal machines.[xlvii] This comic.”[xlix] Spoerri finds his own pack of wolves gains power and autonomy – carnivalesque at the flea markets, where he freedom -- from the human image of the also finds the “used objects” for his wolf, an image that these wolves do not art. Carnival of Animals, through its dialectical resemble. The tool displaces its function within montages of ground and foreground, shows the human world, and devours human ideas us the horrors of modern classification and of and the idea of the human itself: all that one the mortification of animals and humans. can see and recognize in Spoerri’s wolf- According to Bakhtin, in modernity, “the mask fountain are the human remains of one foot acquires a somber hue. A terrible vacuum, a and one hand at its base. nothingness lurks behind it.” Yet Carnival is also connected with the “joy of regeneration,” In Lieu of a Conclusion: What’s with something “comic.” There is laughter in Carnival Got to Do with It? the series of assemblages. Note that the laughter it provokes is not that of humans What has the title of Spoerri’s series of laughing at animals, but rather animals and assemblages, Carnival of Animals, got to do humans both appear to be laughing at with the work itself? Where do the human absurdities. About these carnivalesque aspects of animal and human physiognomic experiments, Spoerri said, “in resemblances – so ferociously depicted — my own way, by using found objects, and emerge in this work? One can read the word with much irony, despite the fact that I am no carnival in a simple mundane way, i.e., as scientist, I enjoy developing all these one takes carnival in common parlance: the speculations, which were already absurd in custom of masking oneself as another, taking earlier times.”[l] up some guise. Masks are often animal masks But how does the black comedy in used for caricature (especially of authority) or Spoerri’s Carnival liberate animal-human to invoke the totemic power of animals. Not relations from the anthropological machine, too distant from the popular meanings of here in the guise of physiognomics? First, carnival is Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of it. reduced to two dimensions, then trapped into Bakhtin considered carnival a profane union human-animal resemblances, and finally with the cosmos, a site where tradition meets fetishized in things (or interpretations), Spoerri’s subversion, a ritual of death and resurgence. carnival animals yet manage to escape Spoerri’s Carnival is pervaded by mortality. This science and art –the frames of objective haunting however is not only terrifying; rather, knowledge and transparent vision. These it intimates change and becoming. Death in invisible animals take flight, defying gravity carnivals hints at this dialectical turn, i.e., the and classification, leaving us with the transformation of death into invisible carcasses of our own projections. In an off- regeneration. It is invisible because stage (ob-scene) space of non- regeneration lies beyond the frame of both knowledge, Carnival of Animals approaches art and science within which the human Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of art’s work. They imaginaries have been caged. Bakhtin writes write that the arts have no other aim than to that the mask, in the popular festive unleash becomings. Steve Baker thus spectacles of early modernity, “is connected comments that, in their view, art consists in with the joy of change and reincarnation, with letting fearsome things fly.[li] Now, if gay relativity and with the merry negation of in Carnival, the human logic of resemblances uniformity and similarity.”[xlviii] In his view, appears – for an instant -- insignificant to the masks are associated with the grotesque point of even provoking laughter, it is open body and with its regenerating power in because the artifacts, masks, furs, skulls and folk culture. Similarly, carnivalesque culture skeletons in it emphasize the gap, the 74 incongruities, that (by chance) both separate presentations or situations of objects outside us from and unite us with the images of human perspective. In Spoerri’s Carnival, the animals that humans have themselves collision or “reciprocal contamination” in created. These animals are the mirrors and Spoerri’s terms -- between the readymade masks of human limitations and fears (of gaze produced by the long history of difference and death), which the representation and the return of modern art’s unenvisioned animals of this self-reflexive optical unconscious, i.e., the other (of) vision avant-garde throw back at us in their laughter that the avant-garde brings to the fore, opens as they take flight from the immobilized, up a space off-stage where posthuman immortalized and mortified images of animals can exist outside of representation. themselves they leave behind for us to view. Insofar as Carnival debases high art (representation, illusionism etc.) through the Endnotes willful intrusion of the messy quotidian and [i] My position on posthumanism is akin to Cary Wolfe’s: “when we talk about posthumanism, we are not just talking kitsch, the popular element is certainly about a thematics of decentering of the human in relation to important in it. Its subversive aspect, however, either evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates lies in its re-enactment ad absurdum of the … ; rather, I will insist that we are also talking about how thinking confronts that thematics, what thought visual commonplaces and disciplinary has to become in the face of those challenges. … [T]he point discourses in which art (objects) and humans is not to reject humanism tout court –indeed there are many (their ideas) are situated. From this values and aspirations to admire in humanism – but rather to show how those aspirations are undercut by the philosophical viewpoint, Carnival has on the viewer the an ethical frameworks used to conceptualize them.” Cary same effect that a Chinese classification of Wolfe, What is Posthumanism (Minneapolis and London: animals had on its reader, Michel Foucault, University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xvi. who burst into laughter when he first [ii] According to Pierre Restany, the founder critic of New encountered it. Both the laughter and the Realism, the movement had a strong, solar approach to the classification, in Foucault’s own account, real. Restany was the critical voice of the group from its inception, in 1960. See, Theories and Documents of constituted the main reasons behind his own Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, eds. investigations of human knowledge in Les Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley and Los Angeles: mots et les choses.[lii] Borrowing Foucault’s University of California Press, 1996), 284. words, through its parodic relation to [iii] In general terms, assemblages are three-dimensional ingrained structures of seeing, i.e., through installations composed of found objects. While the term was the avant-garde mise-en-abime of the logic common in the second post-war period, found objects had already been common in Dada and Surrealism. As I indicate of resemblance, Carnival “breaks up all the in the essay by “avant-garde” I broadly refer here to that self- ordered surfaces and all the planes with critical art that, in the twentieth-century, turned its attention which we are accustomed to tame the wild increasingly “to the institutional framework through which art is produced and received, to the ‘dominant social discourses’ profusion of existing things.”[liii] The series of that emerge in art through these institutional mediations.” See assemblages re-enacts and exasperates the Richard John Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-garde: Modernism, carnivalesque dynamics – and black humor - Expressionism and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge and NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10. - of all avant-garde art, thereby setting free its “invisible” animals.[liv] [iv] Giorgio Agamben, The Open (Stanford: Stanford University At the outset of this essay I stated my Press, 2004), 27. More on Agamben follows. wish to extend the analysis of Spoerri’s animals [v] Agamben, Open, 91-92. to the avant-garde at large. I close by suggesting that the avant-garde devices [vi] Foster put it thus: “If artists in the 1950s had mostly recycled avant-garde devices, artists in the 1960s had to elaborate presented in the essay display the human- them critically; the pressure of historical awareness permitted mechanical (automatic) elements – the nothing less. It is this complicated relation between prewar entrapments in and of human optics — and postwar avant-gardes, the theoretical question of avant- garde causality, temporality and narrativity, that is crucial to alerting to the automatism and vulnerability comprehend today.” Hal Foster, “What’s Neo about the Neo- shared by humans and animals alike. Yet the Avant-Garde?” in October, Vol. 70 (Autumn, 1994), 10. avant-garde devices also destabilize the [vii] See Cecilia Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From human point of view through a non-human Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (Minneapolis and London: University look at living and non/living things, at of Minnesota Press, 2010). 75 [viii] See Foster, The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the study is historicist, and Le Brun’s “recognizable” resemblances End of the Century, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1996), xii. are taken at face value, explained away as an instinctive human reaction, a natural human predisposition “vital to our [ix] Leah Dickerman, “Dada Gambits,” October 105, “Dada” biological survival” (105) -- unlike Spoerri’s view of (2003), 3-12. physiognomics and Le Brun’s influential role. Spoerri indicates that the discourse of human-animal resemblances is [x] Dickerman, “Dada Gambits,” 9. indebted to a deep construction of human vision in Western thought, the effects of which, in the end, have first shaped [xi] Fernande Olivier, Picasso and His Friends (New York: and then become a function of knowledge and its Appleton-Century, 1965), 97. discourses/disciplines. Human knowledge and vision classify animals but their classification – like folkloric traditions – [xii] John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso (London: produces masks (and fetishes): knowledge’s truth about Penguin Books, 1965), 77. animals is carnivalesque.
[xiii] Raoul Hausmann, quoted in Karl Riha, Dada Berlin: Texte, [xx] In contrast to reproduction, multiplication involves mobile Manifeste, Aktionen (Stuttgart: Reclam Verlag), 8. Emphasis objects that generate transformations by themselves, by the added. aid of motors or through the audience’s intervention. Thus they produce “multiplied originals.” They are “originals” because, [xiv] Matthew Biro, Visions of the New Human in Weimar like the trap-paintings, no composition left to chance and Berlin (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, time (or movement) is repeated identically. So, while all 2010), 20. derived from one concept, the kinetic works Spoerri called multiples were all different with respect to each other and to [xv] As Walter Serner states, human philosophy and humans themselves in time. Multiplication meant constant variation of themselves are no more than “mixed salad.” Quoted in objects, or a constantly changing object. Novero, Antidiets, 284, n. 14, n. 16. [xxi] Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, [xvi] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: 1927-1934, Vol. 2, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1993), 98. edited by Michael Jennings (Cambridge, Mass and London:
Bellknap Harvard University Press, c.1999, 2001), 733. [xxii] Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 96.
[xvii] Benjamin associates Austrian writer and publicist Karl [xxiii] Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 96. Kraus with the child and the cannibal. Out of both, he writes, a monster, a new angel springs, rather than a new man. See [xxiv] See what Krauss writes in this regard: “The production of “Karl Kraus” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: 1927-1934, sensory stimulation from within the body’s own field, the Vol. 2, 457; For Benjamin on Dada, see his 1936 version of the optical system’s porousness to the operations of its internal “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” On organs, this fact forever undermines the idea of vision’s Benjamin’s language of things as reaction against humanistic transparency to itself. Instead of that transparency there now logocentrism, see Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other arises the density and opacity of the viewing subject as the History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and very precondition of his access to sight.” Referring then to Angels (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, Duchamp’s Large Glass, Krauss adds that if this work obeys to 2000). Duchamp’s dictum of “going beyond” the retina, this is so “to arrive at the threshold of desire-in-vision, which is to say to [xviii] Spoerri offers a genealogy of Carnival in a collection of construct vision itself within the opacity of the organs and the autobiographical anecdotes about his oeuvre. invisibility of the unconscious.” See Krauss, Optical (Id., Anekdotomania: Daniel Spoerri über Daniel Spoerri (Basel: Unconscious, 125. On the “optical unconscious” in Duchamp, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001), (235-240). Therein he repeats the see Ibid, 137. well-known history of Le Brun’s plates, stating that these served to illustrate a now lost lecture on physiognomy that Le Brun – [xxv] Ordinarily, mise en abyme or mise-en-abime designates painter to the King -- had held at the Royal Academy of the visual experience of standing between two mirrors, seeing Painting and Sculpture in Paris, probably in 1671. On Le Brun an infinite reproduction of one's image. The term also refers to see Jennifer Montagu’s The Expression of the Passions: The a formal technique in art history in which an image contains a Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun’s Conférence sur smaller copy of itself, the sequence appearing to recur l’expression general et particulière (New Haven and London: infinitely. Yale University Press, 1994) and also Michel Gareau, Charles
Le Brun: First Painter to King Louis XIV (New York: Harry Abrams, [xxvi] Charles Le Brun lived between 1619 and 1690, Carl 1992). Linnaeus between 1707-1778, Charles Darwin from 1809 to 1882. On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859 and The [xix] Montagu underscores the innovative features of Le Brun’s Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872. For the work especially in relation to the physiognomic study by relation between the Chain of Being and seriality (as non- Giovanni Battista della Porta, the latter also mentioned by hierarchical ordering) see Gautam Ghosh, “The (Un)Braiding of Spoerri in his genealogy of Carnival. Montagu however plays Time in the 1947 Partition of British India” in Anthony Grafton and down the role of physiognomic in Le Brun’s work on expression. Marc Rodriguez (eds) Migration in History (University of Rochester With regard to human and animal resemblances, she Press, 2007), 56-57. I also wish to thank Gautam Ghosh for his explains Le Brun’s plates as both pioneering (almost visionary insightful comments on this essay. and anticipatory of Darwin’s studies) and as indebted to the contemporaneous faith in reason, especially Descartes’s [xxvii] Paula Young Lee connects representations of animals philosophy. On these grounds, she views Le Brun’s with the fierce debates concerning perspective in the resemblances as a great improvement over Della Porta’s seventeenth century. She argues that at the core of the “crude” drawings (20-21). Overall her detailed and accurate debate was the view of and on animals, for the live animal face as it is found in nature—i.e., in motion and in time—is 76 distinct from an architectural landscape and resists being [xliii] See James Urpeth, “Animal Becomings,” in Animal interpreted through the laws of mathematical perspective. Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought, edited The foundation of rational human vision, in short, was by Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton (London and New controversial from the beginning, and the law of perspective York: Continuum, 2004), 211, note 6: “Becoming-animal’ as a could be said to rely on unstable ground. See Lee, Taming form of ‘becoming-minoritarian’ is an important instance of the Two-Eyed Beast: Images, Animals, and Objects in the what Deleuze and Guattari term ‘micropolitics,’ a ‘politics of Seventeenth-Century French Academies (unpublished identity" and pursues a more radical trajectory than that of manuscript. Courtesy of the author). See also Montagu, representation or emancipation …” Expression of the Passions, 23. [xliv] Spoerri’s account of the geographical difference [xxviii] “Who as a young child has not dreamt of the Frog- between the Siberian and Alaskan coats redoubles – parodies King or has not been afraid of the werewolf or yet still of — Beuys’s statements about East and West, his idea of Dracula able to morph into a bat? Even Little Red Riding Hood “Eurasia.” Beuys indeed mentions the migration of the wolf tells the story of a metamorphosis of animal into human and from Siberia to America, in this context. On the wolf-coyote, vice versa. Not to speak of all those proverbs, ‘as strong as a see Beuys and Kuoni, Energy Plan for the Western World: lion,’ ‘as cunning as a fox,’ ‘as filthy as a pig,’ etc., up to the Joseph Beuys in America, edited by Carl Kuoni, with common belief that the dog and its owner resemble each introductory essays by Kim Levin and Caroline Tisdall (New York other … [If we think of this] then we have touched only and London: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990), 213. summarily on a very controversial issue: I mean, that the genetic code is universal: It is shared by bacteria, animals [xlv] See Beuys and Kuoni, Joseph Beuys in America, 142. and humans …” See Spoerri, Anekdotomania, 235. [xlvi] See, Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 35, [xxix] Leland de La Durantaye, “The Suspended Substantive: 43. On Animals and Men in Giorgio Agamben’s ‘The Open’” in Diacritics, 33: 2 (2003), 5. [xlvii] Spoerri had once illustrated the expression “it’s raining cats and dogs” in one of his “word-traps” or Wortfallen. See [xxx] de La Durantaye, “The Suspended Substantive,” 6. Spoerri, Anekdotomania, 140-144. Here, a tool is freed of its use and a substantive is freed of its fixity. [xxxi] de La Durantaye, “The Suspended Substantive,” 8. [xlviii] Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana [xxxii] Agamben, Open, 26-27. University Press, 1984), 39.
[xxxiii] Montagu, Expression of the Passions, 66-67; 71-73. [xlix] Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 39, 40.
[xxxiv] Montagu, Expression of the Passions, 18. [l] Spoerri in an interview with Sandro Parmiggiani in Parmiggiani, La messa in scena degli oggetti (Milan: Skira [xxxv] Montagu, Expression of the Passions, 27. Editore, 2004), 44.
[xxxvi] Or else: the human is the depth/death of the animal, [li] Steve Baker, “‘You Kill Things to Look at Them’, 74. namely its vanishing point. Emphasis added.
[xxxvii] On the notion of supplement –especially according [lii] The French title of Foucault’s work, translated into English to Derrida—see Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short as The Order of Things. Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 9-14. [liii] Michel Foucault, Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), xv. [xxxviii] Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward A Minor Literature (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota [liv] On the avant-garde and carnival, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi Press, 1986) 28, 29, 59. and Luis Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel, see Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film [xxxix] See Baker, “‘You Kill Things to Look at Them - Animal (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), Death in Contemporary Art” in Killing Animals by The Animal 94-111. Studies Group (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 69-98. Speaking of the effects of animal corpses in art, A shorter version of this essay appeared as "Daniel Spoerri’s Carnival of Baker quotes Elaine Scarry (81-83). The quotation perfectly Animals," pages 151-166, In Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and renders the effect of the detrompe-l’oeil as it applies to Paul Youngquist, eds., Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Carnival. Perspective, University Park, 2012, The Pennsylvania State University Press. Copyright © 2012 by the Pennsylvania State University Press.
Reprinted by permission of the Pennsylvania State University Press. [xl] The Oedipalized subject figures first among the domesticated animals because it is caught in the triangular family-structure. More on this in the section Multiplied Wolf- Man. Cecilia Novero did her doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. After teaching at the University of Michigan, Vassar College and the Pennsylvania State University (UP), she has now joined the Department of Languages and [xli] Agamben, Open, 91-92. Cultures at the University of Otago. She has recently completed a book(The Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: from Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).) on the temporal relations between [xlii] See William J. Thomas Mitchell and his analysis of the the historical Avant-garde and the Neo-Avant-Garde at the University of duck-rabbit, which these ducks recall in Picture Theory Minnesota Press (2009). Cecilia's research and teaching interests encompass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 51, 53-57. aesthetics, the Frankfurt School, European cinema, Travel literature, the former GDR, especially women writers and, most recently, "animal studies". She has published numerous articles on Viennese Actionism, the Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri, the Dada movement, the cultural history of food, and film. 77
FISH: SINGLY, AND IN
SHOALS
Every animal that is shown can always signify something, or, to be more precise, it can mean more and something other
than merely the animal as shown. This is in the nature of human artifacts, attaching meaning to which is common
practice in our culture. This is especially apparent in literature: one cannot read of animals without construing their literary occurrence. Roland Borgards discusses the paintings of fish by Vroni Schwegler. Text by Roalnd Borgards
n the Western tradition, we come face-to- literature: one cannot write of animals without face with two diametrically opposed writing of animals. This could be called an I options of taking in animals into Art. For one inevitable, non-circumventable artistic deixis: thing, there are the art-animals that signify Art cannot not show something. something: a lion is couched at the feet of the Secondly, every animal that is shown king, a monkey appears as an emblem of can always signify something, or, to be more lust, a swarm of locusts is eating its way precise, it can mean more and something through the fields, a peacock spreads its tail. other than merely the animal as shown. This is On the other hand, there is animal-art, which in the nature of human artifacts, attaching shows something: the picture of a zebra shows meaning to which is common practice in our a zebra, the picture of an ant shows an ant, culture. This is especially apparent in literature: the picture of an elephant shows an elephant. one cannot read of animals without Two types of animal images might thus be construing their literary occurrence. The same juxtaposed against one another: signifier holds true for the visual arts: every animal that images against display images, meaning can be seen in a picture can also be against viewing, semiotics against deixis. If this interpreted. This could be called an inevitable, already was the whole truth of painting, then non-circumventable artistic semiotics: Art the fish of Vroni Schwegler, singly and in cannot not mean something. shoals, would simply be show animals: Look Thirdly, one might think about to what here, a fish! Yet things are not as simple as extent the animal of Art, both shown and that, for at least three reasons. interpreted, is itself involved in the process of First of all, every animal that signifies showing and interpreting. For this, it is not something is always shown as well. In painting, necessarily requisite to hand an animal a this is self-evident: even a heraldic lion is not brush. It is enough to imagine a constellative only a reference to sovereignty, but also the virtuosity, in which the participants are an artist picture of a lion. One cannot paint animals (with her awareness, with her gaze, with her without painting animals. The same applies to hand, with her practiced skill), some technical 78
Vroni Schwegler Small Shoal in Linz, 2012 Schwegler 79
Vroni Schwegler Detail, The Great Wall With Fish, 2010 Schwegler
materials (oil paint, brush, boards), and an room, in which agents may meet and interact animal (a dead fish – that is, a particular, with one another. Each single painting individual dead fish). preserves such an encounter. This, above all, might be what the To be an agent in this game, the fish paintings of Vroni Schwegler are all about: need not even be alive, it may be dead. In about a space in which an artist, a fish, and the individual painting, then, the fish comes some painting equipment were together; into a kind of life that is something other, and about how this was there: this particular place, perhaps something more, too, than a mere this specific moment, these concrete players biological category. This life does not lie in the in the game. That is why Vroni Schwegler, time fish, but in the painting. Therefore, the and again, lets herself be watched while paintings of Vroni Schwegler do not only show animal-painting; that is why she also takes the one fish at a time, but many fish, and each animals inside houses, drawing them on the one of them in many variations: an wall in pencil; that is why her studio is no assemblage of moments, constellations, closed, but only a concentrated room – a concretions, every single picture the track of 80 an action and its agents: artist, fish, brush. And again: artist, fish, brush. And once more: artist, fish, brush. This creates shoals, which convene such actions. Even if many pictures show the same fish, every painting is nevertheless an individual. In this way, it is not fish-shoals that appear on the wall, but painting-shoals. Inside the shoal, non-biological life multiplies. And in hanging the pictures, the action repeats itself, now, in part, with new agents: an artist, a hammer, a nail (which have taken the place of paint and brush), and fish-paintings (which have taken the place of the fish).
What do we share with animals? Our mortality (Jacques Derrida), our pleasures (Donna Haraway), and possibly (Vroni Schwegler) those places and moments in which, thanks to Art, a kind of non-biological, an a-biotic life emerges. That this constitutes a kind of life that accepts death in its own way, making it part of the game – this, too, can be seen in the paintings of Vroni Schwegler. Fish: singly, and in shoals.
Vroni Schwegler was born in Penzberg (Germany) in 1970 and studied painting at the Art School, Städelschule, in Frankfurt with Hermann Nitsch and Cooper Union School Of Art in New York City. Schwegler has been exploring the genre of still life for many years, using different media such as painting, drawing and printmaking. At present she teaches printmaking at the university of applied sciences in Mainz. For further information: www.vroni-schwegler.de
Roland Borgards was born in Saarbrücken (Germany) in 1968. Borgards is Professor for German Literatur at the University of Würzburg (Germany). His research focusses on Cultural and Literary Animal Studies; his teaching includes the international Würzburg Summer School for Cultural and Literary Animal Studies. For further information: www.ndl1.germanistik.uni- wuerzburg.de/mitarbeiter/borgards/
81
THE ART OF FARMING
I live on a small family farm in North Holland where I exercise my two greatest passions in life: art and nature. My artwork emerges from my experiences on the farm creating a dialog between my two occupations one as a farmer and the other as a working artist. Text by Petra Shilder
rt and life come together on the farm in informs and compliments the other. Through a process where daily occurrences can this process I have been able to create new A inspire new directions for my art. Each art works that both conceptually and day presents new and often unforeseen materially meld these two subjects together challenges and inspires new solutions. These opening for new avenues of expression and daily experiences on the farm form the basis discovery in both. The art practice has also of my artistic inspiration. helped me develop my farming methods to My artistic practice has always been new heights including my most recent project: closely related my own personal experience. hybrid-sheep breeding program which I see Having been born on a family farm in the as much as an art project as a farming one. idyllic Dutch landscape, the genre of Dutch I find that my relationship and landscape painting has always intrigued me. knowledge of my sheep is further intensified by When I first discovering these works as a child I my artistic documentation of them. The was taken by how much these paintings various manners in which I represent them in reminded me of my family farm. I began to my paintings, photographs, drawing, research these paintings and discovered that sculptures and tile works have revealed many of the animals that were depicted in nuances to me that I otherwise may not have them were sheep. The sheep in the paintings observed. however were of breeds and varieties that I This breeding program wonderfully had never heard of before. This started my melds my farming and art practice together journey on the study of the history of sheep, into a unified endeavour. I have created a which in turn brought me full circle to my own unique program where I am cross-breeding sheep breeding-program at my farm. different types of sheep in order to create a On the farm I have been able to blend hybrid that is more independent and requires my two endeavours (of art making and less care from the farmer. By creating this new farming) in a symbiotic relationship where one breed of sheep I plan to bring the animals 82
Petra Schilder Fig.1Smuiger, Dutch style fire place. Fig.2 Delfs Blue tile fragments of pastoral scenery Shilder
closer to their original position in nature with I develop a very close relationship with my greater independence and self-reliance while sheep and that's what I'm trying to capture still maintaining their economic value. I have and present through my work. In the engaged in an extensive visual recording of beginning it was kind of hard to photograph this project through photography, drawing, the animals because they always come right painting, sculpture and ceramic tiles. This up to me when I tried. To get the right shot I documentation forms a non-chronological ended up practically lying in the grass to get narrative of the project that is not just a visual that “right in your face” effect. Recently I had and conceptual documentation. In addition an exhibition of my photo documentary of my it creates a myriad of independent art objects sheep at Irvine fine arts centre (img.3). that form the poetic view of this scientific art I first started painting and etched project. portraits of my sheep on ordinary white I've grown up around the Dutch industrial tiles. I extracted the red pigments I majolica tiles: in our farm we have an old used from the ‘uncle tom’ tulips we grow on Dutch style tiled smuiger fire place (img.1). our farm for the tulip bulb market. My dad collected old tiles and in the fields Of course the pigments didn't last on the tiles around our farm I've found little bits and and I learned to paint in the majolica pieces of old tiles. I've researched the pieces technique instead. I now use manganese and tried to reassemble them (img.2). pigments because it strongly resembles the This was a great inspiration source to start colour of my tulip pigments. The fireplace is a making my own. mix of old tiles and tiles I made. Old Dutch shepherd tiles are my favourite subject since I'm a sheep farmer. 83
Petra Schilder 84 Little Black Racka Ram (tulip pigments on tile) © Schilder
Petra Schilder Bully (tulip pigments on tile) Shilder
Petra Schilder was born in Scharwoude, The Netherlands, 1975. She gained her BFA BFA Autonoom Skulptuur, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, The Netherlands in 2000 and a subsequent MFA Sculpture, The Ohio State University, Columbus. She has exhibited extensively in Europe and the US. Carter and Citizen (http://www.carterandcitizen.com/exhibitions)
85
MORE THAN
MARGINAL: INSECTS IN
THE HOURS OF MARY
OF BURGUNDY
A book of hours was an intensely personal devotion book in the Middle Ages. Used daily to direct the prayers of the owner, these illuminated manuscripts, or hand-made illustrated books, were lavishly decorated to the taste of the patron. In the late fifteenth-century Hours of Mary of Burgundy, also known as the Vienna Hours, every folio is richly
decorated with window scenes of religious subjects surrounded by extravagant foliage. This decoration of the margins includes, among other animals, an array of insects including bees, moths, flies, and grasshoppers. Text by Eileen Yanoviak
he early modern Europe of the late Painted during the burgeoning of the Flemish fifteenth century witnessed revolutions in scientific revolution, the stylized insects in the T scientific inquiry and humanist margins of the Vienna Hours may be seen as ideals. During this period of remarkable reflecting popular cultural attitudes towards change, the long-established trade of animals and religious, moral, and social illuminated manuscripts, or handmade metaphors of insects. An analysis of insect decorated books, waned with the advent of imagery in the Vienna Hours and the the printed book. In spite of these innovations later Hours of Englebert of Nassau will in bookmaking, and perhaps in part because illuminate the emergence of empirical of the regeneration of science, the innovative observation and changing attitudes towards “Ghent-Bruges” style of manuscript production nature during this important moment of and illumination emerged between 1470 and cultural transition. 1480 and flourished for three generations in The Vienna Hours, generally believed to Flanders. Illuminators of the lavish Hours of have been produced between 1475 and Mary of Burgundy (Vienna Hours henceforth) 1480, is a lavish production displaying the are often credited with leading innovations in wealth and influence of the patron.[1] It is a illusionistic illumination that contributed to the book of hours, a personal devotional book continued popularity of the manuscript in the that was used to guide prayer during the north. seven canonical hours of the day. Containing While many scholars have written on this 190 richly decorated folios, each folio manuscript, few have focused on the contains either full-page or half-page extensive marginalia, or margin decoration, miniatures, historiated (decorated) initials, or which enlivens practically every page of profuse marginalia, unless completely left the Vienna Hours. Amidst the profuse blank. It is comprised of the traditional acanthus leaves that decorate the margins, a elements of a book of hours, including the myriad of insects are illustrated. Calendar, Marian Prayers, readings from the 86 gospels, Mass of the Virgin, Hours of the Cross, these window scenes, contends that this is a Hours of the Holy Spirit, Suffrages, Litany, and suggestion of nature-morte, literally translated Office of the Dead. as “dead nature,” but figuratively a The book almost certainly belonged to representation of the fleeting nature of Mary of Burgundy, the daughter of Charles the life.[4] The fleeting life of the present tangible Bold. Charles the Bold was killed during a world is juxtaposed to the religious scene campaign to expand his territories, and Mary illustrated beyond the window frame that took the throne at a very young age. She distinguishes the illumination within. The sense married the Austrian emperor’s son Maximillian of temporal space is further complicated by in 1477, and she died at a young age in 1482 the appearance of Mary of Burgundy within from falling off of her horse. While the only the enclosed window scene, peering back at definite provenance is indicated by the the audience and imploring monogrammed initials of Emperor Matthias I participation. These window scenes may be of the seventeenth century, it is generally considered as the beginning of the trend accepted that the Vienna Hours belonged to towards illusionistic illuminations in the latter Mary of Burgundy.[2] Most scholars believe part of the fifteenth century, a key component the book was commissioned by Maximillian in understanding the emergence of scientific upon their wedding as a wedding gift. accuracy. A manuscript of this importance for a While scholars have labored over patron of such high status would be interpretations of the window scenes, little completed in a workshop with numerous scholarly attention has been paid to the illuminators, or manuscript painters, and would marginalia of the Hours of Mary of have been made to the specifications of the Burgundy. The marginalia composes a patron. The primary illuminator for the Vienna substantial portion of the overall illustration of Hours was probably Lievin van the manuscript. The majority of this Lathem.[3] While Lathem was the primary decoration is in the French style, composed of illuminator contributing the largest number of densely woven acanthus scrolls and full-page miniatures, the so-called “Master of foliage. Interspersed in the margins are Mary of Burgundy” was a secondary illuminator various creatures, both real and who gained notoriety for his innovative fabricated. Included among the beasts and “window scenes.” There are three window animals, there is a variety of insects, such as scenes in the Vienna Hours. The first is the flies, moths, butterflies, snails, grasshoppers, portrait of Mary of Burgundy at her devotional. and a bee.[5] Each of these appears with (Figure 1) While Mary reads in the foreground varying frequency and with different purposes, with her back to the open window, the window placement, and degrees of specificity. behind her reveals a church choir. Within the The insects which populate the margins choir the Virgin Mary is seated on a of the Vienna Hours are relevant for two throne. These window scenes may be reasons. First, there are clear and trenchant understood as a method to portray Mary of symbolic and allegorical meanings Burgundy and her visualization of her associated with insects. And secondly, devotions, a vision of the Virgin Mary. This the Vienna Hours predates the Hours of technique transforms the intangible devotions Englebert of Nassua, also illuminated by the of Mary of Burgundy into visual manifestations Master of the Vienna Hours, which significantly of tangible realities that exist in different enhances the visual, and hence symbolic, temporal spaces. emphasis on insects. Together, the Another window scene appears on 43v, exploration of insects in the two texts reveals a painted again by the Master of Mary of distinctive trend towards naturalism in the Burgundy. (Figure 2) Here again, the private manuscripts of the late fifteenth century in chapel of the patron is depicted looking upon Flanders. a distant landscape, almost a literal In order to properly understand the representation of a vision. Otto Pächt, the first symbolic role of insects in the Hours of Mary of scholar to truly take up the interpretation of Burgundy, it is important to investigate how the 87
Fig.1 Master of Mary of Burgundy, Hours of Mary of Burgundy codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 14v Mary of Burgundy at her Devotions 1482 , Vienna, Austrian National Library
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Fig.2 Master of Mary of Burgundy, Hours of Mary of Burgundy codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 43v and 44r Raising of the Cross Vienna, Austrian National Library
Medieval artist and patron would acquire grandfather of Mary of Burgundy, who was an knowledge of animals, and what role those avid bibliophile that inspired his courtiers to animals would have played within their follow suit.[8] lives. Most often, knowledge about animals The content of the bestiaries was obtained through the use of bestiaries, or demonstrates the importance of using encyclopedic books on animals, which animals as symbols, often allegorical contained general information about the ones. The intention was to use these symbols animals, accompanied by common as moral and religious models.[9] The bestiary analogies, and standard imagery. According essentially included two sections in each entry to bestiary scholar Janetta Benton, “Animal for an animal. The first part was an etymology imagery was derived largely from secondary of the animal’s name and a description of sources rather than from direct observation of habitat and appearance. The next section nature.”[6] The bestiaries were among the explained the symbolic significance and most common picture books in the twelfth moral value of the pseudo-factual information century, particularly in England. These books in the preceding section. A steadily increasing would have been standard in monastic naturalism in the bestiaries of the twelfth, libraries and were a favorite of the thirteenth, and fourteenth century is a secular.[7] Any miniaturist commissioned by reflection of the growing scientific revolution. the Burgundian noble family would have had Benton arranges the animals in access to these bestiaries. If artists did not medieval manuscripts into the following hold them as a reference in their workshop, categories: the common animals, like horses they would have undoubtedly been able to and dogs; exotic animals, such as camels or access one in the library of Phillip the Good, lions; standardized imaginary mythological 89 creatures; and finally imaginary animals of the exaggerated scale, the bee is shown with artist’s invention.[10] Although Benton does eight legs rather than six. This reinforces the not specifically address insects, they would be idea that the knowledge of insects is not from considered among the common first-hand observation or scientific description, animals. The insects depicted in the Vienna but from the pages of bestiaries which were Hours are indeed of the general garden rarely scientifically accurate. variety. The motif of the bee is particularly rich The common fly is among the most in social, religious, and economic profusely used elements in the Vienna associations. In bestiaries, bees’ nests were Hours. (Figure 3) As a devotional book of described as being the model of an ideal hours, the religious connotation of the fly is society. Although bees have meager particularly relevant. Ecclesiastes 10:1 reads, beginnings, they were capable of developing “[d]ead flies make the perfumer’s sweet a sophisticated society and were celebrated ointment turn rancid and ferment; so can a for civic virtue. All bees had a role within their little folly make wisdom lose its worth.”[11] The society, and the king bee, not a queen, was fly is also associated with death, devastation, always admired for his benevolence as a and infestation in the Bible. Evidence of this leader of the colony.[15] Although he had a association can be seen in a painting stinger, bees who disobeyed him stung contemporary with the Vienna themselves in an expression of their loyalty and Hours called Dead Lovers by Matthias selflessness.[16] Grünewald. Two seemingly undead dead While the social model of the beehive lovers are covered in swarming insects, flies was meaningful for industry and society, there among them, serving as a momento were also religious applications for the mori reminder that all people succumb to theme. Bees were associated with the social death.[12] structure of a monastery and the Virgin Mary The stoics of antiquity, as well as the as the model citizen.[17] The efficient and Bible, believed that all animals were created noble bee civilization also served as an for the benefit of humans, even undesirable allegory for Christ and his followers, or by ones like flies.[13] In the Physiologus, the extension, for a ruler like Mary of Burgundy and relative sinfulness and virtuousness of an her people. animal is based upon its connections to The metaphor between Christ and his behavior in people. References to the fly in followers with bee society is supported by the Bible support the notion of human references to bees in the Bible. Bees are behavior analogy. A solid moral story for the specifically mentioned in the Bible on four young Mary of Burgundy, the fly is a warning of occasions.[18] According to Solomon, the the potential for something good to spoil. The consumption of honey and honeycomb fly could also symbolize the brevity of life on brings knowledge of wisdom.[19] While this is earth, explaining the appearance of flies an appropriate reading based on the identity immediately before they are devoured by a of the patron, the presence of the humorous bird as illustrated in numerous instances in nude boy figure alludes to a passage in the Vienna Hours.[14] (Figure 3) The symbolic Genesis in which human beings, superior to all association of the fly with the brevity of life also other creatures, should have dominion over supports Pächt’s understanding of window animals.[20] These Biblical references to bee scenes as images of nature-morte. symbolism evolved, like much of Christian The single appearance of one bee in symbolism, from Ancient texts. the Vienna Hours on fol. 157r is in the margins An entire chapter is devoted to the of a passage in the Office of the Dead. industry and society of bees in (Figure 4) The bee appears large in scale Virgil’s Georgics, a poem extolling the virtues compared to the unidentified unruly naked of labor and agriculture.[21] boy chasing him with an unknown object. This This chapter appeared as an appendix could be a cloth typically used by a to some bestiaries. Janice Neri’s extensive beekeeper to smother bees. In addition to study of insects in early modern European art 90
Fig.3 Master of Mary of Burgundy, Hours of Mary of Burgundy codex Vindobonensis 1857 fol. 29v , 1482 , Vienna, Austrian National Library
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Fig.4 92 Hours of Mary of Burgundy codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 157r, 1482, Vienna, Austrian National Library
from 1500-1700 also points to the economic facing another snail without his shell, ramifications of insects. She cites a 1475 reinforcing the symbolic narrative of trust and woodblock print by Konrad von mistrust, or perhaps piety and doubt. (Figure Megenberg Buch der Nature as evidence of 6) The snail who requires a shell is viewed as the interest in the economic benefits of inherently less courageous and trustworthy studying insects as indicated by the beehive then the shell-less snail, who can defend and round silkworm boxes.[22] himself without protective armor. While bees and beekeeping were While the scene of the shell-less snail virtuous, snails held a significantly less positive presents a narrative element, the green critters association. A myriad of snails appear in which appear in three instances present both the Vienna Hours. (Figure 5) Snails, although narrative and inventive qualities. (Figure not scientifically considered insects, may have 7) These grasshopper-like creatures are the been lumped with other pest-like least directly translated naturalistic insects in insects.[23] Snails were voracious pests in the the manuscript. They have eight to ten legs garden and were generally quite and an abdomen in the shape of a lobster unpopular. In spite of their lackluster tail. If they are indeed grasshoppers, hoppers reputation, snails were a popular subject in and grasshoppers are mentioned numerous manuscripts and folklore. In manuscripts, they times in the Bible. Although no agreement were most popular in the late thirteenth and has been reached as to the specific species fourteenth centuries, appearing more than referred to by “hopper,” they are categorically seventy times in nearly thirty manuscripts. The negative, often associated with the swarms of appearance of the snail becomes less locusts. Joel 1:4 reads, “What the locust has common in the fifteenth century.[24] left the swarms eat, what the swarm has left, In the context of the Vienna Hours, the the hopper eats, and what the hopper has left most relevant symbolic association of the snail the grub eats,” indicating a descending chain is with the Virgin Mary. Helen S. Ettlinger of loathsome creatures.[27] identifies the snail as a symbol of virginity as it While the Biblical interpretation is appears conspicuously sliding along the meaningful, perhaps the key to interpreting bottom of Fransesco Cossa’s 1470- the grasshoppers and other insects is in 72 Annunciation. Additionally, a 1400 print by relation to the other animals and figures in the Francis of Retz, which depicts three snails in illustrations. In a discussion of the use of the rain, reads, “If the dew of the clear air can bestiaries in folklore, Arnold Clayton Henderson make the sea snail pregnant, then God in contends that the relationship between beasts virtue can make His mother pregnant.”[25] For is the most important clue to the moral or a young and royal female patron, one spiritual underpinning of the use of obliged to produce heirs, the emphasis on animals.[28] Henderson explains that in reproduction and virginity was likely very folklores and bestiaries, if poignant. In a more subtle analogy, some the fable is built on the contrast scholars suggest that including undesirable between an oppressive beast animals like the snail, particularly in folklore, and its innocent victim, then the may be considered a demonstration of “high moralization will transform that and low.” In the Vienna Hours, noble birds opposition into some human prey on loathsome snails and flies. (Figure opposition. No rule specifies 5) The proximity of snails and birds could which human opposition one reflect that juxtaposition of high and low, or must choose so long as the more specifically the spiritual and the relative positions of the pair are earthly. In Classical antiquity, the snail was a comparable to those of the symbol of mistrust, deemed suspicious for beasts. One may apply such a carrying its house on its back, fearful of fable to the strong and the weak, thieves.[26] Fol. 53v in the Vienna Hours has a the rich and the poor, the devil charming depiction of one snail with a shell and the sinner, the landlord and 93 the tenant farmer.[29] inquiry may also have been an important cultural factor in the production of the The insects that appear in the Vienna manuscripts. New categories were added to Hours never appear interacting with a species the common compendia of animals in the that is not its hunter or oppressor. Flies appear thirteenth century, particularly bugs and near the beaks of birds, a bee is chased by a fish. Unlike older bestiaries, these newer human, and snails are hunted by other birds. publications elaborated on these new (Figure 8) The only time that insects are not categories of animals, not by moral allegories, being hunted is in the company of their own but by encyclopedic entries such as those kind, or by themselves. Practically related to in Etymologiae.[32] This developing interest in earthly life, hunting was a common empirical observation was prevalent in the preoccupation of the nobility, particularly thirteenth century in England and Italy, and falconry. Mary of Burgundy herself was an eventually manifested in Flemish art. avid falconer, a reason to include such a The Vienna Hours marks an important prolific number of birds in her manuscript, transition point in Flemish art in the fifteenth particularly those that overpower insects. The century, but not only for the insects in the hunter and prey configuration in the Vienna margins. The illusionistic “open window” Hours can tangibly and directly reflect this scenes illuminated by the Master of Mary of interest in hunting, but also a symbolic Burgundy became the style a la mode. As dominion of good over evil. artistic naturalism developed in Italy, it The appearance of insects is not flourished particularly in Flemish art.[33] While limited to the pages of illuminated the Vienna Hours insects were relegated to the manuscripts. No comprehensive account of secondary marginal decoration, the insect insects in visual art is available, but numerous was highlighted as the central visual fourteenth and fifteenth century images component of later manuscripts and other portray insects. Whatever the symbolic mediums. Insects no longer played a reading, the elevation of insects—bees, subordinate role hidden in the exuberant moths, grasshoppers, snails, and flies— from acanthus marginalia. Instead they become the garden to the pages of elaborate the most highly illusionistic component of the personal devotion books, practically requires manuscript. the search for symbolic and social The most striking example of these intentions. In spite of this impulse, there is illusionistic insect illuminations is in the Hours of some debate about the extent to which Englebert of Nassau, completed between animals, including insects, should be read 1470 and 1490 very near the completion of symbolically. It can be argued that the the Vienna Hours.[34] The same illuminator of presence of an animal in visual art is wholly the famous window scenes, the Master of allegorical and symbolic, a practice begun Mary of Burgundy, painted the insects in the largely by Erwin Panofsky in his distinction borders of the manuscript. These insects are between iconography and iconology.[30] truly nature-morte, so convincing that they Others argue that the employment of animals cast a shadow on the page beneath them, is strictly decorative or visual. Rather than extending the world of the manuscript from limiting this study to one philosophy or another, text, to image, to real life. (Figure 9) Many it seems prudent to consider the imagery in insects populate the margins of the Vienna both ways. While some insect images are Hours as symbolic vignettes, but insects absent-minded copies of bestiaries, and transform into the primary focal points of others are merely decorative, many several illusionistic borders in the Hours of manuscripts which incorporate animal Englebert of Nassau. imagery may well reflect meaningful choices The insects in the Hours of Engelbert of made by the patron for his or her book.[31] Nassau are triumphs of illusionism. As Otto Acknowledging the symbolic and Pächt demonstrates, the illusionistic quality of decorative functions of these insect the images expands the dimensions of the illuminations, the emergence of scientific book into multiple spheres. The first dimension 94
Fig.5 Hours of Mary of Burgundy codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 22r,95 1482, Vienna, Austrian National Library
Fig.6 Hours of Mary of Burgundy codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 53v Pentecost, 1482, Vienna, Austrian National Library
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Fig.7 97 Hours of Mary of Burgundy codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 172v, 1482, Vienna, Austrian National Library
is the physical book page itself, the flat areas Nassau. The only creature that appears in where the text is written. Then, the next the Vienna Hours and not the Hours of dimension is the decorated frame on the Englebert of Nassau is the grasshopper. The page which separates text from illustration with only insects in the Hours of Englebert of implied depth. Behind the frame and the text Nassau and not in the Vienna Hours are the is the miniature. It too contains deep ladybug, or “ladybird,” and the caterpillar. recessions into space. Then finally, as nature- The combination of flies, dragonflies, morte, an insect alights itself onto the page, and butterflies is known to be a symbol of so convincingly painted that it casts its own Christ.[37] This combination appears shadow across the faux bejeweled frame. The repeatedly throughout the Hours of Englebert insect exists in the fictional space of the of Nassau. In addition to the interpretations of manuscript, and illusionistically in the real flies and snails already addressed, the space of the patron. ladybugs, dragonflies, and butterflies of In both Otto Pächt’s account of the the Hours of Engelbert of Nassau add further work of the Master of Mary of Burgundy and nuance to the symbolic use of insects in J.J.G. Alexander’s text accompanying the devotional manuscripts. Ladybugs, or “lady- facsimile of the Hours of Engelbert of Nassau, birds,” as they were called, represented the the suggestion is that once these flowers and seven sorrows of the Virgin.[38] Also striking is insects are used as trompe l’oeil, literally to the naturalism of the varying species of fool the eye, they can no longer be butterflies. Each butterfly is painted with considered in the context of symbolism careful observation, and the varying breeds because they are meant to be “real” and can be attributed to the woods of Ardenne in outside the realm of the Brussels.[39] narrative.[35] Alexander and others have also One final symbolic interpretation may suggested that the use of flowers and insects hold significance for the use of both insects in the borders of the Hours of Engelbert of and flowers in both manuscripts. As Nassau is simply a “scatter” effect, claiming mementos from pilgrimages, many people the artist simply wants to “abandon the would return with objects such as peacock anecdotal purpose of the still life and simply feathers, flowers, and insects like butterflies sprinkle the flowers or jewels at random on the and dragonflies. These objects have been colored ground.”[36] This supposition is found pressed into the pages of strikingly lacking in subtlety. If the use manuscripts. The use of insects and flowers in of trompe l’oeil insects was strictly decorative, the margin may be a substitute or reference a tool used to please the eye, than what for such practices.[40] This is strikingly prompted the seemingly intentional selection presented in George Hoefnagel’s Painted of a restricted number of insects? Additionally, Dragonflies with Real Wings positioned atop the rich borders, these insects Attached from Animalia rationalia et are not relegated to mere marginalia. They insecta. Although completed much later in are almost tangible to the reader, and are the 1594-96, during a period of heightened most prominent decorative program of the fascination with specimens, it is an example of manuscript. There must be a purpose beyond how the page served as a medium between virtuoso painting and decoration, one which is reality and illustration. both symbolic and cultural. The Hours of Englebert of Nassau was The distribution of insect types between scribed by Nicholas Spierinc, and the principal the two manuscripts is remarkably similar. Both illuminator was the Master of Mary of books contain flies, snails, and moths, and in Burgundy. Both artists also contributed to both books, flies and moths or butterflies are the Vienna Hours. The fact that both artists the most frequently portrayed. While worked on both manuscripts binds the content the Vienna Hours shows only one reference to and images of one to the other, and a dragonfly, in the form of a hybrid dragonfly legitimizes a comparison of the bird creature, the dragonfly appears in all of its illuminations. The Master of Mary of glory in the pages of the Hours of Engelbert of Burgundy’s oeuvre demonstrates an intentional 98
Fig.8 Selected Hunting Scenes, Hours of Mary of Burgundy codex Vindobonensis 1857, 1482, Vienna, Austrian National Library
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Fig.9 Hours of Engelbert of Nassau, MS Douce 219-220, fols. 19v-20r, c. 1470-1490, Bodleian Library, Oxford
advancement of illusionistic style between the source of contemplation as they populated manuscripts. The development of the career the margins of two of the most lavish and of the Master of Mary of Burgundy emphasizes innovative manuscripts in the fifteenth both the increasing interest in naturalism, and century. Drawing on a pattern established by the ability to employ nature as a metaphor for his earlier manuscript, the Vienna Hours, the life and faith. Master of the Hours of Mary of Burgundy The brilliant illuminations in the Hours of penetrated the page, lifting the insect in Engelbert of Nassau are indeed beautiful, the Hours of Englebert of Nassau from simple innovative, and pleasing to the eye. Yet, the drolleries to the realm of reality. The emerging specificity and arrangement of the objects in interest in naturalism and empirical the borders is too controlled to ignore an observation of the Italian Renaissance finally implied meaning, either literal or symbolic. For migrated from Italy to Flanders, and the medieval audience, insects would have manifested as the illusionistic creatures that been a source of irritation, necessity, mystery, populate the pages of the Hours of Englebert and even spiritual guidance. The prolific use of Nassau. of insects to enliven the borders in these James H. Murrow contends that manuscripts only speaks to the relevance of perhaps the interpretation of manuscripts as these creatures. Whether a representation of laden with symbolism is a bit overwrought. He the average garden pest, or a symbol of suggests that the pursuit of disguised Christ, insects must have been a significant symbolism prevents the images themselves 100 from speaking.[41] With the Vienna Hours, and [xiii] Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries: Text, image, ideology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 169. finally the Hours of Englebert of Nassau, the growing emphasis on the natural world is the [xiv] Marcel Dicke, “Insects in Western Art,” American visual language between image and Entomologist Winter (2000): 229. viewer. The innovations of visual perception [xv] Payne, 81. could indeed finally be the symbolic message. The creative force of God could [xvi] Hassig, 53. be harnessed by artist to imitate nature [xvii] The social structure of the monastery is discussed by itself.[42] As Thomas and Virginia Kauffman Francis Klingender, Animals in Art and Thought to the end of emphasize, “In illuminated manuscripts there the Middle Ages (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971), 359. The Virgin Mary as model citizen is addressed by Hassig, 58. was no separation of the sacred and what seems to us the secular realms. All things in [xviii] Kritsky, 184. nature might be considered to have [ixx] “My son, eat thou honey, because it is good; and the belonged to the sacred.”[43] honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste. So shall the knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul.” Proverbs 24:13-14 as quoted in Juan Antonio Ramirez, The Beehive Metaphor: From Endnotes Gaudi to Le Corbusier (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 16.
[i] Provenance information and theories derived from Eric [xx] Hassig, 169. "And God said, Let us make man in our Inglis, The Hours of Mary of Burgundy (London: Harvey Miller image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over Publishers, 1995), 13-17. The general consensus is that the the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the book was produced after 1475 when the Master of the Hours cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing of Mary of Burgundy’s first works appear, and no later than the that creepeth upon the earth." Genesis 1:26 1480s.
[xxi] Andre Stipanovic, “Bees and Ants: Perceptions of [ii] The famous portrait on folio 14v is likely to be Mary of Imperialism in Virgil’s Aenied and Georgics,” in Insect Poetics, Burgundy, her headpiece carrying the initials RIM; perhaps a ed. Eric C. Brown (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, partial anagram for Marie and the portrait coincides with other 2006), 16. descriptions of Mary of Burgundy. Additionally, her elegant dress indicates she is a lady of the court. Feminine word [xxii] Neri, xi. endings indicate that the book was made for a woman.
[xxiii] See footnote 6. [iii] Antonine de Schryver as cited by Inglis, 10.
[xxiv] Lillian Randall, “The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare,” [iiiv] Otto Pacht, “The Master of Mary of Burgundy,” The Speculum 37 (1962): 358. The snails that appear in these Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 85 (1944): 299. manuscripts are engaged in a snail battle specifically. [v] Janice Neri, The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 (Minneapolis: University of [xxv] Both images are discussed in a short essay by Helen S. Minnesota Press, 2011), xi. Neri explains a broad medieval Ettinger, “The Virgin Snail,” Journal of the Warburg and definition of insects using a woodblock illustration of insects by Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978), 316. Konrad von Megenberg in 1475 Buch der Nature, Huntington Library. This print includes images of spiders, worms, moths, [xxvi] Randall, 361. ants, frogs, and snails, among others. [xxvii] Kritsky, 185. [vi] Janette Benton, The Medieval Menagerie: Animals in the art of the Middle Ages (New York: Abbeville Press, 1992), 17. [xxviii] Arnold Clayton Henderson, “Medieval Beasts and Modern Cages: The Making of Meaning in Fables and [vii] Ann Payne, Medieval Beasts (New York: New Amsterdam Bestiaries,” PMLA 97 (1982), 45. Books, 1990), 9. [xxix] Henderson, 45. [viii] Maurits Smeyers and Jan Van der Sock, eds. Flemish Illuminated Manuscripts: 1475-1550 (Ghent: Ludion Press, [xxx] See discussion of iconography and iconology in Erwin 1996), 13. Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Anchor Books, 1955) 26-39. [ix] Benton, 18. [xxxi] Benton, 110. [x] Benton, 17. [xxxii] Hassig, 173. [xi] As noted in Gene Kritsky, “The Insects and Other Arthropods of the Bible, the New Revised Version,” American [xxxiii] Paula H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Entomologist (1997): 185. Experience in the Scientific Revolution, (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004) 33. [xii] Nicky Coutts, “The Unholy Insect,” Antennae 3 (2007): 32.
101 [xxxiv] The manuscript belonged to Englebert of Nassau, and Eileen Yanoviak is a doctoral student in the Art History program then Philip the Bold, son of Mary of Burgundy. at the University of Louisville. Her primary area of research is J.J.G Alexander, The Master of Mary of Burgundy: A Book of 19th century American landscape, and she is broadly Hours for Englebert of Nassau (New York: George Braziller: interested in the ways nature is interpreted by artists and 1970), 7. society. She earned an MA in Art, Art History in 2011 and a BA in Art History and French in 2005, all from the University of [xxxv] Alexander, 18. Arkansas at Little Rock where she has been Adjunct Faculty for the past six years. She is currently the Curatorial Research [xxxvi] Alexander, 17. Fellow at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft. Prior to pursuing her graduate degree, she worked in curatorial and [xxxvii] Hassig, 169. development for the Arkansas Arts Center.
[xxxviii] Sylvia Landsberg, The Medieval Garden (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2000), 113.
[xxxix] Alexander, commentary to plate 29.
[xl] Thomas DeCosta Kauffman and Virginia Roehrig Kaufman, “The Sanctification of Nature: Observations on the Origins of Trompe l’oeil in Netherlandish Book Painting of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 19
(1991): 58.
[xli] James H. Marrow, “Symbol and Meaning in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 16 (1986): 161.
[xlii] Smith, 54.
[xliii] Kauffman, 59.
Back Cover Image: Chris Musina, Tiger Head, in a Box, oil on canvas 24" x 24", 2011© Musina 102
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