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The Animal in Contemporary Art
From: The Natural History Museum
| By:
Steve Baker |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Animals have always been attractive subjects for artists and their popularity has not diminished in modern times. Artists have radicalised the use of animals to address a range of questions about morality, responsibility, our relationship with the natural world and the nature of art itself. Steve Baker, author and academic, explores a few of the issues surrounding the depiction of the animal in contemporary art. |
  ne explanation for the continuing attraction of the animal for artists, philosophers and others is the perception--which may or may not be justified--that the animal is in some way aligned with creativity. This idea is given an unusual twist in the work of Olly & Suzi, who generally paint endangered species in the wild at the closest of quarters. In some of the pieces they exhibited at The Natural History Museum in London from July 2001 to May 2002, the artists sought to convey the urgent reality of the animals they depicted by giving the animals themselves a role in the mark-making process, even if that appeared to involve 'damaging' particular works. Their work epitomizes a new ecological sensibility in art that stresses the interdependence of living beings in the contemporary world. It would be naive to suggest that art now has as much to offer the animal as the animal has traditionally offered to art, but in a variety of ways artists seem keen to work more closely with the animal than ever before. |
Animal transformations
Opportunities to take on the guise of the animal are eagerly grasped. In the 1990s Jordan Baseman taught himself taxidermy in order to make a number of striking pieces that often used the skins of domestic animals discovered as roadkill outside his studio in east London. The finished pieces occupy an uneasy middle ground somewhere between sculpture and conventional taxidermy. Baseman himself thinks of them as 'empty trophies'. |
One such piece, entitled Be Your Dog, is essentially a headdress make from a scalped pair of Alsatian's ears. It has only been exhibited once, mounted approximately at head height on the wall of a gallery in Austria. Though never intended to be worn, Baseman found to his surprise that visitors to the gallery eagerly aligned themselves with the piece, their backs to the wall, in order to have themselves photographed appearing to 'wear' the ears and to think themselves into this new state of being, just as the title suggests. As the artist acknowledges, 'it's about frustrated desire, more than anything else, because there is a strong desire to wear it. It might sicken you, but you do feel compelled to put the damn thing on'. |
The adoption of animal guises seems to be central to contemporary art's exploration of the animal. In being both outlandish and preposterously transparent, however, these guises make no claim to the truth or reality or nature of the imitated animal. Instead they suggest playful exchanges between the human and the animal, or between one animal and another. The work of William Wegman offers a familiar example. In many of Wegman's photographs of his famous pet Weimaraner, Man Ray, the dog imitates or is dressed as various other kinds of animal: leopard, zebra, bat, dinosaur and so on. As the artist laconically puts it: 'I like things that fluctuate'. The dressing up is generally a half-hearted and haphazard affair, as in Frog/Frog II, where the dog looks down at a frog that it feebly imitates by wearing ping-pong ball eyes and green rubber flippers on its hind legs. |
The adoption of an animal image can be just that easy and approximate. And this is perhaps how the animal is now most productively and imaginatively thought about in art: as something actively to be performed rather than passively represented, an event rather than a subject. It is not that distinctions don't operate here, between one animal and another, or between reality and representation, but they seem to operate increasingly fluidly. |
The living animal in the gallery
Despite a few familiar precursors, the increasing amount of recent art to feature living animals seems also to be a new phenomenon. And given that the animal in the gallery space is seldom, if ever, there of its own choosing, it is hardly surprising that the ethical issues raised by its treatment by the artist have now come to the fore. Mark Dion's Some notes towards a manifesto for artists working with or about the living world, in the catalogue of the Serpentine Gallery's Greenhouse Effect exhibition in 2000, is an earnest set of handwritten notes that eschews the irony found in much of his earlier work. The manifesto includes this uncompromising declaration:
'Artists working with living organisms must know what they are doing. They must take responsibility for the plants' or animals' welfare. If an organism dies during an exhibition, the viewer should assume the death to be the intention of the artist'.
That statement could certainly be applied to a work exhibited at the Trapholt Art Museum in Denmark earlier in 2000. Marco Evaristti's installation displayed ten ordinary kitchen blenders, in each of which a single goldfish was swimming. Visitors to the exhibition were free to switch on any blender, 'transforming the content to fish soup', as one report flippantly put it. But even this piece, which may seem to exemplify art's cynical manipulation of animals, has been the subject of other more generous readings. The animal rights philosopher Peter Singer noted the cruelty of keeping the fish in such small sterile containers and of allowing exhibition-goers to 'grind them up' on a whim, but he also acknowledged that 'when you give people the option of turning the blender on, you raise the question of the power we do have over animals'. |
Art, animals and responsibility
In the past year the issue of our power over animals has been raised most acutely by the controversy surrounding a transgenic artwork by the Chicago-based artist Eduardo Kac, entitled GFP Bunny. Kac has a very clear sense of the kind of art that he makes, and of the kind of art that he thinks worth making. 'The artist is not a decorator', he insists. 'The artist is a philosopher'. More enigmatically, he asserts that 'art is philosophy in the wild'. These views inform the complex manner in which Kac's recent transgenic art addresses the status of the living animal. For him, human and animal do not constitute securely discrete forms of life or fields of knowledge. He intends his art to be an 'examination of the notions of normalcy, heterogeneity, purity, hybridity and otherness'. |
Kac believes that 'artists can offer important alternatives to the polarised debate' about genetic engineering, putting 'ambiguity and subtlety' in place of polarity. He defines transgenic art as 'a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering to transfer natural or synthetic genes to an organism to create unique living beings'. In the case of the GFP Bunny artwork, this involved the creation in a French laboratory of an albino rabbit whose entire body glows green under fluorescent light. Kac is still campaigning to get the laboratory to release the rabbit, named Alba, so that she can live with the artist and his family in Chicago as he had intended. (The laboratory's director claimed that the artist had never been given authorization to take her away.) |
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| Eduardo Kac with Alba (2000) | |
Whether or not viewers approve of the use and treatment of animals in Kac's transgenic art, his comments about the attitudes that inform that work--and in particular about his attitude to Alba--are generally unambiguous. 'Responsibility is key', he insists, and he objects 'to treating an animal as an object, be it an art object or an object of any kind'. In contrast to the one-way relationship of power that is evident in 'corporate genetic engineering', he argues that the artist's responsibility is 'to conceptualise and experience other more dignified relationships with our transgenic other'. Transgenic art's creation of 'unique living beings' must 'be done with great care, with acknowledgement of the complex issues raised and, above all, with a commitment to respect, nurture, and love the life thus created'. Of Alba herself he writes: 'I will never forget the moment when I first held her in my arms...She immediately awoke in me a strong and urgent sense of responsibility for her well-being'. But what exactly is the nature of that responsibility? What does it entail? What actions does it permit or prohibit? |
In the transgenic projects that created Alba and the various animals of his more recent project, The Eighth Day, Kac worked with GFP--a protein derived from a particular kind of jellyfish. He claims that GFP is 'deemed harmless by every scientist who works with it', but he doesn't comment on the views of those scientists who choose not to work with it. Those who criticize the procedure do not claim that Alba has been harmed or that she ever was in pain--the procedure precedes the animal's birth--but rather that Kac seems to overlook the larger picture. |
That picture was presented uncompromisingly by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in a recent lecture entitled 'The animal that therefore I am'. Derrida observed that over the past 200 years 'traditional forms of treatment of the animal have been turned upside down by the joint developments of zoological, ethological, biological and genetic forms of knowledge, and the always inseparable techniques of intervention with respect to their object...namely the living animal'. |
This does have a bearing on Alba and Kac's other transgenic creatures. Like all transgenic animals created in the laboratory, Alba emerges from what Derrida plainly calls the 'hell' of 'the imposition of genetic experimentation' that has condemned untold numbers of other laboratory animals to 'an artificial infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous'. Kac may judge the procedures he uses to be safe because 'transgenic technology has been successfully and regularly employed in the creation of mice since 1980 and in rabbits since 1985'. But that, of course, is precisely the technology that has shamefully led to a very significant increase in the numbers of animals currently subjected to laboratory experiments. |
Nevertheless, Kac sees it as his responsibility to 'dramatize' the technologies of genetic engineering. This, for him, is the artist's distinctive role. He says: 'if we leave technology behind in art, if we don't question how technology affects our lives, if we don't use these media to raise questions about contemporary life, who is going to do that?' In the case of GFP Bunny it could be said that Kac got it wrong, because at the time of writing, contrary to his intentions, Alba is still stuck in the French laboratory. But getting things wrong is one model of what art quite properly does. It calls for an experimental attitude that is evident in Kac's assertion that 'art's legitimacy lies in its ability constantly to reinvent itself', and to remain open to unexpected transformations. |
As an artwork, GFP Bunny remains open in almost every respect. The uncomfortable irony of this situation is obvious. Had everything gone smoothly, Alba would presumably be living a more agreeable life in a Chicago household and the GFP Bunny project would be, quite simply, of less interest. This is not intended as an aesthetic judgement that coldly prefers Alba's current situation; it is to say that had everything gone to plan, there would have been less to learn from the work, and from how it slipped from the artist's control. It would also have been far less likely to find unexpected support from a spokesperson for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who commented that in highlighting the plight of such animals the controversy could be 'helpful for laboratory animals everywhere'. It is in its goings-wrong, therefore, that this remains for the present Kac's most compelling project. |
The postmodern animal
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| Sheep (1997). | |
The general theme of things going uncomfortably wrong is a useful approach with which to address the question of what might be called the 'postmodern' animal. The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard defines the postmodern as 'that which denies itself the solace of good forms'. This idea of 'good form' represents the most lamentably timid option, the very antithesis of art. In contrast, the thing that renders postmodern so many of the animals in contemporary art is precisely their botched or problematic relation to form. This is an aesthetic rooted in conceptions of the artist's own experience as an unfitting human, and it crops up in much recent art and literature. In Edwina Ashton's video performance, Sheep, the artist sits at a desk in a homemade sheep costume. Telling appalling sheep jokes at the expense of the animal identity she has taken on, she physically tugs the features of the sheep's makeshift face back and forth, and agitatedly wrings her sheep 'hands' throughout the four-minute duration of the piece. |
Similarly, in Will Self's novel Great Apes, the central character--the artist Simon Dykes--feels like a stranger in his own body from the start. He thinks of this body as 'this physical idiot twin', and finds himself experiencing 'the psychic and the physical ever so slightly out of registration'. This is what Dykes calls 'that lack-of-fit'. Later in the novel, he wakes one morning (after a night of particularly heavy recreational drug abuse) to find that he has turned into a chimpanzee, as have all other inhabitants of his previously-human world. His unwillingness to accept this new animal status is itself described in terms of a physical mismatch, 'as if the limbs he were attempting to control were not altogether coextensive with those he actually had'. |
 Without overstating the extent to which such discomfort may now be characteristic of the compromised beings who inhabit a postmodern world, contemporary art is certainly awash with unfitting animal transformations. Jan Fabre's extraordinary video installation at The Natural History Museum in London in 2000 was an instructive instance of how this postmodern aesthetic may be understood to operate. It involved a group of the museum's entomologists, wearing goggles and makeshift insect costumes which were clumsily strapped on over their overalls, clanking noisily around the museum's galleries and variously imitating flies, beetles, butterflies and parasitic wasps as they simultaneously (and inaudibly) held forth on their specialisms. In this visual fable of experts performing inexpertly, it was the scope for exchange and becoming that was central. Called A Consilience, Fabre's vision was of 'a sharing of knowledge', across disciplines and perhaps also across species. |
The beautiful animal?
 There remains a difficult question around the notion of beauty. Can contemporary animal imagery be beautiful without resorting to the complacent or sentimental 'good form' complained of by Lyotard? Two artists who use photography show that it can. Frank Noelker aims for 'the strongest combination of beauty and sadness' that he can get, and says of the animals he photographs in zoos that 'they don't fit' in what he calls 'these absurd spaces'. The artist's work is precisely to make that lack of fit evident. |
 The perception of animals as 'beautiful' is also central to the aesthetic concerns of Britta Jaschinski. For her, the artist's responsibilities lie in the detailed and difficult work of looking, and of communicating critical knowledge in that looking. Jaschinski's remarkable photographic series Beasts, from the late 1990s, is driven by her conviction that 'animals don't need us'. It aims to chart the animal's line of flight from the human, and to reinforce the animal's unavailability to the human. One consequence of this radical un-humaning of animals, which attends instead to what Jaschinski calls 'their own existence, their dignity and their beauty', is a visual ambiguity that loses all sight of taxonomic propriety. In the photograph above, the body of a zebra could almost be mistaken for that of an exotic translucent fish. In another of Jaschinski's photographs the ears of a llama have more than a passing resemblance to the wings of a butterfly. |
 Animal unconcern here takes the form of the artist's unconcern. She says of her extraordinary gibbon photograph, Hylobates lar, that 'it really doesn't matter' that it is sometimes mistaken for a frog. The disorientation is deliberate. 'That's what I'm interested in', she says. 'On first glance you don't even recognise it as an animal'. The work of the image lies elsewhere, as it does in almost all postmodern art. It lies in sloughing preconceptions and recognisable identities, and in finding a space for thinking about ourselves, as much as animals, as 'things that fluctuate'. |
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