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Louise Lippincott and Andreas Bluhm, 2005, Merrell Publishers: London

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Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750–1900

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Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750–1900

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Using examples from hundreds of artworks, this exhibition catalogue argues that the way we look at nature - and animals in particular - altered dramatically during “revolutionary changes in political systems, methods of production, and technologies” (p13). A succession of prints, sketches, botanical drawings, paintings, photographs, busts and ceramics illustrates a view of animals as objects to be classified, hunted, captured, displayed, worn, vivisected, domesticated, and even loved. They also show the way we projected our own concerns and fantasies onto the animal body - as religious or political allegories, as status symbols, and (post-Darwin, post-Empire) as a distorting mirror to our sense of civilised exceptionalism.

It’s important to notice who the ‘we’ is in this story. The exhibition and catalogue, no doubt by design, draws entirely on the high art of European and “American” sources, so reflects only the experience of a wealthy Western elite. The story of other classes’ and other cultures’ ways of looking are not included.

What makes this book useful for me is as a set of questions for now. What do contemporary images of animals tell us about our real and imagined relationships with nature? What images dominate, and which are missing? And - in the midst of dramatic political, social and environmental change - what are the images we might need? And is the 'we' who needs them?

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ed. Nato Thompson 2005, MASS MoCA Publications

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Becoming Animal: Contemporary Art in the Animal Kingdom

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Becoming Animal: Contemporary Art in the Animal Kingdom

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The catalogue for a 2005 exhibition at MASS MoCA.

Amazon says: "Contemporary artists investigate the boundaries between animal and human in a world of transgenics and dissolving distinctions... In an age when scientists say they can no longer specify the exact difference between human and animal, living and dead, many contemporary artists have chosen to use animals in their work—as the ultimate "other," as metaphor, as reflection. The attempt to discover what is animal, not surprisingly, leads to a greater understanding of what it means to be human. In Becoming Animal, 12 internationally known artists investigate the shifting boundaries between animal and human. Their explorations may be a barometer of things to come."

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https://shop.whitechapelgallery.org/products/animals

From website:

Animals have become the focus of much recent art, informing numerous works and projects featured at major exhibitions. Contemporary art has become a privileged terrain for exploring interspecies relationships, providing the conditions for diverse disciplines and theoretical positions to engage with animal behaviour and consciousness.

Artists’ engagement with animals opens up new perspectives on the dynamics of dominance, oppression and exclusion, with parallels in human society; and animal nature is at the heart of debates on the ‘anthropocene’ era and the ecological concerns of scientists, thinkers and artists alike. Centred on contemporary artworks, this anthology attests to the trans-disciplinary nature of this subject, with art as one of its principal points of convergence.

Artists surveyed include Allora & Calzadilla, Francis Alÿs, Julieta Aranda, Brando Ballengée, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Lygia Clark, Marcus Coates, Jimmie Durham, Marcel Dzama, Simone Forti, Pierre Huyghe, Natalie Jeremijenko, Joan Jonas, Eduardo Kac, Mike Kelley, Henri Michaux, Robert Morris, Henrik Olesen, Lea Porsager, Carolee Schneemann, Michael Stevenson, Rodel Tapaya, Rosemarie Trockel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Haegue Yang, Adam Zaretsky.

Writers include Giorgio Agamben, Steve Baker, Raymond Bellour, Walter Benjamin, John Berger, Jonathan Burt, Ted Chiang, Simon Critchley, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, David Elliott, Carla Freccero, Maria Fusco, Tristan Garcia, Félix Guattari, Donna J. Haraway, Seung-Hoon Jeong, Miwon Kwon, Chus Martinez, Brian Massumi, Thomas Nagel, Jean- Luc Nancy, Ingo Niermann, Vincent Normand, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Adriano Sack, Will Self, Jan Verwoert, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2015/apr/18/silverback-gorilla-cracks-glass-nebraska-enclosure-video

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Oil and acrylic on board (2023)

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Taken from the animated GIF version of the gorilla attack video. As the gorilla's body fills the screen we see the audience reflected in the glass.

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Image from the book 'Children of the Forest' by Elsa Beskow, 1910

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There's a lot going on here. This is the kind of picture that would have scared me as a child. but as an adult, I find it eerily reassuring. The children are comfortable here - look at the way the girl on the right gently touches her frog friend.

Elsa Beskow was a much-loved children's book author and illustrator in Sweden. Amazon summary: "The children of the forest live deep in the roots of an old pine tree. They collect wild mushrooms and blueberries and shelter under toadstools when it rains. They play with the squirrels and frogs, and when autumn comes, they collect and prepare food to see them through the long winter, until the warm spring breeze starts to blow."

This feels like an elegy to a disappearing way of life, like a fantasy version of 'Cider with Laurie', or a precursor to 'My Neighbour Totoro'.

(See also: Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750–1900)

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In the 2009 UK-Romanian film Katalin Varga, the lead character seeks revenge against the man who raped her in a forest. In the scene from 50'25" she recounts the attack, and then narrates the following:

"I remained still for hours, after. Lying there in the silence, waiting for the darkness to hide my shame from the world. A fawn of the forest came to my side and told me not to weep and that Jesus died for these men's sins. I asked the fawn, 'Whose sins have I just died for?' He didn't answer. and just shed a tear for me. A wise owl flew to me and slowly, more creatures of the night came to be by my side. The rain started to fall, washing away the blood and semen. The animals gathered enough twigs, leaves and grass in their mouths, claws and beaks to cover my naked body and keep me warm for the night. They announced that the Lord is with me. And upon this, they stood guard. Eleven years on, they're still here to make sure I never fall again."

What to make of this? The animals can be read as angels - beings with direct access to God (the Bible is rich in animals: 93 individual species are listed here https://www.learnreligions.com/animals-in-the-bible-700169)

But also I'm thinking about the neuroscience of trauma - the parts of the brain that come into action to hold us together after trauma. This article https://www.bostontrials.com/how-trauma-changes-the-brain posits that the 3-Part Brain (reptilian, mammalian and neommalian) closes down its higher functions, reducing us to a reptilian "fight, flee or freeze" response.

Could we interpret Katalin Varga's experience as a form of self-created animal therapy (https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/animal-therapy) in which the mammalian kicks in as a survival mechanism? Or in which the human brain makes sense of its extraordinary transformation into reptile?

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KATALIN VARGA | lungmetraj de Peter Strickland | HU-RO-ENG | CINEPUB

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'Young Girl Eating a Bird (The pleasure)' by Rene Magritte, 1927

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Made on the fly using the slo-mo feature on my iPhone 5SE. Music by experimental New York singer/performance artist Meredith Monk, in which her vocal becomes rather birdlike. Through the music, I wanted to give the impression that the audience 'becomes burd' as they watch the hornbill fly through the auditorium. Mirror neurones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron

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Filmed surreptitiously on iPhone 5SE.

What I'm trying to do here is observe the different responses from the audience who's observing the orangutan. The kids want to connect with him, whereas the ageing man at the end gazes somewhat mournfully, returning again.

My supervisor sent me from here to Thomas Struth's Museum photographs, which observe the audiences in major galleries. The parallels are really useful....

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Sketching from a high point overlooking the orangutan enclosure, two things become clear. The moat creates an island - and this reminds me of Singapore. But also island-as-metaphor for life inland death. And the ‘trees’ are leafless, to enable visitors to have an uninterrupted view of the prisoners. Foucault’s panopticon.

Jeremy suggests I make a video from this viewpoint. That’s a good idea, but I’ll need a selfie stick tripod, and probably a fisheye lens.

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Orangutan Island. Photos 5 Feb 2023. Collage 6 Feb 2023

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An image made from iPhone photos stitched together, Hockney-style. This method was pragmatic (I wanted the whole moat shown, and have a basic camera) rather than artistic. The multiple perspective thing isn’t important to me at the moment

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For many years, London Zoo held chimps tea parties, where visitors watched trained chimpanzees acting out the civilised ritual of afternoon tea. Decades later (I guess) the tea company PG Tips ran this series of advertisements, which play on ideas of working class aspiration.

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Nigel Rothfels,2002, John Hopkins University Press

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Savages & Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo

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Savages & Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo

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Something incredible/ Need to get the picture of the people standing on paintings

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An idea is to add an audio track to the Singapore Zoo footage, in which 'members of the public' speak about their relationship with zoos and animals.

But - like the Katalin Varga monologue and a lot of my favourite songs - the audio footage will make a diversion. Beginning with rational statements and personal stories related to animals, the audio will then journey into a more dreamlike, irrational space... taking the audience into an altered state of consciousness.

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Old Hat (2019) Oil and acrylic on canvas

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I picked up the catalogue The Lost Paradise as a break from reading about human's connection with animals. I just wanted to enjoy the Swedish artist Mamma Andersson's paintings. But the accompanying essay by Karl Ove Knausgaard returns me to the same themes, but focuses on the act of painting:

A tree trunk. Broad, massive, clearly ancient, probably an oak… For a few weeks.. it hung on a white ·wall at David Zwirner, in New York […] I assume that everyone who visited the gallery and walked around looking at the paintings had seen many tree trunks in their lives; in fact, I would not be surprised if they had seen a good number of them that very day. Now they were seeing this. I am sure some of them just glanced at it before moving on to the next painting, but many no doubt stopped and stood looking at it for a while, perhaps even bending closer to study the details. They probably wouldn't have behaved in the same way when faced with a real tree trunk - for example, one in Central Park. No, they would very likely have walked past a real tree trunk with no further ado, perhaps without even noticing it, as if it were invisible. Obviously this is so because painting is a language, art is communication, a picture is an expression. The tree, or its part, expresses only itself, and has no meaning beyond that. So what does this painting express? (p47)

Painting elevates its objects, and it does so by taking away their objectivity, since it is not as themselves that the objects become visible, but in the encounter, which is always subjective. And perhaps, it strikes me now, it is precisely the encounter that is the elevation. For the world in itself, and all the things it contains, is arbitrary, without value; it is we who give it value. Painting incorporates the objects of our world, which is the world, by encountering them. (p49)

Although I'm currently travelling in the direction of video, audio and/or participatory art, this is a reminder of the power of painting. Painting - and looking at painting - as a form of encounter.