ANIMAL

[BEYOND HUMAN]

key words: haunting, mourning,body, animal, human, revolution

Spectre – a dead person who has not been properly mourned, who haunts us, bother us, refusing to pass over to the ‘other side’.

A dead person horror of whose death lays not only upon the close family & friend but upon all those who cross the path of their history.

But for animal, there is a lack of mourning. Animal has different agency from human, and no one writes about the history of an animal, those 2 problems are structural elements of such haunting. Perhaps because of distance of civil eating, we repress of deny the proper death for the animal and such repression breed a haunting.

Vulnerability:

Animals – their suffering – the question of its lack of certain power – speech, thought, self-consciousness, representation…

The body expresses the limits of the body which itself is he necessary mode and the limit horizon for communication.

Limited by the body but also empowered by it we communicate a vulnerability across species. If we are haunted by the death of animals, it is because we too have bodies which are vulnerable to a violent death that goes without mourning.

Rethink human and non-human community.

The haunting through the animal body and the ways that the animality of the animal opens up the animality of the human and so troubles good sense and common sense.

No sense in which a revolution should abide by human clockwork. As haunting manifests, the revolution has already taken place.

This haunting from the past is for a future, to come.

Revolution is an event which has taken shape in the past and haunts us.

There is no calendar for the animal revolution.

Being A Known Animal

Non human primates 灵长类动物/apes are ambiguous in that they exist at the boundary of the ‘almost human’.

Language has been particularly problematic in relation to non-human and human primates first: because the biological difference between human and apes (apes have neither capacity to speak n write) second: language involves the communication of shared concept between speaker enabled by the mind of the speaking agents.

Problematic the fictions of human-chimpanzee communication through a consideration of arguments about control training which is conceived of as a form of language.

The animal actor – chimpanzee become popular in mainstream films. Critical reception comments on the performances of animal.

Public found chimpanzees and their human-like antics fascinating, exploiting their potential as comic performers with chimps shows being a key attraction.

  • Humanlike performance – smiling, laughing, picking up domestic human activities.
  • our understanding of nonhuman agents.. is modelled on our understanding of humans to a large degree

Being Trained:

Young chimpanzee separates from its mother, control wanted and unwanted behaviours.

Training technique, harsh method – beating, electric shock.

Chimpanzee retirement, after approached sexual maturity.

Training as interspecies relationships, brings in ethical obligation to communicate across irreducible difference.

Philosophy of training recognizes animals and humans as embodied communicative beings with the potential to acknowledge and be responsive to each others demands.

Training, as a form of communication, has important ethical dimension and dependent on the willingness of animal to cooperate and the other way round. Reciprocal Arrangment.

Unworkable relations – cannot achieve mutual acknowledgement of the moral significance of actions even with the benefits of interspecies communication.

Being Moral Agent

Few psychologists examples of having chimpanzee as domestic pet show that the solution to dismantling the barrier between human and apes resides in interspecies communication.

Share communication, language gives access to shared moral understanding.

 

THE POSTMODERN ANIMAL

endorsement – support

scepticism – doubt

 

animal-endorsing:

  • animal-endorsing art tend to endorse animal life (conservationist, animal advocacy-support for)

animal-sceptical

  • a sceptical art sceptical of culture’s means of construction and classifying the animal in order to make it meaningful to human.

Animal characters proselytize (propaganda) about ‘truths’ concerning the natural world.

Contemporary art employing animal imagery.

Artists have sought to make pieces which reflect their immediate encounter and interactions with animals in the wild.

Postmodern scepticism about the operation of truth about what counts as ‘authentic’ experience.

Joseph Beuys’s use of animal in his art, he drew together the roles of artist, environment activist, and education.

Dion: Making art, the focus is on relations and processes- an ecology of art.

The animal is a reminder of the limits of human understanding and influence, but also of the value of working at those limits.

ART AND PHILOSOPHY

Many postmodern/poststructuralist artist… adopt/identify with the animal as metaphor/as an image of, their own creativity.

– a sense of alienation from human

– sense of bodily freedom and unboundedness.

Art offers access to a kind of truth to which a more narrowly defines philosophy is blind. ‘ Our imagination needs both art n philosophy.’

Franz Marc: How does a horse see the world?

how different artist make art about sheep in distinct ways.

Sheep Piece – ‘imagination rather than observation’ – Moore’s work of animal sculptures speaking sheep’s voice is intended to be entirely human rather than attempting to imitate the animal.

PET – man-animal, consumer societies, are creature of their owner’s way of life, is not proper animal, a living betrayal of its properly animal potential or trajectory.

Deleuze & Guattari :

3 kinds of animal:

1. operate at the greatest distance from animal.

2. classified/state animals, fixed symbolic meaning serve exclusively human interest.

3. pets: ‘my’ cat, ‘my’ dog.

 

WILD VS DOMESTIC

Contemporary artist, the way they deal with animal reflects the way they see themselves as artist, it is self-image. They are interest more in wild animals.

Carolee Schneemann , kissing with her cat – diff to read as art.

One in thesafe space of gallery, artwork of wild animal no longer carry the full weight of its wildness.

Olly & Suzi: being in raw environment, makes us want to make art.

Animal rights n postmodern thought increasingly find themselves in alliance.

The notion of domestication – restriction n stifling of freedom n imagination.

wild – virtually the epitome of healthy and purposeful creativity.

Unanimous in regarding sentimentality as a bad thing – artists think (to pets, not to wild animal)

Animal advocacy n postmodern art – share common ground. As if having sentiments/ feeling for other species (companion animals) were a sign of weakness.

(sentiment vs seriousness)

too close to the animal, lost of proper sense of objectivity n distance.

BOOK – Society and Animals, What is an Animal? Tim Ingold,  What is Nature? Kate Soper.

An evocation of the cat as that link the mundane n profound.

Philosopher – love of the work to be done in taking animal seriously (even pets)

– make relation of love n philosophy explicit.

[Artwork/performance]

Olly n Suzi

Survival of the cutest

Fin de Siecle, 1990

Natural History n other Fictions – Raw 1998

Shark Bite 1997

Taxonomy of Non-Endangered Species, Dion.

 

 

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