Animals and Artists

Elizabeth Eleanor Jacqueline Atkinson

Description

Animals and Artists discusses a selection of modern and contemporary artworks that challenge traditional representations of nonhuman animals, and that expose human viewers to animal otherness.

It argues that the individuated and discrete human self in possession of consciousness, rationality, empathy, a voice, and a face, is open to challenge by nonhuman capacities such as distributed cognition, gender ambiguity, metamorphosis, mimicry and avian speech. In traditional philosophy, animals represent all that is lacking in humankind. However, Animals and Artists argues that just because humans frame ‘the animal’ as a negative term, their binary opposite and everything that they are not, does not mean that animals have no meaning in themselves. Rather, animals in their very unknowability, mark the limits of human thinking.

By combining art analysis with poststructuralist, post humanist and animal studies theories as well as scientific research, Elizabeth decentres the human and establishes a new position where differences are embraced. In our current moment of ecological crisis, Animals and Artists brings readers into solidarity with other animal species, among them spiders, silkworms, bees, parrots and octopuses. The book raises empathy for other live forms, drawing attention to the shared vulnerabilities of human and nonhuman animals, and in so doing underlines the power of art to bring about social change.

Readers will include animal studies scholars, artists, art historians, Jean Painlevé scholars, Surrealist enthusiasts, non-academics who are concerned about the human-animal relationship, the environment or larger identity politics issues.

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Octopus Reality: A Space Threatening Fragmentation

Interlude 1: Encountering Radical Otherness

2. The Dangerous Alliance of Women and Insects

Interlude 2: Unravelling the Secretions of the Silk/Worm

3. Spiders and Tomás Saraceno: Interfacing Nature and Culture through Art and Science

Interlude 3: Hospitality for an Other

4. Deconstructing Logocentrism: Parrot Echoes

Afterword

Bibliography

Sujets

• Plants
• Themes
• Subjects
• Monographs
• Monograph
• Art
• Animals

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 27 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781789386394
• Langue: English

Extrait

Animals and Artists
Animals and Artists

An Exploration of Impossible Encounters
Elizabeth Eleanor Jacqueline Atkinson
First published in the UK in 2022 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2022 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2022 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or byany means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, orotherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: MPS Limited
Cover designer: Tanya Montefusco
Cover image: Still from Kumi Oda; Circle of Silk , 2017.
Frontispiece image: Still from Jean Painlev and Genevive Hamon, Les Amours de la pieuvre (1965), 13 mins film.
Production manager: Laura Christopher
Typesetter: MPS Limited
Print ISBN 978-1-78938-637-0
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-638-7
ePUB ISBN 978-1-78938-639-4
To find out about all our publications, please visit our website.
There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue and buy any titles that are in print.
www.intellectbooks.com
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Octopus Reality: A Space Threatening Fragmentation
Interlude 1: Encountering Radical Otherness
2. The Dangerous Alliance of Women and Insects
Interlude 2: Unravelling the Secretions of the Silk/Worm
3. Spiders and Tom s Saraceno: Interfacing Nature and Culture through Art and Science
Interlude 3: Hospitality for an Other
4. Deconstructing Logocentrism: Parrot Echoes
Afterword
Bibliography
Figures 1.1: Still from Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon, Acéra ou Le Bal des sorcières (1972). 1.2: Still from Jean Painlevé, L'Hippocampe (1934). 1.3: Still from Jean Painlevé, L'Hippocampe (1934). 1.4: Still from Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon, Les Amours de la pieuvre (1965). 1.5: Still from Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon, Les Amours de la pieuvre (1965). 1.6: Still from Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon, Les Amours de la pieuvre (1965). 1.7: Still from Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon, Les Amours de la pieuvre (1965). 1.8: Still from Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon, Les Amours de la pieuvre (1965). 1.9: Still from Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon, Les Amours de la pieuvre (1965). I1.1: Exhibition view of Pierre Huyghe, After Alife Ahead (2017). 2.1: Exhibition view of Pierre Huyghe, Untilled (2011–12). 2.2: Exhibition view of Pierre Huyghe, Untilled (2011–12). 2.3: Exhibition view of Pierre Huyghe, Untilled (2011–12). I2.1: Still from Kumi Oda, Circle of Silk (2016). I2.2: Still from Kumi Oda, Circle of Silk (2016). I2.3: Still from Kumi Oda, Circle of Silk (2016). I2.4: Still from Kumi Oda, Circle of Silk (2016). I2.5: Still from Kumi Oda, Circle of Silk (2016). I2.6: Still from Kumi Oda, Circle of Silk (2016). I2.7: Still from Kumi Oda, Circle of Silk (2016). I2.8: Candice Lin, The Worm Husband (Our Father) (2016). I2.9: Candice Lin, The Worm Husband (Our Father) (2016). 3.1: Tomás Saraceno, Our Interplanetary Bodies (2017). 3.2: Tomás Saraceno, Webs of At-ten(sion) (2018). 3.3: Tomás Saraceno, Webs of At-ten(sion) (2018). 3.4: Tomás Saraceno, Our Interplanetary Bodies (2017). 3.5: Tomás Saraceno, Our Interplanetary Bodies (2017). 3.6: Tomás Saraceno, Our Interplanetary Bodies (2017). 3.7: Tomás Saraceno, Our Interplanetary Bodies (2017). 3.8: Tomás Saraceno, Museo Aero Solar (2007). 3.9: Tomás Saraceno, Museo Aero Solar (2007). 3.10: Tomás Saraceno, Our Interplanetary Bodies (2017). I3.1: Still from Pierre Huyghe, Untitled (Human Mask) (2014). I3.2: Still from Pierre Huyghe, Untitled (Human Mask) (2014). 4.1: Still from Allora and Calzadilla, The Great Silence (2014). 4.2: Still from Allora and Calzadilla, The Great Silence (2014). 4.3: Still from Allora and Calzadilla, The Great Silence (2014). 4.4: Still from Allora and Calzadilla, The Great Silence (2014). 4.5: Still from Allora and Calzadilla, The Great Silence (2014). 4.6: Still from Allora and Calzadilla, The Great Silence (2014). 4.7: Still from Allora and Calzadilla, The Great Silence (2014).
Acknowledgements
I must first thank Intellect for agreeing to publish my little book and specifically Mareike Wehner for all of her support and encouragement throughout the process. I am grateful to my peer reviewers for their immensely constructive comments, helping me to turn this manuscript from a Ph.D. into a book.
I extend my most sincere thanks to my supervisor John Slyce. He planted the first seed for the germination of this project back in 2015, encouraged me past my initial trepidations, and would later step in to help me untangle my ideas in 2018. I also thank Nicky Coutts who offered me interesting ways to approach my material as well as a wealth of knowledge on the question of the animal. Thank you to Nina Power for her initial support and encouragement for this project. Her academic criticality helped me formulate some of the larger concerns that form the backbone of this thesis. And thank you to my examiners Harriet Hawkins and Rosie McGoldrick for their excitement about my research, and allowing me to iron out my ideas before releasing this work into the world.
I am grateful to the artists whose powerful practices have provoked my thinking. Kumi Oda was kind enough to share images and videos which helped me to contextualise their work Circle of Silk . Allora and Calzadilla took the time to answer my curious questions about the development of The Great Silence and their work with Ted Chiang. These snippets helped me to formulate my arguments and position the artworks within my ideas. I am grateful to the Archives Jean Painlevé and the galleries who have provided me with fantastic images to accompany my writing; the Gasworks, Hauser & Wirth and Esther Schipper teams.
Thank you to my colleagues at Royal College of Art who helped to shape my academic development. Jazbos Grosz invited me to contribute to his exhibition I Scared My Computer in 2019 where I could test the water with some of my later writing. Magali Berthon pushed me to consider the secretions of the silkworm for our symposium Silk Unravelled in 2017. Freddie Mason and Mae Losasso with whom I collaborated for the conference INTIMATERIAL in 2017 where I presented some of the most exciting pages of my writing and the fantastic films of Jean Painlevé. I am especially grateful to Isabelle Held whose support encouraged me to continue with this work even when I was at my bleakest.
Thank you to my parents for always being there, even though neither of them has a clue about what it is I have actually been doing. And to my sister Katherine for knowing a little more.
And finally, thank you to Mia, the animal I get to encounter every day, she's never far from me.
Introduction
The violence of language

Language is not innocent in our primate order. Indeed, it is said that language is the tool of human self-construction, that which cuts us off from the garden of mute and dumb animals and leads us to name things, to force meanings, to create oppositions, and so craft human culture. 1
Our current moment is one of terrifying ecological collapse. This extends beyond the primary human concerns for climate change and the accumulation of plastic waste. Factory farming, acidification of the oceans, rapid deforestation, habitat loss and mass extinction are all dramatically impacting many nonhuman species with extreme, debilitating and fatal consequences. Much of the damage being irreparable, it is not a case of capitalism and technology coming to the rescue . 2 Rather, a drastic shift in the human relationship to other life must occur. This book analyses a selection of artworks that make such a shift available. I have chosen works that explore nonhuman ways of being in the world, their individual abilities and capacities and in so doing challenge human understanding. Animals are no longer othered as resources to be appropriated and exploited by humanity but positioned as examples of difference with their own inherent values and ways of making meaning that provoke re-consideration of anthropocentrism.
Over the history of Western philosophy and metaphysics, anthropocentric thought concerned with the erection of Man above nonhuman species - as well as women, racial and sexual minorities, and those who are differently-abled - has led to a gross homogenisation of these others. They are disregarded, subject to indiscriminate violence and denied any form of subjectivity on their own terms. Animals specifically are sacrificed in the name of humanity - both as food and expendable resources but also as representative of everything that the human is not. They are judged against humanity - the measure of all things - falling short in these tests and identified only by what they don't have or cannot do . Animals have thus come to represent all that is lacking in mankind. Language being one of their most identifiable privations has become the most violent tool humans use to determine their distinction from the animal world. Language opens up the space for an oppositional binary relationship between humans and animals. It prepares the ground for the constitution of both the negative status of the animal and the positive status of the human as rational, speaking, empathic, autonomous and with an ethically recognisable face.
This negative status of the animal has resulted in philosophical dogmas that they are without subjectivity, mere automatons, poor-in-world and without a face, and so banished outside of the human ethical circuit. 3 However, this book argues, following Stephen Morton's proposition in his chapter Troubling Resemblances included in Lynn Turner's The Animal Question in Deconstruction , that just because we frame th