Concepción Cortés Zulueta Universidad Autónoma de Madrid TESIS DOCTORAL/PhD Thesis Project: FUNDAMENTOS BIOLÓGICOS DE LA CREACIÓN: ANIMALES EN EL ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO Y ARTE ANIMAL CONCLUSIONS1 In my PhD thesis project I have addressed the topic of the presence and agency of non human animals in contemporary art, as well as the evolution and changes in the attitudes of artists towards those animals, to conclude with a bold and innovative exploration of the possibility that animals do make art, inside and outside the gallery space. The main chronological framework of my dissertation embraces approximately five decades, from the mid-sixties to the present day. Regarding my theoretical backing, my foundings certainly lie in the field of art history. Thanks to my background in biology, I have also turned to some scientific disciplines (ethology, primatology, neuroscience...) in order to enrich my proposal and to become closer to the perception and points of view of other animals. Furthermore, the transversal academic conglomerate that constitutes animal studies has helped me to navigate through the different fields and approaches, maintaining non human animals and their perspectives in the spotlight, and simultaneously enlightening and challenging dichotomies such as animal/human, biology/culture, natural/artificial... As an starting point, I opted for the introduction of live non human animals in the gallery space made by several artists during the second half of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies. A situation that I have depicted as “the black box (animals) inside the white cube (art gallery)”, in a novel prismatic meta-image that has proved itself as a really useful thinking device. Along the preceding decades, animals had been described by behaviourists as black boxes whose inner workings were either nonexistent or inaccessible to us. At the same time, animals were still perceived as mechanistic bundles guided by instinct. Accordingly, ascribing to them what were thought of as 1 In these conclusions, I have limited the references in the sake of clarity, as they all the necessary references are included in the corresponding chapters and in the bibliography. 1 human traits (intelligence, emotions...) was considered anthropomorphism, and wrong2. Meanwhile, the white cube of the art gallery had been calling for a very specific type of occupant: a rational, detached and disembodied eye, the perfect match for that sacralised and aseptic space reserved for the elite3. If the notion of the black box involved denying the “human” subjectivity to the animal, the concept of the white cube implied rejecting most of the animal (body, biology, physiology) in the human; as well as the rest of the senses other than vision 4 . Thus, this meant a particular gap had been established between the animal and the human across two distinct areas. A breach that, somehow, was to be exposed and denounced through the implications of the decision, made by these artists, of introducing live animals other than humans inside the gallery. Instead of reinforcing these patterns, the black box/white cube encounter ended up debilitating both of them, widening the fractures that had begun to appear on their walls and surfaces. Possibly, those artists didn’t have the above claims as main concerns but, nevertheless, they did set in motion a chain of events that revealed non human animals as subjects that could not be ignored. In the second half of the sixties, the panorama was one of questioning of the prevailing art system and its tropes, such as the art object5. Animals were seen as an adequate resources to replace the allegedly immutable and perennial sanctioned works of art: they were alive, on the move, in constant change. They brought attention to the context in where they were exhibited, to the reactions to the “viewers” towards them, and to the positions occupied by each of them, animals or humans (or both). Animals also put into play other senses, their sounds and scents had to be forcibly noted; as was attested by displeased members of the audience, witnesses of how their biological processes stained the floor and walls of the white cube and corrupted its unblemished atmosphere. A circumstance, the latter, that increased the awareness about the assumptions and prejudices imposed by the white cube, even to humans. As this white cube was a paradigm accompanied by a certain ideology that 2 Allen, Colin and Michael Trestman. "Animal Consciousness". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2014 edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2014/entries/consciousness-animal/ Last Access 20/09/2014. 3 O'Doherty, Brian. Inside the white cube: the ideology of the gallery space. (San Francisco: University of California Press, 1999). 4 Jones, Caroline A. “Sniffing out the subject”. Eyesight alone: Clement Greenberg's modernism and the bureaucratization of the senses. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005): 391-92. 5 Lippard, Lucy R. Six years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 2 posed as the only possible one, while trying to exclude life and its functions; for instance, fatigue, drinking, eating and their consequences. In this manner, the live non human animals entered by some artists into the gallery unveiled themselves both as a nuisance for the white cube and as subjects in conflict with the objectual nature of the conventional work of art. Indeed, they resisted the requirements enforced by the white cube, but also some of the expectations placed upon them by the artists. They were alive and had to be taken care of, fed, cleaned; they moved too much (or too little); they chuckled, squealed, tweeted, squawked, neighed, growled too high (or too low). Ultimately, they exercised their preferences and agency within the boundaries and scope available to them, and on occasion this caused scandals, trouble, or opened up new possibilities. Subsequently, in the first chapter I initiated my narrative with Robert Rauschenberg, who in 1963 was pranked by some students in Yale. These young artists presented to the visiting one a live chicken as if it was a real sculpture he was supposed to judge, as if one of his combines had come to life6. Among the students in attendance were Chuck Close, Nancy Graves and Richard Serra7. Shortly after Graves and Serra travelled to Europe, where they married and settled for a couple of years. While in Italy, both relinquished what they were doing and conventional modes of representation, dumped the contents of their studios in the Arno river, and surrounded themselves with animals8. Apparently, they were looking for something more present, more real, more connected to life. Thereby, in 1966 the attempt to mock Rauschenberg pieces and trajectory metamorphosed into Serra’s first show in Galleria La Salita, Rome, in which live animals were exhibited along with other stuffed ones, and the rough cages of all of them9. A big scandal ensued, even with legal ramifications, and a lot of artists (directly related, or not so much, to the then emerging Povera movement) incorporated the presence of live animals to the basic repertoire of poor, industrial and ephemeral materials that was being developed at the moment in the Italian scene. By then, Jannis Kounellis stood out proclaiming that his focus was to “present”, not to “represent”, and 6 Schimmel, Paul (ed.). Robert Rauschenberg: combines. (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005). 7 Close, Chuck. “Oral history interview with Chuck Close, 1987 May 14-Sept. 30”. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-chuck-close-13141 Last Access 07/05/2013. 8 Close, Chuck. “Nancy Graves”. The portraits speak: Chuck Close in conversation with 27 of his subjects. (NewYork: A.R.T. Press, 1997): 11-38. 9 Serra, Richard. “Serra en conversación con Hal Foster”. Richard Serra: La materia del tiempo. (Bilbao: Museo Guggenheim, 2005): 23-26. 3 so he presented birds, fish and horses in several successive exhibitions taking place in Rome, reclaiming (with the aid of the gallerist Fabio Sargentini) new industrial locations for the use of contemporary art10. In Kounellis installations, though, there was a tension between the animation of the artworks and the objectification of the animals, as the second ones were restrained (and their needs partially neglected) with the aim of serving the principles of the composition. However, in these early years this was not the only approach to the introduction of non human animals in the gallery space. In the milieu of systems art and Jack Burnham’s theories11, there was also a greater emphasis in cycles, processes, networks, interconnections... Hans Haacke underlined the variations that occur in the atmosphere of the white cube (temperature, humidity, air currents) by displaying the unfoldings of condensation inside a clear cube and, in parallel, he exhibited the life cycle of birds by means of the installation Chickens Hatching12 (1969). A few years later and after a few environmental pieces, the artist focused in the institutional critique, in a move that was seen as a coming-of-age by some and as a step back by others. The artistic duo formed by Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison was among the latter, because they thought Haacke had restricted his understanding of the social and the political to the human matters, leaving behind the rest of the living creatures and the environment 13 . In contrast, the Harrisons had devoted themselves to investigate a definite kind of systems: ecosystems, with all their complexity and human-animal interdependencies, their natural and artistic niches and the intent (on the part of the artists) to improve a situation deteriorating worldwide. If Haacke and the Harrisons had turned to science to devise and shape their efforts, so did Luis Fernando Benedit14 after including live non human animals in his works following a stay in Rome (1967-68) and a fascination with Kounellis’ proposals that persuaded him to abandon painting (“representation”) for “presentation”. Back in Argentina, Benedit started building and showing labyrinths with animals inside, hoping this would convince viewers about their intelligence, in what was another instance of non human perspectives peering outside the black box. 10 Mouré, Gloria. Jannis Kounellis. Obras, Escritos 1958-2000. (Barcelona: Polígrafa, 2001). Jones, Caroline A. “Hans Haacke 1967. Reconstituting Systems Art”. Hans Haacke 1967. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011): 6-27. 12 Young, Dennis. New Alchemy: Elements, Systems, Forces/ Nouvelle Alchimie: Elements, Systemes, Forces. (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1969). 13 Schläpfer-Miller, Juanita (ed.). “Helen and Newton Harrison in conversation with Brandon Ballengée”. Transdiscourse 1: Mediated Environments. (Vienna: Springer, 2011): 45-58. 14 Rizzo, Patricia. “Biografía documentada”. Luis F. Benedit en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes: Obras 1960-1996. (Buenos Aires: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1996): 282-9. 11 4 In spite of all of these defiances to the ideology and constraints of the white cube, some hierarchies were still apparent, as the pressure to objectify animals demonstrated. The responses came from the margin. The Brazilian tropicalia artist Hélio Oiticica vindicated antropofágia (the creative deglutition and regurgitation of Western influences), and also the patched and recycled aesthetics of the favelas 15 . In these circumstances, the parrots he surrounded with his environments and experiences were not exotic punctuation marks, but an appeal to emotions and indolence, to another way of life far from the corners and sharp edges of modernity. Anyhow, the ones that finally were willing to take (temporarily) the place of the animals were two women artists. In 1971 Bonnie Ora Sherk locked herself up in an empty cage at the San Francisco Zoo during feeding time, and ate her lunch next to the tigers 16 . Besides stressing the continuity between her and the felines, Sherk made the most of the performance by using it to wonder about the intelligence, perception and emotions of the tiger that decided to peer over at her. In 1974 Fina Miralles remodeled the white cube of Vinçon gallery, Barcelona, into a makeshift zoo, and shared the fate of the other four animals confined there by occupying one of the five cages17. This protest against the conditions animals were then kept in zoos was followed, a couple of years later, by another one concerned with the abuses endured by women during Franco’s dictatorship. Sherk and Miralles, each in her own way, associated the plight of non human animals with that of women; as either of them were groups not so welcomed by the elitist white cube. Non human animals, at his point, had already fulfilled the role of works of art on their foray into contemporary art, in line with their previous characterization as objects or semi-objects, though animated. Now that they were revealing themselves as subjects, they could also act as human surrogates. As the white cube was a space imprinted by (visual) perception, artists began to speculate about the senses of other animals and to address those animals as viewers (and smellers). This type of substitution often carried a component of parody or humour, purported or befallen, that at times involved some controversy or accusations of encouraging inexcusable humiliations or offenses; because animals were still seen as lower and undeserving beasts, not to be equated with 15 Oiticica Hélio. “Tropicália: March 4, 1968”. Readings in Latin American modern art. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004): 177-9. 16 Cavagnaro, Peter. “Q & A: Bonnie Ora Sherk and the Performance of Being”. blook BAM/PFA. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. June 12, 2012. http://blook.bampfa.berkeley.edu/2012/06/q-a-bonnie-ora-sherk-and-the-performance-of-being.html Last Access 13/05/2013 17 Parcerisas, Pilar. “La dialéctica natural-artificial en el trabajo de Josefina Miralles. Conceptualismo(s) poéticos, políticos y periféricos. (Madrid: Akal, 2007): 76-82. 5 elevated humans. Paradoxically, this conceptualisation transformed animals in a neat reinforcement to question certain aspects of the white cube and the mode of perception it promoted. Animals constituted what appeared to be a rather absurd addition to a preestablished scheme that presented itself as absolute and immutable, and in accordance with the premises of lateral thinking 18 , this addition was advantageous as a way of destabilizing the system and finding new alternatives. Among other reasons, because beyond a regular change it also was somewhat of a reversal. After all, in Western cultures humans had defined themselves in opposition to other animals, and this fact made it easier to unmask the assumptions enforced by the white cube upon perception. Throughout the second chapter of this thesis, I proceeded to examine the above issues and many others, clustered around the phrase I chose as its title: the parable of the “weird bug” (bicho raro). This fabricated idiom alludes to that human tendency of resorting to others as templates against which our own position, in a certain matter, is compared and measured. Moreover, animals seem to be a special case in this regard, since reactions such as the visceral ones pointed before suggested there was still a rejuvenated scala naturae or great chain of being in operation, but just in an informal range. As if the orderly and progressive succession of creatures (animals, man, angelic beings) continued to be influential, although with some changes and a cosmic touch. Namely, that angelic beings had been replaced by extraterrestrial ones in our ponderations. On the one hand, this sequences or power structures are echoed by ancient as well as recent stories in which “lower” beings are deceived by illusion or representation and “higher” beings know better, like the contest between the Greek painters Zeuxis, Parrhasius and a few birds; the dog scene portrayed in the “His Master’s Voice” gramophone painting, or the anecdotes broadcasted by some mobile phone TV commercials. On the other hand, there is the common and widespread practice of invoking aliens when trying to consider problems like human colour perception, the variety and numbers of our senses (and their possible alternatives), or our sensory thresholds. Aliens who can either be extraterrestrial (those imagined little men, grey or green) or terrestrial (echolocating bats, electric fish, slippery sea stars or efficient bloodhound dogs with astonishing olfactory abilities). This is why “bicho raro” looks like a suitable invention to summarise all these foreign creatures, and to 18 De Bono, Edward. Lateral thinking: creativity step by step. (New York: Harper Colophon books, 1970). 6 think how and why so many theorists and artists turn to them in order to illuminate our own positions, attitudes or convictions, as my exposition demonstrates. Among these theorists, a very remarkable one is the biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944), concerned with the depiction of the surrounding perceptual worlds (or Umwelten) of a myriad of “bichos raros”, from his renowned tick to house flies, sea urchins, Paramecia, snails, hermit crabs, domestic dogs or even human biologists, physiologists or astronomers19. Due to his vindication of a subjective biology and the impact he has had in several contemporary artists, his ideas and writings have been decisive for my research. Other advocates of “bichos raros” could be philosopher Thomas Nagel and zoologist Donald Griffin, both of them interested in bats. Griffin discovered and described their echolocation, and he was applauded for it. However, decades later he was ostracised for awarding awareness, minds, intelligence, emotions, to non human animals, in another instance of the reluctance of the scientific community to concede supposed human capacities to other beings owing to an alleged fear towards anthropomorphism20. Nagel used bats as an study case, to explain why he thought the experiences of other animals were inaccessible to us 21 . The philosopher ended suggesting that a novel implementation of objective inquiry might prove valuable but, given the developments in fields like neuroscience, my stance is quite the opposite. I lean, thus, towards recommending a specific kind of subjectivity instead, as informed by the said developments and as I have argued in the pertinent section of the second chapter. In consonance with the above, in the seventies a few artists began to apply the “bicho raro” strategy and decided to create exhibitions intended for animals other than humans; as if they were trying to uncover and counteract the perceptual pressures of the white cube and to offer some alternatives to its elitism and perpetual asepsis, to vision as the one an only sense, and to the absence of the body. In 1975, in one of his reflections à propos of immortality, Gino de Dominicis planned an exhibition whose entrance was restricted: only animals were allowed 22 . The human “viewers” were invited there just to stand outside Lucrezia de Domizio gallery in Pescara, wondering 19 Von Uexküll, Jakob and G. Kriszat (ilu.). “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men. A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds”. Instinctive Behavior. The Development of a Modern Concept. (New York: International University Press, 1957): 5-80. 20 Griffin, Donald R. The question of animal awareness: Evolutionary continuity of mental experience. (New York: Rockefeller University Press, 1976). 21 Nagel, Thomas. “What is it like to be a bat?”. The philosophical review 83, nº 4 (1974): 435-50. 22 Tomassoni, Italo (ed.). Gino De Dominicis: Catalogo Ragionato. (Milan: Skira, 2011). 7 what the ox, the donkey, the goat, the goose, the turkey and the chicken that had been admitted had perceived inside. An exercise in humility in which at least some of them saw the humorous side. Marcel Broodthaers (1924-76) died before he could accomplish the exhibition for dogs he had been planning, but he had already produced several variations of his Musée de l’Art Moderne, Départament des Aigles. In this fictional meta-institution the artist meditated not only about art and museums, but also about the notion of what an eagle really was. In one of its sections/exhibitions, he compiled a huge number of figurative eagles in order to distinguish our human meanings and projections (majesty, grandeur, power) from the real birds of prey, who could be afraid of bicycles23. Just like animal studies would advise years later. In light of this, it was a shame that Broodthaers didn’t have enough time for his exhibition for dogs. Still, the project was partially resumed by the original author of the idea, Dieter Roth, accompanied by Richard Hamilton. The duo joined a local dog, Chispas Luis, to embark upon a collaboration that gave shape to a show for two- and four-legged visitors in Cadaqués, summer of 197624. Eventually Roth, Hamilton and Chispas Luis utilised the findings of Broodthaers (hanging the paintings at a proper height for a regular dog, representing topics appreciated by canines) in an enterprise stamped with humour and male rivalry, as hinted by the doggish alter-egos the two human artists adopted. Nevertheless, the dogs this exhibition summoned were a bit cartoonish and too visual. Something that another show by Jacques Lizène (developed between 1974-77) seemed to mend, when he insisted in the attractiveness scents hold for dogs25. Specially, the biological ones, like urine or faeces. In this way, Lizène’s assault to the white cube contained two of its worst enemies: odours and biology. These artistic shows for non human animals of the seventies tended to be rather humorous and to remain in the surface of the topic, as if coming up with this extravagant idea was almost enough. Shortly after, this kind of proposals would grow to become more detailed, aimed at real and specific animals and not so much at generic, comical or distorted versions of them. Since they sought to be more realistic, they were condensed in individual works instead of expanded into exhibitions. Artworks, these ones, that appeared occasionally in the eighties, scattered in the nineties, and were more 23 Broodthaers, Marcel. Der Adler vom Oligozän bis heute. (Düsseldorf: Städtische Kunsthalle, 1972). Hamilton, Richard and Dieter Roth. Collaborations of Ch. Rotham. (Cadaqués: Galería Cadaqués, 1977). 25 Lizène, Jacques and Marc Renwart. J. Lizèn: petit maître liégois de la seconde moitié du XXème siècle, artiste de la médiocrité. (Brussels: Atelier 340, 1990). 24 8 common as the 21st century approached and started. These pieces orbited around a few axis and options. Regarding the conception and elaboration of the works, they could be modelled or adapted from different prototypes and be neighbouring, more or less, the products of pragmatic design or the more distanced scheme of high art. In the first case, they could be seen as responding to ergonomic needs, as Matthew Fuller formulated it26. In the second, the goal would be more nebulous. Intersecting and interacting with this dual distinction there would be another one, related to the reception of the works of art by the animals. Artists could be interested in causing a certain impact or reaction on the side of the animals (their audience) by aiming to the peculiarities of their perceptions; or in paying a greater attention to the well-being and comfort of those animals, to focus in improving them. Or trying to combine both perception and well-being. In fact, the works for animals that I have analysed present a composite mix of elements pertaining to the four axis outlined above, and the nuances are varied and numerous. But this division that I have proposed helps to clarify the panorama surrounding this compelling issue, as it is apparent in my essay. A couple of clear cases of service towards other animals would be that of ecoartists like Betty Beaumont and Lynne Hull. In 1980, Beaumont and her collaborators dumped thousands of recycled coal fly-ash blocks in the Atlantic Ocean, to generate a flourishing ecosystem in a previously degraded spot; a change that would benefit both fish and fishermen27. The work, as such, was only visible for underwater creatures, its main audience. Hull, meanwhile, practices what she calls “trans-species art”, and her client list includes “hawks, eagles, pine martin, osprey, owls, spider monkeys, salmon, butterflies, bees, frogs, toads, newts, bats, beaver, songbirds, otter, rock hyrax, small desert species, waterfowl and occasional humans 28 ”. Her initial motivation was to respond to the gigantic and egotistic earthworks and the like, “the large scale macho artworks out in the western deserts”, as she wished to find a “more feminine gesture of caring for landscape and environment29”. She went on to create hydroglyphs for small creatures to drink, roosts for birds of prey to perch, havens for 26 Fuller, Mathew. “Art for Animals”. July, 2007. http://www.spc.org/fuller/texts/8/#sdendnote4anc Last Access 01/08/2013. 27 For general information about this artwork, see: http://greenmuseum.org/content/work_index/img_id382__prev_size-0__artist_id-37__work_id-75.html Last Access 05/08/2013. 28 Hull, Lynne. “Lynne Hull. Creating Trans-species Art and Sculpture for Wildlife”. http://ecoart.org/?page_id=7 Last Access 12/08/2013. This is Hull’s website and blog, and a great resource to explore her works and thoughts. 29 Hull, Lynne. “How I started making art for wildlife”. http://eco-art.org/?p=560 Last Access 08/08/2013. 9 martens and islands for aquatic beings to take shelter, hoping to repair some of the damage already done by humans to these animals and to the environment as a whole. Artist Bill Burns, with his Safety Gear for Small Animals, is a mixed case30. His miniaturised and anthropomorphic designs denounce both the vulnerability of those small animals and our disproportionate obsession with human safety, as well as our tendency to deal with everything in human terms. Meanwhile, in Augmented Animals designers Auger and Loizeau seem to imagine other animals as clients as a “bicho raro” strategy, to escape the constraints of a client-oriented design and reflect upon them, and to assist their animal customers in dodging the shortfalls of evolution via technology31. Artists Elizabeth Demaray32 and Amy Youngs33, on they part, both conceived separated projects devoted to providing improved and artificial shell-housings for hermit crabs. The comparison between these two proposals is a fruitful one, as it brings again to the foreground the need to trust a little bit more the preferences and agency of other animals with regard to their well-being, even if they are “just” crustaceans. A few artists that have examined and exploited ways of attracting and repelling other animals (and thus, their perceptions) are Paul Perry, Michel Blazy, Ulf Rollof or Brandon Ballengée. Their procedures, that relied on scientific information, involved employing scents, pheromones, food, specific colours or lights... Besides, there would be other works related to growing concerns about the interests and well-being of other animals. Around 2004, Lucy Kimbell began fantasising about a Rat Evaluated Artwork, that would be judged by these rodents34. However, for the artist the idea entailed a long battle with herself, divided between ethics and aesthetics considerations in which the former appeared to weight a bit more that the latter, as she wasn’t comfortable with the action of forcing the rats to stay in the gallery. Instead, she organised a family and pet friendly event, and a lecture. Last but not least, Rachel Mayeri’s film Primate Cinema: Apes as Family 35 (2011) works as a perfect summary and peak of the second chapterof this thesis. The 30 For general information about Bill Burns, see: http://billburnsprojects.com/ Last Access 12/08/2013. http://www.auger-loizeau.com/index.php?id=6 Last Access 19/08/2013. 32 Demaray, Elizabeth. “The Hand Up Project: Attempting to Meet the New Needs of Natural LifeForms”.http://www.elizabethdemaray.com/main_all.html?http://www.elizabethdemaray.com/Projects.htm l Last Access 21/08/2013. 33 Pike-Russell, Vanessa. “Interview with Amy Youngs”. The Crabstreet Journal. http://crabstreetjournal.org/wp/blog/tag/3d/ Last Access 25/08/2013. 34 Baker, Steve. “’Tangible and Real and Vivid and Meaningful’: Lucy Kimbell’s Not-Knowing about Rats”. Animal Encounters. (Leiden: Brill, 2009): 197-218. 35 http://rachelmayeri.com/blog/2011/04/18/primate-cinema/ Last Access 26/12/2013. 31 10 plan was to make a movie for captive chimpanzees. The artist worked side by side with psychologist Sarah-Jane Vick and the chimps’ keepers to guarantee a solid scientific backing for the project, that was intended to, simultaneously, entertain the apes and improve their lives by enriching their zoo environment. The film star (a fictional and enculturated female chimp) acted as a symbol of the human-chimp primate encounter Mayeri was trying to promote. The final gallery installation included multiple screens, two of them reproducing (side by side) the film for chimps and their reactions, and another TV set showing the project’s Making of in an adjacent room full of books related to the work: a complex multi-screened piece for a multi-screened human mind, a mise en abyme not only because of its structure and configuration but also because of its content. A product a little less “chimpcentric” than the result the artist had hoped for; as we, humans, were the ones able to either follow through or lose ourselves irremediably in that meta-labyrinth of images36. Once the artists had introduced non human animals in the white cube of the gallery space, and those black boxes had revealed themselves as perceiving subjects, it was a matter of time that artists would explore the possibility of some sort of communication. The knock on the outside of the box had received a response, so the next step was to attempt a dialogue. For this reason, I dedicated the third chapter of this thesis to investigate the role of animals as interlocutors in contemporary art and culture, as treated by artists and studied by scientists; as well as the experimental endeavours pursuing to translate the perceptual worlds and experiences of other animals into our own human terms. As means of organising the spine and contents of the chapter, I turned to a book by ethologist Konrad Lorenz, whose English title is King Solomon’s Ring, and its original German one Er redete mit dem Vieh, den Vögeln und den Fischen37 (he spoke to the beasts, the birds and the fish). The last sentence refers to the powers of this legendary ring, that allowed King Solomon to speak to and understand animals. But Lorenz argues science and observation have conferred upon him similar powers without any magical contraption. Some of the examples the scientist proposes are useful to delineate the communicational comings and goings between humans and other animals, 36 I have addressed this artwork in detail both in the second chapter of this thesis and in this paper: Cortés Zulueta, Concepción. “How Does a Snail See the World? Imagining Non-Human Animals’ Visual Umwelten”. Meta- and Inter-Images in Contemporary Visual Art and Culture. (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013): 263-79. 37 The Spanish translation follows the original German title: Lorenz, Konrad. Hablaba con las bestias, los peces y los pájaros. (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1999). 11 since they contain humans talking Animal (either Cockatoo, Jackdaw or Duck), as well as animals talking Human (Roa the crow giving a human alarm call). In 1959 Lorenz just insinuated slightly what, decades later, was going to be ascertained. That is, that some animals went well beyond the repetitive and vacuous imitation to which we had limited their efforts to communicate with us; orally, in the case of parrots (or corvids) and gestually, in the case of apes other than humans. Lorenz’s original title also gave me the sections in which I was going to divide most of the third chapter, depending on the animals or group of animals the different artists were dialoguing with: beasts, birds or “fish38”; on earth, air, or water. Moreover, it is no coincidence that the ethologist provides the backbone of the chapter, as the implicated artists resort to scientific advances and to fields like ethology, primatology, psychology, evolutionary biology, etc., to design and ground their proposals. For instance, artist Nicolas Primat attended at least one primatological conference, and built a whole exhibition (Demo Bonobo) around the ideas of evolutionary biologist (and primatologist) Frans de Waal39. Primat aspired to assemble a meaningful communication with other primates (bonobos, baboons, squirrel monkeys) thanks to our evolutionary kinship, to the similarity of our bodies, emotions and gestures. He tried to integrate in non human primate groups as if he was cohabiting with foreign tribes, with other languages and cultures he was compelled to learn. An effort that is best understood if we consider the methods practiced, nowadays, by primatologists like Barbara Smuts40, or the legacy of the talking apes: Washoe and her chimpanzee family41, Koko and Michael (gorillas), Kanzi and Panbanisha (bonobos) or Chantek (orangutan). Irene Pepperberg’s research with Alex42 (an African Grey Parrot) was essential for artist Rachel Berwick and her collaborator and bird expert Sue Farlow43. Pepperberg used the model/rival technique to teach Alex the meaning of human words, and how to 38 For structural reasons, these “fish” include some that are not so biologically, as whales. As this is not a biology thesis, I invoke the indulgence of the reader regarding this point. 39 Brechet, Pascal. “Nicolas Primat - Demo Bonobo (1ere partie)”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAhI6KmZmU Last Access 24/01/2014. 40 Smuts, Barbara. “Encounters with animal minds”. Journal of Consciousness Studies 8.5-7 (2001): 293309. 41 Fouts, Roger, y Stephen Tukel Mills. Next of kin: What chimpanzees have taught me about who we are. (New York: William Morrow, 1997). 42 Pepperberg, Irene M. The Alex studies: cognitive and communicative abilities of grey parrots. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). 43 Farlow, Sue. “Bearers of a Lost Language”. ParrotChronicles, 2002 http://www.parrotchronicles.com/features/maypore/maypore.htm Last Access 16/02/2014. 12 answer questions. As this method was based on social interactions it presumed that the parrot had social abilities, a faculty that in the past had been often denied to animals other than humans. Berwick and Farlow applied the same technique with Papetta and Apekiva, a couple of Amazon parrots (a blue-front and an orange-wing). The plan was to teach them to talk and understand Maypure, a long lost South American language whose last words had been spoken by a parrot, as supposedly Alexander von Humboldt had attested in his diaries44. Then, the parrots were to be exhibited in an installation, as a living proof of the confounded boundaries between nature and culture, language and biology. If Berwick wanted the birds to talk, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg wanted them to sing, and to sing with him (and with his clarinet), to make music together 45 . He challenged scientists to clarify why birdsongs couldn’t be considered as music, and he defended that making music was also pleasurable to birds; a claim that could coexist with evolutionary and pragmatic explanations of birdsong, like male competition. In the philosopher’s experience, when playing music with birds they did establish an intuitive dialogue and created something new that was more than the sum of its parts. Another creatures with whom it was possible to play music were whales, albeit it was a difficult enterprise due to the underwater factor. It was in the early seventies when Roger Payne unveiled and popularised whale songs46, and employed them to advocate for their cause and halt their abusive hunting, adding their own voices to the debate. Their mysterious lives in the oceanic depths and their subaqueous tunes seized the imagination of the time and incited artists like Jim Nollman, who attempted to arrange a lengthy musical collaboration with the cetaceans as a way of fostering a communion with nature47. Decades later, Louis Bec would focus his attention in electrical fish, like elephantnose fish (Gnathonemus petersii). As these electrical fish both communicated and perceived their surroundings through weak electrical pulses, the intention of the artist was to offer them the opportunity to contribute with their voices in the networks of global communication, made also possible by electricity48. Bec’s complex fabulatory epistemology located these fish as a fundamental node in the Animal-Machine-Man 44 This presumption is not accurate, but I discuss this issue in detail in the corresponding section. Rothenberg, David. Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song. (New York: Basic Books, 2006). 46 Payne, Roger S. and Scott McVay. "Songs of humpback whales”. Science 173.3997 (1971): 585-97. 47 Nollman, Jim. The Beluga Café: My Strange Adventure with Art, Music, and Whales in the Far North. (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2002). 48 Bec, Louis. “Les Stimutalogues. Le Gnathonemus petersii: Electricfish”. noema. http://noemalab.eu/ideas/essay/les-stimutalogues/ Last Access 17/03/2014. 45 13 relationship, because they were able to convey through the same means (electricity) both their perceptual Umwelten and their communications. A means, electricity, that was also a crucial component of the functioning of our cells and of contemporary communication networks like internet, and a continuity, this last one, that insinuated the possibility of a more direct future connection, maybe even brain to brain, as hinted by artists like Antony Hall49. An intriguing outlook that emerged while writing this third chapter about animals as interlocutors was how, in the late sixties and along the seventies, had coalesced several modes of building bridges towards new perspectives. The paths that were taken seem to coincide with the rejuvenated scala naturae I sketched earlier: other animals, humans, extraterrestrial beings or realities. In 1969 human beings landed in the moon for the first time. That same year Allen and Beatrice Gardner published in Science Magazine their report about their achievements “Teaching sing language to a chimpanzee50”, that is, to Washoe. The two events were linked by some, and Roger Fouts even expressed his exhilaration about being able to talk with Washoe with these words: I felt like I had walked on the moon with Washoe. For thousands of years humans had fantasized in myth and fable about talking with animals, and now we were realizing that dream. It was tremendously exciting to be a direct partner in this breakthrough conversation51. Roger Payne also acknowledged a similar association of ideas, and alluded to extraterrestrial communication and cetacean “greetings” in the same paragraph, in a 1979 flexi-disc for National Geographic with those “Songs of the Humpback Whale”: The recording you all now hear was carried on board a Voyager spacecraft and into outer space. The reason for including such a strange message, one of many greetings from Earth, is that there is a remote chance, sometime within the next 1.2 billion years (the expected lifetime of the spacecraft) that some other space-errand civilization may find this bottle tossed into the cosmic ocean and decode its message from Earth. That idea stops my heart. The songs of whales, so long confined within the vaults of the sea, have in the span of just twenty years, burst through its surface, flowed over the land, 49 Hall, Antony and Rikke Hansen. “Enki – Human to Fish Communication”. Antennae 13 (Summer 2010): 29. 50 Gardner, R. Allen, and Beatrice T. Gardner. “Teaching sign language to a chimpanzee”. Science 165.3894 (1969): 664-72. 51 Fouts, Roger and Stephen Tukel Mills. Next of kin: What chimpanzees have taught me about who we are. (New York: William Morrow, 1997): 104. 14 conquered the hearts of their age-old enemy, man, and they are now bound in a 1.2 billion year journey that spread them throughout the galaxy52. Going beyond the limits of what was then known meant, either, to discuss colour preferences with a group of chimpanzees 53 or walking on the surface of the moon; picturing the obscure lives of the colossal whales in the cold and dense sea abysses or sending alien-friendly messages across the universe (whale songs included). But when the eighties approached, the foundations of that whole castle in the cosmos (and in the abysses) tumbled and fell, at least partially. The enthusiasm of the age had pushed things too far and too quickly, and the negative consequences of that rush concurred with the opposition by whom still thought animals had to remain in their place, at a proper distance from humans. A circumstance, this one, that Fouts has linked to economic and political interests that were benefiting of specific forms of animal exploitation. Anyway, as I have summarised above and presented in detail in the main body of my dissertation, throughout the nineties and the beginning of the 21st century, artists as Primat, Berwick, Rothenberg, Bec, adopted and adapted the positions and attitudes of the preceding decades, incorporating to their practices novel scientific knowledge. In addition to this shared inclination, there are other common or affiliated traits between these artists. I discern an emphasis in the body, as well as in the nonverbal aspects of communication (gestures, the emotions that conveys a certain posture or physical energy). There is also some vindication of subjectivity and intuition. All of it, maybe, to balance the excessive weight and importance that is usually given to an aseptic and intellectual understanding of language, speech and communication; as if these were confined in another white cube. In this context, posing a dialogue with other animals was a way to underline these biases and shortcomings. Subsequently, it became possible to attempt translations of non human animals that addressed more than one domain simultaneously, integrating a few of them in the same conceptual or artistic frame. As, for instance, did Temple Grandin when she drew a detailed analogy between her intellectual and sensory autistic particularities and those of animals54, or Marcus Coates, who managed to embody in a single work (Dawn Chorus, 2007) the metabolism, time perception, somatic sensations and social dimensions of birds. As if he was 52 Payne, Roger. “Songs of the Humpback Whale”. National Geographic (January 1979): 24. Lenain, Thierry. Monkey painting. (London: Reaktion, 1997): 98-99. 54 Grandin, Temple and Catherine Johnson. Animals in translation: Using the mysteries of autism to decode animal behavior. (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006). 53 15 accomplishing, decades later, what Jakob von Uexküll had imagined as one of the future purposes of art: to enlighten the subjective path of biology by bringing closer to scientists the experiences and perceptual worlds of other animals55. Up to this point, I had scheduled and developed the first three chapters of my thesis to examine the various roles non human animals had been appointed inside and around the white cube of contemporary art, those of works of art, viewers and interlocutors. But there was a very important one left, that of artists. In order to fulfil this role, animals had to be agents, as well as regular collaborators. At the most basic level, this meant that they had to move to act, to express themselves, to leave a trace. Because “if you don’t move, you are a mushroom”, as one of my biology professors asserted in a taxonomy class: a sentence I have recycled as my fourth chapter’s title. If you don’t move, you might be mistaken by a fungus, or a plant, which don’t generally move. On the contrary, movement tends to define animals, it “animates” us. Thus, it should come as no surprise that many artists have paid a close atention to animal movement and to its consequences. Nor that this fourth and last chapter is the most comprehensive one of my dissertation, due to the fact that my original motivation and the impulse behind this project was to explore the contributions made by other animals to contemporary art, as it is as agents, collaborators and artists how they are able to make their most significant interventions. My strategy to deal with animal movement and agency was to take advantage of a seminal performance by human Joseph Beuys and coyote Little John: I like America and America likes me 56 (New York, 1974). In this piece I recognised a point of inflection that both echoed the preceding attitudes towards animals (pre-1974) and anticipated the future (post-1974) in this regard. An evaluation, this last one, that was supported by the substantial number or artistic responses Beuys and Little John’s action had gathered over the years. In May 1974, Beuys arrived in New York from Düsseldorf, was wrapped in felt, transported in an ambulance to René Block Gallery, and spent three days locked up in its white cube with a male coyote, and a number of items (felt, crook, torch, gloves, musical triangle, straw, Wall Street Journals), alternating highly ordered ritualistic phases with others unstructured ones. Then, the initial trip was reversed and the artist flew back to Germany. His refusal to step on American soil was a protest against the 55 56 Von Uexküll, Jakob. Ideas para una Concepción Biológica del Mundo. (Madrid: Calpe, 1922): 74-5. Tisdall, Caroline. Joseph Beuys, Coyote. (London: Thames & Hudson, 2008). 16 Vietnam War, and against other issues like the historical abuse towards Native Americans, for whom the coyote was standing for. The impact of the artwork was noteworthy, though there was (and still there is) a tendency to highlight certain features of the performance: its epic traits, the struggle between man and coyote, the risks allegedly endured by Beuys, the ritual and the shamanic conciliation, the symbolic and spiritual roles personified by the coyote... In contrast, there exist other current interpretations far more placid, which point that the supposedly wild coyote had a name (Little John) and an owner57, the playful nature of some of the interactions, and the occurrence of intervals of repose and mutual understanding between Little John and Beuys58. Besides the characteristic calm of this account of the action, another trend that pervades is an increased stress in the individuality of the coyote (Little John), instead of just considering him a generic representative of a species, Native American peoples, the wilderness, or a symbol of any other idea or group of ideas. Something that could be related with the already mentioned eagle exhibition by Broodthaers, who had tried to separate the meanings we projected upon the eagles from the birds of prey in themselves. The question was to aerate the prevalent aura of excessive danger and violence that used to define the action, and to face it with another viewpoint in mind. This was an attitude that could also be found in the artistic responses to I like America and America likes me I cited before. An early one was by Rose Finn-Kelcey and two magpies, who in 1976 inhabited for two days the window display of a London gallery59. Despite sharing some of the mystical atmosphere of the coyote piece, this performance was a little bit more earthly. Magpies were everyday birds, and the interactions between them and the woman were not marked by the rigid ritual that framed the comings and goings of man and coyote. Another performance by Kira O’Reilly and the pot-bellied female pig Deliah could be seen as the definitive appeasement of Beuys and Little John’s action: Falling Asleep with a Pig60 (2009). As its title points out, woman and female pig lived and slept together in the gallery space for a extended period of hours. All the needs of Deliah were carefully assessed and met, as O’Reilly was conscious of the non-consensual nature of the presence of the female 57 Even a collar, as I could ascertain in Helmut Wietz’s documentary about the action. Williams, David. "Inappropriate/d others: or, the difficulty of being a dog”. TDR/The Drama Review 51.1 (2007): 92-118. 59 Battista, Kathy. Renegotiating the body: feminist art in 1970s London. (New York: IB Tauris, 2013): 58-9. 60 http://www.artscatalyst.org/projects/detail/interspeciescornerhouse/ Last Access 08/07/2014. 58 17 pig in the gallery, and she sought the greatest symmetry possible. In the whole, the performance was peaceful and rather domestic, an encounter rather than a struggle, and it underscored shared aspects between the two females (rest, sleep, dreams, among others) that had been thoroughly omitted in the narrative surrounding Beuys’ proposal. This doesn’t mean those aspects were entirely absent from Beuys works. A second look, prompted by the type of artistic responses briefly reviewed here, revealed their existence at a certain distance from the spotlight. For instance, Beuys and Little John playing with the pair of gloves, or relaxing in the straw near the window. By all appearances, it is this kind of direction the one Nicolas Primat is exploring too when he declares himself inspired by the German artist. Conversely, there have been other artistic reactions to I like America and America likes me that have magnified its violent component, even to the point of distortion and caricature. That is the case, I believe, of Oleg Kulik’s I bite America and America bites me (New York, 1997), a reenaction of Beuys’ piece but with the Russian artist assuming the role of Little John, and behaving like a raging dog. The security apparatus (bars, chains, bites suits) was wildly exaggerated, and the performance appeared to be somewhat of a staging of an “eye for an eye” exchange between Russia and the United States. Likewise, in 2008 Diane Borsato devised another performance (and video art) that responded to the excessive drama, grandeur and epic ascribed to Beuys’ piece, and she did not so by exaggerating it, but by inverting its coordinates. She relocated the white cube into her bedroom and metamorphosed the coyote into a cat; specifically, into her own cat61. It was a manner of shifting the axis of the discussion about our relationships with other animals: from the symbolic and elevated realm that was so widespread before to the inside of our homes, to the real animals we treated daily. Precisely, several works of art have addressed the topic of our cohabitation with other animals by evoking the layout of a house. In A House for Pigs and People/Ein Haus fur Schweine und Menschen (documenta X, 1997), Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel presented a divided house where the audience could contemplate a family of pigs behind a one-way mirror62. The installation and the row of interrogations posed by the artists in the catalogue urged for reflection on issues like the past and present of the 61 http://dianeborsato.net/projects/three-performances-after-joseph-beuys-marina-abramovic-and-bonniesherk/ Last Access 21/06/2014. 62 Höller, Carsten and Rosemarie Trockel. A House for Pigs and People/Ein Haus fur Schweine und Menschen. (Cologne: W. Konig, 1997). 18 age-old human/pig association, or the intersections between the commercial exploitation of animals raised for food and that of women’s bodies or vulnerable workers. Questions we had really close, at home, but that we tended to avoid anyway. Another previous work with the word “house” in its title had been A House Divided (Berlin, 1989) by Mark Thompson63. If Höller and Trockel chose pigs for their project, Thompson opted for insects that had also a sustained relationship with humans: bees. The artist turned the white cube into a yellow one by using beeswax, and built a clear beehive in the gallery that allowed the observation of the comings and goings of the bees who feed on either side of the Berlin Wall, then about to fall. As the one-way mirror, the clear beehive was a window to evaluate our connection with animals, and to reconsider the divide we had set between us and them. In fact, Thompson approached this subject with some of the epic tone often attributed to Beuys: he introduced his head into the hive, without being sure how the bees were going to react. Interestingly enough, this action found a similar response to that of Kira O’Reilly in Sleeping in a Bee Hive by Bärbel Rothhaar64 (20046). This time, the hive was located in Rothhaar’s bedroom, and inside the box there was just a wax sculpture of the artist’s head. Again, a calmer proposal by a woman artist that remarked a more “homey” continuity between us and the rest of animals. In spite of the struggle that Beuys and Little John’s action staged at times, the piece also alluded to the continuity cited above. During the ritualistic phase, the German artist offered over and over the handle of the crook to the coyote, as if he was requesting his participation. In addition, Beuys incorporated to the performance a game with the pair of gloves that Little John improvised at one point, which delineated the growing confidence between the two males and shaped the evolution of their relationship. For the man, the coyote was a peer sculptor, as he demonstrated by welcoming all the canine interventions. Thereby, Beuys opened the way for many other artistic collaborations between humans and other animals, in which the latter did contribute to the creative process. An outstanding example would be The Mended Spiderweb series by Nina Katchadourian, a group of works that she produced during the summer of 1998 in Pörtö, Finland, as part of a bigger section of her career called Uninvited Collaborations with Animals65. In order to help the spiders, Katchadourian decided to patiently repair (with a conspicuous red thread) the spoiled webs she noticed around her 63 Stiles, Kristine and Peter Howard Selz, (eds.). Theories and documents of contemporary art: a sourcebook of artists' writings. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996): 632. 64 http://www.baerbel-rothhaar.de/en/bienen_01.html Last Access 05/08/2014. 65 http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/uninvitedcollaborations/spiderwebs.php Last Access 02/09/2014. 19 cabin. Allegedly, her intentions were good, but she was surprised to find that the interventions were not welcomed by the 8-legged arthropods, who expelled the foreign and noticeable threads into a pile on the ground below the webs. Rather than imposing her human will to the tiny beings, the artist acknowledged their agencies and decided to build her project around them. A choice that amended our tendency to prioritise human solutions to animal and environmental problems, even if the former ignored the preferences and agencies of the animals implicated. If artistic collaborations such as the ones accomplished by Katchadourian with the spiders were occasional and didn’t continue for too long, other ones involved a lifetime. That would be the case of William Wegman and Man Ray, Fay Ray, Batty, Chip, Bobbin, Candy, Flo or Topper, the artist own saga of Weimaraner dogs66. In the early seventies, Man Ray’s spontaneous interferences in Wegman’s videos ended up determining both their content as well as the drift of his career towards a lifelong collaboration with his dogs, even though the human was reluctant at first. Over time, his videos, books, films and photographs, a cooperative co-creation, became an engaging statement about the human/dog relationship, thanks to which you could witness the emergence and growth of a bond, the changes caused by aging, the subsequent loss and duel, and its partial relief due to the juxtaposition of another life, of another cycle, that didn’t erase nor replace the previous one. In line with this, you could uncover yet another aspect of I like America and America likes me. In the performance you had Little John and you had Beuys, a coyote and a human, a canine and a primate. In this light, if you focused in the growing trust between man and coyote during the days the piece lasted, you could relate its progress with a reference to the domestication and joint evolution of humans and dogs. A process that wasn’t (as current research suggests) as one-sided as we have long believed, since both humans and dogs shaped and domesticated each other, and thus contributed to the resulting changes. As my exposition shows, the transformation experienced in the attitudes of artists towards non human animals acknowledges new ways of conceptualising our interactions with them, in accordance with a novel perception of our position and role in the environment as a whole, in the networks constituting the ecosystems. As if there was no longer a “man in charge” or in control, but a complex circuitry of interdependencies, a whole new world of possible agencies to consider. Actually, Beuys 66 McHugh, Susan. “Video dog star: William Wegman, aesthetic agency, and the animal in experimental video art”. Society and Animals 9.3 (2001): 229-52. 20 himself was an early pioneer regarding the introduction of the concerns towards the environment into the European political institutions in the late seventies and early eighties. The artist was among the founders of the German Green Party (Die Grüne) and he even acted as one of its candidates for the European elections67. In advance, in 1969 he had already declared himself a member and the spokesman (and leader) of the Party for all animals he had created. In his works and political activities Beuys tried to give voice to other agencies, to other animals, and simultaneously he imposed himself as his representative and dictated their words to some extent. This would be the point of inflection I cited before, the mixture of past and future stances I detect in Beuys, and the reason why I found I like America and America likes me so valuable as a reference or template for the first half of my fourth chapter. The piece echoed and was the heir of the preceding decades, but it also anticipated and engendered the future, as manifested in the multiplicity of perceptual worlds and agencies taken into account in the works of artists like Katchadourian, Primat, Mayeri, Coates, Bec and many others. In recent years, scholars have paid a close attention to non human agencies, animal or not. That is the case of Actor-Network Theory68 or Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter 69 . This tendency has opened up the panorama, as now any agency can be considered and examined, and not just human ones. However, I felt a bit uneasy about the homogenisation this appeared to bring about for animals. Their agencies could be addressed, but more or less in the same way of those of a rock or a hammer; probably to circumvent the weaknesses of vitalism. Because of it, I thought it was necessary to discuss some of Bennett and Latour’s ideas, as I have done in detail in the corresponding section of this thesis, and find a compromise for “my” animals. On the grounds that I believed I was sensing a connection and recognising something (more), peculiar, in the works created by animals. I encountered an answer when reading how, for Bennett, human power is a kind or thing-power in which matter has organised itself in a more complex way. The thought of that complexity made me remember that we share certain kind of organised structures with many animals: brains. We even share some rather special cells with some of them, mirror neurons, involved in reading and replicating animal movements, and possibly also responsible of or associated with 67 Beckmann, Lukas. “The Causes Lie in the Future”. Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy. (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2001): 91-112. 68 Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social-An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 69 Bennett, Jane. Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 21 empathy. Accordingly, this continuity could make us feel intellectually and bodily connected to the movements of other animals, or to their tracks, to their traces; maybe even at an emotional level. This would be consistent with the observation I made before, when commenting Nagel’s views, that it could be useful to look for more subjectivity, grounded in current knowledge about our brain, to approach the perspectives and experiences of other animals. Considering the said connection we feel towards the movements of other animals, and to its traces, it should not come as a surprise the large number of artists that have focused their practices on this issues. At this point, in order to sort out their efforts I divided them depending on the medium conquered by the animals involved: air, water or land. An early case of artistic interest towards birds flights was that of Jan Dibbets in Robin Redbreast's Territory / Sculpture (1969), a conceptual approximation to the question 70 . Dibbets supposedly shaped the territory of the male bird in Vondelpark (Amsterdam) by displacing, little by little, the posts that marked its boundaries. The sculpture, as stated by the artist’s words, was made of the invisible lines traced by the flights and movements of the bird inside the virtual territory. Hence, it could only be perceived and imagined through the documentation prepared and exhibited by Dibbets. Artists, though, did not follow birds trajectories just in the outside, they also introduced them in the white cube. There seems to be somewhat of a lyric enthrallment with the idea of a flock of birds (or butterflies) doodling in the air inside an art gallery, as explored by works of Jannis Kounellis, Mark Dion, Damien Hirst, Bik Van der Pol... But one of the most renowned would be from here to ear by Céleste BoursierMougenot, presented in several variations after his debut at PS1, New York, in 199971. The installation involved accommodating a group of finches in the gallery space, with guitars as perches and cymbals as water and food containers. The birds flew and lived around, and the sounds they produced were amplified, filling the air and generating a peculiar and synaesthetic atmosphere, where the music underlined the birds movements and influenced the general mood, humans included. 70 Dibbets, Jan. Roodborst territorium / Sculptuur 1969. Robin Redbreast's Territory / Sculpture 1969. Domaine d'un rouge-gorge / Sculpture 1969. Rotkehlchenterritorium / Skulptur 1969. (New York and Cologne: Siegelaub/Walter König, 1970). 71 Bianchini, Samuel. “Listenings Working: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot in Conversation with Samuel Bianchini”. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot: États Seconds. (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2008): 127-31. 22 Water, again, entailed further difficulties, but this hasn’t stopped artists to scrutinise fish movements. Boursier-Mougenot himself did a piece with goldfish (fisheyedrones, 2011). Another would be 2000-7-2, a performance by Zhu Ming in Changchun, China, in which the artist smeared a glowing substance both into his naked body and that of a fish inside a tank, highlighting their motions in the dark. Nevertheless, perhaps the most noteworthy case would be a series of works by Ken Rinaldo in collaboration with some specimens of Siamese fighting fish (Betta splendens), collaboration that started in 1993 and was culminated in 2004 with Augmented Fish Reality72. Rinaldo designed successive mobile habitats for the fish that could be controlled by their swims and propelled around the gallery space, either hanging from the ceiling or rolling on the floor. The tanks facilitated more symmetric interactions between fish and humans, and a better access to their aquatic Umwelten thanks to cameras and live projections. Video artist Sam Easterson also used cameras to follow many animals over the land such as cows, pigs, sheep, goats, bison, caribous, wolves, armadillos, scorpions, alligators, tortoises, spiders, crickets... He mounted cameras on them and then presented the results with the least edition and post-production possible73, to offer an intimate outlook of their lives. Therefore, it was easier to empathise more directly with the animals, to understand how their relied on various senses, what caught their attention. Other artists have taken advantage of the routes of snails (boredomresearch) or filmed the comings and goings of ants (Rivanne Neuenschwander, Donna Conlon, Sean Dockray). Yukinori Yanagi, in turn, did not wield a camera but, on his knees, recorded the trips of a single ant with a red crayon in his hand, revealing a definite pattern and the attempts of the social insect to return to her anthill74. Even a creature so tiny, then, could express her preferences by the traces of her movements. As insinuated by Yanagi, the tracks and traces of animals movements could be transformed into the lines of a drawing, or into brushstrokes. If you move, you are not a mushroom, you are a trace, you are a line, you can be a brushstroke, and you are expressing yourself. At times, these brushstrokes were produced by non human animals themselves. For instance, the artistic duo formed by Olly and Suzi tried to incorporate 72 http://kenrinaldo.com/ Last Access 10/10/2014. Andreyev, Julie [interview with Sam Easterson]. “People Respond to Images that Provide Hope”. Antennae. The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 21 (Summer 2012): 69-73. 74 Weintraub, Linda. “Obeying Ants: Yukinori Yanagi”. In the making: creative options for contemporary art. (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2003): 236-43. 73 23 the tracks and prints (even bites) of endangered wild animals into their paintings. But there have been proper non human animals painters too. For this reason, I included in my thesis a “A Brief History of Painting by Non Human Animals”, paying special attention to apes, dogs and elephants. Apes like Congo, the chimpanzee who made possible that Desmond Morris realised his studies on The Biology of Art75. Likewise, Washoe’s family; the gorillas Koko and Michael, or the other “monkey painters” reviewed by Thierry Lenain76. Dogs like Tillie, with her scratched canvasses, or like Donnie, with his geometrical compositions of stuffed animals. Elephants like Siri, who convinced David Gucwa that she had something inside her head, emotions she translated into smooth or sharp drawings, depending on the day 77 ; or like the Thai elephants out of job with whom Komar and Melamid ecollaborated78. In all of their lines or brushstrokes we recognise something familiar, far from random, that suggests there is someone behind the traces, a subject behind the movements. At times it is the emotion, happy wide loops or energetic zigzags; at times, it is the composition: the balance of symmetry, the organisations of the elements, the acknowledgement of the pictorial field... Symptoms that point to the existence of a non human animal aesthetics, in continuity with ours79. If we add these symptoms to the capacity for representation (as shown by the drawings of birds, flowers or berries by the female chimpanzee Moja), the resulting inference would be that certain animals are closer to us than we thought in aesthetics and artistic matters. Here, again, the human/animal divide fades, as domains that had been long established as solely human appear to be present in other animals too; at least, partially. Art is one of those realms, as language, or culture. In the last sections of this dissertation, I turned to a couple of Chinese artists that enlightened this issues through their collaborations with animals. In A Case Study of Transference (1994) Xu Bing “tattooed” a couple of to pigs (male and female) with false English words and invented Chinese characters 80 , because he felt their copulation will prove that “nature” was 75 Morris, Desmond. La biología del arte: un estudio de la conducta en la ejecución de pintura de los grandes monos y su relación con el arte humano. (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 1971). 76 Lenain, Thierry. Monkey painting. (London: Reaktion, 1997). 77 Gucwa, David and James Ehmann. To whom it may concern: An investigation of the art of elephants. (New York: Norton, 1985). 78 Fineman, Mia and Komar & Melamid. When elephants paint: The quest of two Russian artists to save the elephants of Thailand. (New York: Perennial, 2000). 79 Welsch, Wolfgang. “Animal Aesthetics”. Contemporary Aesthetics, 2004. http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=243 Last Access 18/03/2015. 80 Xu Bing. “Yang zhu wenda [Raising pigs: A Q&A]”. Heipi shu [Black cover book] (1994): 85-90. 24 victorious over “culture”. Instead, the artist found both to be inextricable from each other. The pigs did mate in front of an ashamed audience, even though the process was more complex than anticipated as they were (like us) shaped by culture, theirs and ours. Addressing this performance allowed me to discuss non human cultures, and how Japanese primatologists were who introduced this concept, as they were not burdened with a religion and/or tradition that completely separated humans from other animals. Around 1989, Liang Shaoji turned to silkworms, and started what has been, since, a lifelong commitment81. Due to his background in textile crafts and traditional arts, he was looking for ways to circumvent the distinction between high and low arts, and he found the answer in the silk thread. A thread both origin and history, matter and concept, biology and culture, art and life. The artist emphatised with the worlds, life cycles, efforts and emotions of those little insects, and began to think about him as if he was just another silkworm. After all, silkworm or human, both animals had evolved together for millennia, both artists devoted their lives to create and, natural or artificial, Liang could not find significant differences between the fabrics woven by humans and the weft that formed the silkworm’s cocoon. Thereby, Liang’s ideas and practices offered me the opportunity to lay the foundations of an analysis about why art tends to be considered as exclusively human. In contrast with this, the last couple of decades have seen a sustained increase in the degree of recognition of non human animal cultures, despite initial reluctance. Especially, in the case of apes and other primates. However, the opposition seems to be bigger in realms such as art or language/communication. Interestingly enough, and depending on who you ask, the role of last bastion of human uniqueness is usually reserved to one of the other, art or language. As a result, to clarify this tendency, I performed a thorough comparison between the positions of a semiotician/linguist (Thomas Sebeok) and a philosopher/aesthetician (Thierry Lenain). For Sebeok, art had a sensory nature that brought it closer to animals, while language was more intellectual and elevated 82 . Conversely, for Lenain art had an element of transcendence that distanced it from other animals, and led him to use the term between quotation marks when it was referred to them83. Maybe as if art ought to be associated with a soul or 81 Liang Shaoji: Preguntas al Cielo - Questioning Heaven. (Beijing/Madrid: Gao Magee Gallery, 2012). Sebeok, Thomas Albert. “Prefigurements of art”. The play of musement. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981): 210-59. 83 Lenain, Thierry. “Animal Aesthetics and Human Art”. Sociobiology and the Arts. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999): 239-51. 82 25 spirit. Language, though, was spared of those quotation marks when being debated around animals, regarding proto-symbolic implications and other considerations. In the whole, art or language, there appears to be a propensity to cling onto the last qualitative difference standing, to clutch at straws in order to avoid being hurled to the same boat with the rest of animals. Accordingly, to discuss art in relation to non human animals has been a delicate and intricate issue, as public lectures tend to remind me. Even examining animal aesthetics is polemic, despite the scientific evidence84. Therefore art, with capital letters, is yet a more complicated topic in this regard. Some of the artistic branches have been more accessible than others, though. The term animal architecture, for instance, has been around for a while, and without quotation marks85. My view is that this is linked to the pragmatic conception of architecture, as this makes it a little less transcendent and a realm more readily available to animals. Thus animal architecture, as concept, results less provocative and humiliating. This lesser resistance could also be associated to the centuries-old trope of the industrious animal/insect, architect and artisan, which I proceeded to examine in relation to Hubert Duprat’s collaboration with caddisfly larvae86. The artist provided precious materials to the larvae and removed their cases, so they built new ones with the appeal of little jewels. It was fascinating to analyse this last collaboration next to that of Liang Shaoji and the silkworms. Liang considered himself another silkworm among them (or at least, as someone that could be equated to them), but Duprat acted as the master and supreme architect who guided the efforts of his community of little artisans. In addition, Duprat or Liang, each of them had different ways of organising knowledge. Both departed from a similar tiny live unit to conform their cosmologies, yet the French artist opted for segmentation and compartmentalisation instead of the more global, integrating and fluid approach favoured by the Chinese artist. Given this contrast, it was not surprising that Liang advocated more clearly for a higher continuity between humans and other animals, between nature and civilization. 84 Welsch, Wolfgang. “Animal Aesthetics”. op. cit.; Snaevarr, Stefan. “Talk To the Animals: A Short Comment on Wolfgang Welsch's <<Animal Aesthetics>>”. Contemporary Aesthetics, 2004. http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=251Last Access 19/03/2015 85 Von Frisch, Karl and Otto Von Frisch. Animal architecture. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974). 86 Chastel, Louis. Hubert Duprat Theatrum: guide imaginaire des collections. (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002). 26 As it could not be otherwise, the final section of the fourth chapter, and of my dissertation, is consecrated to a group of animals that fascinate some and make others feel a little bit uneasy: bowerbirds87. Their impressive bowers turn everything upside down because of their complex structures and colourful decorations, that confound further the boundaries we have set between humans and other animals; as male bowerbirds even follow baroque and theatrical rules in their arrangements to trigger certain visual illusions88, while female bowerbirds grow an elaborated taste to judge the efforts of their partners. All of which appears to have an essential learned component that is transmitted and modified from generation to generation, and generates distinct artistic styles among different populations89. In this regard, the gaze of artist Mary Jo McConnell offers an interesting insight into the works of bowerbirds, an outlook that complements the scientific approach. As a meticulous and intuitive observer, in her paintings McConnell records the strategies implemented by particular birds to increase the appeal of their architectures and decorations, which often coincide with the ones she uses herself: the orientation towards light of bowers and objects, the selection of ornaments, the colour palette, the overall composition... As I have argued in detail in the main text of the thesis, if we take into account bowerbirds it seems difficult to avoid talking about animal art, in spite of the different degrees of complexity between the former and human art. Furthermore, to the solid argument provided by bowerbirds we should add the admission of animal art inside museums and galleries (often in association with other kinds of outsider art); the fact that they express themselves through the traces and tracks of their movements (sometimes with a considerable level of awareness); the possession of a certain aesthetics (symmetry, composition, pictorial field, colour choices) that affects their perceptive preferences and pleasurable experiences, or the recognition that artistic intention should not pose an unavoidable theoretical problem (as does not in many historical pieces). In the whole, art should not be treated and considered as the last line of defence facing the siege of other animals, of the threat that endangers our human uniqueness. If we feel (at all) like we need something to define ourselves and to reaffirm our positions, it should be subtler, less categorical. 87 Frith, Clifford B. and Dawn W. Frith. Bowerbirds: Nature, Art & History. (Queensland: Frith & Frith, 2008). 88 Endler, John A., Lorna C. Endler and Natalie R. Doerr. "Great bowerbirds create theaters with forced perspective when seen by their audience”. Current biology 20.18 (2010): 1679-84. 89 Diamond, Jared. "Animal art: variation in bower decorating style among male bowerbirds Amblyornis inornatus”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 83.9 (1986): 3042-46. 27 In these conclusions, I have both summarised and regrouped the ideas that structure this thesis project, pointing to the convergences and interactions between them. Along the decades that constitute the chronological framework of this dissertation occurred relevant changes in the ways in which artists conceived and approached non human animals, in parallel to the evolving attitudes of scientists and the growing concerns of a significant percentage of the society, as I believe I have demonstrated. These changes affected both the positions we assigned to non human animals as well as the ones occupied by us with respect to them, the environment, the planet, and the universe/cosmos. The starting point I chose to evaluate and interpret the said changes was “the black box inside the white cube” image, that illustrated the encounter and demise of two related and complementary modes of understanding humans and animals in art and science. Humans were light, empty from matter an full of thinking, unmoving in their elevated contemplation of their master plan; animals were dark and solid inside, packed with flesh and biology, incessant in their aimless movements, which seemed to be the only thing they could offer. This delineated a stepwise hierarchy from the floor to the heavens, based on weight (the less, the better), height and posture, in which everything looked in order, even the senses. Then, the black box/white cube encounter initiated a transference that filled humans with viscera and animals with perception. With animals as perceptive subjects and humans on the move (no longer contemplating any master plan), agencies and control were more distributed. There was a shift towards a network of interdependencies and bilateral relations that extended and enhanced our empathy towards other animals and the environment which, aside from arising our concerns about their vulnerability, made us more aware of our own. We were no longer in total control, not even of our immediate surroundings or of our biology, of our own bodies. Scientists continued erasing the dogmas of the past and gathering new advances, with occasional frictions and steps back in delicate issues; while artists took advantage of their progress and of the presence of live non human animals inside the white cube to open up new perspectives and to approach to theirs, exhausting all possibilities: animals as works of art, animals as audience, animals as interlocutors, animals as artists and collaborators. First, with half a smile and wild expectations; then, taking things back down-to-earth, and to daily life and everyday problems. Maybe, pointing with it to another path that vindicates new ways of using subjectivity and empathy with the aim of 28 approaching animals in general (humans included) and improving both our knowledge about them, and how we meet their needs and preferences. This dissertation, thus, has thoroughly examined the topic of animals in contemporary art as well as animal art. Thanks to the integration of knowledge from various fields and sources, I believe I have demonstrated both that it is possible to approach non human animals perspectives, and that they do make contributions in the sphere of art. I also hope not only to have interpreted the past, but also to have anticipated the future, at least some of it. As for the future of my research, the conceptual framework that I have devised can be easily applied, with compelling results, to any other artwork that includes live non human animals. Likewise, there would be another promising field in which to dig deeper, regarding the complementary positions towards others animals adopted by Western and East Asia artists, with the former tending to be more aware of human projections upon animals and to differentiate them from the real animals (thanks to compartmentalisation) and the latter more likely to stress our continuity with them (thanks to a more fluid approach). Finally, if our brain reacts in a very specific way towards animals and, as I have shown, this has affected both art and artists, the same or other of the neuroscientific findings I have turned to could be useful to explore various artistic domains (dreams and their representation, for example, could be a very stimulating topic). In the whole, and above everything else, I am convinced that I have proved the relevance of this thesis, even beyond the realm of contemporary art. Because, as human animals, we rely in empathy and perspective-taking (of humans, of animals) in order to think and define our conception of ourselves, and the position we occupy in our most immediate surroundings, the environment, the planet and the universe. 29