While
non-human animals (e.g. the bulls and horses depicted in the caves of
Lascaux) have been subjects of art for tens of thousands of years, in
the past few decades living animals have become not mere subjects but
objects of art. Unlike two or three dimensional representations of
animals, or even dead animals (the stuffed goat central to Robert
Rauschenberg's "Monogram," or Joseph Beuys' dead hare, for instance),
the use of living animals in contemporary art is becoming more and more
common. In just a few days this month alone, two well-publicized art
works were presented in two different parts of New York City using
living animals as material. Maurizio Cattelan (whose sculpture "Him"
just sold at auction for over 17 million dollars) had his 1994
installation "Warning! Enter at Your Own Risk ... Thank You," which
includes a live donkey, restaged at the Frieze art fair; and Duke
Riley's "Fly by Night," which involves 2,000 pigeons flying about over
the East River with lights attached to their ankles, began its six week
run.
While
many artists and critics maintain that the question of whether this use
of animals is abuse or not is difficult to answer definitively, it is
hardly debatable that the employment of animals (beings incapable of
consenting to spending days, weeks, or merely hours, confined to, and on
display in, galleries or museums - or, in the case of Riley's piece,
performing tricks over the East River) is exploitative, reflecting a
form of domination that does not simply regard living animals as
material so much as it deforms animals into material (into things that
legendary artist Richard Serra described,
in the statement accompanying his 1966 work "Live-Animal Habitat," as
comparable to objects such as sticks, stones, and paint).
In
a historical period witnessing sustained public outrage over the
abusive treatment of animals by entities such as SeaWorld, the use of
animals as material in the art world raises, among others, the question
of whether art galleries, museums, and their wealthy patrons (not to
mention the general public) have any reason to regard the cultural
production of the art world as being somehow qualitatively superior to
such ostensibly "lowbrow" (and abusive) institutions as zoos and
so-called marine mammal parks. (In many respects, the claims to
aesthetic and ontic seriousness that pervade the art world make their
installations and performances qualitatively worse. For, more than
simple emanations of the economic order cannibalizing the planet, these
institutions serve - on multiple levels of abstraction - as this order's
ideologues and enablers.)
While the use of live animals as objects of art seems to be more common than ever in this second decade of the third millennium, and is central to such iconic works of contemporary art as Joseph Beuys' 1974 piece "I Like America and America Likes Me" (in which the artist spent three days in a gallery with a wild coyote), the practice is less than 80 years old. The use of living animals as objects of art, as opposed to subjects of art or objects of mass entertainment, can be arguably traced to 1938, when Salvador Dalí (ridiculed for his self-advancing proclivities by other surrealists by the anagrammatic nickname Avida Dollars) presented his installation "Rainy Taxi." In this work, a precursor to Edward Keinholz's 1964 "Backseat Dodge '38," two mannequins were placed in a taxi. A shark-headed chauffeur sat in front. In the back seat, surrounded by lettuce and chicory, living snails crawled over the female. While Dali's use of living animals was not widely emulated at first, by the 1960s the use of live animals in the art world became more common.
The
controversial Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch's religiously-oriented
"actions" began, for instance, in 1962. Initially involving the
butchering of carcasses, viewers of his performances would ultimately
see professional butchers, overseen by veterinarians, publicly slaughter
animals. And while it may seem counterintuitive, Nitsch, whose Orgien
Mysterien Theater hasn't incorporated public slaughters since 1998, is
regarded by himself, and many others, as an animal protector. Only
killing animals already slated for commercial slaughter, Nitsch regards
the horrors involved in commercial farming as "the biggest crime in our
society."
By
the mid 1960s, as previously mentioned, contemporary giant Richard
Serra was using rats and mice as objects in his "Live-Animal Habitat."
And by the end of the decade, in the year the US symbolically penetrated
the moon with its flag pole, Jannis Kounellis produced his now
legendary installation "Horses," an installation that involved tethering
a dozen horses to the walls of a Roman garage.
In
the years following Beuys' iconic 1974 piece, live animals continued to
feature as objects/materials of art. Among the most controversial of
these is Kim Jones' 1976 "Rat Piece," in which Jones burned three caged
rats to death in a Los Angeles performance. A year later, in 1977, Tom
Otterness (known mostly these days for the cartoonish public sculptures
for which he's paid millions)
created "Shot Dog Film," in which he adopted a dog from an animal
shelter, tied it to a fence, and shot it to death. As the 20th century
came to a close, and the 21st got underway, the use of animals as
objects, as opposed to subjects, of artworks appeared to be more
prevalent than ever.
In
the year 2000, for instance, Marco Everistti exhibited his
installation, "Helena and El Pescador," in Denmark. Intended as a
critique of the brutality of the world, the installation was comprised
of ten blenders, each containing water and a live goldfish. Attendees
were given the choice of turning on the blenders and killing the fish,
or pardoning them. Two fish were soon liquefied. Ultimately, the
blenders were unplugged. And while many have condemned Everistti for
placing vulnerable creatures in harm's way, replicating the brutality he
was critiquing, the counterargument - that it is a bit ridiculous to
get all bent out of shape by the killing of a few goldfish while
socially accepted things, like the vastly more violent commercial
fishing industry, and commercial farming industry, among other
industries, are busily contributing to the sixth great extinction - is
not entirely unpersuasive.
At
any event, while it may not be difficult to find some merit in Marco's
"Helena," or in his more recent work involving living goldfish, or in
Nitsch's work, it's hard to find much merit at all in the work
incorporating animals of international graffiti mystery artist Banksy.
Though the most recent one is already a decade old, Banksy has produced
at least two artworks that use live animals as material. In a 2003
exhibition, in East London, he included a work comprised of pigs
spray-painted to look like police, a cow painted with Andy Warhol faces,
and sheep spray-painted in the black and white stripes of concentration
camp inmates. And at the 2006 Barely Legal exhibition in Los Angeles,
attended by such celebrities as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, his
installation "Elephant in the Room" incorporated a then-38-year-old
elephant named Tai. Intended to bring awareness to global poverty, the
literal elephant was spray-painted to match the pink floral pattern of
the room's wallpaper.
In
"Elephant in the Room," Banksy not only subjected Tai to the violence
of capture, being painted, and to the indignity of being displayed as a
painted object. On top of this, the paint turned out to be toxic -
adding further injury. While "Elephant in the Room" was the subject of
protest, and the toxic paint was scrubbed off, considerable irony
inheres in using an elephant in such a way in order to bring awareness
to global poverty, since poverty is but an effect of an economic order
that turns people, as well as nearly everything else, into commodities -
into things.
A
year after Banksy's "Elephant in the Room," the late Mike Kelley (one
of the most influential American artists of the early 21st century)
produced his installation "Petting Zoo." Based on the biblical story of
Sodom and Gomorra, "Petting Zoo" incorporated, among other objects, live
goats, sheep, and ponies. And rather than merely looking at these
creatures, viewers were invited to pet the animals (according to the
statement accompanying the piece, this is supposed to be relaxing). As
problematic as "Petting Zoo" may have beeen, however, Kelley's and
Banksy's works seem benign compared to Costa Rican artist Guillermo
Vargas' infamous 2007 installation (in which a starving a dog was tied
to a wall, just out of reach of a bowl of dog food), or the artworks
made from living animals created by Belgian conceptual artist Wim
Delvoye.
Best known for his "Cloaca," a "useless machine" designed to waste food by daily transforming it into synthetic excrement (which was then sold, of course), Delvoye has gained notoriety over his longstanding practice of tattooing pigs. Said to admire pig skin because of its resemblance to human skin (which he also tattoos, on the condition that he receives possession of the tattooed skin upon the tattooed person's death), Delvoye describes the tattooed pigs as "living canvas." "I show the world works of art that are so alive they have to be vaccinated," he's stated. In order to avoid animal protection laws he moved his "Art Farm" to China in 2004, where his practice continues. Asked about the charges of animal cruelty levied against his work, Delvoye has responded in interviews that the pigs are treated well - they're even fed ice cream - and probably prefer living long lives with tattoos to getting slaughtered, chopped up, and eaten.
The
year in which the world was supposed to end, 2012 turned out to be a
big year for employing animals as an art medium - objects, as opposed to
subjects, of artworks. In addition to Miru Kim's Beuys-inspired "I Like
Pigs and Pigs Like Me" (in which the naked artist spent 104 hours
cavorting with pigs in a gallery at the international art fair Art
Basel), and conceptual artist Darren Bader's "Images," which used cats
as sculptures, and Belgian artist Jan Fabre's cat throwing controversy,
2012 included Damien Hirst's "In and Out of Love" at
the Tate Modern in London, which incorporated, and famously resulted in
the deaths of, over 9,000 butterflies.
Hirst,
who is one of the most commercially successful artists of all time,
Banksy, and Delvoye, are not the only internationally recognized "art
stars" using live animals as material. In 2014, celebrity artist Cai
Guo-Qiang triggered outrage by gluing iPads to the shells of three live
African sulcata tortoises in his "Moving Ghost Town" at the Aspen Art
Museum. And, a year later, in 2015, French conceptual artist Pierre
Huyghe exhibited artworks incorporating living animals at both the
Museum of Modern Art and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
(His work on the roof of the Met incorporated an aquarium housing a
lamprey, among other creatures; while, 30 blocks away, his 2012
sculpture "Untilled," a reclining nude whose head is made from a buzzing
beehive, was exhibited in the MOMA sculpture garden. But these were
hardly the first artworks Huyghe has made out of living animals.)
While
such establishment art critics as Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz (chief
art critics for the New York Times and New York Magazine, respectively)
would probably express some degree of disapproval over Kim Jones' "Rat
Piece," or Delvoyes' tattooed pigs, they nevertheless do not seem to
object to treating animals as objects - i.e., to a practice normalizing
domination and exploitation. Indeed, Saltz (whose peculiar understanding of feminism involves his "old belief" - as he puts it in his encomium to Hillary Clinton -
that misogyny is "hard wired into us, primitive, primal, deep," rather
than historically and culturally produced, as more critical critics
recognize) positively raved about
the 2015 restaging of Kounellis' 1969 installation "Horses." And
it should not come as a surprise, I suppose, that a person whose social
media portraits depict him in the embrace of Bill Clinton should enjoy
the feeling of walking amidst a dozen powerful, yet disabled, animals.
That is, it is entirely consistent that someone who appears to delight
in power would enjoy the experience of participating in a grand bondage
scene. And though they may be provided with better care than the
creatures unfortunate enough to be held captive at SeaWorld (each horse
was attended by, as Saltz put it, "three loving grooms"), the horses are
nevertheless still tied to, and facing, a wall for eight hours a day,
on display for the amusement of the public.
Defenders of works such as "Horses," or the recent re-staging of superstar artist Maurizio Cattelan's 1994 installation "Enter at Your Own Risk...Thank You" (which features a donkey, as a type of self portrait, standing about in a manger-like space beneath a chandelier for much of the day at the Frieze art fair), who point out that the captive animals are well fed and treated humanely only illustrate the prevalence of the inability to recognize the state of capture, and being treated as an object, as constituting a harm in itself. Yet, in a social world in which people are not only commodified (i.e., objectified) and confined throughout the ever-lengthening workday, all the while pressured to spend their so-called free time deforming their experiences into further commodities (for the benefit of corporations like Facebook), it is hardly surprising that many see the treatment of an animal as an (art) object as completely normal. Relatedly, it hardly seems coincidental that Sir Gabriel (the name of the donkey at Frieze), as well as Tai (the elephant) also appear in mainstream movies and music videos alongside such figures as Britney Spears. All of which is to say, the aesthetic that these artworks seem to be realizing is not an actual aesthetic at all, but an anesthetic. As opposed to an actual aesthetic (which involves critique), anesthetic, like entertainment, functions to numb people, facilitating the smooth operation of the hegemonic order.
Duke Riley's "Fly by Night," which will be performed each weekend at the Brooklyn Navy Yard until June 12,
illustrates this anesthetic aesthetic well. Described by Roberta Smith
in her New York Times review as a "performance by 2,000 pigeons,"
she also compares the "performers" to "sailors on deck" of a ship.
Perhaps she should have added that, as has been the case historically in
naval projects, these sailors have been conscripted. They did not join
this performance willingly. They only participate at all, and take
flight, because people, waving large sticks at them, force them to fly
about, lights attached to their ankles, for the crowd's amusement. Smith
described it as "a revelation." And though it may have been visually
striking (retinal art, as Duchamp might dismissively put it), as opposed
to an anesthetic, a critical aesthetic requires actual criticism -
which involves, at the very least, attentiveness to the pervasive,
stultifying influence of ideology.
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