Search Results

Chapter 8 investigates the phenomenon of “art by animals” as a counterpoint to the first part of the book, which focuses on the display of dead bodies and the tensions that emerge in social practices meant to attribute subjectivity to only some of those bodies as a prerequisite for mourning. Rather than focusing on dead bodies as before, Desmond examines the traces left by living animal bodies, activated and captivated in the transnational market for “art” by animals. In particular, she examines items that get designated as “artworks” when they record the physical trace of a specific animal body, such as the imprint of fish scales on paper. Desmond sketches the transnational contours of the market for this type of animal art and the implied continuum that positions the value of artworks along a scale of increasing capacity for “intent” demonstrated by the species producing the works, including seals, birds, and elephants.

In the book’s introduction, Desmond explains the terminology she will use to describe relations involving humans and animals and provides an overview of the book’s tripartite structure. She discusses the challenges and particularities of the academic and scientific field of “animal studies”, as well as the functionality of experience and her own anxieties about what “animals” are actually involved in animal studies. Desmond wraps up the introduction with a general statement about the book’s purpose, and her hopes that it will help us understand how so many arenas of everyday life unfold in an embodied concert with animals.

In this chapter on “art” produced by nonhuman primates and its transnational market, Desmond explores the issues of representational art and how that categorization is used to raise the bar in humans’ evaluation of nonhuman animals’ intellectual capacities and our resultant moral obligations to them. Desmond retains an emphasis on understanding the creation, reception, and circulation of animal art products within the context of a specifically European-derived notion of art making and its contemporary linkage of notions of individual creativity, subjectivity, and visual skill. She cites the post-World War II rise of abstract art and abstract expressionism as a key prerequisite for the expansion of the animal art market overall. Special attention is paid to works produced by primates involved in human language studies, such as Kanzi and Koko.

Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn’s essay, ‘Animals, Art and Abjection’, teases out the implications of Kristeva’s contention in Powers of Horrorthat the abject engenders a fragile state within which the human strays on the territory of the animal. For Kristeva, some cultures have branded animals as abject and as ‘representatives of sex and murder’. In such cultures, the animal is figured in negative terms and notions of animalism, of the human as an animal species, are suppressed. Animals therefore figure as impure and are made to form the constitutive outside to the human. Creed and Hoorn, however, argue that contemporary art practices that explore animals and animality do so as a means to challenge the notion that animals form humankind’s abject other. In this context, the artworks do not function to purify the abject but rather embrace what has hitherto been labelled as abject as a means to renegotiate its status from within an anthropocentric society.

With reference to a number of contemporary cases, such as that surrounding the Guggenheim’s Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World exhibition, this chapter argues that some important controversies about the ethics of art can be explained in terms of a disconnect between people who tacitly adopt the perspectivist (or another interpretation-oriented) approach to ethical criticism and people who tacitly adopt a production-oriented approach to ethical criticism. The chapter argues that perspectivism tends to be favored not only in philosophical aesthetics, but also in art criticism and in many art world institutions. In contrast, non-specialists tend to tacitly adopt the production-oriented approach. In the case of the use of animals in contemporary art, current controversies are further explained by the fact that, given some fairly uncontroversial premises about the moral respect that we owe to non-human animals, people who evaluate such work from a production-oriented approach are likely to find much that is prima facie ethically blameworthy. Moreover, they are rationally warranted in doing so.

This epilogue by Jay McDaniel reflects on the animal paintings of Jan Harrison. Harrison's animals are not merely looking at us, McDaniel argues. They are also flowing and causing us to flow. They are bearing witness to the withness of the body, and hence inviting a knowing with rather than a knowing about. They are teaching us to fold into their singularity in our difference. They are telling us that their flesh does not simply belong to us, nor does our flesh simply belong to us. They are impelling us to ask, How far does flesh go down? And they are prompting us to answer, Deep enough to show that your bodies are also our bodies and so your futures are also our futures.