Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation

QUOTES AND ANALYSIS ON BOOK BY STEVE BAKER

What happens when the questions of what animals signify is asked in relation to our own experience? It is clear that Western society continues to draw heavily on symbolic ideas involving animals and that the immediate subject of those ideas is frequently not the animal itself, but rather a human subject drawing on animal imagery to make a statement about human identity. In what follows I shall be considering some of those representations and some of those symbolic idea in order to assess their operation and their influence in contemporary culture. ix

This small section of the introduction interested me as it is something that I notice as a common theme in animal artists. They will say 'I use animals to represent humans by proxy', yet this seems inherently somewhat futile to me as the entirety of this is based upon the human, and the animal is just but another representation of the human self. Because of this, true representations of the animal are actually very evasive, because it is so impossible to seperate the animal from all the things which it may or may not symbolise or stand for. It also makes me start to question exactly why on the whole, human culture refuses to engage in the animal as a standalone concept.

The book sets out to tackle three main questions. First, why should it be that the animal, frequently concieved as the archetypal cultural 'other', plays such a potent and vital role in the symbolic construction of human identity in such a variety of contemporary instances? Of course, if representations of the animal can be used to make almost any kind of statement about humans and human identity, it might reasonably be asked to what extent animal constitutes a meaningful connecting theme at all. Part of the books purpose, however, is precisely to question and to demythologize the idea of animal imagery as a 'natural' resource for saying-things-about-humans. x

This next point then goes on to further intruige me as to the problematic nature of humans with the animal. Despite this refusal to engage with animals in their own right, as this paragraph states, there are ten-to-the-dozen enagagements with animals in relation to humanity. The problematic nature of this subject was really getting me interested, and I could already tell this book was going to be picking away at the exact area of inquiry I find so fascinating.

The juxtaposition of public and private and of the innocent and the exploitative across these various identifications and enthusiasms, these rhetorics of loathing or of condescension, is itself important; ours is a culture in which animal references can be employed in any context, and in which animals can apparently be used to mean anything and everything. This of course is part of the difficulty - it may be far from clear what one could meaningfully say about the role of the animal in relation to such diverse examples; as a rhetorical device for characterizing political opponents, an affectionate family nickname for a child, and the cynical international marketing of a television cartoon. We are however dealing here with the products of a shared culture with shared stereotypes (which is not to say that the public necessarily consent to all these stereotypes, but certainly that it recognizes and understands them). The question then is what is to be made of this understanding. 4

This is also very true. Even down to the base models of our language, animals are always used to liken or describe traits in unrelated entities. 'Living like a pig' for example, even though to actually pick apart the phrases leads to many contradictions. Pigs on the whole are clean, clever and pleasant animals and only bathe in mud because they lack sweat glands and need to keep cool. In this way perhaps animals are the most complex and deep running set of connotative symbols in modern human culture. Intrinsically, they represent a set of symbols at the most fundemental, primary level, to which most humans become accustomed to in childhood through animal imagery in play and education.

It addresses neither the 'moral' or 'immoral', but rather the amoral use of animals in popular culture and the popular imagination, and it does so in the conviction that any effective cultural strategies on behalf of animals must be based on an understanding of contemporary cultural practice. 5

 This is also fundemental I feel, as it is only through deep understanding and analysis of the assumptions and connotations of contemporary culture, that we can attempt to reclaim some elements of the servicable, appropriable nature of animals.

John Berger's 'Why look at animals?', the opening piece from his 1980 collection About Looking, is one of very few texts to pay much attention to the interconnection of real and symbolic issues in human dealings with animals. 11

I was not aware previously that John Berger had specifically discussed looking at animals in one of his texts, and made a mental not to take About Looking out in the library to find this extract as a contemporary fine art source of reference.

Both developments betray the crucial loss of the animal's symbolic power, mystery and authenticity, only to replace it with a rather literal and unsatisfying form of visual knowing: 'The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters.' 14

Living animals offer further evidence of this decline, and again that evidence comes from looking: 'in the zoo the view is always wrong. Like an image out of focus' But whose view is this? In this urban gaze which is typically mediated by either the photographic lens or the bars of the cage, 'animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost all significance. They are the objects of our ever extending knowledge. What we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what seperate us from them. 15

These two extracts were incredibly insightful, and I wish I had happened upon them sooner as they would have gone brilliantly into my essay, however I was already well over the word limit, so feel like any more information may have overwhelmed my ability to condense the ideas down into the 3000 words. It does definitely add strength to my conviction that I could definitely develop this topic further for my research report and dissertation next year.

Berger doesn't actually say so, but what he is describing here is the white male gaze, the empowered gaze: his account of it is remarkably similar in terms which, in his earlier and more famous book Ways of Seeing, he had described the male artist's objectification of the female model through looking. In our dealings with animals, Berger shows, the relation of knowledge and image can be a difficult one - the practice of looking is at the heart of both our sympathy for and our oppresion of the animal. But the final answer to his question 'Why look at animals?' must surely be this: only by understanding who has power over the image can we begin to elaborate a worthwhile cultural history of the animal. 15

This passage interested me as although it is perhaps a bit of en extreme comparison, it does a lot to illustrate how empowerment of the objectifying party allows for manipulation of representation. It likened the way in which through visualising and conceptualising something according to our own empowered specifcations, we objectify it. Just as female models have been represented to objectively for capital gain over an age, so has the appropriation of animal logos, patterns, shapes and names. Penguin books, dulux paint, andrex toilet paper. All have been appropriated by this empowered gaze and turned into tools for advertisement, appeasement and profit.

Since the publication of John Berger's 'Why look at animals?' in 1980, at least, it has become something of a commonplace to say that the spectacle of the zoo animal must be understood historically as a spectacle of colonial or imperial power. Harriet Ritvo's more recent and more extensive treatment of this theme documents precisely how this rhetoric of power operated in Britain during the nineteenth century, when menageries and zoological gardens were growing in popularity. She suggests that in this 'grand appropriative enterprise' the captive wild animals served as 'simultaneous emblems of human mastery over the natural world and of English dominion over remote territories', and that the Regents Park Zoo, for instance, became 'the symbol, for a large segment of the populace, of Britain's spreading global influence'. She explains part of the attraction of the spectacle as follows: 'Few English citizens were likely ever to wield the kind of power represented by the animals' captivity, but since that power was exercised by their countrymen over nature or the human inhabitants of distant lands, all could take vicarious pleasure in the evidence of its magnitude'. This may seem to have little to do directly with expressions of national fondness for animals. However, Ritvo's description of the animal's place in this pattern of associations prompts comparison with a quite different contemporary phenomenon, and one to which a spurious notion of fondness is central. 67

 This is another passage I wish I had been able to include in my essay, but again would probably not have had space for. In relation to my essay, it further supported my point that Rousseau's paintings were not representing any kind of Jardin de Plantes, but instead an expression oh his desire to connect with nature in a truer form, as within 'The Dream' the wild animals were not utilized as these symbols of western mastery over the remote territories, or even as icons of the developed world's dominion over the natural.

It seems that modern Western society more than any other emphasizes the 'Otherness' of the non-human. By drawing a sharp dividing line between human and non-human. By drawing a sharp dividing line between human and non-human, a vast gap is created between subject (the free acting human agent) and object (the passive acted-upon thing). This division is related to the notion that we, Homo sapiens, are unique among the natural species (as if not every species were unique in itself!) We percieve ourselves as belonging to a totally different order: the realm of culture, while all other beings and inanimate things are only nature. 79

I found this section also highly interesting as it began to suggest reasons for this cognitive dissonance between denial of the animal, and constant appropriation and reference. As we percieve ourselves as beings of 'culture' and everything else; 'object' or 'nature', then by this classification, we are the only things in the spectrum capable of appropriation or conceptual reproduction and therefore are able to dispense that where desirable. In modern day understandings however we know this not to be true; small communities of chimpanzees in Africa have begun to use stone tools, and have thus enterred their own Stone Age, and some pods of Dolphins have been recorded wrapping sponges around their noses to protect them and allow them to forage easily against the jagged ocean floor.

So if culture is not something specific to humans at all, nay, if humans themselves are not specific at all, and merely the highest known end of a sliding scale of complexity, then what does that say about our treatment of the imagery (and furthermore the bodies) of our fellow animals? A point made later in the book cites the painted signs often outside butchers of a grinning waving pig holding up an open sign and inviting customers in to buy some sausages. And hence the root of the dissonance lies. If we were to properly acknowledge animals in their own right, I feel it would contradict a great deal of the fundemental iconographic structures with which we percieve and interpret this modern world of images and symbols. Let alone open a massive can of worms in the meat and dairy industry.

The evidence of the previous three chapters has shown that animal images, animal symbols and of course animals themselves can evoke a bewildering variety of responses: pride and respect; hatred, contempt and fear; pleasure and affection. The present chapter asks why the apparently incompatability of of these sentiments does not generall seem to trouble the popular imagination. 167

I also liked this passage because it discussed another side of the inconsistancies of animal representation. I think this further reinforces the point of the objectifying nature of evoking the image of the animal with vested interests. For when viewing animals as objects, it is easy to cast them in whatever light the creator desires by applying human stimulus

As the opening chapter of this book suggested, the sign of the animal typically operates in the unwritten system of common-sense consciousness, of common knowledge, of stereotypes, where meanings are assumed to be self-evident. Much as with a linguistic sign, where a majority of language-users may know nothing of its etymology, its meaning will nevertheless be known to them in the sense of their knowing when and how to use it, and they will do so quite 'naturally' and unthinkingly. Similarly, in the context of its everyday use, there is no need to dwell on the sense of an animal sign - it is part of common sense, part of what everyone already knows, part of everyday reality. 171

Th visual priorities of disnification may reflect a more general cultural drift. This is a drift which is evident, for instance, in Barthes's assertion that 'what characterizes the so-called advanced societies is that they today consume images and no longer, like those of the past, beliefs': and in Alice Walker's lament that 'animals are forced to become for us merely "images" of what they once so beautifully expressed'. Implicit in such observations is a sense that the general shift from textual to visual priorities will be characterized by a drif towards the stupid and trivial. In very many cases the evidence of animal representation would appear to support this view. 175

This also reminds me of a passage I extracted from Documents in Contemporary Art; Nature, which suggested the transition over the ages from the worship and belief of natural phenomena (animals, weather, natural disasters) as dieties or divine intervention, to the worship of things and consumption (phones, clothing, style, car, induviduality, social icons) as supreme artefacts, is atleast in part to blame for man's extraction from the natural world. "Without the spirit, we would be in the world of mere objects." I wonder if there are any correlations between objectification of animals, and movement away from perceptions of natural phenomena as divine and exalted, and instead transition into the scientific, rational and fundementally explainable. Thus images of animals are no longer 'expressions', but instead symbols and icons designed to summarise and package an idea instead of express it.

A premise of totemic belief and cult is that it was the animals who made the world for man, who riginally laid down the order and design of human social existence, and who are ultimately responsible for its continuation. The Western cult of conservation precisely inverts this premise, proclaiming that from now on it shall be man who determines the conditions of life for animals (even those still technically wild shall be 'managed'), and who shoulders the responsibility for the survival or extinction. Yet from the relativizing perspective of the anthropologist, the animals that occupy the cultic worlds of totemists and conservationists alike are creations of the human imagination... what is the relationship between these 'animals in the mind' and those that actually surround us? ... Do animals exist for us as meaningful entities only insofar as each may be thought to manifest or exemplify an ideal type consituted within the set of symbolic values making up the 'folk taxonomy' specific to our culture? 178

This section further discusses the ideas I have already mentioned, but also continues to allude to reasons why commodification of animals is so widespread and unchallenged. Even in our attempts to preserve and benefit other creatures on the planet, we still belitte them down to objects and ensist on their monitering and management, so that even the wild animal in it's most pure format is still subject to human classification and rationalisation.

Examples like these should not be thought to constiture a perverse misinterpretation of the animal, where by means of an inexplicable inversion the representational has come to be priviledged over the real. The animal is only ever knowable in mediated forms. To see animals at all is to see them as something - as something we have made meaningful, even if that something is only the display of our own investment in the idea of an authentic nature, a natural order of things, for which the animal is the ideal icon under the order of disnification, as Bob Mullan and Garry Marvin write in Zoo Culture:

Animals quite obviously cannot and do not .... represent themselves to human viewers. It is man who defines and represents them, and he can in no sense claim to achieve a true representation of any particular animal; it merely reflects his own concerns. 180

Due to the otherness of the non-human perspective, and also perhaps the arrogance of our species in believing we are the most complete beings to work this planet, very little credence is given to the animal representation in its own right, and creatives throughout time have been more fundementally interested in what animals can represent to us as humans, than anything they could represent for themselves.

Neoteny refers to a condition in which there is retention of youthful characteristics into adult form... No doubt unconsciously, but yet methodically, in order to satisfy our own tastes, human beings have selectively created animals which are neotenous. Shedding light on this process, ethologist Konrad Lorenz has described and diagrammed the innate releasing 'schema' for human parental care responses. He proposes that the physical configuration of a high and slightly bulging forehead, large brain case in proportion to the face, big eyes, rounded cheeks, and short, stubby limbs call forth an adult nurturing response to such a 'lovable' object, moving people to feelings of tenderness. The same positive reactions are elicited by animals who exhibit these juvenile traits ... Roundess is the essence of neotenous configuration - round heads, round cheeks, short rounded limbs, and plump, rounded bodies characterize juvenile forms in both man and animals. 181

I have been having a few ideas recently about satirising the current trend for brachycephalic dog breeds such as pugs, french bulldogs and chihuahuas. These dogs are inherently popular for their aesthetic, neotenous appearance, but are also host to a massive selection of health issues due to their shortened face and altered respiratory passages. They summarise many of the same themes as my exploration of white tiger motifs, however on a much deeper domestic level which I think could resonate with many people personally, as these dogs are increasingly common among pet owners; many of whom do not realise the almost constant discomfort and additional care that these pets need. This critical reflection on neoteny could be very useful for that experimentation.

As I suggested at the outset, there is little point in complaining about this: it is simply how disnification seems currently to operate. Like any other cultural system, it is only answerable to itself, and its representations are fundamentally arbitrary. Once in a while it is useful to throw its representational logic in reverse in order to remind ourselves of this. Francis Masse has done so in a magnificent bande dessinee entitled Les Deux du balcon. Taking Stephen Jay Gould's ideas on the neotenization of Mickey Mouse as its premise, the book includes a visit to an imaginary museum, a kind of Natural-History-of-Neoteny Museum. The exhibits include a row of trophies: they present the ridiculous spectacle of the progressive ageing and deflating of the cute ideal of Disney's ageless neotenous mouse. 183

 This little section of the comic strip was a perfect illustration of the way animal iconography is manipulated. Using a comic is the perfect housing for this discourse, as it allows direct juxtaposition of realistic and cartoon imagery in a way which feels natural and unforced. The small fetus disney mouse and gloved hand floating in display chambers denotes the human ownership over the forms of the mouse, even though we have given it anthropomorphic qualities there can be no confusion that these cartoon beings are entirely at the mercy of human exploitation.

Rather than looking at aspects of animal representation and saying 'this is how it appears to be; this is what seems to be going on', I want now to ask whether and how things might be changed - to the advantage of animals - through the constructive use of representations. At the very least, it should be possible to outline the conditions under which we might usefully speak of 'strategic images for animal rights'. 188

 This was the part of the book I was most excited for as it would hopefully provide some academic artistic strategies to subvert the commodification of nature, whilst citing relevent examples of how this has already been deployed in our culture.

Wildlife programs have grown to become such a televisual industry that ... you can watch more than a dozen over any seven days. All beautiful, all leaving you frustrated at the brief and distant glimpses you get, at best, of the real thing'. The glimpse is never enough to satisfy our desire for the real. Umberto Eco says much the same thing about the role of the realistic fake wild animal in Disneyland. The crucial thing is 'its obedience to the program': it is there when viewers want to see it, and it stays there. 'A real crocodile can be found in the zoo', he writes, 'and as a rule it is dozing or hiding, but Disneyland tells us that faked nature corresponds much more to our daydream demands'. 194

One thing that I am beginning to understand with animals is the innate contradictory nature of our relationship to them. Of course there is the desire to see animals in a way which is 'authentic' and 'wild', yet our very understanding of animals as subjects prevents this, as our ideas of authenticity on the most part wildly differ from what an animal would truly experience in it's day to day life. The crocodile in the wild would be nigh impossible to constantly witness or track purely because of the perfection to with which it is able to exist in it's habitat. The very nature of succesfully existing in the wild relies heavily on not drawing attention to oneself, yet the entire premise of a zoo is to draw attention to it's animal inhabitants. Therefore it is impossible for zoos to truly be authentic due to a profound difference in strategy between the animal itself and the desires of the audience; to make an animal suitable for zoos and public viewing, many of the characteristics which once made it so authentically wild and unobjectified must be in themselves deminished. That is where wildlife programs come in, seemingly freeing the animal subject from the human institution and representing it in it's own right, but even here we are only able to witness these animals from the lens of human understanding and narratives; these documentaries represent but another avenue of animal captivity and objectification.

This group's meanings and intentions will be disallowed. They do not 'really' speak for the animal. Whether they know it or not, thyr concern is the sign of something else (anything else): political subversion, self-centeredness, repressed sexuality, madness, a hatered of humanity - take your pick.
This cultural denial of the animal is maintained by means of a rather effective two-pronged attack: it comes from common sense (in the form of the discourse of the press) on the one hand, and from theory (psycoanalysis, historical sociology, and a good deal more besides) on the other. Any attempt to refuse or deny the systematic denial of the animal, of course, must then be taken as an expression of precisely what it sought to deny! It is a Catch 22. The possibility of addressing the issue of animals has been closed off.  216

The thing which the culture finds too hard to accept is that anyone might consider animal abuse signifcantly objectionable to be prepared to break the law to do something about it. This is not to say that those speaking from within the consensus expressly condone particular forms of abuse: they may want to see such practies ended, but by legal means. But their denial of the animals constitutes a failure of imagination, because they dont (and they can't believe that others do) take the issue seriously. This is no great revelation; it is one more mundane instance of the trivialisation of the animal. 216

These sections interestingly discussed the ways in which even passionate animal rights activists can reaffirm our cultural denial of the animal. The idea that any human would be prepared to break the laws of cultural human society for something which is not a member of that cultural society, nay by all modern accounts is apparently in itself unable to produce culture, is too problematic to face head on, as it begins to unpick the problematic nature of our relationship and exploitation of the animal in close detail. The only way we can accept the actions of demonstrative animal rights campaigners, in the press and popular opinion, is to transfer their intentions from the desire to protect animals to conversely the intention to hurt or disquieten humans.

a dividing line can be drawn between human hurt and animal hurt; for displacement of human sacrifice with animal sacrifice (and its implicit designation of the human body as a privileged space that cannot be used in the important process of substantiation) has always been recognized as a special moment in the infancy of civilisation. Elaine Scarry - The Body in Pain 216

 This small quote outlines the moral subjectivity in relation to our concepts of pain and suffering as felt by autonomous beings. The part about the human body being seen as a 'privileged space' which cannot be used as without consensual agreement; a resource for materials, study, evidence or sacrifice.

This final commentary turns more directly to the question of strategies for change. In a rather obvious way, stereotypes are the enemy of change. While it is therefore vital to contest existing stereotypical conceptions of the animal, it is just as important not to replace them with new stereotypes, new forms of conceptual closure. There will be no single way of representing animals, and the favoured formss of any particular moment should never be mistaken for a simple pictoral reality. This consideration will necessarily effect the kind of visibility into which the animal may be brought. The problem with the idea of the 'positive' image, as noted earlier, is that it insists on a particular form of visibility. This would inevitably be just as rigid as the culture's existing regulatory forms of what may or may not be made visible with regard to animals - and once the culture at large had got its measure, its idealistic meanings would be left behind as the hollow shell of the imagery was appropriated for quite different purposes. A more productive way forward may be to think in terms of engendering an unpredictable play of the visible and the invisible, where meanings would be less susceptible to this kind of cultural recuperation.
All three of the strategies I describe below engage in this 'game' of looking and not looking, of being permitted or not permitted to see, and of casting doubt on what it is that is being seen. They do not perscribe how the animal should be seen; instead they serve in their different ways to get the animal into visibility without tying it to a fixed iconography, familiarty with which would soon return it to a conceptual invisibility.  217

This section marked the start of the area of inquiry I was most interested in and began to suggest different strategies for the representation of animals which resists their commodification. As earlier mentioned, the empowered gaze is what lies at the heart of objectification, and thus all of these methods take steps to attempt to subvert the empowerment of the human gaze upon animals. The paragraphs highlight the importance of stepping away from fixed iconography and familiarity, all of which render induvidual animals invisible as autonomous creatures with whom we share our world. It was also affirming some of the features I noted when working with the 3D tiger screen prints; these works denied audiences the ability to properly recognize the tiger, and so gave back some of it's autonomy as a vibrant, self governing being, and began to help it move away from it's position as an objectified aesthetic curiousity.

The second point concerns the difficult question of the acceptability of the imagery. As editor of Turning Point, Phillips explains that he is constantly obliged to strike a balance between the responsibility to reproduce the often gruesome pictorial evidence of animal abuse, and the awareness that it would be counterproductive to sicken readers to the point where they would no longer be prepared to look at it and read about it. The 'reality' of the image will count for nothing if that reality seems to horrific to be countenanced. 220

I think this section holds particular power when likened to my own ecological interests, and ideas of apocalypse fatigue. When faced with facts and figures about impending, overarching issues which threaten our way of life on this planet, people tend to become overwhelmed and feel unable to make any difference at all, and are thus less likely to feel able to make any changes to help the situation. Thus the image and message must employ freedom of strategy to avoid this, and find ways to reach audiences in a way which is without blame or guilt, but also didactic enough to inspire action and progression.

If, before a cartoon sequence by Disney, one read and believed the caption, There is nothing else, the film would strike us as horrifically as a painting by Bacon. - John Berger

[...]
The ubiquity of the cute image makes it all the more important to have a go at unsettling its meanings, though the results may still look just the same. Disney material offers a potentially fascinating example because it exploits both the anthropomorphic (in the animal characters themselves) and the therianthropic (in filling theme parks with people dressed up as those characters). Additionally, it appears to care very little about the distinction between these two characters of representation. 226

I like this small section, and think it could be coupled with earlier quotes to suggest a new are of interest in neoteny in animals, and disnification and appropriation of animal iconography. There is something intruiging in this 'culture of cute' as a way to anthropomorphise and objectify the animal to such an extent that it becomes almost entirely commodified; owners will buy the fashionable french bulldog purely on aesthetics and cuteness, often without any clue that the fold of skin on their face actually require deep cleaning as often as on a daily basis in order to prevent severe and debilitating skin infections.


The next paragraph was specifically reffering to an image of animal rights protectors wearing mickey mouse ears while protesting with their bodies tied to a structure.

To me, here in Britain, the images seemed faintly ridiculous (for the reasons already given, I presume), but that response in itself might serve as a warning against taking a perscriptive attitude to animal representations. It is not only that we are frequently uncomfortable with the therianthropic image - that, after all, is its general purpose and its particular advantage if it can be turned back upon its own stereo typical meanings. Just as important here is the point made earlier in the chapter: notions of how animals 'should' be represented have more to do with personal taste (the social construction which is often hard to keep in mind) than with any loftier motives. 229

This idea of a 'correct' way of representing an animal is cited here to be to do with 'personal taste', yet I think this further hints to the commodification of animals. The fact that human taste comes into it when representing animal iconography is further refusal to admit that this animal could be recognised in it's own right without the lens of human 'taste'. It is 'tasteful', 'iconic' and connotatively 'correct' visualisations of the animal that has already led us down this path of objectification; once again the very idea that humanity alone has dominion over culture, class and taste: unique standalone creators and purveyors of culture.

The merchandise currently offered by British organizations campaigning for animal rights include such items as neotenized and beribboned cuddly toy bunnies. These strike me as embarrassingly kitsch, but they do at least acknowledge the need to participate in a world of representations which extends beyond my finicky tastes. I am also less than clear how they are to be meaningfully distinguished as representations from their idealogical opposites such as the real mink teddy bears for sale at the Jindo Fur Salon in Bond Street; however, this kind of complicity in the space of the popular is itself a prerequisite for any effective loosening of fixed meanings. 230

I agree with this statement as it speaks of a 'need to participate in a world of representations' although think it somewhat contradicts the strategies suggested earlier about freeing the animal image from these very representations. However due to the multilateral nature of these issues, it is impossible to suggest that progress can be made through one plan of attack alone, and atleast to some extent efforts must be prepared to exploit the very attitudes which have in turn been used to exploit animals across human history.

Some readers may strongly oppose the representational strategies of which I have written in favoure here: the use of the conventions of photographic display to 'picture' animal abuse (regardless of whether it may actually be shown); the willing adoption of therianthropic attributes in order to exploit their troubling connotations; and the provisional appropriation of cute anthropomorphic imagery in an attempt to destabilize its traditional meanings. I certainly make no claim that these represent the only valid way forward. Each of them, however, seems to me to have a similar advantage. Each does its best to avoid centering the human subject, and each avoids objectifying the image of the animal. Each discourages complacency by remaining awkward, problematic, and provisional. They therefore have at least some small chance of keeping open the options for 'picturing the beast', refusing it a fixed iconic form, keeping an open mind about the meanings it might carry, the better to contest those meanings which seem manifestly to work against what we take to be its interests. 232

 These strategies really got me thinking about precise, focussed ways I could help empower natural iconography whilst still producing educative artworks intended to highlight specific issues and challenges facing the natural world. It also reaffirmed my work with the white tiger prints as ways of interrupting, destabilising or challenging ideals of humankind's dominion and appropriation of all that is not in itself human. The work I was doing with handprints, censorship of identity and 3D illusions all helped with reclaiming the image of the tiger in it's own right, and denying us, the human objectifiers, from continuing to commodify these magestic creatures through the empowered gaze and looking.