Documents on Contemporary Art: Animals

DOCUMENTS ON CONTEMPORARY ART  - ANIMALS

Filipa Ramos - Art across species and beings

"By locating the animal at the core of an intersection of multiple disciplinary terrains, this survey promotes a dialogue between the humanities and sciences, technology and ethics, reinforcing meeting points by intersecting diverse specialisms across the vector of contemporary art. The four sections - Fables, Gazes, Mutations. Struggles - suggest an intensification of the relations between humans and non-human animals, progressing from forms of myth-making and storytelling (fables) to explore interspecies manifestations of desire and visual encounter (gazes), intense forms of shared corporeality (mutations), and finally new types of engagement with the challenges that animals currently face (struggles). The titles also suggest gestures - fabulating, gazing,  mutating, struggles - that projects modes of dynamic action and agency." 17

Maria Fusco - Death Park 2010
The protagonist visits a park and sees different interactions between mankind and nature including a turdus merula, also known as the common blackbird, with a Twix wrapped in its beak. "I'd like to see the nest that that wrapper becomes woven into: shiny."

"I prefer my nature with a bit of plastic in it: well defined, open at 7,00 a.m, closed at 6.30p.m. Then I know exactly where I am. Otherwise I don't understand, nature pushes me out, keeing me at blades length. The countryside scares me shitless. Lost, almost, but not quite alone, in damp silence, save for legions of little animals that can see you in the dark, circling, with rows of sharp teeth and claws." 29

Chus Martinez - The Octopus in Love 2014
An interesting discussion about the different forms of measurable 'intelligence' and the complications associated with such a measurement. 

"The octopus is weird; it has an eerily malleable body, sucker-studded arms, skin that can transform into a convincing facsimile of seaweed—or sand—in a flash. It can solve mazes, open jars, and use tools. It even has what seems to be a sophisticated inner life. What’s confusing about all of this is that the octopus has a brain unlike that of almost any creature we might think of as intelligent. In fact, the octopus brain is so different from ours—from most of the animals we’re accustomed to studying—that it holds a rare promise. If we can figure out how the octopus manages its complex feats of cognition, we might be closer to discovering some of the fundamental elements of thought and to developing new ideas about how mental capacity evolved. “Part of the problem in working out what’s essential to intelligence in the brain is working out which are the features that, if you took them away, you would no longer have an intelligent system,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher at CUNY who studies animal minds. “What’s essential as opposed to an accident of history?” Think about it: chimpanzees are, like us humans, primates. Dolphins are mammals. Even clever crows and ravens are at least vertebrates. But our last common ancestor with the octopus was probably some kind of wormlike creature with eye spots that lived as many as 750 million years ago; the octopus has a sophisticated intelligence that emerged from an almost entirely different genetic foundation. If you want to study an alien intelligence, Godfrey-Smith says, “octopuses are the closest thing we have.” 41

"A large part of the neuronal mass of the octopus is spread throughout its eight arms. Unlike humans, the octopus brain does not have a centralized encephalization, which shows that a centralized brain is not the only evolutionarily advantageous form of intelligence. The octopus’s unusual neuronal distribution allows for its eight arms to be “autonomous.” They can carry out activities on their own, or coordinate among themselves, without needing the head to be involved." 41

Bradley Bailey - The Definitively Unfinished Taxonomy of Marcel Dzama's Archetypes and Themes 2013

An interesting interpretation of bears from Marcel Dzama.

"Bears in Dzama's art often are not simply representations of the animal, but rather highly anthropomorphized versions, hybrids with other animals or costumes. He explains, 'For as long as I can remember, when I see a bear I always imagine its a girl underneath, wearing a bear costume as some sort of armour. Like it gives her superpowers. With the help of his mother, Dzama created a number of bear costumes during the Royal Art Lodge years and after." 44

Henri Michaux - Still More Changes 1929

"Suddenly the ground collapsed, pushing a beach into me, a pebble beach. It began ruminating inside me and summoning the sea, the sea. Often I turned into a boa, and although the length bothered me a bit, I would get ready to sleep, or I was a bison and I would get ready to graze, but soon a terrible typhoon would burst out of my shoulder and the small boats were sent flying through the air and the steamers wondered if they would make it into port and all you could hear was SOS. I was sorry not to be a boa or bison any more. A little later I had to shrink to fit on a saucer. Endless sudden changes, everything had to be done all over again, and it wasn't worth the trouble, it was only going to last a few moments, and yet you had to adapt, and there were always these sudden changes. It's not so bad going from rhombohendron into a cropped pyramid, but it's really tough going from a cropped pyramid into a whale: straight off you have to know how to dive and breathe, and the water's cold and then you're face to face with the harpooners, but in my case, as soon as I saw one, I took off. But it could happen that without warning I was turned into the harpooner, and that meant much more ground to cover. When I managed to overhaul the whale I launched a harpoon quick smart (after checking I'd made the line fast), good and sharp and strong it was, and away it went, driving deep into the flesh and opening up an enormous. Then I realized I was the whale, I had become the whale again, with a brand new opportunity for suffering, and suffering's something I just can't get used to." 48

Ingo Niermann - A Pig's Life 2003

"We can't show the children the animals that are fattened up in factory farms. But in picture-books, you can still see farms where various animals wander around freely, with only ever two or three of each type. Children's farms are modelled on this world - like in the picture books, the animals are disproportionately large compared to the buildings. This is where children first see and touch a pig or a goat. And in Berlin, when the children cross the little Panke stream on their way to the 'Pinke-Panke' children's farm, some of them ask 'Is that the sea?'" 53

'Why cant Susi walk normally?'
'Her knees hurt. She's too heavy.'
'Has she been eating too much?'
'No, pigs are always as round as her. But her bones are too weak. Look how thin her legs are.'
'Why are her legs so thin?'
'People want to eat lots of meat, but they dont have any use for the bones. So they breed pigs with as thin bones as they can.'
'Susi looks sad. Her legs hurt.'
'Susi is already twelve years old. Normally pigs don't get that old. They are slaughtered before their legs start to hurt.' 54

"The buildings on the children's farm are timbered. This connects it to the idea of a proper i.e pre-industrial farm. But some of the animals that lived on those farms looked completely different then. The German Pasture Pig, for example, had a black and white saddle, and it's thick bristles stood erect on its back like a comb. It was quite short, had long legs, and with its instinct for rooting and its long snout it was perfect for going through potato and cereal fields after the harvest. But it wasn't suitable for intensive rearing in an enclosed space. So first a fat pig was cultivated, and then, as a consequence of increasing demand for as many lean cuts as possible, the lean modern pig. The became ready for slaughter in 175 days instead of five years, and two extra ribs were added to their length." 55

"During the summer, Susi lay in the sand without moving for hours on end. When she sometimes got up on her front legs, she had to breathe heavily for a long time afterwards. She was going to be put to sleep, but when they reluctantly decided to call the vet he'd gone on holiday; by the time he came back Susi was already much better. The next time she can't get up in the mornings, she's going to die." 56

John Berger - Why look at Animals? 1977

"Public zoos came into existence at the beginning of the period which was to see the disappearance of animals from daily life. The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters. Modern zoos are the epitaph to a relationship which was as old as man. They are not seen as such because the wrong questions have been addressed in zoos."

"The capturing of the animals was a symbolic representation of the conquest of all distant and exotic lands. 'Explorers' proved their patriotism by sending home a tiger or an elephant. The gift of an exotic animal to the metropolitan zoo became a token in subservient diplomatic relations." 66

"Meanwhile, millions visited the zoos each year out of a curiosity which was both so large, so vague and so personal that it is hard to express in a single question. Today in France 22million people visit the 200 zoos each year. A high proportion of the visitors were and are children.
Children in the industrialized world are surrounded by animal imagery: toys, cartoons, pictures, decorations of every sort. No other source of imagery can begin to compete with that of animals. The apparently spontaneous interest that children have in animals might lead one to suppose that this has always been the case." 67

"The family visit to the zoo is often a more sentimental occasion than a visit to a fair or football match. Adults take children to the zoo to show them the originals of their 'reproductions', and also perhaps in the hope of refinding some of the innocence of that reproduced animal world which they remember of their own childhood.
The animals seldom live up to the adults' memories, whilst to the children they appear, for the most part, unexpectedly lethargic and dull. (As frequent as the calls of animals in a zoo, are the cries of children demanding: Where is he? Why doesn't he move? Is he dead?) And so one might summarize the felt, but not necessarily expressed question of most visitors as: "Why are these animals less than I believed?" 67

"And this unprofessional, unexpressed question is the one worth answering.
A zoo is a place where as many species and varieties of animal as possible are collected in order that they can be seen, observed, studied. In principle, each cage is a frame round the animal inside it. Visitors visit the zoo to look at animals. They proceed from cage to cage, not unlike visitors in an art gallery who stop in front of one painting, and then move on to the next or the one after next. Yet in the zoo the view is always wrong. Like an image out of focus. One is so accustomed to this that one scarcely notices it any more; or rather, the apology habitually anticipates the disappointment, so that the latter is not felt. And the apology runs like this: What do you expect? It's not a dead object you have come to look at, it's alive. It's leading it's own life. Why should this coincide with its being properly visible? Yet the reasoning of this apology is inadequate. The truth is more startling." 68

"The animals, isolated from each other and without interaction between species, have become utterly dependent upon their keepers. Consequently most of their responses have been changed. What was central to their interests has been replaced by a passive waiting for a series of of arbitrary outside interventions. The events they perceive occuring around them have become as illusionary, in terms of their natural responses, as the painted prairies. At the same time, this very isolation (usually) guarantees their longevity as specimens and facilitates their taxonomic arrangement." 68

"Zoos, realistic animal toys and the widespread commercial diffusion of animal imagery all began as animals started to be withdrawn from daily life. One could suppose that such innovations were compensatory. Yet in reality the innovations themselves belonged to the same remorseless movement as was dispersing the animals. The zoos, with their theatrical decor for display, were in fact demonstrations of how animals had been rendered absolutely marginal. The realistic toys increased the demand for the new animal puppet: the urban pet. The reproduction of animals in images - as their biological reproduction in birth becomes a rarer and rarer sight - was competitively forced to make animals ever more exotic and remote." 69

The Naked Ape - The Human Zoo

"The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. They have been immunized to encounter because nothing can any more occupy a central lace in their attention.
Therein lies the ultimate consequence of their marginalization. That look between animal and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which, in any case, all men had always lived until less than a century ago, has been extinguished." 70

Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden,  New York City, 1908-36 :Donna Haraway

"At the very basis of a zoological garden there is a putting to death. True, this 'death' does not pretend to maintain the biological life of the animal intact, but it deprives it of the entire network of relationships that consitutes its environment - what Jakob von Uexkull, the forerunner of ethology, called Umwelt, the set of percepts and determinations that form the specific 'worlds' of all living species and which can remain radically indifferent to one another. Thus the death experienced by the animal is above all the disappearane of its Umwelt, the eclipse of its perceptual world. In a way, the animal's eclipsed world is the shadow cast by the science of Enlightenment: what the removal of a specimen to the zoological garden creates in nature is a 'denaturalizing cut' that is both the establishment of a physical fence (the enclosure) around the animal and the isolation of an object within the animal (the animal figure)." 71

"The seperations that scientific modernity imprints on the world (seperations between species in the zoological garden, between sanity and madness in the clinic) cut right through the dense network of relations that the seperated entities mantained with one another, creating static breakpoints through the objectifiction and isolation of factual truths. The seperations thus create the silent space of an exchange put to death, deanimated." 72

"Hagenbeck's zoo was based on the concept of the Freianlage (free enclosure), consisting of a series of open air panoramas in which the animals are seperated from each other not by partitions or cages but by moats. These ditches are themselves meticulously concealed by landscaped areas of bushes and rocks that act as transitions between different types of animal habitat in the park (the African jungle, the Russian steppes, the American plains, the Arctic ice pack, etc). Thus the landscape of Hagenbeck's wildlife park is traversed by gaping divisions hidden from view: the absent cages and bars, no longer interrupting the free stroll between animal 'worlds', are replaced by a narrative of freedom and peace." 73

Georges Didi-Huberman - The Paradox of the Phasmid - 1998- 'Phasmes: essais sur l'apparition' 15-20

"I want to acquaint you with my favourite animal or, rather, the animal that afforded me, one day, the most exquisite terror, the terror of the dissimilar. Remember the place in the Jardin des Plantes called the vivarium, the viver? It's an enclave of lives and dangers, where the Ancients held eels and snakes, toothed and poisonous beasts (undoubtedly to unleash them, one day, on an enemy). A deathly silence habitually reigns in these places - for who knows if the meanest beasts are not the most silent? Today, however, the vivarium rand with the charming little cries of a child amusing itself by tapping his nail, and even his fists, on the glass that barely seperated him from a big black scorpion. The glass confers true power, a secure and invisible border; the child rejoices in the face of the false danger. His hand on the glass can caress a lethal stinger, a theoretical and fascinating caress permitted to him by a few millimeters of hard transparency. Soon the child will break clear through, realizing that the glass if cracked: the enemy animal, too, caresses the border, but in order to cross the breach in the other direction: and it is, of course, to take his revenge on you, guilty child, anxious child.

A vivarium always displays scenery, mineral or vegetal. The game in front of its glass panes consists by and large of locating captive, discerning the animal. Why do we tap on the glass? To see movement. The word vivarium tells us that it is exposing life. But at first, nothing moves. It is not only that the unknown animal - on the sign I read 'Silver Oxybelus' - may show itself to be utterly immobile, like the three crocodiles holding an intolerable vigil in the next room. But it can happen, it usually happens, that nothing shows itself. Then the game is to seek the form, the living form that is supposed to be there before me, on an indifferent ground of sand, pebbles or plants, all the elemens appropriate for 'recreating', as we dare to call it, the beast's 'environment'." 78

Giorgio Agamben -Taxonomies - 2002 - Speaking of Carlous Linnaeus

"The idea that apes, like the other bruta, were essentially different from man in that they lacked a soul was something he was not ready to concede easily to theologians. In a note to the System naturae (1735-58) he dismisses the Cartesian theory that conceived of animals as if they were automata mechanica with the vexed statement: 'surely Descartes never saw an ape.' in a later writing, bearing the title Menniskans Cousiner, 'Man's Cousins', he explains how difficult it is to identify a specific difference between the anthropoid apes and man from the point of natural science. Not that he does not see the clear difference that seperates man from beast on the moral and religious level:

Man is the animal which the creator found worthy of honouring with such a marvellous mind and which he wanted to adopt as His favourite, reserving for him a nobler existence; God even sent His only son to save him.

 But all this, he concludes,

belongs to another forum; just as the shoemaker sticks to his last, I must remain in my workshop and consider man and his body as a naturalist, who hardly knows a single distinguishing mark which seperates man from the apes, save for the fact that the latter have an empty space between their canines and their other teeth." 81

"An analysis of the Introitus that opens the Systema leaves no doubts about the sense Linnaeus attributed to his maxim: man has no specific identity other than the ability to recognize himself.  Yet to define the human not through any nota characteristica, but rather through his self-knowledge, means that man is the being which recognizes itself as such, that man is the animal that must recognize itself as a human to be human. Indeed, Linnaeus writes that, at the moment of birth nature has thrown man 'bare upon the earth', unable to know, speak, walk or feed himself, unless all this is taught to him (Nudus in nuda terra...cui scire nichil sine doctrina; non fari, non ingredi, non vesci, non aliud naturae sponte). He becomes himself only if he raises himself above man (o quam contempta res est homo, nisi supra humana se erexerit)." 83

Seung-Hoon Jeong - A Global Cinematic Zone of Animal and Technology

"These two oppositional modes of animal representation, however, work in the same anthropocentric paradigm in which the notion of nature, the animal world, could not come into being without its insertion into the cultural dichotomy of nature and culture. Nature did not pre-exist culture in that its idea was not born until culture named and incorporated it into the conceptual frame of what humans believe as reality. Only within this frame does nature appear to be the opposite of our lifeworld, while the frame itself remains cultural. Therefore, animals exist as the Animal only and always as viewed by, and related to, the human. We immediately recognize animal allegories for human characteristics, good or evil, brave or cowardly, generous or greedy, and so on (thus animal characters are inherently civilized); otherwise we consider animals to be either domestic and helpful or untamable and harmful (thus the prevailing 'pet or pest' binary persists). Our binary attitude to them, at least in our civilized safety without sublime threat from wild animals, is then sentimental or brutal, 'sometimes aglow with the welcoming hearth but just as often coldly shutting out the unwanted outsider'." 94

"Conversely, the animal Real, even if absolutely aggressive and invincibly destructive to humans, subsists primarily as being-in-itself, which we only secondarily view as being-for-us or opposed to us." 94

"Undoubtedly, this anthropomorphic tendency works according to what Fredric Jameson calls hermeneutic 'depth models': dialectic, phsychoanalytic, existential or semiotic - the heirarchical dichotomy that there is a latent meaning, essence, signified below the appearance of manifest signifier. What matters is the invisible deeper level full of human-oriented meanings and not their animal image. Put differently, however, the absolute difference between human and animal is reduced to relative differences among human-looking animal groups. The 'reading' of animals as disguised humans is then at risk of being blind to animals themselves; our vision has a blind spot with regards to their animal being as just seen on screen." 95

"Ontological others of the human call for our attention in this regard, urging us to explore a larger bio-polis emerging between, and encompassing both, the human world that become ever more globally homogenized and its radically external -immanent environment, natural or technological. The question of how to face this environment requires complexly ethical rather than simply plotical attitudes, since biopolitics concerns not a new public sphere so much as the condition of any such polis, as we will see. We need to review te ethical turn expansively as eco-ontological." 96

The Post-Human Animal - Ana Teixeira Pinto - 2015

"Giorgio Agamben's The Open (2004)"

"But the flurry of interest in the animal and the revival of Haraway's 'post-human' runs deeper than micro-trends in exhibition making. It seems to be motivated by the imbrication of political, economic and ecological crises of recent years and the awareness that these have failed to effect tangible political changes.
As Fredric Jameson put it in 2003, it is 'easier to imagine the end of humanity than the end of capitalism'. The moment when nature is completely subsided into culture, what Hegel theorized as humankind's destiny, has re-emerged under a more ominous heading, the Anthropocene, a geological epoch denoting the period from 1945, the year of the first nuclear detonation, and roughly coinciding with Kojeve's 'end of history'." 108

Of Humans, Animals and Monsters - Christopher Cox - 2005

"Animals are uncanny creatures. Like us, they eat, sleep, defaecate, copulate, build, perceive, desire, and maybe even think, talk, and have rights. We admire them, paint and photograph them, emblazon them on flags, shields, and currency, and we treat some of them like best friends and members of ourr families. From Aesop's fables to Mickey Mouse and The Far Side, our stories are filled with humanized animals who reflect us back to ourselves. 'There is something charming about an animal become human', the philosopher Simon Critchley aptly notes: but, by the same token, 'when the human becomes animal, the effect is disgusting.'
We are surely a kind of animal. Yet we are also repulsed by the thought that we might be merely animals, and have spent an enormous amount of time and intellectual energy convincing ourselves that we are something different. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that all Western morality has been an effort to curb, even to deny, our animal nature - what Plato called 'the wild beast n us'. The same can be said of religious doctrine, philosophical speculation, political thought and biological classification: all have been enlisted in the effort to make the case that we are something more, better and higher than the animal kingdom." 116

"Not only did Darwin eliminate the boundaries between species; he also flattened the ancient hierarchy that placed human beings at the top, and he denied that evolution is in any way progressive, that human beings are in any way better than their forebears or any other species. In his copy of Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Darwin famously scribbled the phrase 'never use the words higher or lower!' and remarked to a friend that 'no innate tendency to progressive development exists [in nature].' Natural selection is local and temporary, lacking any long-range aim or goal. And the complexity of human beings and 'higher' animals represents only one of nature's possibilities, by nomeans the best or highest. Complex creatures simply represent life's diversification in the only direction available to it." 119

Unbecoming, Animal - Mitchell Akiyama - 2015

"It is Eve, woman, who is the first and the last human to hear the animal, to fully understand its speech. Or perhaps this serpent is also the first and the last animal endowed with the subtle gift of speech. In this singular encounter, as we all know, the serpent convinces the female progenitor of the upstart of the human race to eat of the fruit of a forbidden tree, a fruit which opens her and her counterpart's eyes to the unsightliness of their naked genitals.
In those first days, humans and animals alike were babbling and bare. But never again. At least not  outside of stories. Language and clothing become, enduringly, two of the measures by which the animal and the human are distinguished." 152 

"For Darwin, these were differences merely of degree, not of kind. Darwin's claim in The Descent of Man (1871), that all the higher faculties possessed by people are there in other animals (although yet unrealized), unseated the millenia-old, Biblical assumption that humans stood alone in nature thanks to some unique, privileged state of communicative being. To be sure, this line of thinking was already present in The Origin of the Species (1859), in which Darwin honed the tools he would later use radically to displace humankind's centrality in God's creation. It was a canny tactic to focus, as he did, on focus -  that is, on the development of a sensitivity to light across species, tracing this capacity from a rudimentary ability to distinguish between light and dark towards more sophisticated ways of seeing. The 'perfected' eye, proposed Darwin, contained within it aeons of simpler solutions to the task of converting light into sensation. In The Descent of Man Darwin set himself to dismantling an even larger icon: the belief that the human species was sovereign, exceptional and fundementally different from other creatures. He posited that the distinction between humans and other animals - both physiological and mental - was only comprised of gradations, differences in defree. While he suppoed that the mental faculties of a lamprey, an ape and a human differed in sophistication, Darwin argued that the intervals among them fell along a continuum, itself a product of evolutionary forces." 153

"'Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.' Leakey's reply speaks to the contortions that philosophers and scientists have performed for well over two thousand years in their efforts to seperate the human from the animal. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben traces these divisions and definitions back to Aristotle's definition of life in De anima. According to Agamben, Aristotle failed to articulate what life is; rather, he circled around being, casting aside those entities that lack the vital, nutritive force inherent in something that can be said to be living. Aristotle defined the human by what is proper to it as a distinct species, but also by decisively clearing away what is not. What Agamben calls the 'anthropological machine' has, for much of Western history, posited Homo sapiens as a placeholder for human traits. 'The anthropological machine of humanism', he writes, 'is an ironic apparatus that verifies the absence of a nature proper to Homo, holding him suspended between a celestial and a terrestrial nature, between animal and human - and thus, his being always less and more than himself." 154

The Matter and Meaning of Museum Taxidermy - Rachel Poliquin - 2008

"If taxidermy's value has been questioned within museums, animals have emerged as an edgy medium for contemporary artists. 157 [...] The animals in much contemporary works engage questions about how we come to know the natural world and what such knowledge means for humans. Nature and animals become not fixed entities fully explained by hierarchies of natural order but provocative forces. 'whose properties remain radically unknown and unknowable', as Norman Bryson writes about Mark Dion's The Library for the Birds of Antwerp, an installation piece which incorporated live birds. On display are questions about the abilities (or failure) of science and philosophy to make sense of the world, about the limits of human understanding, and the potential for alternate systems of thought to provide a less confident but more hollistic perspective on our relationships with the  natural world and its other non-human inhabitants." 158

"As Steve Baker highlights in Postmodern Animal, across the works, 'regardless of any ethical stance, materials count, materials create knowledge, or at least encourage open and imaginative thought'. The materials certainly do count, but I would argue that the sort of imaginative thought that they provoke is less engaged in gaining knowledge and clarity than in casting these creatures as troubled and troubling animal things. Indeed as Baker argues, the new animals in contemporary art are 'encountered' rather than passively viewed. For Baker, the postmodern animal is 'most productively though of as an embodied thing', and while it may take various forms - live animals or taxidermied creatures, either as a whole or disjointed, in installations, sculpture or performance - its essence is always most fully realized through an encounter or, more precisely, a confrontation with a viewer. 'Unable to quite constrain itself, it [the postmodern animal] creates something (a physical space, a situation) which comprises and binds the bodies of the viewer and the thing itself to form a new, awkward and explicitly non-modernist whole; only the viewers presence completes the work." 158

"Contemporary animal studies, particularly aesthetic and phiosophical discussions of taxidermy within art galleries, have something to offer museum studies. The strange fusion of unknown and recognizable that characterizes the postmodern animal complicates cultural and historical biographies of museums' animal-objects. For all their material similarity to other art objects, for all the manipulation of taxidermied animals, something elusive remains, in part because of the communication both with and about animals is so problematized. Burt stresses, even if the imagery is recognized as contrived, audiences still respond to the embodied thingness of the animal - 'as if these images were living animals' - and are provoked to question whether the art's treatment or representation of the animal is ethically appropriate. This 'aesthetic of livingness' challenges accepted animal-human relations and disrupts 'any possibility of a self-coined aesthetic, where the animal would be simply an art object 'out there' in the gallery space'. Particularly in light of contemporary concerns surrounding the loss of species in the world and the devaluation and removal of taxidermy from museums, to ignore the animal-thingness of taxidermy, to discount the importance of 'the aesthetic of livingness', is to disregard the very essence of what makes taxidermy loathed or appreciated." 159

"Playing between its obstinate thingness and cultural significance, nature is 'impossible to pin down', yet necessary for the production of meaning'. As I have suggested, this endless interplay between materiality and meaning is the essence of  encounters with taxidermy whether in museums or galleries." 159

"Encounters with taxidermy combine a broad spectrum of talk: the uses and abuses of nature, the validity of the materials of descriptive natural history, the historical trajectory of particular creatures on view, the cultural mechanics choreographing that trajectory, relations between species including humans, and, ultimately, whether the experience is proscriptive or aesthetic, or both." 159

The Meaning is Confused Spatially, Framed - Mike Kelley - 1999

Passage about tests conducted on baby monkeys where they were given surrogate mothers in control groups, one half of the test was conducted with soft warm realistic mothers and the other with cold wire mother with 'doglike' heads.

"It is this unconscious aspect of Harlow's primate experiments that makes them so fascinating, and so disturbing. Clearly, most animal research is not truly meant to shed light on the behaviour of animals. It is designed to reflect, in some manner, certain aspects of human behaviour." 171

Outfitting the Laboratory of the Symbolic - Claire Pentecost - 2008

On neoliberalism

"Via this ideology, anything humans value becomes legally articulated as something to be owned by one party literally at the expense of another: not only real estate, material products and technological inventions , but also the basics of life, health and safety: knowledge, creativity, nutrition, sanitation, medicine, water. Consequently (and certainly not only in the sciences), we have seen a transformation of the living world into limitless possibilities to stake legal property and an inalienable right to profit. Add to this a jurisprudence that grants corporations the right and protections of induviduals and a de facto privilege for status when held by a corporation as opposed to actual induvidual persons. Situate this in a system of public research and educational institutions that, again, in accordance with neoliberal principles, has been gradually defunded and so relies increasingly on corporate partnerships and the generation of patentable, marketable knowledge products. Then drive this entire system around the globe via brutal trade agreements in which intellectual property regimes are enforced by the world's military and economic superpower. This is the context of the life sciences today." 187

"Although her proficiencies cover a different terrain, Natalie Jeremijenko's work shares with Ballengee's a dedication to pedagogy and the reorientation of values in the life sciences. Formally educated in both neuroscience and engineering, she has amassed a great deal of expertise - not toward establishing herself as an expert in those fields, but in order to do projects that experts would not do for the realistic fear of jeopardizing their authority. What she retains throughout her endeavors is a feel for the nonexpert: the artistic deftness of [...] Feral Robotic Dogs is to make scientific 'data' legible to non-scientists. Legibility is understood as a complex phenomenon including attraction, relevance to common experience, engagement of the senses, and adroit interfacae with popular media." 189