Selected abstracts
Request full text versions via email. Please note that, at times, some pieces are being written up for publication and are thus not yet publically available owing to copyright issues.
- - -
Guest talk for:
Göteborgs Universitet, Konsthögskolan Valand, November 22, 2010, Sweden
'Art and the Animal Aesthetic'
This talk introduces the audience to the field of animal aesthetics. It looks, more specifically, at the ways artistic appropriations of ‘vocal’ animal mimicry rub on the larger issue of animal representation. From a philosophical standpoint it runs through some claims made by philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben with regards to the notion of an other-than-human 'voice', The topic will be of interest not only to people working with animals in aesthetics and recent art, but also students whose practice deals with performance, performativity, live media, sonic art and inter/transdisciplinarity.
- - -
Conference paper for:
Pidgin Language: Animals, Birds and Us, Kings Lynn Arts Centre, October 10, 2009, UK
'Finding the Animal Voice'
Re-jigged version of my paper for the Courtauld-Darwin conference (see below) - parts of which I sang dressed as a blackbird!
- - -
Conference paper for:
The Art of Evolution: Charles Darwin and Visual Culture, The Courtauld Institute of Art, July 2-4, 2009, London, UK
'Almost the Same: Animals, Ambivalence and Mimicry in Contemporary Art'
Elizabeth Grosz notes how Darwin’s greatest contribution to thought is a change in focus from static Being to ever-changing Becoming, welcoming random events as instigators of change. Darwin’s understanding of life has, in this respect, influenced a wide range of thinkers interested in the concept of ‘difference’. Deleuze and Guattari go one step further, introducing the notion of ‘becoming-animal’ together with a horizontal, rhizomatic system that cuts across the hierarchies of the Darwinian model of the tree of life. ‘Mimicry’ is a form of becoming which Darwin returns to several times. Deleuze and Guattari, however, remain distrustful of this seemingly passive method of copying. Yet, mimicry continues to hold a peculiar position in the evolutionary game, as it troubles the distinction between the expected and the new. As such, it inserts uncertainty into an already existing system by being neither fully ‘of itself’, nor fully ‘of the other’. Recently, art has taken an animal turn, with more artists investigating the appearance of animal life in contemporary culture. The first part of this paper discusses artworks in which animal behaviour is itself mimicked. Rachel Berwick’s may-por-e, 1997-present, Peter Callesen’s Concert for Birds, 2005, Bill Burns’ Bird Radio, 2007, and Marcus Coates’ Dawn Chorus, 2007, all imitate the ‘voices’ of birds. In Callesen’s and Coates’ work, the idea of ‘becoming-animal’ is embraced in almost literal ways, whereas Berwick and Burns use birdsong to unsettle the link between the animal body and the animal voice, like a bird may throw its voice to confuse predators through vocal mimicry. The second half of this paper investigates how artistic appropriations of bird mimicry rub on the larger issue of animal representation. In traditional philosophy, animals have tended to be deprived of ‘voices’, perceived to only produce ‘sounds’ or ‘cries’. As the German word Stimme (meaning ‘voice’ and etymologically related to ‘voting’) implies, being robbed of one’s voice is also to fall outside representation. The artistic ‘double robbing’ of the voice (which takes place in the parroting of animal mimicry) aims, this paper argues, to dislocate the voice, showing how all voices, human and animal, are, in a sense, ‘found’, as the common expression ‘finding one’s voice’ indicates. As such, the appropriation of vocal mimicry produces a hiccup in the field of representation.
- - -
Conference paper for:
Meet Animal Meat, GenNa, Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, 21-23 May, 2009, Sweden
'Travelling Skins: Hides, Furs and other Animal Surfaces in Art'
This paper investigates the animalisation of the skin-border, examining how skin - the use of skin, the display of non-human animal skin – plays a vital role in the production of zoe and bios. Traditional taxidermy pushes forward the idea that animals are their skin. The flaying of non-human animals transforms flesh into meat and leaves the skin to carry the animal's animalness, or Tierheit, forward. By contrast, human skin is generally perceived to not travel as easily beyond the dead body, but to be, instead, inseparable from it. The ongoing showing of animal pelts reveals that this difference in the treatment of human and animal skin is not inherent, but actively produced. As such, this paper borrows from, and builds on, theories of the performative production of identities through display and exposure, both in terms of how beings may be 'stripped' and put on display, but also how the artistic appropriation of such displays have been be used to subvert, challenge and, most of all, trouble the workings of what Giorgio Agamben has termed the 'anthropological machine'. Paraphrasing the French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, it could be argued that there is something pathological about this over-emphasis of the skin-border, about the need to reify the human-animal skin-surface itself. Such over-projection of 'skin' stands, it could be said, as a testament to the unfinished formation of human subjects who, in order to confirm the coherency of their subjecthood, must continually reaffirm their own skin-borders. This paper focuses on the current interest in using animal skins in contemporary art. Recently, more and more artists have begun to use animal skins in their work, either through the appropriation of taxidermy, such as in Andrea Roe's automata, created from animal skin and motors (e.g. Seagull, 2004), or through the manipulation of living animals' skin within Bio Art, of which the most famed example is Eduardo Kac’s genetically modified, GFP Bunny, 2000, a rabbit with fluorescent fur. At first, these trends: ‘animal death’ and ‘animal life’ may seem diametrically opposed; however, this paper argues that they cannot be separated, and that they, when seen together, both represent a current artistic preoccupation with the appearance and construction of animality in contemporary society.
