1. Human
Why do we look at animals? Today, our gaze is mediated by the zoo, the dramatized wildlife documentary, Disney, the food industry and other circuses that have contributed to the far-reaching abstraction, cultural marginalisation and instrumentalisation of the animal throughout modernity.(1)Never before did so many children grew up without knowing where meat and milk come from. At the same time, our society has a growing awareness of the role modernity plays in the current ecological crisis. In light of this, art centres and thematic festivals aim to create a space for discussion and reflection concerning our relation to animals. What exactly do the arts add to the debate? What promise does the animal hold for us? Why do we look at animals?
Although animals did once have a self-evident place in our living environment, the nostalgia for an authentic relation with animals, and hence for a naive way of standing in the world, is in itself a by-product of modernity. Since man and animal don't share language, there is no understanding of each other's Umwelt, let alone a mutual understanding. Animals linger on the edge of our language-ridden world, they remind us of that which we don't understand and thus of art's very beginning. That is at least the primal scene Georges Bataille describes in Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art (1955) when watching the earliest grotto paintings: by shedding his animalistic nature, man lost "the glory of the beast", for which he sought compensation in the transgressive practices of art and play. Yet, can the Aristotelian insight that the place of humans is delimited by respectively gods and animals still be maintained today? If the symbolical place of god has been exchanged nowadays for an aesthetics of catastrophe (in which latest since the mad cow disease also animals have a place), then which horizon of meaning can the animal open up for us today? Both the pastoral conception and the use of animals to stir discomfort and incite political debate therefore do not only concern subject matter but also the status of representation.
Animals remind us of the environment's vitality for us, human beings: we are entirely part of an ecosystem that envelopes and carries us. That terrain equally underpins in its originary expressiveness the oral and embodied sources our current language and culture thrive upon. With this analysis in Becoming Animal (2010), the philosopher David Abram doesn't want to renounce writing and digital culture, but wonder whether we can embrace this ecological phenomenology in order to arrive at a richer sense of culture: "How, then, to renew our visceral experience of a world that exceeds us -- of a world that is wider than ourselves and our own creations? (...) Can we renew in ourselves an implicit sense of the land's meaning, of its own many-voiced eloquence? Not without renewing the sensory craft of listening, and the sensuous art of storytelling. (...) Can we begin to restore the health and integrity of the local earth? Not without restorying the local earth."(2)
The animal indicates the limits of our understanding and of our sense of superiority, but also its paradoxical promise now appears more complex: via the animal that slumbers in us can we unfold our bodies in the imaginary realm and thus become fully human, a becoming that inevitably also means a 'becoming-with' and so a 'becoming-heterogeneous' or 'becoming worldly'.(3)How can we begin to understand ourselves as animals? The postmodern shamanism of David Abram points out that ecological awareness cannot be detached from a critical reflection on representation, thus granting a fundamental place to art in this matter. A few recent performances bring real or imaginary animals on stage in order to explore aspects of our self-image. They teach us barely anything about animals, yet they do initiate a critical relation to spectatorship and thereby provoke specific questions. Why do we look at animals in the theatre?
[The animals and performances discussed in the bestiary are: the donkey in Balthazar (1. Stories) by David Weber-Krebs; the Culebra Island Amazon of Puerto Rico in Abecedarium Bestiarium by Antonia Baehr; dog, horse and 'theatre animal' in Animal Dances by Martin Nachbar; the Tasmanian tiger in Zoological Institute for Recently Extinct Species by Jozef Wouters; albino crocodile in the film Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog.]
3. Culebra Island Amazon of Puerto Rico
The animal as metaphor is central in Abecedarium Bestiarium [which opened at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels in May 2013], for which Antonia Baehr invited befriended artists to take an extinct animal species as inspirational source for portraying their relationship in the form of a score. This procedure reminds one of Baehr's Lachen/Rire/Laugh (2008), yet this time it doesn't take off so easily: the work counts too much on the private mythology of Baehr and her clique, which isn't always interesting for outsiders. The scores are moreover mediocre in quality, making them eventually mainly a vehicle for the virtuosic performer that Baehr is. Dressed in an old-fashioned men's suit, Antonia Baehr presents each evening a different selection from the collection of scores whilst guiding the audience around like in an exhibition space, to then flesh out a Dodo, a Yangtze River Dolphin, a Tasmanian Tiger, a Martelli's Cat, a Forest Tarpan or a Lesser Bilby. The form is diverse qua media but unwaveringly strict in its interpretation, for extreme disciplining is a strategy employed by Baehr as an artist and performer to raise gender issues. A surprising contribution is ‘The Steller's Sea Cow Sonata for Solo Performer and Endangered Media’ by Sabine Ercklentz, for which Baehr is seated at a table and creates via voice, tape recorder and other analog media a soundscape that might sound like a far echo of the Steller's Sea Cow but mainly reminds us of the role media play in our imagination.
In Abecedarium Bestiarium the animal is a somewhat arbitrary theme, yet that also makes something clear: animals speak to us and at the same time don't speak to us. With numerous stories, fables and fairy tales, we have a veritable cultural history featuring animals, even though that imaginary realm has dwindled with modern life. At the same time, as human beings we will never be able to understand the language and world of animals. The extremes of the common and the alien characterize also Baehr's insistence on an idiosyncratic art, which claims its autonomy by designing a language on the basis of familiar signs that in their bizarre combination appear as totally foreign. On the level of gender she develops queer identities that derive their intelligibility from the re-enactment and redistribution of existing role templates. In a score by Pauline Boudry, as a figure in drag Baehr pulls a Culebra Island Amazon of Puerto Rico on wheels behind her, a duet in which a moustached ventriloquist on high heels and a parrot perform Gertrude Stein's 'Patriarchical Poetry'. Although Baehr's work often provokes political interpretations, this never happens via clear statements but through a whimsical imagination and a recalcitrant form. Art speaks to us and at the same time doesn't speak to us. Other than the aloof donkey, the gesture of the Culebra Island Amazon of Puerto Rico is multi-coloured and brimming with culture. Where we think it speaks our language, the chattering parrot misleads us and turns out to be a red herring.
Notes
(1) For an extended analysis, see John Berger, ‘Why look at animals?’ (1977), in Idem, Why Look at Animals?, London 2009, pp. 12-37.
(2) David Abram, Becoming Animal. An Earthly Cosmology, New York, 2010, pp. 288-9
(3) On these different forms of becoming in relation to animals, see Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, Minneapolis, 2008, pp. 3-42, and Vinciane Despret, 'The Body We Care For: Figures of Anthropo-zoo-genesis', Body & Society, vol. 10 no. 2-3, 2004, pp. 111-134.