Antennae

ISSN 1756-9575

Issue 26 - Autumn 2013

Painting Animals II
Chris Musina Towards a New Animism / Christohpher Reiger A Modern-Mystic Look at Animals/ Jessica Holmes Animals as Wallpaper /
Sunaura Taylor Witnessing Animals / Rene J. Marquez Decolonizing Dog Painting / Isobel Wood Animals in Low-Res / Olly and Suzi Picturing the Beast / Vanessa Barbay Becoming Animal: Matter as Indexical Sign in Representation / Cecilia Novero Posthuman Animals and
the Avant-Garde: The Case of Daniel Spoerri / Roland Borgards Fish: Singly, and in Shoals / Petra Shilder The Art of Farming / Eileen Yanoviak
More Than Marginal: Insects in the Hours of Mary of Burgundy

Antennae
The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Editor in Chief
Giovanni Aloi

Academic Board
Steve Baker
Ron Broglio
Matthew Brower
Eric Brown
Carol Gigliotti
Donna Haraway
Linda Kalof
Susan McHugh
Rachel Poliquin
Annie Potts
Ken Rinaldo
Jessica Ullrich

Advisory Board
Bergit Arends
Rod Bennison
Helen Bullard
Claude dAnthenaise
Petra Lange-Berndt
Lisa Brown
Chris Hunter
Karen Knorr
Rosemarie McGoldrick
Susan Nance
Andrea Roe
David Rothenberg
Nigel Rothfels
Angela Singer
Mark Wilson & Brynds Snaebjornsdottir

Global Contributors
Sonja Britz
Tim Chamberlain
Lucy Davis
Amy Fletcher
Katja Kynast
Christine Marran
Carolina Parra
Zoe Peled
Julien Salaud
Paul Thomas
Sabrina Tonutti
Johanna Willenfelt

Copy Editor
Maia Wentrup

Front Cover Image: Olly and Suzi, Red Tiger, Karnali, Nepal, 1997 Olly and Suzi

EDITORIAL
ANTENNAE ISSUE 26

This and the previous issue of Antennae have been entirely dedicated to the practice of
painting. The aim of this exploration is not that of attempting to draw conclusions on the
matter of animal representation through the medium of painting itself, but to focus on the
specificities of the medium in order to understand how these can aid, address, envision or
suggest new human-animal relations. In the case of painting, both issues do not present a
conceptualised selection of contributions but instead aim at maintaining a very open
mind about the intricacies that painting animals may unveil. Resisting a thematic curatorial
approach, both issues, however provide a departure from classical representational tropes
in which the non-human has for centuries been symbolically objectified. How
objectification is prevented, exploited, or subverted in panting is something the selected
works and texts featured in these instalments aim at mapping.
As per usual, this is a very rich issue gathering a number of contributions from
established and emerging academics, researchers, curators and artists. Special thanks go
to all those who have contributed to the making of this ambitious project.

Giovanni Aloi
Editor in Chief of Antennae Project
Lecturer in Visual Culture:
Queen Mary University of London
Sotheby's Institute of Art
Tate Galleries

CONTENTS
ANTENNAE ISSUE 26
5 Towards a New Animism
Drawing from a deep phylogeny of cultural cues, Chris Musina references historical painters, contemporary animal cultures, kitsch and museum dioramas in an
exploration of the represented relationships to the animal world. Musina addresses the animal not as symbolic object, but as subject, yet a subject aware of its own powerful
symbolic nature; painting is interesting to the artist precisely because of this reason and its effects. These paintings are populated with knowing animal protagonists who
stare back at the viewer with an uneasy gaze; aware of that uncomfortable places they occupy in our cultural histories--asking for compassion, mercy, or simply to be put out
of their misery.
Text by Chris Musina

11 A Modern-Mystic Look at Animals

Growing up on the rural Delmarva Peninsula, I became acquainted with the local flora and fauna at a young age. Working at field chores, hunting, fishing, and
especially when playing, my outdoors experiences were akin to the Wonderland exploits of Lewis Carroll's Alice. Carroll's premise, that "things get curiouser and curiouser,"
guided me through many a childhood adventure. I anthropomorphized animals and cast them as key players in an epic production of which I, too, was a part. For me,
as for Alice, the natural world was enchanted and ethical in an unsentimental way.
Text by Christopher Reiger

15 Animals as Wallpaper
London-based artist Jessica Holmes makes mixed media paintings, where elements of collage create fields, planes and confusions of perspective that are mirrored in an
inverted view of the relationship between humanity and animals.
Text by Jessica Holmes

18 Witnessing Animals
I am moved to paint because I am moved to see. Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing that one sees is a quote from the philosopher Paul Valery. This quote
resonates deeply with me. To me this process of seeing is at once political and profoundly personal. It is political in its slowness, in its individuality, and its absurd inefficiency. It
is personal as trying to see without names is deeply subjective. In painting, the time spent seeing and paying attention is important to me, especially when it is a paying
attention to things that are hard to look at, things that we as a culture would rather not see.
Text by Sunaura Taylor

30 Decolonizing Dog Painting

I would argue that painting (object and practice) and animal representations both suffer from associationsor even as perceived expressions ofsentimentality. Why is
sentimentality such a bad thing, I wonder? The modernist heritage of western societies seems certainly to have vilified all that is non-rational, un-Enlightenment, and, especially,
sentimental.
Text by Ren J. Marquez

37 Animals in Low-Res
My mother talks to her cats like theyre guests at a dinner party. The first mistake was letting them sit at the kitchen table, the second was buying a potty stool to help them
reach the cat flap better. She is in absolutely no doubt that each cat has its own opinions and political leanings, its own food brand preference and that they are a few
consonants short of sounding out the days of the week. .
Text by Isobel Wood

44 Picturing the Beast A Portfolio by Olly and Suzi

We paint together. Ours is a total collaboration. We paint hand over hand on the same painting at the same time. All our work is created in this way. Our art-making process
is concerned with our journey; a collaborative, mutual response to nature at its most primitive and wild.
Text and Images by Olly and Suzi

52 Becoming Animal: Matter as Indexical Sign in Representation

My practice-led PhD research project in the Painting Workshop at the Australian National University challenges what it means to be a painter of animals. The treatment of
animals by my Hungarian born father, Tibor, an amateur naturalist and taxidermist, is fundamental to the motivations driving my painting practice and its development.
Equally, formative and ongoing exposure to Australian Aboriginal visual traditions, popularised in a style known as x-ray, inform my exploration of animal representation.
Text by Vanessa Barbay

59 Posthuman Animals and the Avant-Garde: The Case of Daniel Spoerri

Cecilia Noveros essay situates Daniel Spoerris 1995 series of assemblages Carnival of Animals within the legacy of the historical Avant-Garde. In taking a close look
at Carnivals ingenious recourse to non-organicity, through Spoerris reworking of chance, and the readymade, but also frottage, the essay argues that the Avant-Garde helps
to envision human and non-human encounters outside anthropocentric and representational frameworks. At the same time that Spoerris assemblages leave behind the
frameworks of representation, they do not configure a new space of action or being for non-humans. Rather, they point to multiple lines of escape, including the carnivalesque.
In short, the essay maintains that Spoerris work offers a valuable example of how the Avant-Garde indeed contributes to the discussion about con-figurations of human and
non-human animals.
Text by Cecilia Novero

78 Fish: Singly, and in Shoals

Every animal that is shown can always signify something, or, to be more precise, it can mean more and something other than merely the animal as shown. This is in the
nature of human artifacts, attaching meaning to which is common practice in our culture. This is especially apparent in literature: one cannot read of animals without
construing their literary occurrence. Roland Borgards discusses the paintings of fish by Vroni Schwegler.
Text by Roland Borgards

82 The Art of Farming

I live on a small family farm in North Holland where I exercise my two greatest passions in life: art and nature. My artwork emerges from my experiences on the farm
creating a dialog between my two occupations one as a farmer and the other as a working artist.
Text by Petra Shilder

85 More than Marginal: Insects in the Hours of Mary of Burgundy

A book of hours was an intensely personal devotion book in the Middle Ages. Used daily to direct the prayers of the owner, these illuminated manuscripts, or hand-made
illustrated books, were lavishly decorated to the taste of the patron. In the late fifteenth-century Hours of Mary of Burgundy, also known as the Vienna Hours, every folio is
richly decorated with window scenes of religious subjects surrounded by extravagant foliage. This decoration of the margins includes, among other animals, an array of insects
including bees, moths, flies, and grasshoppers.
Text by Eileen Yanoviak

TOWARDS A NEW
ANIMISM

Drawing from a deep phylogeny of cultural cues, Chris Musina references historical painters, contemporary animal
cultures, kitsch and museum dioramas in an exploration of the represented relationships to the animal world. Musina
addresses the animal not as symbolic object, but as subject, yet a subject aware of its own powerful symbolic nature;
painting is interesting to the artist precisely because of this reason and its effects. These paintings are populated with
knowing animal protagonists who stare back at the viewer with an uneasy gaze; aware of that uncomfortable
places they occupy in our cultural histories--asking for compassion, mercy, or simply to be put out of their misery.
Text by Chris Musina

ascinated by the inherent beauty of

animals, I explore their populating of
human culture, through a deep
phylogeny of cultural cues. My work
investigates how animals are looked at,
represented, and understood by different
cultures and different parts of culture. Be it
Eastern medicine, American sports, Greek
mythology, or evolutionary biology, animals
figure heavily across almost all realms of
humanity, relegated often to commodity,
logo, metaphor or mascot. I want to bring the
animal forward addressing many means of
animal understanding, though the medium of
painting. Painting is as old as human history
itself, and can be a rich and wondrous
examination of our history over vast millennia.
Digging back tens of thousands of years
before recorded history, our ideas of the world
around us were recorded, and that mainly
concerned the local fauna, as painted on the
wall of cave walls. Animals have populated

our visual culture since then. In dissecting

these cultural animals and animal histories,
painting automatically connects both the
viewer, myself and the animals into this long
becoming. Paintings time on this planet and
place within our culture is a fertile ground
within which I am able to traverse and
connect
historical
and
contemporary
depictions, ideas, and events. I comb the
past, and probe the present, through other
artists paintings and other sources for specific
animals representations as have existed and
exist; animals that have shaped and continue
shaping our view of not only ourselves but also
that of our interactions with them.
I construct my paintings as a dioramic
space. There is a sense of depth, but one that
is rather shallow, loaded with enough details
and enough information to suggest a narrative
without ever completing one: they are
paintings after all. The animals in my work are
in direct confrontation with humans/humanity.
5

Chris Musina

The Wolf of Ansbach (To Our Dearly Departed Burgermister), 2011, acrylic on canvas 48" x 66" Chris Musina

Chris Musina

La Mort et la Batification de St. Guinefort, 2011, oil and gold leaf on canvas 40" x 30" Chris Musina

This preys on a sense of contemporaneous

unease surrounding us, specifically in our
relationship to nature, and its seeming break
down in the time in which we live: a time
increasingly being dubbed the Anthropocene.
In an attempt to elicit powerful visceral
reactions, I merge the power of spectacle with
humor and horror, all the while examining
those natural histories and representations,
their pasts, presents and possible futures. This
chimeric amalgamation elicits a sense of
connection and familiarity, unsettled by an
uncertainty caused by loaded obscure
references. I borrow from places where I see
the animal as central, where the viewer will
recognize the syntax, even if they are
unfamiliar with the specifics. I am calling upon
the
human-animal
relationship
by

creating new and unpredictable mythologies

that draw attention to a culture that is only a
product of our animal nature, and a nature
that is a notion developed by our place within
culture. In uneasy times, we search for
certainty in science, stories, histories and
myths, places ridden with represented
animals. I dont work to aid this comfort, but to
capitalize on it, to appropriate, problematize
and exacerbates its representation.
I love painting fur, the repetitive mark
making and brush strokes, the paint rolls softly,
as luxurious as the real thing, guiding your eye,
as if your hand, down through a soft silky coat.
I want the viewer to feel that desire, that
animalistic want to touch that fur, to stroke it
gently, running their hand all the way down the
animals body until they encounter something
7

Chris Musina

Still Life with Deer in a Garbage Can, 2013, oil on canvas 66" x 48" Chris Musina

Chris Musina

Rape of the Taung Child, 2012, oil on canvas "48" x 66" Chris Musina

else, something that should elicit a strong

sense of repulsion, yet the fur is painted so
lovingly that one cant help but look at it.
To understand what is human, one
must understand that which is non-human. It is
an attempt to understand the other; the
ultimate other, the animal. In the vein of
Derridas The animal that therefore I am, my
work is also a recognition that not only do we
look at the animal, but the animal looks at us.
From my research into animal cognition
studies, I believe that animals understand
that we see from our eyes, and that they do
as well, evident in the importance of eye
contact (and its avoidance) in the animal
world. It is generally saved for gestures of
violence or sexual pursuit (not too different
from us). These paintings are filled with animals
that, regardless of their state of pain, pleasure,
or even death, return the viewers gaze. A
gaze that is confrontational, knowing, longing,
and directed, in an implicating stare. As you
ogle at their broken bodies, they look you
square in the face. In this returned glance we
are denied the very otherness of the animal
that we need to exist comfortably outside of.
We come face to face with another being,
one that is sentient, that knows were looking at
it, and is looking back. We can project
ourselves into that animal and its position. The
viewer sees not only the animal, but possibly
themselves in these violent situations. In the
medium of painting these figures are
permanently locked into this state, they can
never heal, they can never die, these
interactions that, in nature, would be rather
momentary. We are implicated by these
object/subjects; they are looking back,
making us uncomfortable, blaming us, asking
us for mercy.
This is some sort of anthropomorphism,
which can be, like painting itself, a pejorative
term, a negative paradigm in contemporary
art-making; another reason that I approach
painting from this angle.
Through this
challenge some very difficult questions are
posed.
If
we
are
to
live
nonanthropocentrically, how is one to do it?
especially when the only thing we really know
is not only human experience, but specifically
our own personal human experience. The
other option is empathy, projection, trying to

addresses the other, to understand that which

is non-human. In my practice, to understand
this huge set of others in any meaningful,
heartfelt,
way,
the
only
option
is
anthropomorphism. We can only understand
the universe through ourselves. Carl Sagan
said that we are a way for the universe to
know itself, and I use that sentiment in stating
that we are a way for ourselves to know the
universe, and the first step is to understand our
closest relatives within its vastness, the animals.
Anthropomorphism, I would argue, still
represents
a
valid
stewardship
and
understanding of our planet and its coinhabitants. When you look at the other, the
animal other, and recognize that they are
looking back at you, that they have agency,
and can possibly consider them as yourself,
and then an entirely new, yet incredibly
ancient, view of our beastly brethren unfolds
towards a new Animism.

Chris Musina is a Canadian born artist (1979) who earned a

BFA from the University of South Florida and a MFA from the
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. For more information
please visit chrismusina.com

10

A MODERN-MYSTIC LOOK
AT ANIMALS

Growing up on the rural Delmarva Peninsula, I became acquainted with the local flora and fauna at a young age.
Working at field chores, hunting, fishing, and especially when playing, my outdoors experiences were akin to the
Wonderland exploits of Lewis Carroll's Alice. Carroll's premise, that "things get curiouser and curiouser," guided me
through many a childhood adventure. I anthropomorphized animals and cast them as key players in an epic
production of which I, too, was a part. For me, as for Alice, the natural world was enchanted and ethical in an
unsentimental way.
Text by Christopher Reiger

s I matured, however, my childhood

love of nature evolved into a fascination
with biology and ethology, a process
akin to the broad philosophical and
intellectual developments impelled by the
European Enlightenment. In the 16th
century, educated Europeans began to
distinguish between fantasy and fact, and
between myth and history. They gradually
abandoned enchantment and magic in favor
of analysis and rigorous experimentation,
hallmarks of the scientific method.
Four hundred years later, weve
constructed a great wall between the
supposedly adverse realms of imagination
and reason. This segregation helps prevent
modern man from indulging in superstition
and championing ignorance, but it also
diminishes our comprehension of the
world. The 19th century English poet and critic
John Ruskin alluded to this undesirable
secondary effect when he wrote of "the
broken harmonies of fact and fancy, thought
and feeling, and truth and faith." Indeed, a

complete appreciation of nature requires us

to interweave cognition with imagination;
specifically, we must ground ourselves in
reality while remaining open to the mystical or
immaterial.
I consider myself a natural history artist,
but my drawings and paintings are outside the
traditional bounds of the genre. They
celebrate particular animal species (and
sometimes landscapes) and draw inspiration
from my outdoor experiences as well as the
latest research, but they are also mystical in
inclination.
Mystics survey and respond to the same
earthly, material realm that the rest of us do,
but they locate the extraordinary in the
mundane. As the modern mystic Henry David
Thoreau lamented, All this [splendor] is
perfectly distinct to an observant eye and yet
could easily pass unnoticed by most. Mystics
reawaken their capacity for reflective wonder
and, in so doing, experience a kind of rebirth
into a vaster dimension of human experience.
Scientists are essentially doing the same thing
11

Christopher Reiger

Constellation (Canis Rufus), pen and sumi ink, gouache, and watercolor on Arches paper, 12 1/2 x 10 inches, 2010 Reiger

-- inspiring awe and wonder -- albeit using a

very different toolkit.
Astrophysicist Adam
Frank, in his book, The Constant Fire, argues

that the spiritual impulse is at the root of both

religion and science (i.e., that religion is a kind
of proto-science). Frank writes,
12

Christopher Reiger

Submerged in His Erotic Mystification, watercolor, gouache, sumi ink, and marker on Arches paper, 32 x 32 inches, 2009
Reiger

"science [] makes life's sacred

character apparent to us. [...] This
transformation comes about when
the observer cares enough to
notice the world's details.
The
experience [] comes in the
moment when we encounter a
new image or recognize the key
pattern in a new dataset.
It
comes whenever the pathways of

science make the world stand out,

illuminated and luminous. [] It is
a result of an encounter with the
world when it is allowed to speak
for itself. In hearing its voice we
see the world as new and worthy
of awe.
Still, not all scientists or spiritual leaders accept
Franks framing. The late evolutionary biologist
13

Christopher Reiger

Slow Motion, Falling Through the Ylem, pen and sumi ink, gouache, and watercolor on Arches paper, 13 x 13 inches, 2009
Reiger

Stephen Jay Gould called the realms of

science
and
religion
nonoverlapping
magisteria, arguing that there is no
convergence of the two because science
trades in facts to explain material
phenomena, whereas religion traffics in the
unverifiable and the unobservable. I think
Goulds model is useful, but I believe that the
two magisteria are separated not by a great
wall, as so many insist, but by a permeable

membrane. At points of contact, then, there

is a bleeding of one realm into the other. My
pictures are the observations of a naturalist
working at this intersection.
Christopher Reiger is a writer, artist, and curator living in San Francisco, California. He
graduated from the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts (NYC) in 2002, and his paintings
and drawings have been included in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and
abroad. Christopher has contributed art criticism to a number of print and online journals,
and his essays and short-form pieces about art, natural history, and miscellany are published
in books, art and culture magazines, and online journals, as well as on his long-running blog,
Hungry Hyaena. In 2011, he and artist-curator Selene Foster co-founded BAASICS (Bay Area
Art & Science Interdisciplinary Collaborative Sessions), a series of San Francisco-based
evening programs that bring together local visual artists, musicians, choreographers,
scientists, and interdisciplinary thinkers to present engaging, multi-media lectures and
performances that explore a given theme.

14

ANIMALS AS WALLPAPER

London-based artist Jessica Holmes makes mixed media paintings, where elements of collage create fields, planes
and confusions of perspective that are mirrored in an inverted view of the relationship between humanity and
animals.
Text by Jessica Holmes

No glass can reach! from

Infinite to thee.

nimals form a non-human commentary

on abandoned places, where the
natural world is haunted by ghosts and
fragments of domesticity. Her current series
are painted on canvas and cheap
Homebase wallpaper. The tired and peeling
wallpaper is dashed and stained, a resentful
and fading memory of something once
valued, now lost. Holmes work sits on the cusp
of exterior and interior, as desolate landscape
and enclosed homeliness queasily occupy
the same space.
These
painstaking
depictions
of
anonymous domestic wastelands and the
animals that inhabit them are influenced by
the uneasy relationship between opulence
and morality in Dutch still life the Vanitas
paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries. The
place of animals in Dutch still life was partly
defined by their role in the Great Chain of
Being, as described in Popes Essay on Man.

This was the Enlightenment conception that

human and animal are middle links on a
natural scale with inanimate objects at its
base and the divine at the top. The luxuriously
painted corpses of animals in Vanitas
paintings were both a reminder of our own
mortality, and of our correct place in the
chain, where these beasts exist to serve our
needs. Of course, were the chain to be
broken, chaos would be the only possibility:
The least confusion but in one,
not all
That system only, but the whole
must fall.
Let Earth unbalanc'd from her
orbit fly,
Planets and Suns run lawless thro'
the sky.

Vast chain of being, which

from God began,
Natures
ethereal,
human,
angel, man
Beast, bird, fish, insect! what no
eye can see,

As Jessica Holmes animals explore the

wasteland of human comforts, the chain has
clearly fallen. However, this is a postapocalypse without drama it is the entropy
of human interaction that has done the
damage, a theme that links into earlier site15

Jessica Holmes

A device which is exploding, 122cm x 153cm, mixed media, 2011 Holmes

face of nuclear holocaust. The Birds and the

original 1950s version of The Fly are classics of
a genre that inverts mans relationship with
nature to show that humanity at its most
familiar is utterly vulnerable. This debt to Bmovie chills and nuclear paranoia is
acknowledged in the titles of the works, all of
which are quotations from 1950s American
bomb shelter manuals.

specific works: a high-street shop, closed by

the 2008 recession, where deer plummeted
from the sky (We Cannot Say What We Cannot
Think, 2009); a community centre that was
shortly to be demolished to make way for
Olympic construction, where the walls were
papered with pages of share indices from the
Tokyo stock exchange (If the Sky Were to Open
Up, 2006). In these works, the animal and the
inanimate have turned the great chain of
being on its head, taking possession of a posthuman world, and becoming unthinking
masters.
These scenes of absence and loss draw
on a variety of other intellectual and artistic
sources, in particular the psychological
techniques of Cold War Hollywood horror films.
These films also used animals to represent
insecurity about the fragility of modernity in the
16

Jessica Holmes

Hours or even days of warning, 122cm x 153cm, mixed media, 2011 Holmes

Jessica Holmes was born in 1980. She completed her BA at

Wimbledon School of Art and then went on to the
Postgraduate diploma at the Royal Academy Schools. Since
graduating, Holmes has appeared in exhibitions at Collyer
Bristow, the Parlour Gallery and Project Space, the Royal
Automobile Club and Spitalfields Church, and been shortlisted
for the prestigious Clifford Chance Postgraduate Printmaking
Award.
Other recent exhibitions include Gilding the Lily ,
Transition Gallery, March 2011, The Lunar Society, Guillochon
Gallery (Art Projects, London Art Fair) January 2012, Shelter
Up My Street, Conningsby Gallery, March 2012 and Throwing
Perfume on Violets, Blyth Gallery at Imperial College, June
2012

17

WITNESSING ANIMALS:
PAINTINGS AND THE
POLITICS OF SEEING

I am moved to paint because I am moved to see. Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing that one sees is a
quote from the philosopher Paul Valery. This quote resonates deeply with me. To me this process of seeing is at once
political and profoundly personal. It is political in its slowness, in its individuality, and its absurd inefficiency. It is
personal as trying to see without names is deeply subjective. In painting, the time spent seeing and paying attention
is important to me, especially when it is a paying attention to things that are hard to look at, things that we as a
culture would rather not see.
Text by Sunaura Taylor

the factory farms and slaughterhouses were

located. I was surprised to learn there was a
chicken processing plant located only a few
blocks from me in a more industrial and less
gentrified part of my neighborhood. As so
often happens, this massive industry was
somehow invisible to most moderately well-off
people in our city, tucked away on strange out
of the way roads, where the pollution, the
smell and the terribly paid, largely immigrant
workers, would be out of sight. Armed with a
camera, I set off with my brother and my
boyfriend on what turned out to be a
remarkably short walk from my house to the
plant. However, within a few short minutes of
taking pictures we were kicked of the
premises.
As luck would have it, I found out a few
days later that an acquaintance of mine
worked at another local chicken factory and
was willing to take the photos for me. He took
the photographs, but to the surprise of all of
us, was fired the very next day for doing so.
This painting began a series of works of
animals in factory farms. Although I had been
a vegetarian nearly my whole life, working on

few months before I moved to

California to begin my MFA at UC
Berkeley, I decided I wanted to start my
largest painting to date a 10.5 x 8 painting
of hundreds of hens on a chicken truck. These
trucks are a common sight in my home state
of Georgia and they had always been deeply
troubling to me. As children, my siblings and I
would hold our breath as they drew near to us
when we were driving down the highway. This
began as a response to the smell hundreds
of dying birds and their feces cooking in the
sweltering summer heat - but soon it became
something else: a way for us to acknowledge
the suffering that was beside us. To not breath
for the moments that these hens were near
was our way of empathizing with them.
The problem with my plan to paint one
of these trucks was that they never stop in
public locations. As an artist who works from
photographs I needed to find a spot where
these trucks would stop for long enough that I
could snap some usable pictures. The solution
to my problem turned out to be only a few
blocks away. Like most relatively well-off
people in my city, I was unaware of where
18

Sunaura Taylor

Chicken Truck, oil on canvas, 2008, 10.5' x 8' (126" x 96") Taylor

these paintings profoundly changed the way I

thought about animals specifically the way I
thought about eating animals. Within six
months of starting Chicken Truck, I was a
committed vegan. In an interview I recently
did with legendary artist Sue Coe, she called
art about animal cruelty the kiss of death for
ones art career. As a new graduate student in
an MFA program, I was admittedly a bit
horrified of my newfound obsession with
animal exploitation.[i]
What has always moved me to paint is
the act of seeing itself. In many ways I am
someone who is obsessed with seeing. And by
this, I mean very literally looking. As a painter, I
have spent countless hours of my life staring at
canvasses, at colors, at pictures, at blank
walls,
at
photographs
of
exploited
animals. Like so many other artists, I have
been deeply influenced by philosopher Paul
Valerys much referenced words: To see is to
forget the name of the thing that one sees.[ii]
My earlier work had mostly been
portraits of individuals who were close to me,
as well as self-portraits that dealt with the

complex relationship I had as a disabled

person to my own body. It is easy to make the
leap from my body to my seeing. From my
wheelchair I learned how to see, how to watch
the world. Since my tactile skills are weak, my
body made up for this by constantly exercising
my eyes. I watched the things that others
touched. I watched as I waited, as I moved. I
do everything with my mouth I cook, clean,
kiss, sing, carry, and paint through my teeth,
jaw, tongue and lips... and my mouth is very
close to my eyes. I see so many things most
people don't get the opportunity to really see.
When something is carried between one's
teeth, it means it must have at one point been
staring them in the eye. Every shadow, every
color change, every shape and piece of
grime is there. This is how I learned to see
detail, to pay attention to my visual world; to in
effect, fall in love with the act of seeing. My
mouth taught me.
But this is too easy; only partly true. As a
disabled person, it is too simple to bring
everything back to my body. I very likely would
have loved seeing if I were able-bodied.
19

Sunaura Taylor

Downed Dairy Cow, oil on canvas, 2008, 5" x 4" Taylor

In fact, perhaps I notice the things that are

close to my eyes in my daily life because of a
love of seeing that I would have had
regardless of disability. Perhaps I love to see
because seeing is political. Who and what we
choose to see, when we choose to see
these are political choices we are constantly
making.
Animals, and especially animals in
factory farms, are an unfortunate example of
the ways in which what we choose not to see
profoundly affects the lives of others. The
private suffering these animals go through is
an extremely important place to explore the
act of paying attention. In modern day CAFOs
(Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations),
animals are subjected to terrible violence and
are never recognized as living beings. During

their brief lives, these animals are seen only as

units of production in the ever increasingly
efficient machine that is the meat industry.
I often paint from photographs, my
own and those taken by others, including
imagery that comes from various animal
advocacy organizations. Photographs of
animal cruelty are usually taken by activists
from various organizations who go undercover
to expose the atrocities that exist behind the
slaughterhouse and factory walls. However,
these images are often never seen by the
public, or if they are seen, they are largely
dismissed as manipulative animal rights
propaganda.
I am incredibly grateful that images of
this sort are taken, as they are vastly important
documents of violence and wrongdoing that
20

Sunaura Taylor

Dead Calves on a Conveyor Belt, oil on canvas, 2008, 5" x 4" Taylor

have lead to various successes in punishing

specific instances of cruelty, as well as raising
awareness about animal exploitation more
generally. Various ag-gag bills, which
criminalizes shooting this sort of footage, are
so scary precisely because of how important
this imagery is in the campaign to end animal
cruelty. Nonetheless, despite how valuable
these images are, there is also something that
has always troubled me about how these
images are used in campaign literature.
Perhaps the trouble comes from the
accompanying text with the persistent bold
words pleading Go Veg!, which seems to
simply turn these dying or dead animals into
slogans. Or perhaps the bad flavor of many of
PETAs media antics has rubbed off on these
images. Or perhaps the problem of these

images is best expressed in a question many

artists have asked what are ones
responsibilities when representing exploitation
and death?
I have tried to answer the concerns
these images raise for me, by transforming this
imagery into paint. What happens to images
when they transform from something that took
an instant to be captured by a camera, into
something completely inefficient, something
that can take months of individual labor and
time spent looking to create? (The dilemma of
course is that here, as they appear in this
article, the images are once again photos
photos placed beside words and thoughts). By
painting these photographs I hope to
transform these images into memorials. They
are works of portraiture. Through looking,
21

Sunaura Taylor

Downed Pigs, Oil on canvas, 2008, 5" x 4" Taylor

through paying attention, I mourn these

individual animals. The process of seeing is at
once political and profoundly personal. It is
personal, as trying to see without names, as
Valery describes, is deeply subjective. Its
political in its slowness, in its individuality, and
its absurd inefficiency. There is something
powerful to me about the slowness of
painting. It took me more than a year and a
half to paint the 102 chickens that make up
chicken truck longer than the actual
chickens were alive.
Painting is an utterly inefficient way of
creating a representational image in the
twenty-first century. But that is why I love it. It's
inefficiency. That is one of the most
remarkable things about disability too how
fantastically inefficient it is! Of course I am

partly joking here, but also serious. Efficiency

oppresses both nonhuman animals and
human animals: the exhausted and disabled
dairy cow is made into meat when she no
longer
efficiently
gives
milk;
the
slaughterhouse worker is laid off when he
begins to show signs of disability from the
repetitive stress of the job. I like that my body
does not follow the laws of efficiency. I will
never be the most efficient employee or
efficient consumer. Ill take my time use my
mouth or feet instead of my arms spend a
year on a painting that many will say looks like
a photo, instead of taking a photo.
Where agricultural animals are rarely
seen as anything other than products,
disability is rarely viewed beyond stereotype
and metaphor.
22

Sunaura Taylor

Baby Lamb Undergoing Mulesing, oil on canvas, 2008, 5" x 4" Taylor

Hackneyed and problematic representations

of disability are consistent and pervasive
around us. The politics of seeing (in other
words, of representation) is profoundly
important in regards to disability.
Disability is a social justice issue, but it's
a social justice issue that Americans, and
even very progressive Americans, often don't
really understand. The way most people view
disability betrays a deep misunderstanding of
what it means to be disabled. Being disabled
is seen as an individual tragedy. The problem
is seen solely as a medical one, versus a
social, political and economic one.
Disabled people confront stereotypes,
stigmas and major civil rights infringements
daily due to disability. We are some of the
worlds poorest peoples, some of the least
educated, some of the most likely to be

abused, and on top of these things, it is legal

to keep us from participating in many social
spaces due to physical and attitudinal barriers,
to segregate us into institutions and special
programs, and it is seen as acceptable to talk
for us instead of to us (or in the case of those
who
are
nonverbal
and
profoundly
intellectually disabled, to those who know
them best and have their best interests at
heart).
Historically, and throughout the world,
people with physical and mental differences
have been marginalized in one way or
another whether through extreme and
violent measures such as sterilization,
infanticide, eugenics, and institutionalization or
through more systematic inequality like
impoverishment,
institutionalization,
imprisonment, and lack of access to housing,
23

Sunaura Taylor

Culled Male Chicks in a Dumpster, oil on canvas, 2008, 5' x 3.5' (60" x 42") Taylor

As an artist, I am fascinated by visual

discourses of disability: the talented and agile
sideshow freak, who uses her mouth or feet to
play the guitar or light a cigarette. The invalid
in a wheelchair who is surrounded by doctors
touching and prodding. The smiling child
under a rainbow, who is about to drop the
crutches he holds because he believes in a
cure
My other visual work explores these
narratives, especially sideshow imagery and
medical photography, which are some of the
most persistent and enduring discourses of
disability. These representations construct
disability as exotic, freakish, and horrifying, as
well as pitiable, tragic and in need of cure. By
altering this imagery with paint, I hope to
disrupt these narratives and present disability
as something else a political issue.
With this imagery, it is not the time spent
looking that is important to me (these images
are actually paint on top of digital prints of
photographs), but rather the immediacy of

work and education. Given all this, our actual

physical or cognitive impairments are often
the least of our worries.
According to the Convention on the
Rights of Persons With Disabilities, 10 per cent
of
the
worlds
population,
or
650
millionpeople, live with a disability. Disabled
people are actually the worlds largest
minority.[iii] However, most people are still
unaware that disability is more complex than
a personal narrative.
Disability scholars realize how ableist
stories reinforce how we are treated socially
and politically everyday, but we also realize
the same is true of other kinds of
representations,
images,
and
cultural
perceptions. There are countless ways from
pity mongering charity drives to sappy supercrip characters in movies to representations in
political discourse of disabled people as
scroungers, fakers or economic burdens, in
which the lived lives of real disabled people
are replaced with metaphors and stereotypes.
24

Sunaura Taylor

Animals With Arthrogryposis, oil on canvas, 2009, 6 x 9(72 x 108) Taylor

visual intervention. Through painting directly

onto the images I alter their meaning,
transforming the way disability is seen.
In some of my images my subversive
mission is clear the freaks are pissing on pity
or flicking the gazers off, but in others my
marks are less obvious, asking my audience to
critically reflect upon their own assumptions
and projections as viewers. I often try to bring
attention to the thing that isnt exposed in the
image, but that is most desired, most curiously
considered and yet left covered: Did a half
man have a penis? How hairy was the hairy
woman? In my sideshow work, the marks I
make often already exist within the fantasy of
the gaze and its conflations with the image.
While I expose the freak, I often (but not
always) cover up the individuals in the
medical photographs. The medicalization of
disability forms the ways in which disabled
bodies are understood. Doctors probe,
measure and stare, but as the joke often goes
at least the Freaks got paid. The medical
gaze is calculated, measuring, labeling and
dissecting. The patient becomes a body to be

cropped, numbered and labeled not unlike

a butchers diagram. I often erase or white-out
the individuals in the medical images in a
gesture towards returning privacy to these
individuals, but also as a way of removing
disability from the gaze of medicine and
pathology.
Animals and animality are central
themes in this work. By bringing animals or the
suggestion of animals directly into this imagery
I hope to raise questions about our relationship
to their bodies as well. What does it means to
be compared to an animal? How and where
do the oppressions of animals and the
oppressions of disabled people intersect? As a
freak, as a patient, I do not deny that Im like
an animal. Instead I want to be aware of the
mistreatment that those labeled animal
(human and non) experience. I am an
animal.
Painting has allowed me to see and
focus on animal and disability oppression for
hours every day to spend time seeing, both
politically and personally. Through this work I
have become increasingly aware of the
25

Sunaura Taylor

Self-Portrait as Butcher Chart, oil paint on photocopy on paper, 2009, 11 x 9 Taylor

interconnections between the oppression of

animals and the oppression of disabled
people. These connections center on a
corrupt value system that declares some
bodies normal, some bodies broken, and
some bodies food.
Animals are continually judged by
ableist human traits and abilities. We
understand animals as inferior and not
valuable for many of the same reasons
disabled people are viewed this waysthey
are seen as incapable, as lacking and as
different. They are affected by the privileging
of the able-bodied human ideal, which is the
constant standard against which they are
judged, justifying their exploitation and abuse.
Our anthropocentric worldview can be
understood as supported by ableism. The
abled body that ableism perpetuates and
privileges is always not only nondisabled but
also non-animal.

Animals are also affected by ableism in the

form of our cultural opinions and values: our
notions of what it means to be independent;
of how to measure productivity and efficiency;
our notions of what is normal; even our notions
of nature. These values not only affect our
notions of disability, but, the point is, they also
affect the nonhuman animals we share this
planet with.[v]
In Animals With Arthrogryposis, a large
painting I did a few years after I finished
Chicken Truck, there is an image of me
standing naked, with two pigs and a calf. In
the painting, yellow medical arrows point to
each of us. The image is reminiscent of a
medical photo and we are numbered A-D.
The full name of my disability is Arthrogryposis
Multiplex Congenita. The animals in this
painting also have my disability. In cows the
condition is called Curly Calf, but it can occur
in various animals including pigs and lambs. It
26

Sunaura Taylor

Lobster Girl, oil paint on digital print on paper, 2010, 5.5 x 3.5 (66 x 42) Taylor

is a condition that is common enough on

factory farms to have been the subject
of Beef Magazines December 2008 issue.
It strikes me as important that the
animals we eat are themselves disabled
what I have called manufactured to be
disabled."[v] Industrialized farm animals live in
filthy and unnatural conditions that lead to
illnesses and disabilities, but they are also bred
and physically altered to physical extremes,
where udders produce too much milk for a
cows body to hold, where turkeys cannot
bear the weight of their own giant breasts, and
where chickens are left with amputated beaks
that make it difficult for them to eat. In the
face of such brutality, it is hard to view
painting and art making as substantial tools of
resistance. In many ways they are flimsy and
problematic interventionsand yet I am still
drawn to making them. The images we are
confronted with may not be the most violent
manifestation of the human tendency towards
exploitation, but they no doubt impact our
world, our decisions, and our very beings, in
ways that effect who we will be as individuals
and what values our world will hold. Bell Hooks

writes, "Thich Nhat Hahn tells students that

putting images inside our heads is just like
eating. And if you are what you eat it is
equally true that to a grave extent we are
what we see."[vi] This ingestion of seeing
strikes me as related to Valery's "naming." To
name something is to have that something
already inside of you. And if it has been
named wrongly, then the consequences can
profoundly damaging.
Judith Butler writes, One is, as it were,
brought into social location and time through
being named... The name constitutes one
socially, but ones social constitution takes
place without ones knowing. Indeed, one
may well imagine oneself in ways that are
quite to the contrary of how one is socially
constituted; one may, as it were, meet that
socially constituted self by surprise, with alarm
or pleasure, even with shock.[vii]
Names are oppressive because
Injurious names have a history, one that is
invoked and reconsolidated at the moment of
utterance, but not explicitly told. Images, of
course, utter as well.
To see to the extent that animals
27

Sunaura Taylor

Intersex, oil paint on digital print on paper, 2010, 6 x 3.5 (72 x 42) Taylor

are no longer trapped in names, no longer

caught in labels such as "livestock," or "meat,''
and to see disability without words like pity,
cure or freak this is my goal.
Endnotes
[i]

http://bombsite.com/issues/1000/articles/6696 accessed
September 11, 2012
[ii]

Weschler, Lawrence, "Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the

Thing That One Sees", p.203
[iii]

http://www.un.org/disabilities/convention/facts.shtml
accessed Feb 22nd 2011

Sunaura Taylor is an artist, writer and activist. Taylor's artworks

have been exhibited at venues across the country, including
the CUE Art Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution and the
Berkeley Art Museum. She is the recipient of numerous awards
including a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant and an
Animals and Culture Grant. Her written work has been printed
in numerous edited collections as well as in publications such
as the Monthly Review, Yes! Magazine, American Quarterly
and Qui Parle. Taylor worked with philosopher Judith Butler on
Astra Taylors film Examined Life (Zeitgeist 2008). Taylor holds
an MFA in art practice from the University of California,
Berkeley and is a Ph.D. student in American studies in the
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. Her book
Beasts of Burden, which explores the intersections of animal
ethics and disability studies, is forthcoming from the Feminist
Press.

[iv]

Taylor, Sunaura, "Vegan, Freaks and Animals: Toward a New

Table Fellowship", American Quarterly, Volume 65, Number 3
(September 2013), Species/Race/Sex, edited by Claire Jean
Kim and Carla Freccero. 757-764
[v]

Taylor, Sunaura, "Beasts of Burden: Animals and Disability"

Qui Parle, volume 19, number 2, (Spring/Summer 2011),
Special Issue: At the Intersections of Ecocriticism , 191-222
[vi]

http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2012/09/bell-hooks-nolove-in-wild.html?spref=fb accessed September 11, 2012

[vii]

Excitable Speech, 36

28

Sunaura Taylor

No Arms! (Self-Portrait), oil paint on digital print on raw canvas, 2010, 4 x 6 (48 x 72) Taylor

29

DECOLONIZING DOG
PAINTING
I would argue that painting (object and practice) and animal representations both suffer from associationsor even as
perceived expressions ofsentimentality. Why is sentimentality such a bad thing, I wonder? The modernist heritage of
western societies seems certainly to have vilified all that is non-rational, un-Enlightenment, and, especially, sentimental.
Text by Ren J. Marquez

s an artist of a colonized persuasion

from a non-modernist heritageI take
issue with modernist attacks on
sentimentality. I especially take issue with
attacks on painting and paintings of animals,
dogs in particular, as somehow illegitimate
forms of contemporary art that simply
functionif we can use that wordas
Greenberg and his ilk would charge, as kitsch.
If, however, we do live in an era of
deconstructed and discredited modernism,
what
exactly
is
the
problem
with
sentimentality? And, by extension, from an
artist who paints dog portraits, what is wrong
with making paintings of dogs?

Rather than get involved in the many

implications defining, I focus on the second
definition in thinking about my work with dog
paintings. The primacy of reason here
smacks of the Enlightenment values that
govern our western cultures. But what about
feeling? Is feeling (intuition?) completely
illegitimate in establishing knowledge? Animal
trainer, poet, and philosopher Vicki Hearne
describes the intangible as it relates to
animals: in animal work there is the strong
sense of something else being recovered, not
innocence, but knowledge that is unmediated
and therefore not so nervous. A fundamental
criticism of painting and animal work both is
the exploration and expression of the
intangible and unmediated. I would argue,
however, that it is exactly these elements that
can contribute to profound understanding
and even critical re-consideration what we
think we know.
Not only do I see dog paintings as valid
subjects in and vehicles for contemporary art
discourse, I see dog paintings as potentially
transgressive and, indeed, subversive. My
approach to dog portraiture is decidedly
postcolonial as it actively seeks an
understanding of the world disentangled from
imposed modernist values; my dog portraits
offer a model of alterity to discourses of
contemporary art and to broader ontological

Sentimentality, as defined by the Oxford

English Dictionary <oed.com>:
1.
a. Of persons, their dispositions and
actions: Characterized by sentiment.
Originally
in
favourable
sense:
Characterized by or exhibiting refined
and elevated feeling. In later use:
Addicted to indulgence in superficial
emotion; apt to be swayed by
sentiment.

2. Pertaining to sentiment.
a. Arising from or determined by feeling
rather than by reason.
30

Ren J. Marquez

Aspen, oil on canvas, 36in x 48in, 2008 Marquez

questions. Ontologically, the dog portrait

proposes
a
radical
reconsideration
reminiscent of Donna Haraways cyborg: The
cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics.
The cyborg is a condensed image of both
imagination and material reality, the two
joined centres structuring any possibility of
historical
transformation.
(Cyborg)
Imagination and material in dog portraiture is
a practice of collaboration: dog and artist.
This practice embraces disavowal of certainty
and a differentiated field of experience
(Derrida) through visualand decidedly nonverbalcollaboration in the truest sense of the
word. The conglomeration of dog and artist,
and even pet keeper, offers a relevant,
contemporary model of hybridity.
As hybridity implies an intertwining of
original forms, the question for art, humans,
and non-humans is one of subjectivity: what
are the forms under consideration? In
contemporary art, Baurriaud offers an art from

where the substrate is formed by intersubjectivity, and which takes being-together

as a central theme, the encounter between
beholder and picture, and the collective
elaboration of meaning. For the encounter
with a dog painting to be meaningful,
however, the dog must be recognized for her
or his own subjectivity and what that
subjectivity brings to the experience of the
viewer. Steve Baker, contemplating Deleuze
and Guattaris becoming animal, considers
what becoming animal looks like: Arts
workmoving the human away from
anthropocentric meanings and subjective
identityis presented as much the same thing
as the animals work. It is the work of figuring
out how to operate other-than-in-identity. The
various arts have no other aim than to
unleash becomings. Popular understanding
of painting and animals rests on tenets so
deeply ingrained as to inhabit the pantheon
of so-called knowledge. But both painting and
31

Ren J. Marquez

Blotter (2008), oil and acrylic on canvas, 20in x 16in Marquez

Guattari in his exhibition Becoming Animal

(Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art,
2005-06), surveying animality as otherness in
models for critically evaluating human social
structures, dynamics, and (potential) progress.

animals find re-invention through critical reevaluation of how we construct knowledge.

Recognizing animal subjectivity in the
reconsideration of knowledge, curator Nato
Thompson further nods to Deleuze and
32

Ren J. Marquez

Untitled (puppies in sweaters), acrylic on canvas, 18in x 24in, 2011 Marquez

Thompson presents the ideas of Giorgio

Agamben:

England with an Iraqi Prisoner on a

leash or the caged enclosures of
war prisoners reminiscent of a
zoo.

Investigating the creation of

camps for those deemed not
part
of
society
(such
as
concentration camps or the
camps developed in 1896 by the
Spanish in Cuba), Agamben
locates and analyzes separated
territories
that
delineate
a
population outside the usual rules
of governance. A current corollary
might be Abu Ghraib or
Guantnamo Bay where political
prisoners are no longer offered
common access to the law.
Imagine the photograph from
Abu Ghraib of Private Lunndie

Although the exhibition does not offer pet

portrait objects per se, it is replete with the
practice of pet portraiture. Artists such as AnnSofi Sidn, Kathy High, and Mark Dion raise
ontological issues that give rise to political
strategies. The human and nonhuman
animals comingle in becoming.
With regard to painting specifically, the
material of paint is both a site and means of
collaborative practice designed to transgress.
Revisiting Hearne, paint invites understanding
that can be unmediated and intangible.
Thoughts
of
material
collaboration,
comingling, and inter-subjectivity all invoke
33

Ren J. Marquez

Studio, oil and acrylic on canvas, 36in x 54in, 2003 Marquez

yet
again,
Haraways
ideas
around
companion species; all are reflected in
painted dog portraits, which, like dogs
themselves, are about the inescapable,
contradictory story of relationshipscoconstitutive relationships in which none of the
partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating
is never done once and for all. (Companion)
The sentimentality of human-dog relationships
compares to that of artist-paint and
encourages a contemporary functioning of
radical pet portraiture. In his catalog essay for
the Triumph of Painting, Barry Schwabsky writes:

modern idea of the image, it is

painting that allows us to
internalize it. Its a question of
touching and being touched.
Touch, the mark of the handas modernist
a value as it might beclearly retains some
currency in the contemporary context. Being
touched, however, sounds remarkably
sentimental. And yet it is valued? Perhaps we
can
consider
touch
in
its
various
manifestations as a beacon of ontological
presumptions of what it means to be human
as well as nonhuman.
The question I am always askedand
often ask myselfis But they just look like
regular, old dog portraits how are they
different? The difference lies not in the object
but in the subjects, both human and nonhuman. In his Becoming Animal exhibition,
Thompson rejects invigorating traditional
categories in favor of what he calls a radical
space of empathy. Haraway extends that

The fascination with craft has the

same source as the more
widespread
attraction
to
painterliness
among
todays
younger
painters
a
fundamental concern with the
physical involvement with the
image. For although it was
photography that taught us the
34

Ren J. Marquez

Sophia, oil and acrylic on canvas, 24in x 24in, 2000 Marquez

space as a site of action and portends the

subversive potential for dog portraits:

possible but absolutely necessary

joint futures. For me, that is what
significant otherness signifies.
(Companion)

How can general knowledge be

nurtured in postcolonial worlds
committed to taking difference
seriously? Answers to these
questions can only be put
together in emergent practices,
i.e., in vulnerable, on-the-ground
work that cobbles together nonharmonious agencies and ways
of living that are accountable
both to their disparate inherited
histories and to their barely

The emergent practice, in my case,

intertwines the personal history of a colonized
culture, an immigrant, and person of color
with that of a western-trained, visual artist and
dog trainer. Inasmuch as none of these
identities can be extracted from one another,
neither can the history of painting or dog
portraits be extracted from their contemporary
iterations. Hybridity hardly seems an apt term,
however, when the coming together of all
35

Ren J. Marquez

Tina, oil on canvas, 24in x 18in, 2005 Marquez

36

these histories and identities constitutes a new

subjectivity. For example, in our relationship
with dogs, the subject is just that: the
relationship. The human and non-human are
superseded by the unit they become. In
painting and in the painting of dogs, reliance
on conventional understanding of what
constitutes either, must give way to what they
become together as a subject. And in new
and unexpected subjectivities we engage the
hopelessly
radical
and
transgressive
sentimental.

References
Baker, Steve. What doe Becoming-Animal Look Like?

Representing Animals. Ed. Nigel Rothfels.

University of Indiana Press, 2002. 67-98.

Indianapolis:

Bourriaud, Nicholas. Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Presses du

rel, English version, 2002.
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Trans. David
Wills. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. New York: Fordham University
Press, 2008.
Haraway, Donna J. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs,
People and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm
Press, 1993.

Born in the Philippines and raised in the U.S., Marquez is a

painter, drawer, and video maker whose research interests
include postcolonial and animal identities and subjectivities.
His studio investigations brought him to found and run Free to
Be Dog Haven, a sanctuary for dogs, the focus of his studio
practice. He is documenting his work in an in-progress
manuscript titled Sanctuary: Dogs, Art, and Collaborative
Being.
Past exhibitions include the Cultural Center of the
Philippines, Bronx Museum of the Arts, the International Center
of Photography, the Banff Centre, University of California-Irvine,
and the Delaware Art Museum. Marquez received his MFA in
Painting from the University of Pennsylvania and also holds an
MA in Asian Studies from Cornell University. He resides in the
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania metropolitan area where he serves
as faculty and Interim Chair of the Department of Art at the
University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware.

--------------------. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology,

and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, from
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature.
London: Free Asssociation Books, 1991. Rpt. in Ed.
Badmington, Neil. Posthumanism. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2000.
Hearne, Vicki. Animal Happiness. New York: HarperCollins
Publishers, 1994.
Schwabsky, Barry. An Art that Eats its own Head. The Triumph
of Painting. Saatchi Gallery. London: Jonathan Cape Random
House, 2005. 8-9.
Thompson, Nato. Becoming Animal. Boston: The MIT Press,
2006.

37

ANIMALS
IN LOW-RES
My mother talks to her cats like theyre guests at a dinner party. The first mistake was letting them sit at the kitchen
table, the second was buying a potty stool to help them reach the cat flap better. She is in absolutely no doubt that
each cat has its own opinions and political leanings, its own food brand preference and that they are a few consonants
short of sounding out the days of the week. .
Text by Isobel Wood

guts. Marcus Coates wore a stuffed stag on his

head in Journey to the Lower World and Dutch
art group Idiots seem to have a veritable
menagerie of dead beasts to play with. Each
work communicates its message powerfully the concreteness of the three dimensional
draws a reaction from the viewer like blood
from, well, a dead animal. But there appears
to be very little animal-inspired painting
gaining as much recognition. I wanted to take
my new zest for oils and this animal aesthetic
and create an original series of paintings that
would carry more weight than mere animal
studies. I wanted to turn the nauseatingly
sentimental pet portraits that engulfed turn-ofthe-century Victoria England on their heads,
simultaneously paying homage to and
mocking the Kennel Club art of Edward
Landseer and John Emms. Pet pride turned
postmodern.
I stumbled upon Lynne RobertsGoodwins Bad Birds whilst rootling around in
Cabinet magazines 2005 archives. A Sydneybased photographic artist, Roberts-Goodwin
sought the assistance of a head veterinarian
at the Australian Museums Department of
Ornithology and produced a series of portraits
of long-dead birds from their collection. The
budgerigars and parrots face away from the
camera against a black backdrop.

isturbingly, she is not alone in these

indulgences: I can name at least ten
people whove developed unhealthy
relationships with their pets, whove rushed to
the rescue centre after a messy divorce or a
death in the family. In todays Western culture
we ruthlessly farm, abuse, exhibit and
consume animals in staggering quantity, and
while I am far too young and naive to present
any kind of an argument for or against these
activities, I can certainly assume the role of
bemused onlooker. This is where my art
practice comes in.
I took an interest in both painting and
animals simultaneously and have spent the
last four months delving furiously into the two
with equal fervor. From the writings of Steve
Baker on The Postmodern Animal and
Botched Taxidermy through Deleuze and
Guattari to David Sylvesters interviews with
Francis Bacon, I have managed to compile a
somewhat disheveled timeline of how the
animal (or rather mans view of the animal) has
shaped both our thinking and, by default, our
art.
The
amount
of
taxidermy
in
contemporary animal art is difficult to ignore:
mention Thomas Grunfeld or Angela Singer
and the mind immediately races to ostrichlegged cows and rabbits spewing red button38

Ren J. Marquez

Tina, oil on canvas, 24in x 18in, 2005 Marquez

39

Ren J. Marquez

Tina, oil on canvas, 24in x 18in, 2005 Marquez

40

Ren J. Marquez

Tina, oil on canvas, 24in x 18in, 2005 Marquez

41

Ren J. Marquez

Tina, oil on canvas, 24in x 18in, 2005 Marquez

42

As Cabinets writer Charles Green rightly states,

The absence of the face confounds our
anthropomorphic projections, frustrating our
tendency to want to read certain kinds of
temperament or character into the faces of
animals. The only information the viewer can
glean from such portraits is that regarding
markings, plumage and color. The lack of
facial features was, indeed, frustrating.
Eager to emulate this, I collected
photos of pet cats from both the Internet and
from friends. I used my very limited photoshop
skills to pixelate the eyes of some, the entire
face of others. Pixel size was important here:
too large and the illusion of the features
werent clear, too small and the enigma was
lost. I had no idea whether the paintings would
work as I hoped, and approached the first one
with a sort of half-arsed abandon (if it turned
out badly, at least I hadnt wasted hours of
precious Frieze magazine perusal and
Facebook chatting). However the first feline
was a success, and those goose bumps Im
sure any fellow painter can relate to when a
series is imminent, started appearing.
The process of pixelation, a technique
only familiar to those of us living in a
Westernized 21st century, partnered with the
centuries-old oil painting made for an
interesting juxtaposition. Craft will always be
integral to my artistic endeavors and therefore
to simply pixelate a JPEG file was not enough.
The painting itself offers a tentative hand to
those Victorian pet portraits before yanking
them toward the millennium.
Most intriguing were the reactions of my
friends and peers to this series - a few asked
what have these cats done wrong? most
likely associating pixelation with the petty
criminals seen beating up shopkeepers on
Cops With Cameras. Some commented on
the beauty of the colors used for the squares
and complimented my ability to get the hues
just right. Steve Baker, when I nervously
emailed him some of the pictures, brought my
attention to the fact that where the noses and
mouths had not been pixelated, it was still
quite easy to read the cats as conventionally
cute.
My mother has yet to comment.

Isobel Wood lives, works and studies in London. She is twenty

years old and does not own any cats.

43

PICTURING THE
BEAST
a portfolio by
Olly and Suzi

"We paint together. Ours is a total collaboration. We paint hand over hand on the
same painting at the same time. All our work is created in this way. Our art-making
process is concerned with our journey; a collaborative, mutual response to nature at
its most primitive and wild. The majority of our art is conducted in diverse and remote
environments both on land and in the sea. We paint on location and in close
proximity to animals, which are often endangered, because they are still here. They
are our primary subject matter. Where possible we use natural pigments and
materials. In this way the wild is our studio.
The painting is primarily about representation and symbolism. Whether we
place the "animal as icon", singular, primitive and large upon the paper or paint the
landscape, herd, migration, or movements of the predatory pack we attempt to
integrate clarity and ambiguity in the same painting. Conceptually we aim to raise
awareness and an understanding of our subject matter. When possible we
incorporate the track, print, spoor or bite of the animal in our work, documenting the
habitat or the passing of a creature that is here now but may not be for much longer.
This interaction can be viewed as evidence to an event, a form of primal
investigation; a physical performance of the senses.
We show our painting and drawing in installation alongside photographs and
film to communicate and document the art making, and our subsequent interaction
with nature, as an ongoing process.
"All primitive expression reveals the constant awareness of powerful
forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear, a recognition and
acceptance of the brutality of the natural world as well as the eternal
insecurity of life."
Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko

44

Olly and Suzi

Bull Moose, Syracuse, New York, 1989 Olly and Suzi

45

Olly and Suzi

Red Tiger, Karnali, Nepal, 1997 Olly and Suzi

46

Olly and Suzi

Cheeta Gang Inspecting, Namibia,1997 Olly and Suzi

47

Olly and Suzi

7 Wildogs, Mkomazi, Tanzania, 2007 Olly and Suzi

48

Olly and Suzi

3 Ravens, Northern Minnesota, 1998 Olly and Suzi

49

Olly and Suzi

Musk Ox, Ellesmere Island, Arctic Canda, 1998 Olly and Suzi

50

Olly and Suzi

Deer for Beuys, Northern Minnesota,1998 Olly and Suzi

For 27 years collaborative artists Olly and Suzi have dedicated their lives to tracking, painting and raising awareness for endangered
animals and the fragile habitats in which they live. They have conducted over 70 field expeditions into the wild documenting
predators in remote Arctic, desert, ocean and jungle environments. In 1994 Olly and Suzi met legendary East African conservationist
Tony Fitzjohn and began their work with African wild dogs. A passion that is ongoing today. Olly & Suzi exhibited a large wild dog
installation in 'Nature of the Beast' at the New Art Gallery Walsall in 2013. In 1997 they made interactive work underwater with great
white sharks and then embarked on a three-month expedition to track and co-exist with Arctic wolves on Canada's remote
Ellesmere Island. In 2001/2002 'Olly & Suzi Untamed', their year long retrospective, took place at the Natural History Museum in
London. In 2003 their book, Arctic, Desert, Ocean, Jungle was published in the USA by Abrams. In February 2009 their documentary
'Wild Art - Olly & Suzi Paint Predators' was screened on the BBC's 'Storyville' strand. In 2012 Olly & Suzi embarked on a new body of
fieldwork aimed at raising awareness for the Kora national park in51
Northern Kenya.

BECOMING ANIMAL:
MATTER AS INDEXICAL
SIGN IN
REPRESENTATION
My practice-led PhD research project in the Painting Workshop at the Australian National University challenges what it
means to be a painter of animals. The treatment of animals by my Hungarian born father, Tibor, an amateur naturalist
and taxidermist, is fundamental to the motivations driving my painting practice and its development. Equally, formative
and ongoing exposure to Australian Aboriginal visual traditions, popularised in a style known as x-ray, inform my
exploration of animal representation.
Text by Vanessa Barbay

due to the combination of an emblematic

silhouette that denotes the animal subject
and
a
vibrant
abstract
patterning
called rrarrk that divides the body into
segments filled with multi-coloured crosshatching. Key internal organs usually also
feature in X-ray painting hence the term, and
it denotes the subject as a food animal
or mayh. The painting can then be instructive
on a more practical level, describing the
dividing up of the animal body for
consumption. Landscape features can also
be considered body parts of ancestors and,
inversely, body parts of animals in paintings
can be interpreted as landscape features.[2]
Rrark operates simultaneously as a screening
device and an indicator of ancestral power,
[3] the full comprehension of which is revealed
incrementally to initiates through ceremonial
revelation. The ochres used to paint with are
also potent carriers of meaning deriving from
the mythological beings at the sites where
they are collected, which are interwoven
within personal identity through links to kinship
classification systems or moiety shared by
animals and people of the region.
The rich complexity of Aboriginal culture
in Western Arnhem Land enables a seamless
interplay
between
metaphysical
and
practicable purposes within paintings of

hrough my image-creation experiments

that bring decomposing creatures into
contact with canvas, I interrogate the
nature of representation within a traditional
painting format. Painting as a medium makes
a significant contribution to contemporary
representations of animals through its potential
to harness materials as carriers of meaning,
exercising their power as an indexical [1] sign
of animal. While taxidermy and its
modifications blatantly provided such an
encounter on the material and subjective
level, as a form of representation it must
contend with the weight of its own history.
Investigation within painting process offers a
subtler alternative in its ability to weave
materials seamlessly into a metaphorical
space of contemplation. A significant power
painting has its ability to create illusions,
whether to overtly deceive or initially beguile in
order to enable often latent revelations to
occur in the spectator over time.
In paintings of animals by Aboriginal
artists in Western Arnhem Land, Australia for
example, the representation of any life form
also evokes ancestral narratives and
associations, which allude to an artists
responsibility for clan lands. The X-ray painting
genre enables an artist to conceal maps of
dreaming or djang sites within animal bodies
52

Vanessa Barbay

Lamb of God (Spring Lamb), Lamb, delek, silk stitch and rabbit skin glue on canvas, 2011-12 Barbay

animals that has not received the level of

critical scrutiny it deserves within the
contemporary animal art context. The genres
clever use of illusion, the importance given to
painting materials as indexical signs, and the
elevation of the animal as a significant subject
for art, has influenced my commitment as a
painter to the representation of animals. As a
part of my research I chose to live in
Gunbalanya,
a
Kunwinjku
speaking
community in Western Arnhem Land, for three
months after an initial ten-day visit as part of
an archaeological Rock Art Field School. I
offered myself as a body and mind requiring
enculturation, the process by which a person
adapts to and assimilates the culture in which

he lives.[4] My focus was on the biggest

outdoor painting gallery in the world where
animals are the main subjects, the stone
country of the Western Arnhem Land plateau.
These extensive galleries informed my
understanding of the animal painting
produced by artists at the local art centre,
Injalak (named after nearby Injalak Hill, a rock
art gallery site). Archaeology has had a
pervasive role in placing rock art within the
imaginations of a contemporary EuroAustralian audience attuned to linear histories.
In an attempt to overcome the unfathomable
aspects of the passage of time that may
undermine the appreciation of a rock
paintings innate qualities, I regard paint as
53

Vanessa Barbay

Display (Spring Rosella), Rosella and rabbit skin glue on canvas, 2011 Barbay

54

Vanessa Barbay

Resurrection (Spring Lamb), Lamb, delek, silk stitch and rabbit skin glue on canvas, 2011-12 Barbay

bright
yellow
and
deliciously
rich
like ngalmangiyi or freshwater longneck turtles
fat. Ngalmangiyi painted on Injalak Hill in the
rich yellow pigment karlba produced in me a
sensation
distinctly
coloured
by
my
experiencing of pigment and fat. Fat turtles
are extracted from the thick mud of extensive
swamplands in Gunbalanya around Injalak Hill.
The golden mud karlba is an unpredictable
substance, sandy grit penetrates its otherwise
smooth golden body, moisturised in a liquid
atmosphere. On textured variable rock
surfaces, the initially fluid pigment becomes a
powdered stain precariously exposed to the
hot tropical air. I have used my share of the
ochres collected in Arnhem Land in my
animal paintings, but it is the involvement with
animal bodies informing the link between
painters, their materials, and their animal
subjects that I was anxious to explore.
There are unquestionable familial forces

material, activating a being of sensation.[5]

I seek to draw [the spectator] into the
compound[6] that is, the actual matter of
which rock painting consists. A key aspect of
my research in Western Arnhem Land was to
understand the significance of paint as a
transforming
substance,
or
materia
prima,[7] within
animal/human
cultural
interplay.
On a trip through the bushland of
Maburrinj, collecting pigments with traditional
owners, we came to the karlba or yellow
ochre site. I dug karlba underwater from the
banks of a deep pool fed by a small waterfall.
I was amazed at the clays golden colour in
the sunlight and filled two flour tins, staining my
hair and face with a golden glow. Karlba is
described as the fat of ngurrurdu or emu,
linking the pigment to an emu dreaming site
in Maburrinj. Ngurrurdu have the same skin
name as I was given: Ngalkangila. Emus fat is
55

that also contribute to my desire to involve

animal bodies in their own representation.
When my father migrated to Australia, he
brought with him the Eastern European
tradition of domestic self-sufficiency centred
on breeding animals for food, which he
combined with participation in local hunting
traditions. As a child I would crawl into the
breeding pens and spend all day in a
beguiling world where I could taste and smell
as an animal. Target practice and hunting
with my father incited a mixture of fear and
competitiveness, while watching him kill
animals and prepare their bodies for eating
blended horror with anticipation. My father
collected specimens and began practicing
taxidermy and tanning at home during the
1980s. His unusual activities began in the
1970s with butterflies and beetles that I would
watch him catch and pin alive onto foam,
arranging legs and wings symmetrically. Then
he sustained an interest in arachnids and
began breeding the deadly funnel-web to
observe their behaviour before drowning them
in methylated spirits and preserving their
bodies in resin. Soon he was inside large avian
and mammalian bodies (usually road-kill),
removing organs and injecting formalin and
foam. In later experiments during the 1990s he
made plaster casts of fish so an extensive
array of local creatures multiplied inside my
childhood home. My family became used to
unexpected visits by strangers bearing gifts of
the dead or random conversations describing
the location of a body. Thus, the collection of
dead animals and the subsequent use of their
bodies for creative work remains a familial
activity.
During my painting practice I have
developed what I call the shroud process, the
harnessing of decomposition in the creation of
animal images. I find and collect the
deceased bodies of animals, including birds,
usually road-kill. Each season I would build up
sets of bodies and store them in a chest
freezer (ironically acquired from a deceased
estate). The animals found were usually
species thriving in the urban Canberra
environment. Employing the assistance of my
partner, Adam Bell, I transported them to a
paddock on a sheep farm distant from the
farmhouse under a eucalyptus tree. Adam

and I set up an installation for the purpose of

placing dead creatures on canvas, fixed to a
sprung bed base, to decompose over several
months, in order to produce a print or shroudlike impression of the body. The purpose of the
shroud component of my practice-led
research was to take responsibility for the
bodies of animals discarded as road kill or
pests. My collection and placement of the
dead in state is analogous to a mortuary ritual,
and the outdoor decomposition platform
parallels the first mourning stage of mortuary
ritual once practiced in many Australian
Aboriginal
societies,
including
the Kunwinjku language group. Essentially, I
conceive of entering my subject through the
shroud process and through doing so
become[8] the subject, in order to embody
a transformation that reveals this genuine
mutant[9] self, constituted by me: the
painter; and my subject: the dead animal.
Becoming is a dynamic term that embodies
mixtures and mergers but does not seek the
unifications inherent in fixed terminologies. The
shroud-producing phenomenon I enabled
also engages notions of abjection[10] and
pollution.[11]
Taxidermy is a chemical process with
an unnatural logic, which the shroud
deconstructs from the inside out. Taxidermy
mends the borders of a body already beyond
itself, while the shroud image captures this
beyond self. The image produced by the
decomposing dead presents matter ordered
according to the inside as it exits the
convulsing border of the subject. My father
taught me the practice of taxidermy, although
I preferred the appearance of other naturally
mummified bodies he collected caught in
their own death-positions. His arrangement of
dead animals for display was intended to
reanimate
them,
while
simultaneously
inhibiting the corporeal afterlife of the body
through
maggot,
beetle
and
moth
infestation. My inability to perceive the
animal corpse as objectified remains is the
formative psychological affect of my
experience living among animals first as
cohabitants, then as mounted specimens. In
my paintings, the ambiguous and polluted
aspects of decomposition capture entropy,
record erupting boundaries, ensuring the
56

Vanessa Barbay

Eruption (Spring King Parrot), King Parrot and rabbit skin glue on canvas 2011 Barbay

57

Bibliography

inside is visible and sustained. The indexical

reality generated by the resulting image is
startling and confounds aesthetics expanding
beauty into previously abhorrent sensory
realms. Each shroud and its membership in
the corpus embody this paradox, while
simultaneously asserting the inexplicable force
of an individual entity.
I feel this force during the instigation of
the shrouds transition from funerary cloth to
painting. Entering the woodwork shop with
partially deodorised, unsealed canvas,
encumbered with detritus, I prepare the
animal
offerings
for
the
attentive
contemplation awarded the order of painting.
Making taut the supple woven medium whose
subject has long since lost its elastic integrity, I
am careful to ensure the process is precise
and orderly. The untidy nature of the shroud
process is thereby countered by the
compartmental nature of the indoor
workshop. Paradoxically, it is at this point that
the subject is in affect threatened by its new
objectivity as a painting. It is apparent that the
stretcher operates as a surrogate for the body
object that is the corpse. All the animals
subjectivity, its living essence that has
seeped out during decay, is transmuted into
the solid, liquid and gas particles that make
up the shroud stain. The painting object, its skin
of canvas, bones of wood, and staple sinews
house the subject: the self that is, in this case,
the individual animal. As a portrait of the
animal made by its own dead processes the
shroud painting is an expanded portrait,
a memento mori, giving agency and, to an
extent, authorship, to the subject. Yet my
development of an intimate relationship to
each individual shroud painting cohabiting in
the studio often results in post-shroud
interventions or creative communications with
the subjective animal stain using the collected
ochres, silk or cotton stitching, and recently oil
paint and bitumen. Each shroud is an entity
constituted by the inside of a dead animal
and my transformation of it into a painting,
which, like in Western Arnhem Land, is in our
culture, the ideal medium in which to
articulate true selfhood.[12]

Cartwright, Marita Sturken and Lisa. Practices of Looking: An

Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford, New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts
of Pollution and Taboo. London, Boston, Henley:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.
Elkins, James. What Painting Is: How to Think About Painting
Using the Language of Alchemy. New York:
Routledge, 1999.
Guattari, Gilles Deleuze and Felix. A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987. What Is
Philosophy? New York: Colombia University Press,
1994.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.
Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Colombia
University Press, 1982. Reprint, Pouvoirs de l'horreur
1980.
Kuspitt, Donald. The Rebirth of Painting in the Late Twentieth
Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000.
Morphy, Howard. "From Dull to Brilliant: The Aesthetics of
Spiritual Power among the Yolngu." In Man, 21-40:
Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and
Ireland, 1989.
Taylor, Luke. Seeing the Inside: Bark Paintings in Western
Arnhem Land. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
The Gale Group, Inc. "-Ologies and -Isms." The Free Dictionary
by
Farlex, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/enculturation.

Vanessa Barbay is an exhibiting artist who has recently

completed a practice-led PhD research project upon which
this contribution to Antennae is based. Prior to her candidature
at the Australian National University her practice involved both
individual and community based projects focusing on
animals in painting and their role as cross-cultural facilitators in
the context of visual culture in Australia between Aboriginal
and non-Aboriginal communities. This work was based in her
home communities within Yuin country on the south coast of
New South Wales and communities within Wiradjuri country
inland in New South Wales where she completed her Visual Art
degree. She is currently a visiting artist in the Visual
Anthropology Unit within ANUs School of Archaeology and
Anthropology focusing on collaborating with Yuin artists, many
with whom she grew up with, in the creation of story paintings
connecting animals, ancestors and place. In future she hopes
to collaborate with Kunwinjku artists in the creation of paintings
that implicate animal specimens taken from their country
during the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem
Land in 1948 now held at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural
History in Washington D.C.

58

POSTHUMAN ANIMALS AND THE

AVANT-GARDE: THE CASE OF
DANIEL SPOERRI
Cecilia Noveros essay situates Daniel Spoerris 1995 series of assemblages Carnival of Animals within the legacy of
the historical avant-garde. In taking a close look at Carnivals ingenious recourse to non-organicity, through Spoerris
reworking of chance, and the readymade, but also frottage, the essay argues that the avant-garde helps to envision
human and non-human encounters outside anthropocentric and representational frameworks. At the same time that
Spoerris assemblages leave behind the frameworks of representation, they do not configure a new space of action or
being for non-humans. Rather, they point to multiple lines of escape, including the carnivalesque. In short, the essay
maintains that Spoerris work offers a valuable example of how the avant-garde indeed contributes to the discussion
about con-figurations of human and non-human animals.
Text by Cecilia Novero

human, for they break with notions of human

creativity, especially with notions of originality
and autonomy. In particular, the critical
appropriations and adaptations of the postaesthetic tactics of Dada and its adaptations
since the Sixties reveal that animals are the
blind spot of human vision, specifically of
artistic vision. In a section below I briefly show
that the avant-garde, taken as a complex
agglomerate of temporalities and tactics,
critiques the connection between a humanist
(anthropocentric) vision presented as
transparent and knowledge, as the purview
of a rational, hence objective, I. Focusing on
animals in the avant-garde not only helps to
re-think animals, but also helps to value the
effects of the critique, which the avant-garde
practiced and continues to pursue.
I shall engage the points adumbrated
above through a case study, namely, the art
of Daniel Spoerri (b. 1930). Spoerri, an
eclectic artist, remains very active in Europe.
He participated in several avant-garde
movements in the 1960s and 1970s, most

his essay has two major goals. The first is to

show that the avant-garde contributed
and still contributes to the emergence
of posthumanist thinking through its recourse to
posthuman animals.[i] Posthuman animals are
those that leave the realm of representation,
and in doing so, indict canonical regimes of
human vision. Accordingly, the essay argues,
when animals appear in the avant-garde they
do so only as yet-to-be imagined. Through this
assault on human vision and representation,
the avant-garde points to possible ways out of
anthropomorphism. The second major aim of
this essay is to reappraise the avant-garde for
today. The possibility of such a reappraisal
appears if one considers the avant-garde as a
point of emergence of posthumanist thought.
Specifically, the essay argues that the avantgarde destabilizes the human as subject
acting in a world that it separates from itself
and considers its object. Avant-garde devices,
such as montage, readymade, objective
chance, et cetera, are then essential tools in
this act of unhinging of the centrality of the
59

notably New Realism.[ii] I analyze, specifically,

Spoerris
series
of
assemblages
entitled Carnaval des Animaux (Carnival of
Animals, 1995).[iii] Spoerris 1995 assemblages
offer an apposite example of the implications
for animals of both humanist representation
and
the
post-humanist
avant-garde
gaze. Carnival thus expands the critique of
conventions (in both art and life) and brings
these to bear on animals. To foreshadow,
in Carnival representation coincides, broadly
speaking, with the history of vision as a
discursive field. That Carnival s favorite avantgarde device is the readymade or found
object accentuates that vision is discursive,
i.e., an always already filled field. By
assembling myriad readymade animals,
Spoerris work displays the entrapment of
conventional animals in this filled-field of
vision, and the humans that keep thinking of
them conventionally. He also gestures
towards ways out as, indeed, the
title Carnival itself suggests.
The essay has three parts. The first, on
the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde,
introduces, in general terms, the use of the
term avant-garde in this essay and then turns
to the question of posthuman animals. The
second part attends to optics. Here I show
how, in order to indict the illusions of optics
an indictment that Spoerri carried out
throughout his career and most forcefully
in Carnival that this artist consciously returns
to classical avant-garde devices. Spoerri
deploys these devices and tactics to display
the lethal effects that the making of the
human has on animals. This is most evident
when the series of assemblages exhibits
animals as the silent victims of human
representation, as the victims of what
philosopher Giorgio Agamben has identified
as
an
optical
anthropological
machine.[iv] The machine is an optical
device for the constant production of the
recognition of the human in the other,
namely the animal. The animal thus appears
as a distorted image of the human. Part three
examines two assemblages in Carnival, the
fox-man and the wolf-man. I suggest that
Spoerris avant-garde animals manage to
render
inoperative
the
optical
anthropological machine, suspending its

machinations and entrapments. By jamming

the machine, Spoerris avant-garde animals
invoke a space of non-knowledge, where
existence may be conceived outside the
human field of vision and with an eye, as it
were, to other forms of life.[v]
The Avant-Garde and Its Posthumanist
Gaze
Why and What Avant-Garde?
When using the term avant-garde, in which I
include the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s, I
rely on Hal Fosters counter-history of these
movements. Simply put, I refer to the avantgarde as the large set of artistic practices that
became influential around the beginning of
the twentieth century but came to fruition with
the
critical
neo-avant-garde
in
the
1960s.[vi] Such
practices
broke
the
disciplinary boundaries of art and, in Spoerris
own language, spread, contaminated and
were permeated by the impact of discourses
taking place in vast areas of culture,
consequently generating post-aesthetic art.
Accordingly,
while
the
avant-garde
embraced contemporaneous discourses
horizontally, it also moved unpredictably
along several temporal axes. Indeed,
sometimes against the avant-gardes own
declarations in the various manifestoes, the
avant-garde enterprises rejected temporal
linearity and any sense of pre-determined
progressivism. This occurred even when the
goals of the avant-garde movements of the
early twentieth century Italian futurism is
emblematic were set on the new; i.e., on
the future. Even in the latter cases, as I argue
elsewhere, history becomes a terrain where
the causal links between past and future are
disregarded, and the new is seen to arise out
of assemblages of different figurations, or
constellations, in the Now.[vii] Read through
this lens, the avant-garde is evinced not just in
its critical engagement with socio-political
discourses but whenever art becomes the site
for the emergence of new temporalities;
temporalities which it then elaborates,
investigates and (through its own means) calls
into question or even disrupts.
I am aware that the cursory account
above risks eliding key distinctions within the
60

avant-garde. Still, for my purposes here, what

is important is seeing the avant-garde for its
temporal effects. Taking a temporally shifting
and mobile look at the practices of the avantgarde in and through time offers a unique
perspective from which to view the enduring
effects and variegated readings that such
practices generated well beyond their original
intentions, programmatic declarations, and
time-spaces. Foster calls this look a parallactic
view.[viii] From this perspective one might see,
anew, the avant-garde idea as the return of
practices that in their deferral and
displacement beyond set times and places,
but originating in the very same produce
novel, actual, critical configurations. The
avant-garde presents the critic with the
occasion to energize to reactivate and
rearticulate for the present the critical
impulse in art. This gesture involves an
evaluation of the complex effects of historical
relations which supersede or unhinge specific
historical
locations
and
(especially)
connections; an evaluation, that is, which
seeks to account for what Foster calls the turns
in the re-turns of the avant-garde, and the
(dis)articulation of certain practices, devices or
tactics. Since this essay focuses on the impact
of the avant-gardes critical investigations of
the human subject on the representation of
animals, when I speak of avant-garde, my
main point of reference is Dada and its
various reappraisals.
My approach also draws on Walter
Benjamins anti-historicist method in reading
cultural phenomena. It is not a coincidence
that Benjamin speaks of the avant-garde in
terms of allegory, which for him, is an
eminently temporal figure. For him, allegory
finds its actualization in the avant-garde, to
which it brings the force of forgetting and
oblivion. By juxtaposing allegory and avantgarde, Benjamin situates temporality (the
ephemeral, but also the relays of the
unconscious, of involuntary memory etc.) as
counterintuitive operations at the heart of the
most critical avant-garde production. These
operations are best exemplified, for Benjamin,
in Kafkas writings, where, importantly, the
figures of oblivion (i.e., the forgotten) appear
as, or in conjunction with, animals. Through his
allegorical reading of the avant-garde,

Benjamin points out that animals whether

figured as animals or otherwise are at the
roots of modern allegorical production: from
Dada to Surrealism, from Kafka to Kraus
(whom he identifies with the In-human),
including Proust. In fact, Benjamin may have
been the first to make this point.
Here I point, only in passing, to the links
among Benjamin, the avant-garde and
animals. Although Benjamins theory of the
avant-garde was the springboard for the
present inquiry, my central aim is to show how
Spoerris Carnival of Animals (i) problematizes
the representation of animals as the outcome
of a belief in a transparent vision and (ii)
capitalizes on the inconspicuous animals of
the avant-garde. After all, it is their very nonrepresentational quality in the avant-garde
that offers the opportunity for another kind of
figuration, one that indicts human vision for its
anthropomorphic imagination. And it is here,
at this theoretical juncture, that Agambens
notion of the Open of a suspension, a
dialectical standstill becomes salient, as
discussed below.
As noted earlier, Spoerris oeuvre has
often recycled and reinvented Dadas
techniques. As Leah Dickerman points out,
because Dada was a conglomerate of
groups, tendencies, practices etc., it
becomes important that one both be
discriminating and historical in the analyses of
the works considered, and be able to pinpoint
some of the key strategies or the tactics
shared
by
most
if
not
all
Dada
practitioners.[ix] These tactics emphasize how
Dadas interest in the non-organic involved a
direct attack on identity, specifically on the
human as total self, above all; on being
as the purview of humans distinct from things,
animals, and machines. Dadas attacks on
organicity
invariably
include
collage,
montage, readymade, chance and other
forms of automatization that are, in
Dickermans words, so foundational for the
rest of the century that we have to struggle to
recognize their historical novelty today. [x] It is
the effects of the art produced through these
means, means which challenged the
essential qualities and faculties ascribed to
human kind, that retroactively point to this art
as one site of emergence of a thought that
61

painting,
figure/nature
and
foreground/ground both appear fractured
along the same geometrical shapes. Yet they
dont cohere: no shape dominates; they are
all imbalanced, disproportioned, unmatched.
The beholder must renounce his or her
customary human perspective when looking
at these human figures in which he (or she)
resists recognizing himself (or herself). In the
painting, both humans and nature could be
said to be surveyed by an inhuman gaze.
Through this other cross-eyed gaze, da Vincis
and humanisms idea of a universal set
of proportions for the human figure is exposed
as human illusion and self-projection.
Picassos painting exposes this reference to
universal, sovereign subjectivity as the product
of a narcissistic gaze in which humans
produce and reproduce themselves and the
world around them in their own (putatively
better) image.
Picassos painting exemplifies the avantgardes early impulse to critique the humanist
worldview.
This
critique
entailed
a
confrontation with artistic conventions. As the
attack was on the human image, however, it
had repercussions beyond the canvas and
into ways of interpreting human life more
broadly. In this sense Picassos painting and
the avant-garde movements of the early
20th century, each in their own way moved
beyond (mere) formalism and aesthetics.
Indeed the avant-garde shows life and art as
agglomerate; in other words, as inescapably
ensnared. All knowledge, the avant-garde
claims, is actually produced by a human
subject that is no less constituted by the world
as is any other being in it. The avant-garde
thus experiments with viewing the human
landscape from provisional and quite
carnivalesque points of view albeit with the
self-reflexive awareness of their undeniably
human
positionality.
I
discuss
the
carnivalesque in the essays conclusion.
As much as Demoiselles suggests, it is
Dada and Surrealism that exposed the belief
in the autonomy of both subject and art alike
as an ideological construct. One finds the
following
statement
in
a
Dada
manifesto: Wer Dada isst, stirbt daran, wenn
nicht Dada ist (whoever eats dada, and is
not dada, dies of it.)[xiii] Here no distinction is

subtracts itself from speciesism, and that is

open to cyborgian forms of living.
In sum, in this essay the term avantgarde refers to (i) a congeries of critical
engagements with established paradigms of
seeing,
especially
with
regard
to
representation; (ii) artistic engagements or
endeavors that break with a historicist view of
temporality, in which the only agents are
human actors and narrators, in order to start
thinking of different ways to account for the
multifaceted stories of life co-authored with
and featuring both human and non-human
players (as Bruno Latour would have it); and (iii)
the effective use of tactics such as the
readymade and chance to gesture to these
other lives and stories as in Spoerris Carnival,
where animals (in all shapes, guises, ideas
and figures) are the players.

The Dawn of Posthuman Animals in the

Avant-Garde
Upon seeing Pablo Picassos Demoiselles
dAvignon at Le Bateau Lavoir in 1907,
Georges Braque (1882-1963) felt as if he had
been forced to eat rope and drink
paraffin.[xi] The painting, which confronts the
viewer with five feminine nudes with flat and
disjointed bodies, opens the road to Cubism.
As one critic put it: The dislocations in this
picture are the result of aggression, not
aesthetics; it is the nearest you can get in a
painting to an outrage[xii] This rabid work
aims its outrage at the iconic human figure
that had dominated the arts and sciences
since humanism. One could indeed contrast
the angular female bodies in Picassos
painting with the iconic image of Leonardo
da Vincis Vitruvian Man (c. 1487). Da Vinci
draws man as ideally proportioned, as a
micro-cosmos taken to be the measure of all
things, and the perfect incorporation and
example of an ideal relation between man
and nature. Picasso forces the viewer to feel
the dissolution of the boundaries between a
centered self and the world such a self
oversees.
The Demoiselles dAvignon breaks with
established boundaries between the human
figure and nature and in pictorial terms
between foreground and ground. In this
62

made between the art object and its

creator; between artist and art, on the one
hand, and between the art-world and the
mundane life-world on the other. Similarly,
cause and effect become for Dada a
construct that does not explain historical
events, but mirrors an illogical and illusory
human narrative. History, for Dada, dissolves
into a story of human self-presentation and
chimerical representation. Humans do not
control history, or nature, but nature and
humanity, as species, move together in
unaccounted and unaccountable ways. The
Surrealists, for their part, introduce automatic
writing to undermine notions of human
agency as inextricably linked with free will.
In short, the avant-garde casts a gaze
on humans from the outside and
accordingly asks humans to recalibrate their
function in the world. For the avant-garde, the
work of art is less a human work, that is, the
expression of a creative mind, than the
product or effect of something external that,
in Matthew Biros words, left its imprint: both art
and humans are a trace of an other [that is]
variously understood to be objective, natural,
unconscious or divine. [xiv] And this other that
leaves its imprint on humans is what humans
cannot see. Spoerris Carnival, as suggested
above and elaborated below, shows that
animals lie in the blind spot of human visual
technology.
Animals
constitute
the
ontological instability of human vision.
For the avant-garde practitioner, a world
that does not distinguish between animals,
objects and (decentered, flattened) humans
provides an opening for constructive
empowerment. In such a world, humans are
not meant to create but to assemble, in
addition
to
being
assemblages
in
themselves.[xv] Though they do not see
humanity as whole (and wholesome) or as
able to order the world, humans can
constellate things and thoughts. From and
for this lack of grounding, post-humanist
creatures can view the Now as filled with
possibilities, both old and new. Old
possibilities, as Surrealist outmoded objects,
are the forgotten futures of the past. Coming
from the past, old possibilities can play out
anew in the present. In this regard, it is
significant that Benjamin, an acute observer

of the avant-garde, identifies the avant-garde

artist as a new Barbarian/Cannibal, with what
he calls a destructive character, on the one
hand. On the other hand, he identifies these
artists as naked and screaming newborn
babes in the dirty diapers of the
present.[xvi] The two images are juxtaposed
as in a montage: here, the babys promise is
not that of just any human baby, destined to
grow into a common man or woman. Rather
the juxtaposition between the baby and the
Barbarian/Cannibal interrupts the possibility of
human development.[xvii] The baby-cannibal
is an image of another (in)human in the Now,
and this image carries posthumanist power.
This new power derives from the avantgardes destructive wish to wipe out the traces
of humanist Man what has become of da
Vincis Vitruvian Man in modern bourgeois
history and from its acknowledgment of
human animal vulnerability. The baby crying
in the dirty diapers of the present suggests
such a reading. In Spoerris work, in particular
one that features a fountain sculpture to
which I will return in the analyses of Carnival,
the human is both the devourer (the cannibal)
and the left-over a limb, in its own nonspeciesist machine.
Against Optics: The Roots of Spoerris
Avant-garde Animals
Spoerris series of assemblages, after being
partially exhibited in various locations, is now
permanently on view in a former monastery
that the artist acquired and turned into a
museum, in 2010, in the picturesque Austrian
village of Hadersdorf am Kamp. The series of
assemblages
plays
with
unbridgeable
contrasts: it juxtaposes animal objects,
folkloric masks, avant-garde mementos, and
scientific instruments directly onto, or near, the
enlarged reproductions of Charles Le Bruns
canonical seventeenth-century drawings of
animal
and
human
physiognomic
resemblances.[xviii] Individual plates from Le
Brun constitute the ground of each
assemblage of animal figures in the
series.[xix] Occasionally, freestanding objects
are part of Spoerris interventions on Le Bruns
plates. Some freestanding objects also
appear as separate from the feral-men
63

depicted there in the plates. There is, for

instance, a coat-rack with a wolf-fur coat that
is adjoined to the wolf-man depicted on Le
Bruns plate; or a wooden rococo pedestal
with lion carvings surmounted by a skull, which
accompanies the lion-man.
Carnival refashions important devices
from Dada and Surrealism, which have to do
with Spoerris continuous, indeed relentless,
critique of optics. These devices, in addition
to the readymade, include objective chance
(or hazard)
and
the
principle
of dtromper. Both feature prominently in his
work. Through the dtrompe-loeil, Spoerri
shows representational art, especially ordinary
realistic and often romantic paintings, to be
the product and reproduction of banal
illusions. For example, he takes a banal
landscape and adds to it an ordinary water
faucet estranging the view of nature. Through
both these devices, Spoerri further radicalizes
the avant-gardes critique of autonomy, and
the alleged objectivity of the (human) gaze.
Spoerris critical evaluation of modern
optics, as he titles one of his works, shows
that humans are the effect of their own
troubling vision. Already in the works
preceding Carnival, vision is charged with
murder or, in Spoerris words, as corpus
delicti (for example in the series of
assemblages Criminal Investigations, 19721991). Before Carnival, where animals are
identified as the major victims of human
vision, his art had blocked such vision in
various ways: (i) through highlighting the role
that bodily apprehension and memory play in
the act of seeing (Anecdoted Topography of
Chance, 1962); (ii) through the other senses
especially touch and taste -- and through the
disorientation of spatial coordinates (Dylaby,
1962); and (iii) by attacking the belief in
transparent vision (Optique moderne, 196162 and Triple Multiplicateur dArt,1972). The
readymade appears in Spoerris work by
including, significantly, one of Marcel
Duchamps minor works (Rotoreliefs, 1935) in
the Edition MAT of 1959 here, I would argue,
in conjunction with animals as an optical
unconscious. MAT presented Spoerris idea of
art as multiplication or, at most, art as the
production of originals in series.[xx] Let me
elaborate.

At this early point in his career, Spoerri

uses Duchamps work as readymade itself.
Duchamps Rotoreliefs furthermore, are no
more than little and funny inventions that, as
Rosalind Krauss recounts, were to be shown at
a fair, and made common cause with
popular culture.[xxi] Most important is that in
Spoerris MAT Edition Duchamps Rotoreliefs reactivate the submerged carnal desire in
optics that Krauss identifies in them. In her
description, the Rotoreliefs were:
Optical phonograph records
cardboard disks printed with spiral
designs on both sides, for a total of
twelve different patterns. Mounted
on a record players turntable, the
disks revolved soundlessly, the
product of their turning a series of
optical illusions, the most gripping
of which transformed their two
dimensionality into an illusory
volumetric fullness that appeared
to burgeon outward, toward the
viewer.[xxii]
Krauss adds that one had a goldfish set inside
a series of eccentrically placed circles which,
when turning, appeared to cup the little
swimmer within an ephemeral, transparent
bowl.[xxiii] With the sexual component, the
animal (the fish) also comes to flicker through
the pulsatile movements of the disks. Krauss
speaks of this non-presence as the other within
vision. Vision is thereby revealed less as
punctual than as temporal, filled rather than
pure and blank. The Rotoreliefs restore to the
eye that eyes condition as a bodily organ.
And the beat of desire which loses the
object it makes, and finds the object that it
has already lost is shown to work deep
within vision. Vision is no longer separable from
the other senses.[xxiv]
The animal (the fish in the ephemeral
bowl in one Rotorelief) flickers in the field of
vision of the observer of Duchamps reliefs,
suggesting vision as an already filled field.
Likewise Duchamp, as this fleshy animal a
precipitate of the avant-garde flickers
through Spoerris Carnival, interfering with the
apparent objectivity and art-historical
significance of Carnivals own ground; namely
64

Charles Le Bruns plates of animal and human

resemblances, which return here as Carnivals
readymade, and as representations optical
unconscious. The plates are a milestone in
art history, hence a conceptual readymade.
But they are also physical found objects
(found again by Spoerri and via Spoerris
avant-garde art); as such, the readymade
becomes the ground for Carnival. Le Bruns
physiognomic resemblances indeed function
in
the
assemblages
as
the ide
reue (readymade) of vision in and beyond
the arts, in which animals are trapped,
mortified and reproduced.
Spoerris Carnival offers less an escape
from readymade discourses of/on vision,
which it rehearses and displays, than a subtle
disclosing and then jamming of these
discourses. Out of this jamming, sparks of
different
beings
become
imaginable.
Through
its
use
of
readymade,
Spoerris Carnival of Animals offers a critique
of philosophical, scientific and especially arthistorical discourses on animals. Through the
multiplication
of
the
trappings
that Carnival displays namely through
their mise en abime the work also attempts
to set the imagination free from the human
optical machine.[xxv] In Carnival, thus, we
witness both the production of those
anthropocentric
and
anthropomorphic
symmetries and their distortions. Indeed, in
relying
upon
objective
chance,
the
assemblages
abolish
any
hierarchical
distinction between, for instance, the
sciences and art, or the pursuit of
mathematical truth in one case and the
exploration of unbounded imagination in the
other. Likewise but in contrast to the
theological image of the Great Chain of
Being still active in the worlds of Le Brun,
Linnaeus and even in Darwinian evolution
Spoerris Carnival presents a chain of nonhierarchically ordered elements, of historically
unnecessary connections not only among
all living beings but also non-sentient beings
(objects, fetishes, idols).[xxvi] A later work
makes this point explicit: Catena genetica del
mercato delle pulci (Genetic Chain of the
Flea-Market, 2000, also on view in Hadersdorf
am Kamp) presents a sixty-two-and-a-halfmeter-long and one-meter high frieze of

accumulated found and readymade objects

that accompanied Spoerris life for 35 years.
The human genome is applied here to the life
of objects non-human entities.
In Carnival, the animal-objects Spoerri
juxtaposes over, or positions near, Le Bruns
plates
of
human
and
animal
resemblances multiply these
resemblances
beyond
the
human
and
the
animal. Carnival includes
fetish-objects
among the multiplied resemblances and
uses them as yet other uncanny hybrids of
both human and animals, e.g., animal
statuettes, knick-knacks, masks et cetera.
Almost paradoxically, this multiplication of the
resemblances beyond those suggested by Le
Brun also interrupts the illusionistic aspect and
alleged transparency of physiognomy.
Physiognomy is, arguably, a discipline that is
rooted in the belief of an ideal, rational vision.
So is representational art that is rooted in the
perspectival gaze, i.e., in a gaze that masters
its field. If perspective, already in the
seventeenth century, was mostly thought of in
conjunction with physical, architectonic,
immobile space, the body itself depicted in
its static posture was also viewed and
spoken of as part of the architecture of
nature.[xxvii] Through the physiognomic lens,
the face could become the surface where to
observe instantaneous movements of the
soul, movements that would inscribe
themselves
as
traces
on
that
surface. Carnival pokes fun at, and then
exhibits, the implications that the logic of
resemblance has on animals.
Because they challenge hierarchies,
Spoerris animal assemblages aptly take the
title of Carnival, a title that immediately brings
to mind popular disorder and the festive
subversion
of
(modern)
classification,
subversions in which animal figures have
always played a notable role as masks,
costumes, avatars, totems, caricatures,
etc. Carnival takes our common knowledge
of carnivals as readymade too and raises
doubts about the carnival as subversive, i.e.,
the latter as a received (readymade) idea.
Because Le Bruns resemblances as they reemerge in Spoerris assemblages suggest
that animal cross-dressing in carnivals may
not destabilize the human gaze, but instead
65

appropriate the animal as always-already in

that gaze, masquerading may provide a
temporary mask or cover, an alternative or
additional personality. Beneath the animal
clothing, however, the eyes that see remain
human. Carnival is able to invoke the
multifarious, sporadic, and ridiculous --- yet
equally mortal -- effects of such logic
precisely through the used readymade quality
ofxhuman-animal resemblances.[xxviii]
Against this human vision, Spoerris
assemblages exhibit other, artificial eyes, e.g.,
the fox-man examined below in part three.
Juxtaposing and multiplying these fake and
overtly
blind
eyes,
Spoerris Carnival intentionally confuses the
natural with the artificial, human vision with
animal vision, the live gaze with the immobile
gaze, each and all hinting at other invisible
possibilities of existence.

form of living which life-form and form of

living
is
rich
with
its
own singular potentiality.[xxx]
Indeed Agambens Open reprises
Benjamins idea of dialectic at a standstill
and interprets it both as space an interval or
caesura between two terms or coordinates -and an operation that is able to stall and
render inoperative the stable (reiterable and
reiterated) distinctions between subjects and
objects, self and other, humans and nonhumans, and even within humans. For
Agamben the standstill of the dialectic
corresponds to what he also terms the
division of the division, an operation through
which the rifts that split communities,
identities, humans and animals are held in
suspension, exposed without being effaced.
De la Durantaye remarks, this dividing of a
division, or bringing to a standstill of the
dialectic, would also, for Agamben, be the
freezing
of
the
anthropological
machine.[xxxi] In Agambens words, ever
since the Ancien Regime:

Carnival of Animals
The Anthropological Machine: Figuring
Animals

Homo sapiens is neither a clearly

defined species nor a substance: it
is, rather, a machine or device for
producing the recognition of the
human. In line with the taste of the
epoch, the anthropogenic (or
taking up Furio Jesis expression
we might say anthropological)
machine is an optical one. It is
an optical machine constructed of
a series of mirrors in which man,
looking at himself sees his own
image always already deformed in
the features of an ape. Homo
sapiens must recognize himself in
a non-man in order to be
human.[xxxii]

Carnivals target is the impure human gaze

on, and the ensuing human construct of, the
animal. Carnival is an appropriate illustration
of
the
workings
of
the
modern
anthropological machine that is eminently
optical, as Agamben demonstrates in The
Open. Agambens eponymous essay is
important here for at least two reasons. First is
his philosophical elaboration of Heideggers
concept of the Open which could be
compared to the anti-representational
(illusionistic) practices and visions of the avantgarde. Second is Agambens insistence on
the optical aspects of the anthropological
machine that incessantly engages in making
and remaking the human.
As Leland de La Durantaye explains,
Agamben conceives of an openness of
inactivity, of disengagement from ones
environment
and,
perhaps,
ones
world.[xxix] Inactivity or dsuvrement, as
referred to in French by Agamben involves
an energy that cannot be exhausted in the
passing of the potential to the actual.
Between the two, in such passing, a space of
indeterminacy opens where formless life and
lifeless form meet in a distinct life-form and

Agambens inclination to jam this optical

machine that reproduces the human, and to
expose (hold in suspension) the divisions that
perpetuate the making of the human,
corresponds
to
the
breaking
of
representation of either humans or animals
in Carnival. By attending to the specular
operations of this machine, Carnival highlights
the persistence of its mechanisms, namely
66

the production of distinctions between human

and animal; as well as of articulations with
animality, articulations that, as Agamben
points out, are as much internal to the human
as they are external to it. Yet Spoerris series of
assemblages, through its disfigurations and
gaps,
its
erratic
and
discontinuous
temporalities, does not allow the viewer to
(re)compose any integrated or total image of
the human self. In this respect, Carnival takes
flight from its readymade ground, i.e., Le
Bruns plates of resemblances, without
effacing such ground, or forgetting it. Two
assemblages in the Carnival series, the foxman and the wolf-man, help me to show how
Le Bruns readymade resemblances first return
and then are (dis)articulated in Spoerris
assemblages. This return and (di)articulation
leaves us with the possibility to imagine
animals outside of a humanist perspective,
and to set them free as posthuman animals.
It is especially Agambens focus on the
operations of the anthropological machine as
optical device that makes his theory his
Open so compelling for the analysis of the
avant-gardes critique of human vision and
specifically representation.

at the center of the brain as the seat of the

soul. The soul controlled the reactions of the
body through the movements of the pineal
gland. As Montagu reports, if the passions
were controlled from the brain, then the face,
being the nearest part of the body to the
brain, should be the most accurate index of
the mind, and all of the soul.[xxxiv] The
movements of the eyes and mouth towards or
away from the seat of the soul in the pineal
gland guided Le Bruns drawings, as his
diagrammatic [human] heads show. These
heads traversed by straight lines -- transform
into geometrical maps when Le Brun portrays
animals. Indeed Le Brun devised a system of
triangles which he used to draw the animals
heads and to determine the characters of
each species. Triangles drawn with lines
connecting various parts of the face the
organs of smelling, seeing and hearing
were to visualize degrees of power and
intelligence in animals. Le Brun dissected
animal heads to demonstrate scientifically the
veracity of his geometrical mapping. As
Montagu says, animals depend principally on
the sense of smell, and secondly on that of
sight Le Brun was aware that this was not
so of man[xxxv] Accordingly, Le Brun
compared his animals heads with the
sixteenth-century physician Andreas Vesaliuss
anatomical studies of the human head. In the
latter Vesalius had outlined the pineal gland in
red. Montagu adds: For this reason Le Brun
drew the triangle on the human head as
based on a line running through the eyes,
which precludes the possibility of drawing the
other lines which incorporate the ears, noses
and mouth into the system, and which
revealed the characters of the beasts. That Le
Brun drew triangles on animals heads, and
only on the heads, reveals his aim of
accurately portraying the differences between
humans and animals. While the connections
between the pineal gland and the eyes
through the longer optical nerve in humans
as Vesaliuss studies indicated generated
straight lines across the human eyes, the lines
connecting the sensory organs of animals
produced triangles. The line through the
human eyes pointed to the direct connection
of vision with the brain, thus enforcing the
belief in vision as the ontological ground of

Le Bruns Drawings: Mapping Animals

As Jennifer Montagu points out, Le Bruns
drawings
of
animals
and
animal
resemblances are indebted to the scientific /
philosophical paradigms of his day, while at
the same time present important innovations
for the study of expression in art in an age
when naturalistic representation was the aim
of high art.[xxxiii] Three key elements arise here
with regard to the function Le Brun has in
Spoerri: (i) the relevance of Descartes for Le
Brun and Le Bruns fondness for classification;
(ii) the structural connectedness between art
and science, in that both pinpoint and
rehearse the distinction between humans and
animals and (iii) the didactic objective of Le
Bruns
drawings
in
matters
of
expression. Carnival tackles
these
three
points at the origins of modern thought, which
Spoerri both ridicules and shows as lethal to
animals. The impact of Descartes on Le Brun
is especially important in the case of Carnival.
Descartes had located the pineal gland
67

human being. Hence the brain and the eyes

almost come to constitute a perspectival field
particular to the human; its depth is indicated
by the extended length of the optical nerve
itself, hidden from view; for their part, the
animals heads (and expressions) appear to
be all foreground, nothing but a depth-less
face.[xxxvi]
The animal is the pure exteriority or
visible mask of the more complex interior
mechanism that generates the human, who
masters not just emotion but also vision.
Externally, the animal and human face may
mirror one another (albeit always through
deformation, as per the eighteenth-century
Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus). Ultimately,
however, animals lack the depth that makes
humans and human vision not animal.
Both interior and exterior seem necessary to
open the vista on human / animal relations
(resemblances), with the human taking the
position of the fundamental ground the
ontological foundation of being, and vision;
the animal instead is the mirror or mask of that
core, the figure in the foreground, lacking
foundation. Deploying devices that decenter
the
human Carnival complicates
the
physiognomic perspectival game of mirroring
at work in Le Bruns drawings: Spoerri
obfuscates the transparency of this mirroring its
violence thus exposed if not escaped. Like
other dtrompe-loeil, Carnival performs vision
as itself a mise-en-abime of visions own
mechanics. Carnival multiplies resemblances.
It does so first by proliferating animal objects,
representations and their functions throughout
the series. Second, animals recur through their
constitutive physical absence: the animal
objects etc. in the series are supplements that
point
up
the
erasure
of
living
animals.[xxxvii] The
field
of
vision
that Carnival opens appears to be already
saturated by cultural icons and totems. It is
replete with the ethnographic, scientific and
artistic mappings of the animal. These neverending representations interfere with Le Bruns
resemblances, distorting and quite literally
mortifying, i.e., tearing asunder, their visible
recognizable, obvious mathematical
relations. As Spoerris foxes exemplify, this
infinite redoubling shows the laughable
absurdity emptiness of the human

ground and knowledge, namely the human

wish to capture and grasp the animal. In
this laughable absurdity, Carnivals animals
find their line of flight, as Deleuze and
Guattari would have it.[xxxviii]

Triangulating the Fox

In the fox assemblage [Figure 1] a dead
specimen hangs from a common hanger,
below a ladys hat: a middle-class womans
trophy of elegance. The specimens eyes are
dead, yet piercing, staring straight into the
beholders. Another fox is glued horizontally
across Le Bruns drawings. The corpse,
exposing its triangular jaw-bones, occupies the
intermediary space between Le Bruns
animals visage and the fox-mans face. Le
Bruns fox-man is the product of the
resemblances between foxes (cunning) and
clever men. Multiplied fake eyes and jawbones are scattered across the support, as
unused tools, jaws de-fanged and shown in
the geometrical shape that Le Brun adopted
to map the animals passions. The foxs tamed
-- disembodied -- teeth are, in this
assemblage, the accusing body of evidence
of an unfair struggle.
As
already
mentioned,
in
other dtrompe-loeil (e.g., Spoerris Criminal
Investigations,
1970s
and
1990s,
or
his Anatomical Cabinet, 1985-2001) the
objects juxtaposed to the images ground
either break the ideal landscape represented
there by debasing it or, alternatively, transform
themselves into weapons or surgical
instruments that provide the depicted body
with an all-too-real substance: the body as
injured.[xxxix] Similarly, in the fox assemblage,
the jaw-bones transform the geometrical
triangles of Le Bruns rational calculations into
a corpus delicti. The triangle, a tool for
calculating resemblances and for performing
unequal exchanges between humans and
animal, returns here as a weapon that, having
killed the animal, changes the fox into yet
another, i.e., social, supplement, into the
commodity fetish of bourgeois class society.
These physiological fragments randomly
superimposed on Le Bruns drawings, however,
mark the furs with the heavy deadness of the
foxes. The animals absent life makes itself felt
68

Daniel Spoerri

Fig.1 Carnival of Animals: Reproductions of Humans Compared with Those of Foxes, 1995. Assemblage on enlarged scan, after
Charles Le Brun (1670), 185 x 100 x 30 cm. Courtesy of Kunststaulager Daniel Spoerri

69

Multiplied Wolf-Men: Le Brun, Beuys,

Freud and The Meat-Grinder

in their three-dimensional corpses. These claim

the space between Le Bruns drawings of the
fox and his fox-man: if the illusion of threedimensionality was the purview of the human
face in Le Bruns studies of human heads, the
three-dimensional animal corpses starkly
contrast with the actual flatness of the human
face and human gaze. The corpse stands for
the only site of resemblance between human
and animal. Between two fox-muzzles at the
top and three fox-man-faces at the bottom of
the canvas hangs a fox, horizontally. Its
lifelessness is the third element the third fox-in the comparison. In addition, the triangular
jaw-bones envision an escape. As suggested
by
Deleuze
and
Guattari,
trapped,
domesticated animals (first among them the
domesticated, Oedipalized subject) can
escape territorialization and take flight.[xl] The
triangular jaw-bones also look like arrows
pointing in all directions: up, down, inside,
outside and away; they seem to address, that
is, animals as precisely those beings that
escape immediate visual grasping or
representation and that, thereby, remain
outside
the
frames
of
human
knowledge.[xli] They appear as a kind of nonmimetic writing, emblems of some other
writing distinct from sensuous resemblances
and the immediate recognition that
resemblances produce. As such, they reveal a
hole in vision: Carnival suggests that vision
has only been able to produce a series of
recognizable images, i.e., fetishes, whether in
science, art or commerce.
Finally, by occupying the blind spot of
vision, the jaw-bones in this assemblage also
morph into other incommensurate animals
that suddenly and unexpectedly flicker
through the still present resemblances. Little
eyes are placed on two jaw-bones in a
manner that sketches the profile of two
ducks.[xlii] Again these ducks undermine the
classificatory system of resemblances (ducks
equal foxes or ducks differ from foxes)
produced by Agambens anthropological
machine. With their flickering presence within
the jaw-bones, these strange and funny ducks
intimate the possibility of unforeseeable,
unenvisioned becomings.[xliii]

In another of Carnivals assemblages [Figure

2] Spoerri adds a hanger with a wolf-mask
and wolf-coat to Le Bruns ground depicting
the wolf and the wolf-man. Real traps also
bite into the fur-coat. The coat echoes some
mythic
hunt
while
explicitly
quoting
contemporary art, i.e., arts making and
remaking, and its myth-making characters.
Indeed, the wolf-fur coat invokes, somewhat
ironically, a legendary figure of contemporary
art, Joseph Beuys. The irony lies in Spoerris
remake of Beuyss legend through Spoerris
own unverifiable account of the wolf-coat in
the assemblage. Although Spoerri and Beuys
were friends, and Beuys collaborated with
Spoerri more than once, their art speaks
different languages. In Carnival the coat
exemplifies the fetish-character of the
name-of-the-Father Beuys: Beuyss name is
always and immediately associated with his
totemic attire, his famous attachment to felt
clothing, to his hat and to his vest. Spoerri
oxymoronically invents readymade Beuys,
while
he
also
empties
the
name
in Carnival through the unworn, hung wolf-fur
coat. Beuyss originality is lost.
According to Spoerri, he had purchased
the Siberian wolf-fur coat but then lent it to
Beuys. The latter used it in one of his works
and Spoerri was thus never able to retrieve it.
Later Spoerri bought a similar coat, this time
made with Alaskan wolf-fur, while in New
York.[xliv] The coat thus moves from symbol, to
commodity, to loan, to work of art, and back
again to commodity (or copy). Spoerri used
the Alaskan wolf-fur coat in the assemblage
under discussion, where the coat is set
against the readymade resemblances of Le
Brun, serving as the physical (but still empty)
embodiment of Le Bruns wolf-man via its
subtle reference to Beuys. The coat suggests
at once early culture the presumed totemic
power of wolf-fur for early human society
and contemporary relations among animals,
commerce and art. Specifically it juxtaposes
Le Bruns resemblances with Beuyss animal
performances (impersonations, conversations
etc.) and, more precisely, Beuyss 1974
cohabitation with a coyote, also held in New
70

Daniel Spoerri

Fig.2 Carnival of Animals: Reproductions of Humans Compared with Those of Wolves, 1995. Assemblage on enlarged scan, after
Charles Le Brun (1670), with one additional object, 140 x 100 cm and 140 x 50 x 50 cm. Courtesy of Kunststaulager Daniel
Spoerri.

71

York (I like America and America likes me). In

commenting on the coyote action, Beuys
explains his work with animals as an attempt
at recuperating the power (energy) of their
spiritual existence. On his account, he tries to
speak with animals in order to enter another
kingdom, a realm that people have
forgotten.[xlv] He hopes to make contact with
America through the re-enactment of the
traumatic
encounter
between
Native
Americans, whom the coyote represents, and
the Western Man. Arguably, Beuys presents
himself, the artist, as the shaman endowed
with healing powers: his contact with animals,
although revealing a traumatic repression,
aims at a mystical union, of which he
becomes the initiator and medium. Indeed
Beuyss action exemplifies the unequal
relation between human creativity -- the
human hand and impulse of consciousness
and the un-freedom of the coyote,
reduced to total animal energy which
ultimately only the shaman artist can liberate.
In this regard, Beuyss communications with
animals, and his guises, are just another facet
of physiognomics, as it filters through Le Bruns
drawings. Spoerri appropriates both to
counter their effects.
In Spoerris assemblage, the coat hangs
on a rack where, instead of a hat, we find the
mask of a wolf, itself in lieu of the wolfs head.
The wolfs head absent from the rack -- is
represented flat by the drawing on the wall,
which is further compared to the head of the
wolf human sketched directly below it. The
wolf is chopped into pieces in keeping with
both human instrumental reason and
commodity-fetishistic desire: indeed, Spoerri
bought the coat, while Le Brun, in intellectual
fetishistic manner, fragmented animals and
people in focusing only on heads, as the
most important (expressive) part, for humans,
of the bodys relation to the soul.
Spoerris wolf-fur is then shown as
ferociously caught and injured by several
traps. Propped up vertically, as if it were a
human figure -- its head could be the
wolf/human muzzle also depicted by Le Brun
and displaced on paper -- the wolf is
inhumanely wounded, killed and impaled, as
a trophy first of commerce and, second, of
art. The wolf returns reincarnated grotesquely

as human. In order for humans to

domesticate their fear and to satiate their
own and their civilizations wolfish voracity, it
seems that they make themselves into the
wolf which they can admire only as trapped
possessed through the logic of the same -into a human or vertical, bipedal stature, itself
empty.
Yet the wolf takes its vengeance:
Spoerris wolf-man elicits memories of
Sigmund Freuds famous Wolf-Man case, only
to indict psychoanalytical interpretation. The
indictment seems to follow Deleuze and
Guattaris critique of psychoanalysis: namely,
psychoanalysis aims to free the human from
its wolf. In Freuds Wolf Man case, the wolf
coincided with the father caught in the act of
sex by the son who, in his adult life, suffered
from the repression of this event. Freud had
hoped to help the son cope with this initial
traumatic act of seeing with the aid of
psychoanalysis. Yet as Deleuze and Guattari
point out, psychoanalysis only seemingly
liberates humans. In fact it domesticates
them and, in the Wolf Man case, it
domesticates the wolf as well.[xlvi] For Spoerri,
the human may have temporarily escaped
the wolf-man assemblage; yet it has left
behind the injured wolf-fur: the wolf has
definitely been trapped. But Spoerris trapped
and injured wolf (man), whose eyes remain
empty in the mask that is on display, may still
find its (his) pack by rejecting the human
figure/body all together and by fleeing
elsewhere.
Indeed, Spoerri exhibited an imposing
fountain for the Sevilla exposition in 2000,
entitled Fleischwolfbrunnen, which is now on
view at his sculpture garden in Seggiano (Italy)
[Figure 3]. For this fountain Spoerri used
hundreds of meat-mincing machines. The
German
word Fleischwolfbrunnen is
a
common one that literally translates as meatwolf-fountain(ing), and that denominates this
ordinary kitchen tool. Where at first the wolf
appears to return in the fountain as a
domesticated meat-mincing machine, upon
reflection, one sees it is liberated from the
injuries it had suffered in Carnival.
Thexxsubstantive xxxFleischwolfbrunnen
sounds as a verb in German; in a way, it
changes into an action, something like: to
72

Daniel Spoerri

Fig.3 Fleischwolfbrunnen [Meat-grinder-fountain] / Fontana Tritacarne (also known as

Gocciolatoio [Drip Stone]), 1961-1991. Bronze sculpture, 3.25 m x 2.10 m. Courtesy of
Kunststaulager Daniel Spoerri.

73

fountain mincing-machines. Through a

meaningless
non-existent
verb,
fountaining, the wolf multiplies into an
incessantly pouring pack of wolves, a pack of
wild devouring animal machines.[xlvii] This
pack of wolves gains power and autonomy
freedom -- from the human image of the
wolf, an image that these wolves do not
resemble. The tool displaces its function within
the human world, and devours human ideas
and the idea of the human itself: all that one
can see and recognize in Spoerris wolffountain are the human remains of one foot
and one hand at its base.
In Lieu of a Conclusion:
Carnival Got to Do with It?

was familiar with the element of terror and

fear only as represented by comic monsters
that were defeated by laughter. Terror was
turned
into
something
gay
and
comic.[xlix] Spoerri
finds
his
own
carnivalesque at the flea markets, where he
also finds the used objects for his
art. Carnival of Animals, through its dialectical
montages of ground and foreground, shows
us the horrors of modern classification and of
the mortification of animals and humans.
According to Bakhtin, in modernity, the mask
acquires a somber hue. A terrible vacuum, a
nothingness lurks behind it. Yet Carnival is
also connected with the joy of regeneration,
with something comic. There is laughter in
the series of assemblages. Note that the
laughter it provokes is not that of humans
laughing at animals, but rather animals and
humans both appear to be laughing at
human
absurdities.
About
these
physiognomic experiments, Spoerri said, in
my own way, by using found objects, and
with much irony, despite the fact that I am no
scientist, I enjoy developing all these
speculations, which were already absurd in
earlier times.[l]
But how does the black comedy in
Spoerris Carnival liberate
animal-human
relations from the anthropological machine,
here in the guise of physiognomics? First,
reduced to two dimensions, then trapped into
human-animal resemblances, and finally
fetishized in things (or interpretations), Spoerris
carnival animals yet manage to escape
science and art the frames of objective
knowledge and transparent vision. These
invisible animals take flight, defying gravity
and classification, leaving us with the
carcasses of our own projections. In an offstage
(ob-scene)
space
of
nonknowledge, Carnival of Animals approaches
Deleuze and Guattaris idea of arts work. They
write that the arts have no other aim than to
unleash becomings. Steve Baker thus
comments that, in their view, art consists in
letting fearsome
things
fly.[li] Now,
if
in Carnival, the human logic of resemblances
appears for an instant -- insignificant to the
point of even provoking laughter, it is
because the artifacts, masks, furs, skulls and
skeletons in it emphasize the gap, the

Whats

What has the title of Spoerris series of

assemblages, Carnival of Animals, got to do
with the work itself? Where do the
carnivalesque aspects of animal and human
resemblances so ferociously depicted
emerge in this work? One can read the word
carnival in a simple mundane way, i.e., as
one takes carnival in common parlance: the
custom of masking oneself as another, taking
up some guise. Masks are often animal masks
used for caricature (especially of authority) or
to invoke the totemic power of animals. Not
too distant from the popular meanings of
carnival is Mikhail Bakhtins understanding of it.
Bakhtin considered carnival a profane union
with the cosmos, a site where tradition meets
subversion, a ritual of death and resurgence.
Spoerris Carnival is pervaded by mortality. This
haunting however is not only terrifying; rather,
it intimates change and becoming. Death in
carnivals hints at this dialectical turn, i.e., the
transformation of death into invisible
regeneration.
It
is
invisible
because
regeneration lies beyond the frame of both
art and science within which the human
imaginaries have been caged. Bakhtin writes
that the mask, in the popular festive
spectacles of early modernity, is connected
with the joy of change and reincarnation, with
gay relativity and with the merry negation of
uniformity and similarity.[xlviii] In his view,
masks are associated with the grotesque
open body and with its regenerating power in
folk culture. Similarly, carnivalesque culture
74

incongruities, that (by chance) both separate

us from and unite us with the images of
animals that humans have themselves
created. These animals are the mirrors and
masks of human limitations and fears (of
difference
and
death),
which
the
unenvisioned animals of this self-reflexive
avant-garde throw back at us in their laughter
as they take flight from the immobilized,
immortalized and mortified images of
themselves they leave behind for us to view.
Insofar as Carnival debases high art
(representation, illusionism etc.) through the
willful intrusion of the messy quotidian and
kitsch, the popular element is certainly
important in it. Its subversive aspect, however,
lies in its re-enactment ad absurdum of the
visual commonplaces and disciplinary
discourses in which art (objects) and humans
(their ideas) are situated. From this
viewpoint, Carnival has on the viewer the
same effect that a Chinese classification of
animals had on its reader, Michel Foucault,
who burst into laughter when he first
encountered it. Both the laughter and the
classification, in Foucaults own account,
constituted the main reasons behind his own
investigations of human knowledge in Les
mots et les choses.[lii] Borrowing Foucaults
words, through its parodic relation to
ingrained structures of seeing, i.e., through
the avant-garde mise-en-abime of the logic
of resemblance, Carnival breaks up all the
ordered surfaces and all the planes with
which we are accustomed to tame the wild
profusion of existing things.[liii] The series of
assemblages re-enacts and exasperates the
carnivalesque dynamics and black humor - of all avant-garde art, thereby setting free its
invisible animals.[liv]
At the outset of this essay I stated my
wish to extend the analysis of Spoerris animals
to the avant-garde at large. I close by
suggesting that the avant-garde devices
presented in the essay display the humanmechanical (automatic) elements the
entrapments in and of human optics
alerting to the automatism and vulnerability
shared by humans and animals alike. Yet the
avant-garde devices also destabilize the
human point of view through a non-human
look at living and non/living things, at

presentations or situations of objects outside

human perspective. In Spoerris Carnival, the
collision or reciprocal contamination in
Spoerris terms -- between the readymade
gaze produced by the long history of
representation and the return of modern arts
optical unconscious, i.e., the other (of) vision
that the avant-garde brings to the fore, opens
up a space off-stage where posthuman
animals can exist outside of representation.

Endnotes
[i] My position on posthumanism is akin to Cary Wolfes:
when we talk about posthumanism, we are not just talking
about a thematics of decentering of the human in relation to
either evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates
; rather, I will insist that we are also talking
about how thinking confronts that thematics, what thought
has to become in the face of those challenges. [T]he point
is not to reject humanism tout court indeed there are many
values and aspirations to admire in humanism but rather to
show how those aspirations are undercut by the philosophical
an ethical frameworks used to conceptualize them. Cary
Wolfe, What is Posthumanism (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xvi.
[ii] According to Pierre Restany, the founder critic of New
Realism, the movement had a strong, solar approach to the
real. Restany was the critical voice of the group from its
inception, in 1960. See, Theories and Documents of
Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists Writings, eds.
Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1996), 284.
[iii] In general terms, assemblages are three-dimensional
installations composed of found objects. While the term was
common in the second post-war period, found objects had
already been common in Dada and Surrealism. As I indicate
in the essay by avant-garde I broadly refer here to that selfcritical art that, in the twentieth-century, turned its attention
increasingly to the institutional framework through which art is
produced and received, to the dominant social discourses
that emerge in art through these institutional mediations. See
Richard John Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-garde: Modernism,
Expressionism and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge
and NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10.
[iv] Giorgio Agamben, The Open (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2004), 27. More on Agamben follows.
[v]

Agamben, Open, 91-92.

[vi] Foster put it thus: If artists in the 1950s had mostly recycled
avant-garde devices, artists in the 1960s had to elaborate
them critically; the pressure of historical awareness permitted
nothing less. It is this complicated relation between prewar
and postwar avant-gardes, the theoretical question of avantgarde causality, temporality and narrativity, that is crucial to
comprehend today. Hal Foster, Whats Neo about the NeoAvant-Garde? in October, Vol. 70 (Autumn, 1994), 10.
[vii] See Cecilia Novero, Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From
Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (Minneapolis and London: University
of Minnesota Press, 2010).

75

[viii] See Foster, The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the
End of the Century, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1996), xii.

study is historicist, and Le Bruns recognizable resemblances

are taken at face value, explained away as an instinctive
human reaction, a natural human predisposition vital to our
biological survival (105) -- unlike Spoerris view of
physiognomics and Le Bruns influential role. Spoerri indicates
that the discourse of human-animal resemblances is
indebted to a deep construction of human vision in Western
thought, the effects of which, in the end, have first shaped
and then become a function of knowledge and its
discourses/disciplines. Human knowledge and vision classify
animals but their classification like folkloric traditions
produces masks (and fetishes): knowledges truth about
animals is carnivalesque.

[ix] Leah Dickerman, Dada Gambits, October 105, Dada

(2003), 3-12.
[x] Dickerman, Dada Gambits, 9.
[xi] Fernande Olivier, Picasso and His Friends (New York:
Appleton-Century, 1965), 97.
[xii] John Berger, The Success and Failure of Picasso (London:
Penguin Books, 1965), 77.

[xx] In contrast to reproduction, multiplication involves mobile

objects that generate transformations by themselves, by the
aid of motors or through the audiences intervention. Thus they
produce multiplied originals. They are originals because,
like the trap-paintings, no composition left to chance and
time (or movement) is repeated identically. So, while all
derived from one concept, the kinetic works Spoerri called
multiples were all different with respect to each other and to
themselves in time. Multiplication meant constant variation of
objects, or a constantly changing object.

[xiii] Raoul Hausmann, quoted in Karl Riha, Dada Berlin: Texte,

Manifeste, Aktionen (Stuttgart: Reclam Verlag), 8. Emphasis
added.
[xiv] Matthew Biro, Visions of the New Human in Weimar
Berlin (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
2010), 20.
[xv] As Walter Serner states, human philosophy and humans
themselves are no more than mixed salad. Quoted in
Novero, Antidiets, 284, n. 14, n. 16.

[xxi] Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge,

Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1993), 98.

[xvi] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: 1927-1934, Vol. 2,

edited by Michael Jennings (Cambridge, Mass and London:
Bellknap Harvard University Press, c.1999, 2001), 733.

[xxii]

Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 96.

[xxiii] Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 96.

[xvii] Benjamin associates Austrian writer and publicist Karl

Kraus with the child and the cannibal. Out of both, he writes, a
monster, a new angel springs, rather than a new man. See
Karl Kraus in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: 1927-1934,
Vol. 2, 457; For Benjamin on Dada, see his 1936 version of the
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. On
Benjamins language of things as reaction against humanistic
logocentrism, see Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamins Other
History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and
Angels (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2000).

[xxiv] See what Krauss writes in this regard: The production of

sensory stimulation from within the bodys own field, the
optical systems porousness to the operations of its internal
organs, this fact forever undermines the idea of visions
transparency to itself. Instead of that transparency there now
arises the density and opacity of the viewing subject as the
very precondition of his access to sight. Referring then to
Duchamps Large Glass, Krauss adds that if this work obeys to
Duchamps dictum of going beyond the retina, this is so to
arrive at the threshold of desire-in-vision, which is to say to
construct vision itself within the opacity of the organs and the
invisibility of the unconscious. See Krauss, Optical
Unconscious, 125. On the optical unconscious in Duchamp,
see Ibid, 137.

[xviii] Spoerri offers a genealogy of Carnival in a collection of

autobiographical
anecdotes
about
his
oeuvre.
(Id., Anekdotomania: Daniel Spoerri ber Daniel Spoerri (Basel:
Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001), (235-240). Therein he repeats the
well-known history of Le Bruns plates, stating that these served
to illustrate a now lost lecture on physiognomy that Le Brun
painter to the King -- had held at the Royal Academy of
Painting and Sculpture in Paris, probably in 1671. On Le Brun
see Jennifer Montagus The Expression of the Passions: The
Origin and Influence of Charles Le Bruns Confrence sur
lexpression general et particulire (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1994) and also Michel Gareau, Charles
Le Brun: First Painter to King Louis XIV (New York: Harry Abrams,
1992).

[xxv] Ordinarily, mise en abyme or mise-en-abime designates

the visual experience of standing between two mirrors, seeing
an infinite reproduction of one's image. The term also refers to
a formal technique in art history in which an image contains a
smaller copy of itself, the sequence appearing to recur
infinitely.
[xxvi]
Charles Le Brun lived between 1619 and 1690, Carl
Linnaeus between 1707-1778, Charles Darwin from 1809 to
1882. On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859 and The
Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872. For the
relation between the Chain of Being and seriality (as nonhierarchical ordering) see Gautam Ghosh, The (Un)Braiding of
Time in the 1947 Partition of British India in Anthony Grafton and
Marc Rodriguez (eds) Migration in History (University of Rochester
Press, 2007), 56-57. I also wish to thank Gautam Ghosh for his
insightful comments on this essay.

[xix] Montagu underscores the innovative features of Le Bruns

work especially in relation to the physiognomic study by
Giovanni Battista della Porta, the latter also mentioned by
Spoerri in his genealogy of Carnival. Montagu however plays
down the role of physiognomic in Le Bruns work on expression.
With regard to human and animal resemblances, she
explains Le Bruns plates as both pioneering (almost visionary
and anticipatory of Darwins studies) and as indebted to the
contemporaneous faith in reason, especially Descartess
philosophy. On these grounds, she views Le Bruns
resemblances as a great improvement over Della Portas
crude drawings (20-21). Overall her detailed and accurate

[xxvii] Paula Young Lee connects representations of animals

with the fierce debates concerning perspective in the
seventeenth century. She argues that at the core of the
debate was the view of and on animals, for the live animal
face as it is found in naturei.e., in motion and in timeis

76

[xliii] See James Urpeth, Animal Becomings, in Animal

Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought, edited
by Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton (London and New
York: Continuum, 2004), 211, note 6: Becoming-animal as a
form of becoming-minoritarian is an important instance of
what Deleuze and Guattari term micropolitics, a politics of
identity" and pursues a more radical trajectory than that of
representation or emancipation

distinct from an architectural landscape and resists being

interpreted through the laws of mathematical perspective.
The foundation of rational human vision, in short, was
controversial from the beginning, and the law of perspective
could be said to rely on unstable ground. See Lee, Taming
the Two-Eyed Beast: Images, Animals, and Objects in the
Seventeenth-Century
French
Academies
(unpublished
manuscript. Courtesy of the author). See also Montagu,
Expression of the Passions, 23.

[xliv] Spoerris account of the geographical difference

between the Siberian and Alaskan coats redoubles parodies
Beuyss statements about East and West, his idea of
Eurasia. Beuys indeed mentions the migration of the wolf
from Siberia to America, in this context. On the wolf-coyote,
see Beuys and Kuoni, Energy Plan for the Western World:
Joseph Beuys in America, edited by Carl Kuoni, with
introductory essays by Kim Levin and Caroline Tisdall (New York
and London: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990), 213.

[xxviii]
Who as a young child has not dreamt of the FrogKing or has not been afraid of the werewolf or yet still of
Dracula able to morph into a bat? Even Little Red Riding Hood
tells the story of a metamorphosis of animal into human and
vice versa. Not to speak of all those proverbs, as strong as a
lion, as cunning as a fox, as filthy as a pig, etc., up to the
common belief that the dog and its owner resemble each
other [If we think of this] then we have touched only
summarily on a very controversial issue: I mean, that the
genetic code is universal: It is shared by bacteria, animals
and humans See Spoerri, Anekdotomania, 235.
[xxix] Leland de La Durantaye, The Suspended Substantive:
On Animals and Men in Giorgio Agambens The Open in
Diacritics, 33: 2 (2003), 5.
[xxx]

de La Durantaye, The Suspended Substantive, 6.

[xxxi]

de La Durantaye, The Suspended Substantive, 8.

[xxxii]

Agamben, Open, 26-27.

[xlv]

See Beuys and Kuoni, Joseph Beuys in America, 142.

[xlvi]
43.

See, Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 35,

[xlvii]
Spoerri had once illustrated the expression its raining
cats and dogs in one of his word-traps or Wortfallen. See
Spoerri, Anekdotomania, 140-144. Here, a tool is freed of its
use and a substantive is freed of its fixity.
[xlviii] Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), 39.

[xxxiii]

Montagu, Expression of the Passions, 66-67; 71-73.

[xlix]

Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 39, 40.

[xxxiv]

Montagu, Expression of the Passions, 18.

[xxxv]

Montagu, Expression of the Passions, 27.

[l] Spoerri in an interview with Sandro Parmiggiani in

Parmiggiani, La messa in scena degli oggetti (Milan: Skira
Editore, 2004), 44.

[xxxvi]
Or else: the human is the depth/death of the animal,
namely its vanishing point.

[li]
Steve Baker, You Kill Things to Look at Them, 74.
Emphasis added.

[xxxvii]
On the notion of supplement especially according
to Derridasee Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short
Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
1997), 9-14.

[lii] The French title of Foucaults work, translated into English

as The Order of Things.
[liii]
Michel Foucault, Order of Things (New York: Vintage
Books, 1973), xv.

[xxxviii]
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward A Minor
Literature (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986) 28, 29, 59.

[liv] On the avant-garde and carnival, Alfred Jarrys Ubu Roi

and Luis Buuels Exterminating Angel, see Robert Stam,
Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989),
94-111.

[xxxix] See Baker, You Kill Things to Look at Them - Animal

Death in Contemporary Art in Killing Animals by The Animal
Studies Group (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press,
2006), 69-98. Speaking of the effects of animal corpses in art,
Baker quotes Elaine Scarry (81-83). The quotation perfectly
renders the effect of the detrompe-loeil as it applies to
Carnival.

A shorter version of this essay appeared as "Daniel Spoerris Carnival of

Animals," pages 151-166, In Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and
Paul Youngquist, eds., Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical
Perspective, University Park, 2012, The Pennsylvania State University
Press. Copyright 2012 by the Pennsylvania State University Press.
Reprinted by permission of the Pennsylvania State University Press.

[xl] The Oedipalized subject figures first among the

domesticated animals because it is caught in the triangular
family-structure. More on this in the section Multiplied WolfMan.
[xli]

Cecilia Novero did her doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. After
teaching at the University of Michigan, Vassar College and the Pennsylvania
State University (UP), she has now joined the Department of Languages and
Cultures at the University of Otago. She has recently completed a book(The
Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: from Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).) on the temporal relations between
the historical Avant-garde and the Neo-Avant-Garde at the University of
Minnesota Press (2009). Cecilia's research and teaching interests encompass
aesthetics, the Frankfurt School, European cinema, Travel literature, the former
GDR, especially women writers and, most recently, "animal studies". She has
published numerous articles on Viennese Actionism, the Swiss artist Daniel
Spoerri, the Dada movement, the cultural history of food, and film.

Agamben, Open, 91-92.

[xlii] See William J. Thomas Mitchell and his analysis of the

duck-rabbit, which these ducks recall in Picture Theory
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 51, 53-57.

77

FISH: SINGLY, AND IN

SHOALS

Every animal that is shown can always signify something, or, to be more precise, it can mean more and something other
than merely the animal as shown. This is in the nature of human artifacts, attaching meaning to which is common
practice in our culture. This is especially apparent in literature: one cannot read of animals without construing their
literary occurrence. Roland Borgards discusses the paintings of fish by Vroni Schwegler.
Text by Roalnd Borgards

n the Western tradition, we come face-toface with two diametrically opposed

options of taking in animals into Art. For one
thing, there are the art-animals that signify
something: a lion is couched at the feet of the
king, a monkey appears as an emblem of
lust, a swarm of locusts is eating its way
through the fields, a peacock spreads its tail.
On the other hand, there is animal-art, which
shows something: the picture of a zebra shows
a zebra, the picture of an ant shows an ant,
the picture of an elephant shows an elephant.
Two types of animal images might thus be
juxtaposed against one another: signifier
images against display images, meaning
against viewing, semiotics against deixis. If this
already was the whole truth of painting, then
the fish of Vroni Schwegler, singly and in
shoals, would simply be show animals: Look
here, a fish! Yet things are not as simple as
that, for at least three reasons.
First of all, every animal that signifies
something is always shown as well. In painting,
this is self-evident: even a heraldic lion is not
only a reference to sovereignty, but also the
picture of a lion. One cannot paint animals
without painting animals. The same applies to

literature: one cannot write of animals without

writing of animals. This could be called an
inevitable, non-circumventable artistic deixis:
Art cannot not show something.
Secondly, every animal that is shown
can always signify something, or, to be more
precise, it can mean more and something
other than merely the animal as shown. This is
in the nature of human artifacts, attaching
meaning to which is common practice in our
culture. This is especially apparent in literature:
one cannot read of animals without
construing their literary occurrence. The same
holds true for the visual arts: every animal that
can be seen in a picture can also be
interpreted. This could be called an inevitable,
non-circumventable artistic semiotics: Art
cannot not mean something.
Thirdly, one might think about to what
extent the animal of Art, both shown and
interpreted, is itself involved in the process of
showing and interpreting. For this, it is not
necessarily requisite to hand an animal a
brush. It is enough to imagine a constellative
virtuosity, in which the participants are an artist
(with her awareness, with her gaze, with her
hand, with her practiced skill), some technical
78

Vroni Schwegler

Small Shoal in Linz, 2012 Schwegler

79

Vroni Schwegler

Detail, The Great Wall With Fish, 2010 Schwegler

materials (oil paint, brush, boards), and an

animal (a dead fish that is, a particular,
individual dead fish).
This, above all, might be what the
paintings of Vroni Schwegler are all about:
about a space in which an artist, a fish, and
some painting equipment were together;
about how this was there: this particular place,
this specific moment, these concrete players
in the game. That is why Vroni Schwegler, time
and again, lets herself be watched while
animal-painting; that is why she also takes the
animals inside houses, drawing them on the
wall in pencil; that is why her studio is no
closed, but only a concentrated room a

room, in which agents may meet and interact

with one another. Each single painting
preserves such an encounter.
To be an agent in this game, the fish
need not even be alive, it may be dead. In
the individual painting, then, the fish comes
into a kind of life that is something other, and
perhaps something more, too, than a mere
biological category. This life does not lie in the
fish, but in the painting. Therefore, the
paintings of Vroni Schwegler do not only show
one fish at a time, but many fish, and each
one of them in many variations: an
assemblage of moments, constellations,
concretions, every single picture the track of
80

an action and its agents: artist, fish, brush. And

again: artist, fish, brush. And once more: artist,
fish, brush.
This creates shoals, which convene
such actions. Even if many pictures show the
same fish, every painting is nevertheless an
individual. In this way, it is not fish-shoals that
appear on the wall, but painting-shoals. Inside
the shoal, non-biological life multiplies. And in
hanging the pictures, the action repeats itself,
now, in part, with new agents: an artist, a
hammer, a nail (which have taken the place
of paint and brush), and fish-paintings (which
have taken the place of the fish).
What do we share with animals? Our
mortality (Jacques Derrida), our pleasures
(Donna Haraway), and possibly (Vroni
Schwegler) those places and moments in
which, thanks to Art, a kind of non-biological,
an a-biotic life emerges. That this constitutes a
kind of life that accepts death in its own way,
making it part of the game this, too, can be
seen in the paintings of Vroni Schwegler. Fish:
singly, and in shoals.

Vroni Schwegler was born in Penzberg (Germany) in 1970 and

studied painting at the Art School, Stdelschule, in Frankfurt
with Hermann Nitsch and Cooper Union School Of Art in New
York City. Schwegler has been exploring the genre of still life
for many years, using different media such as painting,
drawing and printmaking. At present she teaches printmaking
at the university of applied sciences in Mainz. For further
information: www.vroni-schwegler.de
Roland Borgards was born in Saarbrcken (Germany) in 1968.
Borgards is Professor for German Literatur at the University of
Wrzburg (Germany). His research focusses on Cultural and
Literary Animal Studies; his teaching includes the international
Wrzburg Summer School for Cultural and Literary Animal
Studies. For further information: www.ndl1.germanistik.uniwuerzburg.de/mitarbeiter/borgards/

81

THE ART OF FARMING

I live on a small family farm in North Holland where I exercise my two greatest passions in life: art and nature. My
artwork emerges from my experiences on the farm creating a dialog between my two occupations one as a farmer and
the other as a working artist.
Text by Petra Shilder

informs and compliments the other. Through

this process I have been able to create new
art works that both conceptually and
materially meld these two subjects together
opening for new avenues of expression and
discovery in both. The art practice has also
helped me develop my farming methods to
new heights including my most recent project:
hybrid-sheep breeding program which I see
as much as an art project as a farming one.
I find that my relationship and
knowledge of my sheep is further intensified by
my artistic documentation of them.
The
various manners in which I represent them in
my
paintings,
photographs,
drawing,
sculptures and tile works have revealed
nuances to me that I otherwise may not have
observed.
This breeding program wonderfully
melds my farming and art practice together
into a unified endeavour. I have created a
unique program where I am cross-breeding
different types of sheep in order to create a
hybrid that is more independent and requires
less care from the farmer. By creating this new
breed of sheep I plan to bring the animals

rt and life come together on the farm in

a process where daily occurrences can
inspire new directions for my art. Each
day presents new and often unforeseen
challenges and inspires new solutions. These
daily experiences on the farm form the basis
of my artistic inspiration.
My artistic practice has always been
closely related my own personal experience.
Having been born on a family farm in the
idyllic Dutch landscape, the genre of Dutch
landscape painting has always intrigued me.
When I first discovering these works as a child I
was taken by how much these paintings
reminded me of my family farm. I began to
research these paintings and discovered that
many of the animals that were depicted in
them were sheep. The sheep in the paintings
however were of breeds and varieties that I
had never heard of before. This started my
journey on the study of the history of sheep,
which in turn brought me full circle to my own
sheep breeding-program at my farm.
On the farm I have been able to blend
my two endeavours (of art making and
farming) in a symbiotic relationship where one
82

Petra Schilder

Fig.1Smuiger, Dutch style fire place. Fig.2 Delfs Blue tile fragments of pastoral scenery Shilder

closer to their original position in nature with

greater independence and self-reliance while
still maintaining their economic value. I have
engaged in an extensive visual recording of
this project through photography, drawing,
painting, sculpture and ceramic tiles. This
documentation forms a non-chronological
narrative of the project that is not just a visual
and conceptual documentation. In addition
it creates a myriad of independent art objects
that form the poetic view of this scientific art
project.
I've grown up around the Dutch
majolica tiles: in our farm we have an old
Dutch style tiled smuiger fire place (img.1).
My dad collected old tiles and in the fields
around our farm I've found little bits and
pieces of old tiles. I've researched the pieces
and tried to reassemble them (img.2).
This was a great inspiration source to start
making my own.
Old Dutch shepherd tiles are my
favourite subject since I'm a sheep farmer.

I develop a very close relationship with my

sheep and that's what I'm trying to capture
and present through my work. In the
beginning it was kind of hard to photograph
the animals because they always come right
up to me when I tried. To get the right shot I
ended up practically lying in the grass to get
that right in your face effect. Recently I had
an exhibition of my photo documentary of my
sheep at Irvine fine arts centre (img.3).
I first started painting and etched
portraits of my sheep on ordinary white
industrial tiles. I extracted the red pigments I
used from the uncle tom tulips we grow on
our farm for the tulip bulb market.
Of course the pigments didn't last on the tiles
and I learned to paint in the majolica
technique instead. I now use manganese
pigments because it strongly resembles the
colour of my tulip pigments. The fireplace is a
mix of old tiles and tiles I made.

83

Petra Schilder

Little Black Racka Ram (tulip pigments on tile) Schilder

84

Petra Schilder

Bully (tulip pigments on tile) Shilder

Petra Schilder was born in Scharwoude, The Netherlands, 1975. She
gained her BFA BFA Autonoom Skulptuur, Gerrit Rietveld Academie,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands in 2000 and a subsequent MFA
Sculpture, The Ohio State University, Columbus. She has exhibited
extensively in Europe and the US.
Carter and Citizen (http://www.carterandcitizen.com/exhibitions)

85

MORE THAN
MARGINAL: INSECTS IN
THE HOURS OF MARY
OF BURGUNDY

A book of hours was an intensely personal devotion book in the Middle Ages. Used daily to direct the prayers of the
owner, these illuminated manuscripts, or hand-made illustrated books, were lavishly decorated to the taste of the
patron. In the late fifteenth-century Hours of Mary of Burgundy, also known as the Vienna Hours, every folio is richly
decorated with window scenes of religious subjects surrounded by extravagant foliage. This decoration of the margins
includes, among other animals, an array of insects including bees, moths, flies, and grasshoppers.
Text by Eileen Yanoviak

Painted during the burgeoning of the Flemish

scientific revolution, the stylized insects in the
margins of the Vienna Hours may be seen as
reflecting popular cultural attitudes towards
animals and religious, moral, and social
metaphors of insects. An analysis of insect
imagery in the Vienna Hours and the
later Hours of Englebert of Nassau will
illuminate the emergence of empirical
observation and changing attitudes towards
nature during this important moment of
cultural transition.
The Vienna Hours, generally believed to
have been produced between 1475 and
1480, is a lavish production displaying the
wealth and influence of the patron.[1] It is a
book of hours, a personal devotional book
that was used to guide prayer during the
seven canonical hours of the day. Containing
190 richly decorated folios, each folio
contains either full-page or half-page
miniatures, historiated (decorated) initials, or
profuse marginalia, unless completely left
blank. It is comprised of the traditional
elements of a book of hours, including the
Calendar, Marian Prayers, readings from the

he early modern Europe of the late

fifteenth century witnessed revolutions in
scientific
inquiry
and
humanist
ideals. During this period of remarkable
change, the long-established trade of
illuminated manuscripts, or handmade
decorated books, waned with the advent of
the printed book. In spite of these innovations
in bookmaking, and perhaps in part because
of the regeneration of science, the innovative
Ghent-Bruges style of manuscript production
and illumination emerged between 1470 and
1480 and flourished for three generations in
Flanders. Illuminators of the lavish Hours of
Mary of Burgundy (Vienna Hours henceforth)
are often credited with leading innovations in
illusionistic illumination that contributed to the
continued popularity of the manuscript in the
north.
While many scholars have written on this
manuscript, few have focused on the
extensive marginalia, or margin decoration,
which enlivens practically every page of
the Vienna
Hours. Amidst
the
profuse
acanthus leaves that decorate the margins, a
myriad of insects are illustrated.
86

gospels, Mass of the Virgin, Hours of the Cross,

Hours of the Holy Spirit, Suffrages, Litany, and
Office of the Dead.
The book almost certainly belonged to
Mary of Burgundy, the daughter of Charles the
Bold. Charles the Bold was killed during a
campaign to expand his territories, and Mary
took the throne at a very young age. She
married the Austrian emperors son Maximillian
in 1477, and she died at a young age in 1482
from falling off of her horse. While the only
definite provenance is indicated by the
monogrammed initials of Emperor Matthias I
of the seventeenth century, it is generally
accepted that the Vienna Hours belonged to
Mary of Burgundy.[2] Most scholars believe
the book was commissioned by Maximillian
upon their wedding as a wedding gift.
A manuscript of this importance for a
patron of such high status would be
completed in a workshop with numerous
illuminators, or manuscript painters, and would
have been made to the specifications of the
patron. The primary illuminator for the Vienna
Hours was
probably
Lievin
van
Lathem.[3] While Lathem was the primary
illuminator contributing the largest number of
full-page miniatures, the so-called Master of
Mary of Burgundy was a secondary illuminator
who gained notoriety for his innovative
window scenes. There are three window
scenes in the Vienna Hours. The first is the
portrait of Mary of Burgundy at her devotional.
(Figure 1) While Mary reads in the foreground
with her back to the open window, the window
behind her reveals a church choir. Within the
choir the Virgin Mary is seated on a
throne. These window scenes may be
understood as a method to portray Mary of
Burgundy and her visualization of her
devotions, a vision of the Virgin Mary. This
technique transforms the intangible devotions
of Mary of Burgundy into visual manifestations
of tangible realities that exist in different
temporal spaces.
Another window scene appears on 43v,
painted again by the Master of Mary of
Burgundy. (Figure 2) Here again, the private
chapel of the patron is depicted looking upon
a distant landscape, almost a literal
representation of a vision. Otto Pcht, the first
scholar to truly take up the interpretation of

these window scenes, contends that this is a

suggestion of nature-morte, literally translated
as dead nature, but figuratively a
representation of the fleeting nature of
life.[4] The fleeting life of the present tangible
world is juxtaposed to the religious scene
illustrated beyond the window frame that
distinguishes the illumination within. The sense
of temporal space is further complicated by
the appearance of Mary of Burgundy within
the enclosed window scene, peering back at
the
audience
and
imploring
participation. These window scenes may be
considered as the beginning of the trend
towards illusionistic illuminations in the latter
part of the fifteenth century, a key component
in understanding the emergence of scientific
accuracy.
While scholars have labored over
interpretations of the window scenes, little
scholarly attention has been paid to the
marginalia of the Hours of Mary of
Burgundy. The marginalia composes a
substantial portion of the overall illustration of
the
manuscript. The
majority
of
this
decoration is in the French style, composed of
densely woven acanthus scrolls and
foliage. Interspersed in the margins are
various
creatures,
both
real
and
fabricated. Included among the beasts and
animals, there is a variety of insects, such as
flies, moths, butterflies, snails, grasshoppers,
and a bee.[5] Each of these appears with
varying frequency and with different purposes,
placement, and degrees of specificity.
The insects which populate the margins
of the Vienna Hours are relevant for two
reasons. First, there are clear and trenchant
symbolic
and
allegorical
meanings
associated with insects. And secondly,
the Vienna Hours predates the Hours of
Englebert of Nassua, also illuminated by the
Master of the Vienna Hours, which significantly
enhances the visual, and hence symbolic,
emphasis
on
insects. Together,
the
exploration of insects in the two texts reveals a
distinctive trend towards naturalism in the
manuscripts of the late fifteenth century in
Flanders.
In order to properly understand the
symbolic role of insects in the Hours of Mary of
Burgundy, it is important to investigate how the
87

Fig.1
Master of Mary of Burgundy, Hours of Mary of Burgundy codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 14v Mary of Burgundy at her Devotions
1482 , Vienna, Austrian National Library

88

Fig.2
Master of Mary of Burgundy, Hours of Mary of Burgundy codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 43v and 44r Raising of the Cross
Vienna, Austrian National Library

Medieval artist and patron would acquire

knowledge of animals, and what role those
animals would have played within their
lives. Most often, knowledge about animals
was obtained through the use of bestiaries, or
encyclopedic books on animals, which
contained general information about the
animals,
accompanied
by
common
analogies, and standard imagery. According
to bestiary scholar Janetta Benton, Animal
imagery was derived largely from secondary
sources rather than from direct observation of
nature.[6] The bestiaries were among the
most common picture books in the twelfth
century, particularly in England. These books
would have been standard in monastic
libraries and were a favorite of the
secular.[7] Any miniaturist commissioned by
the Burgundian noble family would have had
access to these bestiaries. If artists did not
hold them as a reference in their workshop,
they would have undoubtedly been able to
access one in the library of Phillip the Good,

grandfather of Mary of Burgundy, who was an

avid bibliophile that inspired his courtiers to
follow suit.[8]
The
content
of
the
bestiaries
demonstrates the importance of using
animals as symbols, often allegorical
ones. The intention was to use these symbols
as moral and religious models.[9] The bestiary
essentially included two sections in each entry
for an animal. The first part was an etymology
of the animals name and a description of
habitat and appearance. The next section
explained the symbolic significance and
moral value of the pseudo-factual information
in the preceding section. A steadily increasing
naturalism in the bestiaries of the twelfth,
thirteenth, and fourteenth century is a
reflection of the growing scientific revolution.
Benton arranges the animals in
medieval manuscripts into the following
categories: the common animals, like horses
and dogs; exotic animals, such as camels or
lions; standardized imaginary mythological
89

creatures; and finally imaginary animals of the

artists invention.[10] Although Benton does
not specifically address insects, they would be
considered
among
the
common
animals. The insects depicted in the Vienna
Hours are indeed of the general garden
variety.
The common fly is among the most
profusely used elements in the Vienna
Hours. (Figure 3) As a devotional book of
hours, the religious connotation of the fly is
particularly relevant. Ecclesiastes 10:1 reads,
[d]ead flies make the perfumers sweet
ointment turn rancid and ferment; so can a
little folly make wisdom lose its worth.[11] The
fly is also associated with death, devastation,
and infestation in the Bible. Evidence of this
association can be seen in a painting
contemporary
with
the Vienna
Hours called Dead
Lovers by
Matthias
Grnewald. Two seemingly undead dead
lovers are covered in swarming insects, flies
among them, serving as a momento
mori reminder that all people succumb to
death.[12]
The stoics of antiquity, as well as the
Bible, believed that all animals were created
for the benefit of humans, even undesirable
ones like flies.[13] In the Physiologus, the
relative sinfulness and virtuousness of an
animal is based upon its connections to
behavior in people. References to the fly in
the Bible support the notion of human
behavior analogy. A solid moral story for the
young Mary of Burgundy, the fly is a warning of
the potential for something good to spoil. The
fly could also symbolize the brevity of life on
earth, explaining the appearance of flies
immediately before they are devoured by a
bird as illustrated in numerous instances in
the Vienna Hours.[14] (Figure 3) The symbolic
association of the fly with the brevity of life also
supports Pchts understanding of window
scenes as images of nature-morte.
The single appearance of one bee in
the Vienna Hours on fol. 157r is in the margins
of a passage in the Office of the Dead.
(Figure 4) The bee appears large in scale
compared to the unidentified unruly naked
boy chasing him with an unknown object. This
could be a cloth typically used by a
beekeeper to smother bees. In addition to

exaggerated scale, the bee is shown with

eight legs rather than six. This reinforces the
idea that the knowledge of insects is not from
first-hand observation or scientific description,
but from the pages of bestiaries which were
rarely scientifically accurate.
The motif of the bee is particularly rich
in
social,
religious,
and
economic
associations. In bestiaries, bees nests were
described as being the model of an ideal
society. Although
bees
have
meager
beginnings, they were capable of developing
a sophisticated society and were celebrated
for civic virtue. All bees had a role within their
society, and the king bee, not a queen, was
always admired for his benevolence as a
leader of the colony.[15] Although he had a
stinger, bees who disobeyed him stung
themselves in an expression of their loyalty and
selflessness.[16]
While the social model of the beehive
was meaningful for industry and society, there
were also religious applications for the
theme. Bees were associated with the social
structure of a monastery and the Virgin Mary
as the model citizen.[17] The efficient and
noble bee civilization also served as an
allegory for Christ and his followers, or by
extension, for a ruler like Mary of Burgundy and
her people.
The metaphor between Christ and his
followers with bee society is supported by
references to bees in the Bible. Bees are
specifically mentioned in the Bible on four
occasions.[18] According to Solomon, the
consumption of honey and honeycomb
brings knowledge of wisdom.[19] While this is
an appropriate reading based on the identity
of the patron, the presence of the humorous
nude boy figure alludes to a passage in
Genesis in which human beings, superior to all
other creatures, should have dominion over
animals.[20] These Biblical references to bee
symbolism evolved, like much of Christian
symbolism, from Ancient texts.
An entire chapter is devoted to the
industry
and
society
of
bees
in
Virgils Georgics, a poem extolling the virtues
of labor and agriculture.[21]
This chapter appeared as an appendix
to some bestiaries. Janice Neris extensive
study of insects in early modern European art
90

Fig.3
Master of Mary of Burgundy, Hours of Mary of Burgundy codex Vindobonensis 1857
fol. 29v , 1482 , Vienna, Austrian National Library

91

Fig.4
92
Hours of Mary of Burgundy codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 157r, 1482, Vienna, Austrian National Library

from 1500-1700 also points to the economic

ramifications of insects. She cites a 1475
woodblock
print
by
Konrad
von
Megenberg Buch der Nature as evidence of
the interest in the economic benefits of
studying insects as indicated by the beehive
and round silkworm boxes.[22]
While bees and beekeeping were
virtuous, snails held a significantly less positive
association. A myriad of snails appear in
the Vienna Hours. (Figure 5) Snails, although
not scientifically considered insects, may have
been
lumped
with
other
pest-like
insects.[23] Snails were voracious pests in the
garden
and
were
generally
quite
unpopular. In spite of their lackluster
reputation, snails were a popular subject in
manuscripts and folklore. In manuscripts, they
were most popular in the late thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, appearing more than
seventy times in nearly thirty manuscripts. The
appearance of the snail becomes less
common in the fifteenth century.[24]
In the context of the Vienna Hours, the
most relevant symbolic association of the snail
is with the Virgin Mary. Helen S. Ettlinger
identifies the snail as a symbol of virginity as it
appears conspicuously sliding along the
bottom
of
Fransesco
Cossas
147072 Annunciation. Additionally, a 1400 print by
Francis of Retz, which depicts three snails in
the rain, reads, If the dew of the clear air can
make the sea snail pregnant, then God in
virtue can make His mother pregnant.[25] For
a young and royal female patron, one
obliged to produce heirs, the emphasis on
reproduction and virginity was likely very
poignant.
In a more subtle analogy, some
scholars suggest that including undesirable
animals like the snail, particularly in folklore,
may be considered a demonstration of high
and low. In the Vienna Hours, noble birds
prey on loathsome snails and flies. (Figure
5) The proximity of snails and birds could
reflect that juxtaposition of high and low, or
more specifically the spiritual and the
earthly. In Classical antiquity, the snail was a
symbol of mistrust, deemed suspicious for
carrying its house on its back, fearful of
thieves.[26] Fol. 53v in the Vienna Hours has a
charming depiction of one snail with a shell

facing another snail without his shell,

reinforcing the symbolic narrative of trust and
mistrust, or perhaps piety and doubt. (Figure
6) The snail who requires a shell is viewed as
inherently less courageous and trustworthy
then the shell-less snail, who can defend
himself without protective armor.
While the scene of the shell-less snail
presents a narrative element, the green critters
which appear in three instances present both
narrative and inventive qualities. (Figure
7) These grasshopper-like creatures are the
least directly translated naturalistic insects in
the manuscript. They have eight to ten legs
and an abdomen in the shape of a lobster
tail. If they are indeed grasshoppers, hoppers
and grasshoppers are mentioned numerous
times in the Bible. Although no agreement
has been reached as to the specific species
referred to by hopper, they are categorically
negative, often associated with the swarms of
locusts. Joel 1:4 reads, What the locust has
left the swarms eat, what the swarm has left,
the hopper eats, and what the hopper has left
the grub eats, indicating a descending chain
of loathsome creatures.[27]
While the Biblical interpretation is
meaningful, perhaps the key to interpreting
the grasshoppers and other insects is in
relation to the other animals and figures in the
illustrations. In a discussion of the use of
bestiaries in folklore, Arnold Clayton Henderson
contends that the relationship between beasts
is the most important clue to the moral or
spiritual underpinning of the use of
animals.[28] Henderson explains that in
folklores and bestiaries, if
the fable is built on the contrast
between an oppressive beast
and its innocent victim, then the
moralization will transform that
opposition into some human
opposition. No rule specifies
which human opposition one
must choose so long as the
relative positions of the pair are
comparable to those of the
beasts. One may apply such a
fable to the strong and the weak,
the rich and the poor, the devil
and the sinner, the landlord and
93

inquiry may also have been an important

cultural factor in the production of the
manuscripts. New categories were added to
the common compendia of animals in the
thirteenth century, particularly bugs and
fish. Unlike older bestiaries, these newer
publications elaborated on these new
categories of animals, not by moral allegories,
but by encyclopedic entries such as those
in Etymologiae.[32] This developing interest in
empirical observation was prevalent in the
thirteenth century in England and Italy, and
eventually manifested in Flemish art.
The Vienna Hours marks an important
transition point in Flemish art in the fifteenth
century, but not only for the insects in the
margins. The illusionistic open window
scenes illuminated by the Master of Mary of
Burgundy became the style a la mode. As
artistic naturalism developed in Italy, it
flourished particularly in Flemish art.[33] While
the Vienna Hours insects were relegated to the
secondary marginal decoration, the insect
was highlighted as the central visual
component of later manuscripts and other
mediums. Insects no longer played a
subordinate role hidden in the exuberant
acanthus marginalia. Instead they become
the most highly illusionistic component of the
manuscript.
The most striking example of these
illusionistic insect illuminations is in the Hours of
Englebert of Nassau, completed between
1470 and 1490 very near the completion of
the Vienna Hours.[34] The same illuminator of
the famous window scenes, the Master of
Mary of Burgundy, painted the insects in the
borders of the manuscript. These insects are
truly nature-morte, so convincing that they
cast a shadow on the page beneath them,
extending the world of the manuscript from
text, to image, to real life. (Figure 9) Many
insects populate the margins of the Vienna
Hours as symbolic vignettes, but insects
transform into the primary focal points of
several illusionistic borders in the Hours of
Englebert of Nassau.
The insects in the Hours of Engelbert of
Nassau are triumphs of illusionism. As Otto
Pcht demonstrates, the illusionistic quality of
the images expands the dimensions of the
book into multiple spheres. The first dimension

the tenant farmer.[29]

The insects that appear in the Vienna
Hours never appear interacting with a species
that is not its hunter or oppressor. Flies appear
near the beaks of birds, a bee is chased by a
human, and snails are hunted by other birds.
(Figure 8) The only time that insects are not
being hunted is in the company of their own
kind, or by themselves. Practically related to
earthly life, hunting was a common
preoccupation of the nobility, particularly
falconry. Mary of Burgundy herself was an
avid falconer, a reason to include such a
prolific number of birds in her manuscript,
particularly those that overpower insects. The
hunter and prey configuration in the Vienna
Hours can tangibly and directly reflect this
interest in hunting, but also a symbolic
dominion of good over evil.
The appearance of insects is not
limited to the pages of illuminated
manuscripts. No comprehensive account of
insects in visual art is available, but numerous
fourteenth and fifteenth century images
portray insects. Whatever the symbolic
reading, the elevation of insectsbees,
moths, grasshoppers, snails, and flies from
the garden to the pages of elaborate
personal devotion books, practically requires
the search for symbolic and social
intentions. In spite of this impulse, there is
some debate about the extent to which
animals, including insects, should be read
symbolically. It can be argued that the
presence of an animal in visual art is wholly
allegorical and symbolic, a practice begun
largely by Erwin Panofsky in his distinction
between iconography and iconology.[30]
Others argue that the employment of animals
is strictly decorative or visual. Rather than
limiting this study to one philosophy or another,
it seems prudent to consider the imagery in
both ways. While some insect images are
absent-minded copies of bestiaries, and
others are merely decorative, many
manuscripts
which
incorporate
animal
imagery may well reflect meaningful choices
made by the patron for his or her book.[31]
Acknowledging the symbolic and
decorative
functions
of
these
insect
illuminations, the emergence of scientific
94

Fig.5
Hours of Mary of Burgundy codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 22r,
951482, Vienna, Austrian National Library

Fig.6
Hours of Mary of Burgundy codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 53v Pentecost, 1482, Vienna, Austrian National Library

96

Fig.7
97
Hours of Mary of Burgundy codex Vindobonensis 1857, fol. 172v, 1482, Vienna, Austrian National Library

Nassau. The only creature that appears in

the Vienna Hours and not the Hours of
Englebert of Nassau is the grasshopper. The
only insects in the Hours of Englebert of
Nassau and not in the Vienna Hours are the
ladybug, or ladybird, and the caterpillar.
The combination of flies, dragonflies,
and butterflies is known to be a symbol of
Christ.[37] This
combination
appears
repeatedly throughout the Hours of Englebert
of Nassau. In addition to the interpretations of
flies and snails already addressed, the
ladybugs, dragonflies, and butterflies of
the Hours of Engelbert of Nassau add further
nuance to the symbolic use of insects in
devotional manuscripts. Ladybugs, or ladybirds, as they were called, represented the
seven sorrows of the Virgin.[38] Also striking is
the naturalism of the varying species of
butterflies. Each butterfly is painted with
careful observation, and the varying breeds
can be attributed to the woods of Ardenne in
Brussels.[39]
One final symbolic interpretation may
hold significance for the use of both insects
and
flowers
in
both
manuscripts. As
mementos from pilgrimages, many people
would return with objects such as peacock
feathers, flowers, and insects like butterflies
and dragonflies. These objects have been
found
pressed
into
the
pages
of
manuscripts. The use of insects and flowers in
the margin may be a substitute or reference
for such practices.[40] This is strikingly
presented in George Hoefnagels Painted
Dragonflies
with
Real
Wings
Attached from Animalia
rationalia
et
insecta. Although completed much later in
1594-96, during a period of heightened
fascination with specimens, it is an example of
how the page served as a medium between
reality and illustration.
The Hours of Englebert of Nassau was
scribed by Nicholas Spierinc, and the principal
illuminator was the Master of Mary of
Burgundy. Both artists also contributed to
the Vienna Hours. The fact that both artists
worked on both manuscripts binds the content
and images of one to the other, and
legitimizes
a
comparison
of
the
illuminations. The
Master
of
Mary
of
Burgundys oeuvre demonstrates an intentional

is the physical book page itself, the flat areas

where the text is written. Then, the next
dimension is the decorated frame on the
page which separates text from illustration with
implied depth. Behind the frame and the text
is the miniature. It too contains deep
recessions into space. Then finally, as naturemorte, an insect alights itself onto the page,
so convincingly painted that it casts its own
shadow across the faux bejeweled frame. The
insect exists in the fictional space of the
manuscript, and illusionistically in the real
space of the patron.
In both Otto Pchts account of the
work of the Master of Mary of Burgundy and
J.J.G. Alexanders text accompanying the
facsimile of the Hours of Engelbert of Nassau,
the suggestion is that once these flowers and
insects are used as trompe loeil, literally to
fool the eye, they can no longer be
considered in the context of symbolism
because they are meant to be real and
outside
the
realm
of
the
narrative.[35] Alexander and others have also
suggested that the use of flowers and insects
in the borders of the Hours of Engelbert of
Nassau is simply a scatter effect, claiming
the artist simply wants to abandon the
anecdotal purpose of the still life and simply
sprinkle the flowers or jewels at random on the
colored ground.[36] This supposition is
strikingly lacking in subtlety. If the use
of trompe loeil insects was strictly decorative,
a tool used to please the eye, than what
prompted the seemingly intentional selection
of a restricted number of insects? Additionally,
positioned atop the rich borders, these insects
are not relegated to mere marginalia. They
are almost tangible to the reader, and are the
most prominent decorative program of the
manuscript. There must be a purpose beyond
virtuoso painting and decoration, one which is
both symbolic and cultural.
The distribution of insect types between
the two manuscripts is remarkably similar. Both
books contain flies, snails, and moths, and in
both books, flies and moths or butterflies are
the
most
frequently
portrayed. While
the Vienna Hours shows only one reference to
a dragonfly, in the form of a hybrid dragonfly
bird creature, the dragonfly appears in all of its
glory in the pages of the Hours of Engelbert of
98

Fig.8
Selected Hunting Scenes, Hours of Mary of Burgundy codex Vindobonensis 1857, 1482, Vienna, Austrian National Library

99

Fig.9
Hours of Engelbert of Nassau, MS Douce 219-220, fols. 19v-20r, c. 1470-1490, Bodleian Library, Oxford

advancement of illusionistic style between the

manuscripts. The development of the career
of the Master of Mary of Burgundy emphasizes
both the increasing interest in naturalism, and
the ability to employ nature as a metaphor for
life and faith.
The brilliant illuminations in the Hours of
Engelbert of Nassau are indeed beautiful,
innovative, and pleasing to the eye. Yet, the
specificity and arrangement of the objects in
the borders is too controlled to ignore an
implied meaning, either literal or symbolic. For
the medieval audience, insects would have
been a source of irritation, necessity, mystery,
and even spiritual guidance. The prolific use
of insects to enliven the borders in these
manuscripts only speaks to the relevance of
these creatures. Whether a representation of
the average garden pest, or a symbol of
Christ, insects must have been a significant

source of contemplation as they populated

the margins of two of the most lavish and
innovative manuscripts in the fifteenth
century. Drawing on a pattern established by
his earlier manuscript, the Vienna Hours, the
Master of the Hours of Mary of Burgundy
penetrated the page, lifting the insect in
the Hours of Englebert of Nassau from simple
drolleries to the realm of reality. The emerging
interest
in
naturalism
and
empirical
observation of the Italian Renaissance finally
migrated from Italy to Flanders, and
manifested as the illusionistic creatures that
populate the pages of the Hours of Englebert
of Nassau.
James H. Murrow contends that
perhaps the interpretation of manuscripts as
laden with symbolism is a bit overwrought. He
suggests that the pursuit of disguised
symbolism prevents the images themselves
100

from speaking.[41] With the Vienna Hours, and

finally the Hours of Englebert of Nassau, the
growing emphasis on the natural world is the
visual language between image and
viewer. The innovations of visual perception
could indeed finally be the symbolic
message. The creative force of God could
be harnessed by artist to imitate nature
itself.[42] As Thomas and Virginia Kauffman
emphasize, In illuminated manuscripts there
was no separation of the sacred and what
seems to us the secular realms. All things in
nature might be considered to have
belonged to the sacred.[43]

[xiii] Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries: Text, image, ideology

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 169.
[xiv] Marcel Dicke, Insects in Western Art, American
Entomologist Winter (2000): 229.
[xv] Payne, 81.
[xvi] Hassig, 53.
[xvii] The social structure of the monastery is discussed by
Francis Klingender, Animals in Art and Thought to the end of
the Middle Ages (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971), 359. The
Virgin Mary as model citizen is addressed by Hassig, 58.
[xviii] Kritsky, 184.
[ixx] My son, eat thou honey, because it is good; and the
honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste. So shall the
knowledge of wisdom be unto thy soul. Proverbs 24:13-14 as
quoted in Juan Antonio Ramirez, The Beehive Metaphor: From
Gaudi to Le Corbusier (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 16.

Endnotes
[i] Provenance information and theories derived from Eric
Inglis, The Hours of Mary of Burgundy (London: Harvey Miller
Publishers, 1995), 13-17. The general consensus is that the
book was produced after 1475 when the Master of the Hours
of Mary of Burgundys first works appear, and no later than the
1480s.

[xx] Hassig, 169. "And God said, Let us make man in our
image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over
the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the
cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing
that creepeth upon the earth." Genesis 1:26
[xxi] Andre Stipanovic, Bees and Ants: Perceptions of
Imperialism in Virgils Aenied and Georgics, in Insect Poetics,
ed. Eric C. Brown (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2006), 16.

[ii] The famous portrait on folio 14v is likely to be Mary of

Burgundy, her headpiece carrying the initials RIM; perhaps a
partial anagram for Marie and the portrait coincides with other
descriptions of Mary of Burgundy. Additionally, her elegant
dress indicates she is a lady of the court. Feminine word
endings indicate that the book was made for a woman.
[iii]

[xxii] Neri, xi.

[xxiii] See footnote 6.

Antonine de Schryver as cited by Inglis, 10.

[xxiv] Lillian Randall, The Snail in Gothic Marginal Warfare,

Speculum 37 (1962): 358. The snails that appear in these
manuscripts are engaged in a snail battle specifically.

[iiiv] Otto Pacht, The Master of Mary of Burgundy, The

Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 85 (1944): 299.
[v] Janice Neri, The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in
Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011), xi. Neri explains a broad medieval
definition of insects using a woodblock illustration of insects by
Konrad von Megenberg in 1475 Buch der Nature, Huntington
Library. This print includes images of spiders, worms, moths,
ants, frogs, and snails, among others.

[xxv] Both images are discussed in a short essay by Helen S.

Ettinger, The Virgin Snail, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978), 316.

[vi] Janette Benton, The Medieval Menagerie: Animals in the

art of the Middle Ages (New York: Abbeville Press, 1992), 17.

[xxvi]

Randall, 361.

[xxvii]

Kritsky, 185.

[xxviii] Arnold Clayton Henderson, Medieval Beasts and

Modern Cages: The Making of Meaning in Fables and
Bestiaries, PMLA 97 (1982), 45.

[vii] Ann Payne, Medieval Beasts (New York: New Amsterdam

Books, 1990), 9.

[xxix]

[viii] Maurits Smeyers and Jan Van der Sock, eds. Flemish
Illuminated Manuscripts: 1475-1550 (Ghent: Ludion Press,
1996), 13.

Henderson, 45.

[xxx] See discussion of iconography and iconology in Erwin

Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Anchor Books,
1955) 26-39.

[ix] Benton, 18.

[x] Benton, 17.
[xi] As noted in Gene Kritsky, The Insects and Other
Arthropods of the Bible, the New Revised Version, American
Entomologist (1997): 185.

[xxxi]

Benton, 110.

[xxxii]

Hassig, 173.

[xxxiii] Paula H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and

Experience in the Scientific Revolution, (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 2004) 33.

[xii] Nicky Coutts, The Unholy Insect, Antennae 3 (2007): 32.

101

[xxxiv] The manuscript belonged to Englebert of Nassau, and

then Philip the Bold, son of Mary of Burgundy.
J.J.G Alexander, The Master of Mary of Burgundy: A Book of
Hours for Englebert of Nassau (New York: George Braziller:
1970), 7.
[xxxv]

Alexander, 18.

[xxxvi]

Alexander, 17.

[xxxvii]

Hassig, 169.

Eileen Yanoviak is a doctoral student in the Art History program

at the University of Louisville. Her primary area of research is
19th century American landscape, and she is broadly
interested in the ways nature is interpreted by artists and
society. She earned an MA in Art, Art History in 2011 and a BA
in Art History and French in 2005, all from the University of
Arkansas at Little Rock where she has been Adjunct Faculty for
the past six years. She is currently the Curatorial Research
Fellow at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft. Prior to
pursuing her graduate degree, she worked in curatorial and
development for the Arkansas Arts Center.

[xxxviii]
Sylvia Landsberg, The Medieval Garden (Toronto:
University of Toronto, 2000), 113.
[xxxix]

Alexander, commentary to plate 29.

[xl] Thomas DeCosta Kauffman and Virginia Roehrig Kaufman,

The Sanctification of Nature: Observations on the Origins of
Trompe loeil in Netherlandish Book Painting of the
Fifteenth
and Sixteenth Centuries, The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 19
(1991): 58.
[xli] James H. Marrow, Symbol and Meaning in Northern
European Art of the Late Middle Ages and the Early
Renaissance, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of
Art 16 (1986): 161.
[xlii]

Smith, 54.

[xliii]

Kauffman, 59.

Back Cover Image: Chris Musina, Tiger Head, in a Box, oil on

canvas 24" x 24", 2011 Musina

102

Antennae.org.uk
Issue twenty-seven will be
online on the 21st of December 2013
103