At the Venice Biennale in 2003 the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss projected onto a black wall hundreds of questions, from the in-depth to the banal, including “Will happiness find me?” “Is everything drifting apart?” and “What is my dog thinking?” (see Fischli and Weiss 2003 for all the questions presented). The questions are such that they cannot be answered and remind us of the limits of human understanding and influence. It is probably not possible to really know what my dog thinks—possibly the same applies to human beings—but this is no reason for showing any less concern or respect to an animal. It is the otherness of animals that appeals most to some contemporary artists. They are curious about “the absolute alterity of [the] neighbor,” as Derrida (2002:380) put it.1
In this chapter I present works by six artists from different countries to show different modes of investigating the minds of animals in art. Artists, just as other human beings, have to invent ways to interpret living animals (see Ullrich, Weltzien, and Fuhlbrügge 2008). The artists discussed here have developed methods to engage in art with animal agents. In order to select these six viewpoints, I asked, “What ways of approaching live animals can be identified in contemporary art?” I found three basic strategies that are useful to work with: observing an animal, imitating an animal, and adopting the point of view of an animal.
Observing an Animal
The first example is the video Vigia (Guard) by Brazilian artist Hugo Fortes (2005; see Ullrich and Weltzien 2009). It shows the face of a young dachshund occupying the entire screen, filling it with the animal’s presence (see figure 18.1). The dog is loosely wrapped in white sheets and thereby framed like a picture. The artwork claims this dog is worth the effort of attentive observation: it is forcing the viewer to attend to the face of this little dog, to an unspectacular moment of its life doing nothing. The artist calls the video a “dog performance by Brioche” and thereby not only informs us about the name of his dog but also assigns some agency to the dog, whose actions or rather whose inactivity determines the narration and the length of the video. She barely moves, so that the video almost seems like a film still. Almost nothing happens in the next twenty-five minutes: the dog falls asleep once for a few seconds, wakes up again, and finally leaves her bed, thereby ending the performance.
FIGURE 18.1. Hugo Fortes, Vigia (Guard), 2005. Video, 25 min. Courtesy of the artist.
The video enacts a fascinating dynamic. The face and especially the tired eyes of the dog that never meet the eyes of the beholder almost cast a spell on the viewer and thus involve him or her in the work. The viewer has ample time to meditate on his or her own way of looking and the different way of looking of the animal. He or she can notice the subtle movements of the pupils, the delicate vibration of the ears, and the gentle twitching of the nose. Brioche’s eyes are never fully closed, not even when she falls asleep. It is as if her eyes mock our eagerness to read something in the eyes of the other. In one segment of the film, she starts dreaming, evidenced in the wild fluttering of the eyelids and jerking of the nostrils. The longer we look, the more alien the dog becomes. We are excluded not only from her sensory experience—we do not even see what she sees—but also from her state of mind, her feelings or dreams. As John Berger (1980) has shown, to become involved with looking is the starting point of relating to the animal, to address the animal no matter if the animal itself offers some kind of interaction or not. Just by closely looking at the dog, we experience the supposedly familiar pet animal as strange and unfamiliar. The functions that are normally attributed to dogs, such as alertness, a quality implied in the title of the work, lose their significance: Brioche’s sleepy, indifferent gaze rules out any use of these functions and even any artistic appropriation of them. The video makes clear that Brioche may possibly see in a physiological way similar to the way a human being sees. Nevertheless, it demonstrates that Brioche sees the world through her own eyes and that we, as humans, will never be able to experience Brioche’s particular view of the world.
The philosopher Jacques Derrida was shocked when he realized that animals have their own perception of humans. He tells us about this moment of epiphany in his long essay “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” (Derrida 2002).2 By seeing his cat looking at him, he recognizes himself as somebody who is being looked at and realizes the equal meaning of the gaze for human as well as nonhuman animals. At this moment he becomes aware of his responsibility toward animals. Hugo Fortes’s video, in my view, also presents Brioche as a “significant other” with her own point of view, one who cannot simply be used as a symbol or metaphor reflecting human desires, interests, needs, or fears (see Ullrich 2008). Fortes’s dispassionate documentary of the gaze of his pet makes us aware of the fact that dogs have their own inner worlds, and it thereby limits any claim to the absoluteness of the anthropocentric gaze.
Albanian video artist Anri Sala (2003) has a different approach suggesting the same thing. In his five-minute film Time After Time, we see the black silhouetted image of a solitary horse surrounded by busy traffic on a highway in front of an undefined cityscape. We can only guess what happened or how the horse was trapped in this situation. The city noise sounds like a choppy sea and imparts a dynamic rhythm to the scene. Just like Fortes, Sala is working with a near total absence of camera movement, which has the effect of freezing scenes into paintings. Both artists are giving their full attention to seemingly marginal scenes. They both mainly observe, refusing to embed their images in a clear flowing narration. The static images enhance the perceptions and sensations of the viewer. This strategy transcends the purely physical being of the observed animal and opens a door to its inner state, even though we might not understand it or understand it correctly. The scene illumination changes constantly, and the camera alternates between a sharp and blurred focus so that the horse keeps losing its clear outline while two light sources in the background grow bigger and seem to come closer until they almost fill a big part of the screen. It is as if this camera method represents our own omnipotent stare—the omnipotent stare of a human being. By forcing us to keep looking, Sala might also imply that we owe a form of attentiveness, that we are too blinded by our own interests to see this animal.
Making this film, Anri Sala might also have asked himself heterophenomenological questions, such as “What is the perception of an approaching car like for an animal with a well-developed flight instinct?” In this video we are obviously not in the position of the horse, but we may see and hear the environment as if we are the horse. The headlights of cars, for example, become the menacing eyes of a predator. And this threat achieves such a central meaning that everything else loses importance. When our attention is drawn back to the horse, everything looks the same as before. The images are in a state of constant becoming and decomposition, creating a nightmarish atmosphere of transition. The fading focus of the camera might serve to simulate the weakening gaze of the horse, the slow attenuation of its visual senses, possibly foreshadowing its death.
Critics see the video as a “metaphor for a clash of nature and progress, and our inability to focus on the needs of our fellow creatures” (Linga 2007). Anri Sala forces the viewer to watch a scene in which nothing really happens, one that he or she might otherwise disregard. No car stops, nobody tries to help, not even the artist and certainly not the viewer of this film. Our inability to act makes us compassionate offenders. The horse fades out of focus again as if it tries to draw itself back from attention or to withdraw into its inner being by closing its eyes. It does not seem to be able to actively flee the situation. Everything becomes diffused and blurred: The horse becomes part of the night. Just before everything turns into blackness, a swelling noise from approaching trucks brings the animal back into focus. The headlights illuminate the scene abruptly and unfold the extent of the horse’s misery. It is famished, barely able to stand; its posture suggests resigned pain. It lifts its hind leg, possibly because it hurts or in a vain attempt at self-defense. As soon as the light, the noise, and thus the threat have passed, the setting of the camera changes again, and the night returns. The headlights save the horse from disappearing, but they also seem to harm the animal. The maltreated horse lifts its leg for a painfully long time, most likely because it is injured. By representing the horse in this way, Sala teaches the viewer a lesson in empathy. He or she can empathize with the horse’s bodily pain and its hopelessness.
Anri Sala’s camerawork gives a brief insight into the inner life of the horse by simulating the visual and auditory perceptions that it might experience. The video posits a heterophenomenological question: how does this horse feel (or how do we imagine it feels) when we consider the perceptions it probably experiences, its apparent pain and dead-end fate? We could give an answer by thinking about how helpless and hopeless we have felt when we were in pain and alone in a more or less hostile environment. Perhaps we can answer the question affectively by watching the video with empathy and analyzing the emotions we have while watching it. Artworks like these may generate concern or respect for the animal and by doing so could possibly lead to a sustained ethical relationship toward animals. (For discussion of heterophenomenology, see Radner 1994).
Imitating an Animal
Other artists try to come closer to the minds of animals not simply by observing animals but also by imitating them. The Austrian Arnulf Rainer, for example, wished to attain the state of mind of an animal in order to become a better artist (see Lenain 1997). He chose two chimpanzees, Lady and Jimmy, to be his teachers (see figure 18.2). Rainer declared the apes to be the coauthors of their common painting activities in 1979. Rainer tried to imitate Jimmy’s and Lady’s every movements and brush strokes as they painted together. He hoped thereby to attain the same clarity and intensity of abstraction as the chimps. The experiment could have been a success considering the belief that “the capacity to recognize the bodily feelings of another is related to one’s own imitative capacities” (see “Empathic” n.d.). If Rainer had observed closely the bodily movements and facial expressions of the chimpanzees, he probably would have gotten a sense of how the animal felt and would have been able to produce corresponding movements or expressions. His prejudices, however, about the way chimps are likely to behave obstructed this process: He assumes that they are wild animals that cannot control their emotions, so he tried to behave in this assumed manner and exaggerated his own “wild” behavior without paying close attention to his fellow painters. In fact, as Thierry Lenain has shown, apes can concentrate and control their actions and have to exert much less physical effort to fill a canvas with rhythm and energy than humans do.3
Figure 18.2. Arnulf Rainer, Parallel malaktion mit schimpansen (Parallel painting action with chimpanzee), 1979. Mixed media on photograph. Courtesy Jablonka Galerie, Cologne.
Film footage of the simultaneous painting performances reveal that the actions were irritating for the chimp (see Brödl 1979). At first one can see Jimmy painting—calm and absorbed—until Rainer’s agitated movements start to irritate him. Jimmy stops painting, infected with the nervous aggression of the human, and chases Rainer away from the canvas. Rainer soon abandoned the experiment. One reason he gave was that he never managed to attain the immediacy, unselfconscious spontaneity, and directness of his animal partners—in his mind, attributes of the ideal artist he admired in the chimps.
This artwork does not show much about the animal’s mind, even though it is intended to do so. This project reveals almost nothing about the creative animal, but a great deal more about Rainer’s view of himself and his idea of an artist. By focusing on the animal, he paradoxically delivered a commentary on human attitudes. Even if Rainer claimed that the chimp provided a model for the artist, and even if he considered his own capacities to be inferior, he nonetheless deployed artistic categories and methods that are distinctly human. He made the chimp an involuntary participant in a game that only humans understand, with the result that Jimmy basically functioned merely as an extra in Rainer’s meditative conversation with himself. Despite this fact, it is an interesting artwork because it challenges the dominant idea of artistic creativity as the result of individual inspiration, human genius, and intention. In other words, the work can be read as an attempt to unmask the illusory character of notions of artistic genius.
Other artists also believe that concepts of individual creativity are outdated. Collective creativity is the new paradigm, apparently applicable to the following work but ultimately not. Beginning in the 1980s, Berlin artist Katharina Meldner has worked on art in some ways collaboratively with ants (see Ullrich and Weltzien 2009). Ants, like some other insects, are often said to have a collective mind rather than individual minds. That makes it even more difficult to relate to them and imitate their behavior. But the imitation of individual ants was the generator of meaning making for Meldner. She traced in pencil with great precision the daily routes covered by ants, thus imitating their traces with her pencil (see figure 18.3), and wrote an accompanying report in which she recorded the weather and the insects’ behavior. To encourage them to enter the paper, she put sugary water on one spot on the paper. Sometimes she had to tease the ants out of their nests by spilling some sweet water. Then she operated in the same, almost pedantic, scientific way as an ethologist, even drawing up an ethogram (a category of all types of behavior of a species). However, she did not try to connect pencil drawings and notes but instead left everything open for a more poetic interpretation. She sought and found something in the traces of the insects and made it visible—made it “come into the picture”—without assigning any meaning to this “something.” She accepted that the traces have a meaning but did not propose what it might be. In her book When Species Meet, Donna Haraway (2007) reminds us that “there is no general answer to the question of animals’ agential engagement in meanings, any more than there is a general account of human meaning making” (p. 262). The traces of Meldner’s ants are not merely proofs of authenticity or extraneous by-products of the creative process; they are in fact the signature of the animal coauthors and constitute the work itself. This kind of attending to an animal and its alleged intentions and desires for its own sake paints a utopian picture of a world in which one can acknowledge animals without considering what use they might have for humans. Meldner meets the animal in a polite way, to borrow the words of Vinciane Despret (2008). Politeness to an animal according to Despret is given when a human-animal asks questions that are meaningful for the animal. That is how one gets more interesting, innovative, and surprising answers than if he or she does not even try to interact with the animal.
FIGURE 18.3. Katharina Meldner, Wege der ameisen (17.8.1998, 17:03–20:11 Uhr) (Ways/paths of the ants (08/17/1998, 5:03 pm-8:11 pm), 1998. Drawing 1 out of 3, pencil on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
Both imitating approaches result in fascinating artworks precisely because they keep the secret of animal minds. But it also seems that imitation is not the best strategy to really understand an animal. If an artist simply copies movements without insight into the motivations or the inner state of an animal, a real dialogue cannot develop. Haraway (2007) suggests that, in order to communicate with the animals, “we have to learn who they are in all their nonunitary otherness in order to have a conversation on the bias of carefully constructed, multisensory, compounded languages” (p. 263).
Adopting the Point of View of an Animal
The last strategy artists pursue in order to come close to the animal mind is adopting the point of view of an animal. Bruce Nauman uses the setting and the practices of behaviorism for his work Learned Helplessness in Rats (Rock and Roll Drummer) of 1988. The title of the work comes from a Scientific American article about experiments on rats and auditory stress (“Stressed Out” 1987). The term learned helplessness in the scientific literature describes a “psychological condition in which a human being or an animal has learned to believe that it is helpless in a particular situation. It has come to believe that it has no control over its situation and that whatever it does is futile. As a result the human being or the animal will stay passive in the face of an unpleasant or harmful situation, even when one does actually have the power to change its circumstances” (see “Learned Helplessness” 2010). Nauman wanted to bring his audience into the position of rats in a learned helplessness experiment. The installation is a closed system that can only be entered and left through one door. There is no daylight, and the whole setting is difficult to grasp at first sight. The audience is confronted with an empty yellow Plexiglas maze and a video projector showing three alternating video tracks of rats negotiating the maze. The maze is scanned in real time by a surveillance camera and a punk rock drummer is playing furiously and badly. The different, simultaneously changing, visual impressions in a rather dark environment and the almost unbearable noise disorient viewers. Because of the noise, they cannot hear themselves think anymore, as one visitor has put it. The viewer moves around in the system and experiences himself or herself as part of it. A viewer may lose his or her external point of view and gain a more internalized one. The causal connection between projection and monitors is not apparent from first visual impressions. The functioning of the system is not obvious. Nauman strategically irritates the viewer to keep him or her uncertain and uninformed. The viewer loses control over the experience, which generates feelings of subjection and anxiety. He or she experiences entrapment, isolation, intensified bodily awareness, excessive sensitivity, and feelings of being “overwhelmed.” The viewer becomes helpless because he or she cannot predict or anticipate the next stimulus—but, unlike a lab animal, the viewer is free to leave the gallery. Nauman’s exhibit supports research on learned helplessness proving that stress reactions can be similar in humans and nonhuman animals.
This artwork, however, does not really make one aware of states of animals’ minds in laboratory situations. It rather seems to me that, in situations of pure stress, confusion, and helplessness, animals, like humans, would lose the connection to the self (“I cannot hear myself think anymore”) and also the connection to other living beings, even to those in similar situations. The ability to empathize weakens as one’s own pain makes one less receptive to the pain of others. But, just by letting us experience stress and making us confused (an intention suggested by the title), this artwork reminds us of our own animal state and of the fact that we share not only physiological but also psychological and mental traits with animals.4
There have also been other attempts to explore the way an animal views the world. My last example is thus a composition involving nonhuman animal, human artist, and a series of cameras: American artist Sam Easterson, based in Toronto, has been collecting footage from the perspective of animals and also of plants since 1998. He equipped individuals from different species—birds, mammals, reptiles, insects—with cameras mounted on a lightweight helmet that he designed (see Easterson 2007, 2010). As the animals moved around, they filmed their world from their own perspectives.5 The idea was for each animal to determine the camera’s point of view and for the artist to be guided by a way of seeing that is not his own. Even though we always see the world only through our own eyes, the viewer nonetheless is allowed to imagine, for a few minutes, that his or her view of things is not the only one. One can ask if these animals are “just objects for the data-gathering subjects called people” or rather “symmetrical actors” with a similarity to humans (Haraway 2007:262). Certainly these video recordings are not intentional as are those of a human camera operator, but they are not pure objects either. But how close can one get to the animal’s mind by seeing life through a camera attached to its head? One is at least forced to confront a question posed by Daisie Radner (1994): “What would my experiences be like if I were in the subject’s circumstances and I had certain features in common with it?” (p. 392). Thus when seeing Easterson’s videos one might ask, “What would a human being feel like while digging the earth like a mole or crawling on the grass like an armadillo? Because of the forward-pointing motion of the wobbly footage, the viewer even has the chance to identify, just as when one adopts the persona of a videogame avatar (for examples of his videos, see Easterson 2007, 2010). The animals in Easterson’s videos claim their involvement by means of vertigo-inducing, often confusing pictures and odd-angle shots of their environment.
The artist hopes that his work “will help expand the public’s capacity to understand the natural environment—in empathetic terms” (quoted in Easterson 2010). For example, the viewer can experience some kind of exhaustion after watching the buffaloes run or the curious, restless point of view of a wandering wolf. Simply viewing the nervous and jumping camera movements may produce exhaustion as well. The viewer may gain some kind of bodily empathy with the animal, even though the more important senses of the animal are still inaccessible. The digital imagery sometimes even evokes other senses, although in an impoverished state. For example, as a predator, the wolf manifests qualities quite different from those of a human: He is always on the move, responding to scent stimuli a human would not even register, the rhythm of his movements determined by his sense of smell. The work does not, therefore, truly embrace the essential differentness of animals, since it disregards their specific senses, particularly ones that are not visual.
Sam Easterson also wanted to learn more about the animals’ habitats. His work enables the viewer to learn about animals’ lives in remote areas without human interference, giving the viewer a glimpse into the animals’ interaction with mates and other species and their encounters with rough landscape. He also hopes to increase the viewer’s sensibility to endangered species’ habitats and therefore lead viewers to make an impact on the animals that live there. Whereas in art animals are often treated as mere objects that are seen but do not themselves see, in this work the animals not only become the documentarians of their environment but also the subjects of their own gaze and actions. The very attempt to adopt the perspective of an animal contains an emancipatory function, because it means accepting that the animal has a point of view.
Both Nauman and Easterson aim at influencing the feelings of viewers. Their work encourages viewers to be involved with their senses. What matters, though, besides the fact that viewers experience interesting artworks, are the ethical obligations to animals that are the consequences of works such as those discussed. When we are put in the position of an animal, we might be more concerned about their well-being and we might feel empathy or respect for them. Using animals in art might thus have impact on animals in real life.
All the artists that have been presented engage with animals not as mythological figures nor symbols but as real, individual, living entities. Each in his or her own way demonstrates an interest in the mind of the animal. All the works help imagine possible nonhuman states of mind, with their alternative realities, and allow us to see that animals also interpret and invent their own worlds. But in none of them are the animals shown as subjects with whom one can communicate. Even though the visual sense is important in all the works, in none of them does the beholder ever meet the gaze of an animal. Even though the works affirm or empower the animal-other and accept animal agency, they do not consider animals to be relevant partners in real interactions. Artists still tend to talk about animals rather than try to talk with them, and, if they do, they do not risk the intersecting gaze. Two examples illustrate this common approach to animals that avoids every real bodily or mental engagement with a nonhuman being. In the video This Little Piggy … Fades to Pink (2003), by Australian artist Catherine Bell, Bell is caring for a piglet while wearing chain armour. And German artist Joseph Beuys, in the much earlier, famous performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), appeared to be explaining artworks to a dead animal.
It would be interesting to see more artworks that refrain from classifying animal experience with human categories and conceptions. Daisie Radner (1994) put it this way: “The question ‘What is the animal like?’ has to be answered in light of the animal’s own physiology and behavior. The key to making progress via Innenwelt heterophenomenology is to recognize that animal experiences are not just pale imitations of our own” (p. 403). Indeed, the investigation of color vision in birds and bees has shown that it is necessary to invent new terms and color categories for these animals, like, for example, bee violet or bird purple. Still, artworks that train one’s ability to attribute mental states to others and to understand that others have desires, knowledge, and intentions that are different from one’s own cultivate empathy. The display of animals’ difference and the implicit acceptance that animals’ experience is of equal value, even while they remain “other,” pave the way toward a new understanding and appreciation of animals.
Notes
References
Berger, J. 1980. “Why Look at Animals?” About Looking, pp. 1–26. New York: Pantheon
Beuys, J. 1965. How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Performance at Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf, November 26.
Brödl, H. 1979. Arnulf Rainer: Sternsucher [Arnulf Rainer: Star Seeker]. Germany: Baumhaus Film Brödl.
Derrida, J. 2002. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Trans. D. Wills. Critical Inquiry 28:369–418.
Despret, V. 2008. Paper presented at the workshop Animal Subjects Under Observation, July 10. Berlin: Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte.
Fischli, P., and D. Weiss. 2003. Will Happiness Find Me? London: Alberta.
Fortes, H. 2005. Vigia [Guard]. Video presented at Festival Prog:Me, Rio de Janeiro, July 18. Retrieved from http://www.progme.org/.
Haraway, D. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Komar, V., and A. Melamid. 2001. When Elephants Paint: The Quest of Two Russian Artists to Save the Elephants of Thailand. New York: Perennial.
Ladygina-Kohts, N. N. 2002 [1935]. Infant Chimpanzee and Human Child. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lenain, T. 1997. Monkey Painting. London: Reaktion.
Morris, D. 1966. The Biology of Art: A Study of the Picture-Making Behaviour of the Great Apes and Its Relationship to Human Art. London: Methuen.
Radner, D. 1994. “Heterophenomenology: Learning About the Birds and the Bees.” Journal of Philosophy 91:389–403.
Rollin, B. E. 2003. “Scientific Ideology, Anthropomorphism, Anecdote, and Ethics.” In S. J. Armstrong and R. G. Botzler, eds., The Animal Ethics Reader, pp. 67–74. New York: Routledge.
Schiller, P. 1951. “Figural Preferences in the Drawings of a Chimpanzee.” Journal of dComparative and Physiological Psychology 44:101–111.
“Stressed Out.” 1987. Scientific American 257, no. 5 (November): 30–32.
Ullrich, J. 2008. “Der Blick der Wächterin: Die Hündin Brioche in Hugo Fortes’ Video ‘Vigia’” [The View of the Guard: The Dog Brioche in Hugo Fortes’ Video “Vigia”]. In J. Ullrich, F. Weltzien, and H. Fuhlbrügge, eds., Ich, das tier: Tiere als Persönlichkeiten in der kulturgeschichte [I, the Animal: Animals as Personalities in the History of Civilization], pp. 253–268. Berlin: Reimer
Ullrich, J., and F. Weltzien. 2009. Tierperspektiven [Animal perspectives]. Berlin: Georg-Kolbe-Museum.
Ullrich, J., F. Weltzien, and H. Fuhlbrügge, eds. 2008. Ich, das Tier: Tiere als Persönlichkeiten in der Kulturgeschichte [I, the Animal: Animals as Personalities in Cultural History]. Berlin: Reimer.