Antennae

Issue 25 - Summer 2013 ISSN 1756-9575

Painting Animals
Giovanni Aloi – Painting Animals / Clive Adams – On the History of Symbolism of Animals in Art and Society / Barbara Larson – Ornithology and
Allegory: Walton Ford / Nikola Irmer – Promethean Boldness / Zhonghao Chen & Andre Krebber – The Materiality of Painting and the Suffering
of Animals / Jane O’Sullivan – Picturing the Pig in Pork and Porky / Matthew Chrulew – Two by Two / Scott Contreras-Koterbay – Ann Ropp &
Suzanne Stryk: Two Characters in Search of a Title I Julian Mohamed Kahouadji – The Neo-Pop Animal / Kari Weil – Heads or Tails: Gericault’s
Horses and the Painting of (Natural) History / Patricia J. Goodrich – Border Crossings

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 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 d’Anthenaise
Petra Lange-Berndt
Lisa Brown
Rikke Hansen
Chris Hunter
Karen Knorr
Rosemarie McGoldrick
Susan Nance
Andrea Roe
David Rothenberg
Nigel Rothfels
Angela Singer
Mark Wilson & Bryndís Snaebjornsdottir

Global Contributors
Sonja Britz
Tim Chamberlain
Concepción Cortes
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: Walton Ford, Tale of Johnny Nutkin, 2001, six color hardground and softground etching, aquatint, spit-bite aquatint,
drypoint on Somerset Satin paper, Edition of 50, 44 x 30 inches, 111.8 x 76.2 cm, Courtesy the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery

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 EDITORIAL
ANTENNAE ISSUE 25

Is painting the most troubled medium in contemporary art? The death of painting has
been announced with regularity at the beginning of each of the past four decades.
Nevertheless, a number of artists like Gerard Richter, Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, Jenny
Saville, Peter Doig, David Hockney, Chris Ofili, June Leaf, Cy Twombly and Joseph Condo,
just to name a few, have demonstrated through their creative reinventions of the medium’s
boundaries, scope, purpose and ambitions that the opposite may indeed be true. What
role has thus far painting played in the animal revolution led by the visual arts? What does
contemporary painting have to say or what can it do about our relationship with the non-
human?
This and the next issue of Antennae will be entirely dedicated to the practice of
painting—at times, animals will appear in the frame, at others they may not. The aim of this
exploration will not be that of attempting to draw conclusions on the matter, but to focus
on a specific medium in order to understand how medium specificity can aid, address,
envision or suggest new human-animal relations. This is an enquiry Antennae began with
the previous issue on animals and literature and it is one that will be continued over the
next few years over a number of instalments. In the case of painting, both issues will not
present a conceptualised selection of contributions but will instead aim to maintain a very
open mind about the intricacies that painting animals may unveil. Resisting a thematic
curatorial approach, both issues will however provide a departure from classical
representational tropes in which the non-human has for centuries been symbolically
objectified. How objectification is prevented or subverted in panting is something the
selected works and texts featured in these instalments will aim at mapping.
To open this first instalment, I have composed an image essay, which gathers
together a number of rather well known (and some obscure) paintings that are not usually
productively understood from a human-animal studies informed perspective. I have
deliberately ignored some classics that have already been at length discussed by myself
and other colleagues in previous publications (Stubb’s Whistlejacket being one of the most
prominent examples). Thereafter, this first instalment deliberately goes back and forth
between figuration and abstraction, and past and present in order to provide as many
different perspectives as possible.
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

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 CONTENTS
ANTENNAE ISSUE 25

5 Painting Animals
This image essay consists of a selection of eight paintings from mainstream art history. Some are extremely well known, some are considered masterpieces,
whatever that may entail, other are a little less popular with wide audiences. None of the selected works have been painted through a human-animal studies
lens, however all, as it will be argued, can provide interesting insights in human-animal relations as unearthed by the medium of painting.
Text by Giovanni Aloi

22 On the History and Symbolism of Animals in Art and Society

Director for the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Clive Adams proposes a concise account of the history of animal representation from the Palaeolithic to
our time. It very much is a crash-course, for those who have yet to read the key texts or need to refresh their memory. A great opener for our double issue on painting!
Text by Clive Adams

27 Ornithology and Allegory: Walton Ford

Walton Ford has had a strong interest in art and the natural world since childhood. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, he is the recipient of several national
awards and honors including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His first major one–man show was at the Brooklyn
Museum in 2006. After living in New York City for more than a decade, Ford and his family have settled in the southern Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts.
Text by Barbara Larson

33 Promethean Boldness
The store-room of the Natural History Museum Berlin, houses an amazing collection of birds, witness to the collection mania of the 19th century. To be confronted with this
plethora of specimens- dead animals, eerily life-like - is quite an unsettling experience. The paintings and drawings pursue a poetic potential of natural history that is inherent
in the practice of collecting and scientific research- the accompanying desire to revivify the mass of dead animals which were categorized and to create a self-delusional
communion with the animals.
Text by Nikola Irmer

37 The Materiality of Painting and the Suffering Animal

André Krebber looks at the work of Zhonghao Chen in which the relationship between material and content, meat and decay is explored through painting. In this particular
instance, Krebber focuses on a series dedicated to paintings of chicken for the purpose of highlighting the relevance and currentness of painting in human-animal studies
debates.
Text by Zhonghao Chen & André Krebber

46 Picturing the Pig in Pork and Porky

I had recently offered a lecture on animals in children’s film, and decided to work up an article on pigs in the cinema – well, not actually in the cinema - but on the big screen.
I wanted to consider a selection of “family” feature films, and the familiar blind spot between the affectionate pig tales produced in the cut and splice of the editing suite, and
those rendered in the slicing and dicing at the delicatessen.
Text by Jane O’Sullivan

50 Two by Two
July 6th, 2007. A procession of black-cloaked figures in animal masks parades down Bourke Street mall. Giraffes, elephants, pigs, wolves – or what passes for them – follow
Noah through central Melbourne, much to the delight or dismay of passersby. Their white-bearded leader encourages them along in booming voice, staff in one hand and
stereo in the other. After all, the animal apocalypse needs a soundtrack, too.
Text by Matthew Chrulew

55 Two Characters in Search of a Title

Collaborations between artists have been a part of the process of making art since art first started being made. Whether at a lower level of the conceptual and creative
process, when many of the contributing artists should more rightly be described as assistants rather than real participants, or at a higher level, when a balance of the work
and creativity is evident, there have been many examples of art produced by two or more people that have benefited from multiple insights and inputs.
Text by Scott Contreras-Koterbay

62 The Neo-Pop Animal

Mohamed Kahouadji was born in Algeria in 1979. He has two-headed passion, being painter and house surgeon. By night, he’s a passionate painter spending the remainder
of his time creating vibrant neo-pop inspired works. The work of Mohammed Kahouadji oscillates between humor and irony. Constantly playing with the famous personalities
from our society– rock stars, politicians, cartoon characters, but still these paintings are never mere caricatures, let alone the mechanical reproduction of a situation.
Images by Julian Mohamed Kahouadji

66 Heads or Tails: Gericault’s Horses and Painting of (Natural) History

The horse, it might be claimed, is one the few, if not the only animal who has, throughout the ages, been deemed worthy of historical representation. In visual records of
heroic action, the horse appears either as a literal support, carrying men into battle, or as a “symbolic animal” who figures the defiant forces of nature that man has
harnessed to his control. As in art history, so in the first natural histories, horses were placed at the top of the animal kingdom — closest to man through their service to him
or their ability to reflect his power and nobility, though assuredly distanced from him as part of the natural world.
Text by Kari Weil

82 Border Crossings
Border Crossings crosses artistic disciplines of painting and poetry. In the process lines are blurred between the conscious and subconscious, and ultimately between others and
self. What began as my creating a series of paintings in response to particular poems has led to writing poems in response to each painting, creating a cycle rather than
series. The paintings themselves are a combination of layered Venetian plaster, poured acrylics and India inks. The poured bodies themselves resemble rivers and maps.
What seemed to be a simple exercise has become an exploration of not only my connection to those creatures, but also to the multiplicity and essence of who I am.
Text and Images by Patricia J. Goodrich

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 PAINTING ANIMALS
an image essay
by
GIOVANNI ALOI

This image essay consists of a selection of eight paintings from

mainstream art history. Some are extremely well known, some are
considered masterpieces, whatever that may entail, other are a little
less popular with wide audiences. None of the selected works have
been painted through a human-animal studies lens, however all, as it
will be argued, can provide interesting insights in human-animal
relations as unearthed by the medium of painting. There is no ultimate
conclusion or final statement to this essay. The beauty of image essays
lies in the transcending of constrictions typical of other forms of
academic writing. This allows readers to make their own connections,
follow their own paths through texts and images and ultimately draw
their own conclusions. I consider the texts accompanying the paintings
as a gathering of observations aiming at problematizing the
conventional art historical readings of these paintings which most
readers will be familiar with.

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 Vincent Van Gogh
Long Grasses With
Butterflies
1890

Butterflies have been amply represented in still-life painting during the

seventeenth and eighteenth century protestant Europe. The symbolic
signification of butterflies in art had been previously cemented by centuries of
mythological and religious appropriation which attributed to the insect a
univocal association with the soul. Van Gogh’s Long Grasses with Butterflies
significantly departs from such tradition, symbolically freeing butterflies from pre-
inscribed signification. What is particularly interesting about the appearance of
butterflies in this painting by Van Gogh lies in the artist’s ability to portray the most
fleeting, light and delicate of flying insects through one of the most materically
heavy and synthetic approaches to the painted surface ever seen in the 1800s.
Van Gogh’s butterflies are minute and pale in colouring. They possibly reference
cabbage whites, and like all other elements on this canvas, are outlined in a
heavy black streak of glossy oil paint. This mediatic rendition is one that
historically would have been considered implausible by classical artists. For
centuries, watercolour and thinly veiled oil paint had been preferred for the
painting of butterflies (and flowers alike), but Van Gogh’s approach, refuses that
prescription. His take on oil paint is the equivalent of a perceptive filter, a
personal interpretation of the seen through a subjective materiality-relationship
between seen and painted.
The artist worked on this canvas during his stay at the asylum in St-Remy
(1989-90). Upon becoming aware of such detail, the painting instantly lends itself
to obvious symbolic readings in which the butterfly may become once again
subjugated by religious symbolism. Within such context, they may come to
represent freedom of the soul. However, like for many other paintings by Van
Gogh, the symbolic may be here an elusively conjured shadow of something
else altogether, something caught between his own approach to his realist
verism, a realism deliberately compromised by awkwardly photographic
croppings, omissions and allusions. Like most other works by the artist, this is a
painting from life. He painted the unkept grounds of the asylum in which he was
confined. The grounds may not have presented him with much more animal life,
nor broader landscapes to paint, and it is perhaps through these restrictions that
the attention of the painter turned to butterflies. They no longer are symbolically
charged as incarnation of the soul. In this painting, butterflies appear equal to
the blades of grass upon which they fly, rendered similar by the same black
outline that defines them. They become part of a disinterested representation of
nature in which disinterest is a paradoxically positive value. There is no desire to
own anything in this image, neither the blades of grass nor the butterflies, which
fly amongst them. An anonymous patch of unkept green and some non-exotic
looking butterflies are here summoned as the reminder of the importance of
what is routinely overlooked by the hustling and bustling of the world, just like the
unstable in the asylum—the animal and the mad.
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Vincent Van Gogh
Long Grasses With Butterflies, oil on canvas, 65 x 81 cm, 1890

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 Jozef Mehoffer
The Strange Garden
1902-1903

The Strange Garden by Polish artist Jozef Mehoffer also proposes an unusual
representational choice involving a flying insect. Here it’s a dragonfly to quite
literally take centre stage in an unprecedented compositional solution that sees
the insect zooming in, towards the viewer. The painting has been widely
interpreted as a symbolist one; one in which the implied symbolism mostly
remains mysterious. The work was painted at the very beginning of the twentieth
century, well before the surrealist influence of the mid-twenties made these
seemingly visionary appearances of out of place objects onirically plausible.
Therefore, how are we to understand the presence of the dragonfly in the upper
part of the canvas? What role does it play within the signifying paradigm
proposed by the image? In a 2009 review of a show held at Tate Britain in which
the painting was included, art critic Brian Sewell, notorious champion of classical
art, referred to the dragonfly as “monster”. Although typical of Sewell’s dismissive
attitude towards anything that transgresses stiff, classical canons, his comment
seemed to hint at the presumed perspectival incorrectedness of the insect’s
placement within the scene. This misplacement made the insect appear a
giant, a fantastical creature hovering above the painter’s family portrayed in the
painting. However, what may be more interesting, would be to read the
presence of the dragonfly at the top of the canvas as an attempt to summon
the fleetingness of one of those moments in which, as we look at a scene, an
insect irreverently, briefly hovers in front of our eyes. Should we indeed be
confronted with such instance, we would justify the size of the insect in relation to
the scene behind it. In such situation, the ‘insolent disturbance’ provoked by the
insect somewhat pierces the screen of our predictable patterns of perception.
The impromptu intrusion of the insect in the scopic field disrupts the consumption
of the image we were gazing at, momentarily derailing the relationship between
us and the world around us.
Who are we supposed to be as we stand in front of this canvas? Another
dragonfly engaged in a courting dance with the one we see in front of us? Or a
bird attempting to catch the insect in flight. Or could we be a fly or a mosquito,
a prey the dragonfly is about to catch?

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Jozef Mehoffer
The Strange Garden, oil on canvas, 217 x 208 cm, 1902-03

9
Henri Rousseau
Surprised!
1891
Another painting which received harsh criticism due to the apparent
implausibility of its perspectival construction is Surprised!, by early modern painter
Henri Rousseau. Rousseau, notoriously composed his images through an
assemblage-like technique which heralded the invention of collage, anticipated
the circulation of images in art which characterised pop art in the 1960s, and
introduced the idea of cut and paste in art. Rousseau used to spend time at the
Jardin des Plantes in Paris where he would sketch the leaves of tropical plants. He
would then, visit the adjacent zoo and nearby natural history museum for the
purpose of appropriating animal and vegetal forms for his paintings. Rousseau
was a dreamer; one that apparently never left Paris but that at the same time
routinely escaped from it through the construction of his own fantasy-tropics
world. Although widely considered a naïve painter, for he never professionally
studied art, his approach to painting could not be said to be entirely individualist.
It is indeed evident that a form of Primitivism sharing substantial overlappings to
the Orientalist discourses of the time, enabled the artist to produce a number of
stylistically challenging, flat-looking canvases in which nature is constructed
through a nominalist approach. In 1891, artist Felix Vallotton, reviewing the
painting, claimed that the tiger was surprising its prey. However, I’d like to suggest
that the circumstances are here very different and that it is the tiger itself to be
surprised by the sudden appearance of a lightning in the sky. This revision of the
narrative provides us with a different standpoint from which to understand the
painting.
Although most of his other works rely on a typically Western sensualisation
of the exotic, in Surprised!, (the only one which received a half-decent review
during the artist’s life-time), Rousseau envisioned a moment of vulnerability in the
life of a tiger—one in which the animal is allegedly surprised by lightning. No
longer and exclusively a fierce man-eater of the far East, the tiger is caught in a
moment of unglamorous spontaneity which dissipates the rhetorical, morally
charged spell which taxidermy had characterised as the only representational
trope for wild and exotic animals. It’s this suspension, the audacity of capturing
the split second in which lightning strikes, that which catches the tiger unawares,
that makes this painting of the tiger so intriguing.
The image could almost be compared to one of those awkward
snapshots of animals which Montagu Browne, writer of Artistic and Scientific
Taxidermy and Modelling (published in 1896), harshly criticized. Those snapshots,
just like Rousseau’s painting, reveal the wild animal in a not-so-elegant moment
of clumsiness, which undermines its great competency within the natural world.
This intrinsically essential nature of the beast was of paramount importance to the
integrity of the aura of the hunter. A clumsy or scared tiger would dilute the
heroized aura the hunter acquired through the killing of a fierce animal, one
which should constantly be hyper-aware of its surrounding, much more than
man could ever be, and one which can be captured or killed only by the
dexterity, bravery and lethal strength of patriarchal force.
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Henri Rousseau
Surprised!, oil on canvas, 130 x 162 cm, 1891

11
 Gerhard Richter
Tiger
1965

In Richter’s Tiger, the picture plane is occupied by the body of a tiger,

traversing it from left to right; the body of the animal is surrounded by grasses,
seemingly immersed in a natural environment, more or less like Rousseau’s. As
a painting of a photograph, the work proposes a similar instance to what
Foucault found exciting about the frenzy that surrounded the popularization of
photography, the ‘freeing of the image’ of the nineteenth century, which he
claimed, was revived in the pop art work of Gerard Fromanger. The rendering
of an appropriated black and white photograph which through Richter’s
characteristic blur-treatment has acquired irreversible levels of ambiguity
become an event transcending the original photographic image. The
deliberate erasure of detail makes it impossible to assess whether we may be
presented with the image of a tiger that was alive when the photograph was
taken, or by a taxidermy mount set in a diorama instead. Tiger, proposes an
un-classical materiality of painting through Richter’s peculiar approach to the
blurring of surfaces. The blur, a strictly technical photographic effect, is here
rendered through the smearing of paint on the surface of the canvas: the
ultimate result is neither strictly photographic, nor exclusively painterly. Richter’s
relentless undoing of detail, in this specific case, produces an anti-aesthetic of
wildlife photography, which capitalizes on the debasement of the objectifying
certainties imposed by classical representation. This transforms a rather banal
wildlife image into a questioning entity, inviting the viewer in a negotiation with
the compromised image; a negotiation that challenges us to think of the tiger
beyond the certitude imposed by classical, objectifying representations.

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Gerhard Richter
Tiger, oil on canvas,140 x 150 cm, 1965

13
Jan Brueghel the Elder
The Entry of the Animals
into Noah’s Ark
1613

The certitude with which classical panting ordered the world within rationally
structured illusory spaces in which a positivist light enabled knowledge of the
seeable was crystallized through a recurrence of repetitive iconographical
choices. One of the most interesting examples of such practice, which shaped
the painterly gaze over four hundred years, is provided by the paradise
paintings executed in the late Renaissance period by Brueghel the Elder. In
these religiously charged paintings, all species of animals, predators and preys,
nocturnal and diurnal, domestic and wild, European and exotic, appeared
congregated together in peaceful and lush landscapes. The impressive
prominence of detail with which each specimen is rendered, suggests that
Brueghel must have studied his animals from live/preserved bodies. Anatomical
accuracy is employed in the painting of all animals. At times, a sense of
anthropomorphism pervades some of his animal representations. This usually
applies to his mammals: horses, lions… Brueghel’s paradise paintings can be
understood as the visual synthesis of different practices, which emerged
through the Renaissance period. The increasing popularity of the cabinets of
curiosities throughout Europe’s aristocracy and the gathering of live animals in
kingly menageries, both must have impacted on the emergence of such
representational tropes in which animals are gathered in a non-natural
proximity. The utopian harmony presented by the scene is one in which the
omnipresent power of God enables an heavenly vision. It is in the images by
Brueghel, images produced for aristocracy, that god-like kingly power can at
least representationally cast a spell over the dystopian creation.

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Jan Brueghel the Elder
The Entry of the Animals Into Noah’s Ark, oil on panel, 54.6 x 83.8 cm, 1613

15
 Pablo Picasso
Guernica
1937
A fragment of the dystopian nature of the modern world was rendered by Picasso
in Guernica. One of the most famous paintings in the history of art, Guernica is a
politically charged statement against war and the atrocities war entails. As it is well
known, the painting was Picasso’s outraged response to the bombing of the
Basque village of northern Spain, by the same name. The events which razed it to
the ground on the 26th of April 1937, were the result of an Italo-German, Francisco
Franco-regime supported experiment aiming at perfecting the practice of areal
bombing on civilians, something that will become one of the most destructive and
horrific features of the then imminent World War II. Guernica famously addressed
the widespread conception that abstract painting could not be political; for it
could only be in the figurative realm of realism that significant form could
effectively produce meaning. Picasso’s ‘on the edge’ approach to the figurative
incorporated abstraction as an emotively charged force, one that semantically
increases the pathos in the image, emphasizing the absence of order, rationality
and logic in the image. Incorporating but simultaneously reinventing an
expressionist approach, the distortion of form acquires the ability of rendering pain,
that pain which cannot be summoned by the presence of tears or a desperate
facial expression. In Guernica, abstraction and figuration are carefully balanced in
a dialectic relationship, which is essential to the heroization of the modern
tragedy.
As it is well known, animals and humans are pictured together in this
apocalyptic scene. Representationally, they are equal to each other. However,
Picasso’s relationship to animals in his paintings has more regularly been
associated with the totemic. Here, the horse and bull, according to Picasso are
intended just as what they are, a horse and a bull. We could nonetheless safely
argue that they are not, and that they cannot simply be that, in a painting. It is of
course impossible to fight back the symbolic readings to which these animal
bodies lend themselves in this context. Both are animals that have historically
become essential part of the Spanish corrida, a struggle between life and death,
a confrontation of powers, a final encounter for one or the other party involved.
Between the bull and the horse however, a third animal appears. It is only
outlined on the wall behind the scene and with its elusive figuration it contributes to
the negation of a coherently, classically structured, perspectival space
construction. It is painted as if it simultaneously could be perching on a table, but
also appears as drawn on the wall as a simple mural within the painting itself. It
has been understood by many to be a dove, a recurrent symbol in Picasso’s work,
an animal representation clearly subjugated by the classical, religious symbolism
of peace. However, here the dove is presented as equally tortured and wounded
as the other animals and humans involved in the representation. Far from other
serene representations of this animal in Picasso’s work, this dove presents peace as
being harmed through the alluded physicality of the pain that is pervading the
figures in the image.
The painting proposes intensity in the place of rhetoric. It proposes an
equalizing level of atrocity in front of which humans and animals are brought
together by the worst of humanity’s actions.
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Pablo Picasso
Guernica (detail), oil on canvas, 349 x 776 cm, 1937

17
 Francis Bacon
Three Studies for Figures
at the Base of a
Crucifixion
1944

It is well known that Francis Bacon interrupted a career as interior designer after seeing
Picasso’s paintings and that therefore, part of his works can be understood as a
furthering of specific parts of Picasso’s own painting project. As a painter of intensities,
Bacon further contributed to the blurring of the boundaries between the abstract and
representational, enabling the development of biomorphic entities merging the
animal and the human. In Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, we are
confronted with those whom metaphorically experienced unutterable suffering
through the witnessing of the death of Christ. In this instance the impossibility of
discerning between the human and animal is compelling, perhaps much more than
in Picasso. This pain obliterates the orders of the living in the representational trope. It is
such an overriding force, that it renders any distinction between human and animal
debased in the absence of language. The only visible and distinguishable trace of
the human in the proposed hybridic forms is the open mouth, one that according to
Bataille is nonetheless ‘bestial’—an opening through which a closeness to the animal
can appear and be experienced. None of the three figures bears the ability to see.

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Francis Bacon
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, oil on canvas, 94 x 73.7 cm each, 1944

19
Cy Twombly
Bacchus
2006

Animals and humans also indissolubly merge in the Bacchus series by anti-heroic
abstract artist Cy Twobly whose distinctive stylistic language provided an alternative
to the grand and dramatic gestures of abstract expressionist artists such as Rothko
and Pollock. Unlike his famous uncertain scribbles, Bacchus however seems to owe
much more to an abstract expressionist gesturalism. The hooping visible on canvas
is the trace of the artist’s own jumping in front of it—the resultant trace of
incontrollable euphoria or an attempt to escape the painterly plane; this remains
unclear and perhaps unnecessary to ascertain. The redness of the pigment on the
canvas, with its random dripping instantly echoes the fluidity of blood, alluding to a
violent murder, a spilling of blood caused by a tremendous force. The hooping
however derails this straightforward, negative reading of the painted surfaces
through a sintagmatic repetition, an echoing evoking life, not death, or maybe the
involvement of both, but the exclusivity of neither.
It is upon giving further consideration the title of the series, Bacchus, that
these red traces are illuminated by the mythological context of the bacchanalia,
the nocturnal wild and mystic rites led by the God of wine. Here, Twombly entirely
bypasses the tradition of figuratively representing bacchanalia (see Titian amongst
many) for the purpose of using the medium of painting in the aim of summoning
the intensity of revelry in which blood and wine blended through the annihilation of
reason. These canvases take us to the edge of representation. The sacrifice of
animals and humans alike, the frenzy of sexual excitement and the terror of death,
the impossibility of distinguishing between one or the other proposes a becoming, a
flight from the known of being human and being animal. Caught up in the extreme
forces of absolutes, which can only be found in ultimate violence, a freedom is
released. This however is not to be understood literally, for language has here
abandoned the representational trope as far as it is possible. The title of the
painting, simultaneously infiltrates language in the experiencing of these canvases,
but ultimately releases any anchorage in the proposal of the event, one that traces
of red paint unleash on the viewer.

20
Cy Twombly
Bacchus, oil on canvas, 310 x 410 cm, 2006

21
 ON THE HISTORY AND
SYMBOLISM OF
ANIMALS IN ART AND
SOCIETY
Director for the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Clive Adams proposes a concise account of
the history of animal representation from the Palaeolithic to our time. It very much is a crash-course, for those who
have yet to read the key texts or need to refresh their memory. A great opener for our double issue on painting!
Text by Clive Adams

T
hroughout history, when civilisations weapons. These hunters decorated the walls
become distressed through revolution – of caves and made sculptures based on the
political, industrial or agricultural – there images of such animals because of the
has been a special need for society importance they had to their lives, and to
and the arts to re-assess our celebrate those animal’s qualities they most
relationship to nature. The first landscape admired. Such subject matter was common
paintings appeared in Rome during the first in Assyrian, Egyptian, Chinese and Eurasian
century B.C. during a period of environmental cultures and it led, in turn, to the rich tradition
stress: the over-cultivation of land and of animal imagery in medieval art.
deforestation. Such murals gave the The extraordinary medieval illustrated
impression of being surrounded by pleasant manuscripts called ‘bestiaries’ were a
groves when, in reality, few existed. At the collection of stories based on ancient Greek
start of this millennium, many of our greatest texts, each of which used the qualities of an
concerns centre around issues involving animal or plant to represent Christian
animals; new genetic technologies and viral allegories for moral and religious
epidemics in relation to those we have instruction. Sculptures and church carving
domesticated, loss of habitat and species were also based on such symbolism well into
depletion in the wild ones. It should therefore the Renaissance. Sometimes the significance
come as no surprise that there now exists a of images common to several beliefs
rich plurality of new artistic practice, diverged; the snake, a symbol of temptation
exhibitions and books, which look at animals and eroticism in the West, signifying the
and what they mean to us today. renewal of life in Far Eastern iconography.
From the earliest times and in different The Old Testament also drew upon
cultures, our sentiments towards animals have earlier mythology and provided a rich source
been focussed in art.[1] In the later of subject matter for Western artists. Indeed,
Palaeolithic period, around 30,000 – 10,000 Genesis – specifically the Edenic narrative
B.C., much of Europe was peopled by and the story of the Flood – provided the
nomads who preyed on the migratory herds theological foundations on which Western
of reindeer, bison and mammoth on which civilisation justified the subordination of other
they depended for food, clothing, tools and species to man’s needs.

22
 George Stubbs
The Lincolnshire Ox, oil on panel, 1790, 67.9 x 99 cm, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

In Tudor and Stuart England every animal was Tennyson’s poem ‘In Memoriam’ – with the
thought to serve some human purpose, if not often quoted line:
practical, then moral or aesthetic. Savage
beasts were necessary instruments of God’s ‘Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
wrath, left among us ‘to be our With ravine, shriek’d against his creed’ [4]
schoolmasters’;[2] they fostered human
courage and were thought to provide useful was published in 1850 but sections relating to
training for war. evolution were written at least six years earlier,
The distinction of man from the beasts, predating Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’
central to the teaching of Descartes and a (1859). Unfortunately, Tennyson’s words now
preoccupation of seventeenth and flavour our sense of what Darwin actually
eighteenth century intellectuals, helped to means by ‘the survival of the fittest’, which was
justify hunting, livestock domestication and not to assert the ‘natural’ rights of the
meat eating and it also provided an predator, but merely to state that those
analogue for the subjugation of other races, species which best adapted would be the
women and the poor.[3] Anthropologists now most likely to survive.
suggest that human thought tends to project Today, science teaches us to question
upon the natural world – particularly animals – the wisdom establishing models of social
values derived from human society and then behaviour based on our incomplete
serve them back as a reinforcement of the understanding of predation and co-operation
human order, justifying some particular in nature. The biologist Richard Dawkins
arrangement on the grounds that is more maintains that although animal nature is
‘natural’. indeed altruistic and co-operative, it follows

23
from, rather than contradicts, selfishness at others in the new Reptile House at the
the genetic level: animals are sometimes Zoological Gardens, Regents Park, where
nice and sometimes nasty, since either can industrially heated water and plate glass
suit the self-interest of genes at different made it possible for the most exotic and
times.[5] dangerous snakes from around the world to
The Neolithic period saw the be safely seen, or to London Zoo, where apes
introduction of farming and the raising of were dressed up in nursery clothes and made
domesticated animals, a new way of life to have tea parties.[9]
which appeared sometime before 6,000 ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell, first
B.C.. The ‘pastoral’ tradition, itself largely published in 1945, and notably illustrated by
based on Roman mythology, was perfectly Ralph Steadman – follows another tradition of
expressed in the paintings of Claude Lorrain animal symbolism in literature which can be
whose paintings were eagerly collected by traced back to the fables of Aesop in the sixth
the ‘improving’ landowners of the eighteenth century B.C. Written at a time when
century Britain, for whom Claude’s images of agricultural issues were very much to the
Arcadia served as a model for their country fore,[10] Orwell’s allegory is one which tells of
estates and, beyond that, a new domesticated animals who take over a farm
empire. From the Greeks came the from their human oppressor. At a deeper
allegorical use in Christian teaching of the level, it expresses disillusionment with the
‘good shepherd’ as representing Christ, the outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution which
‘flock’ as His people and the members of the seemed, to Orwell, to simply replace one
Church as ‘the sheep of His tyrannical system of government in Russia with
pasture’, becoming part of an important another.
visual tradition in the hands of English artists, In today’s world, one is tempted to find
in particular William Blake and his in nature any lesson one wants - the industry
followers.[6] Both traditions help to construct of the ant or the indolence of the cat, the
the aesthetic concept of the ‘green and energy–squandering, rock-star lifestyle or the
pleasant land’ we still expect our countryside hummingbird, or the freeloading of the
to be, whatever the economic realities. cuckoo[11] – but, without Aesop or Orwell, how
Based on the experience of breeding does one choose?
horses for racing and hunting, livestock Since the Seventies we have found
breeding and improvement in England came animal analogies re-emerging in the urban
shortly after the middle of the eighteenth ‘jungle’, with its ‘bull’ and ‘bear’ markets, ‘fat
century to feed an expanding population in cat’ executives and ‘tiger’ economies whilst
the new industrial cities. In contrast to the marketers have used lions, tigers and eagles
‘picturesque’, where bony cattle often to glorify the ‘natural’ qualities of speed,
appeared as incidental details in the power and competition.[12] Today, we seem
landscape, there now emerged a market in more conscious of the need to control the
the commissioning of paintings celebrating influence of such aggressive images and the
the new breeds – prize bulls and fat analogies that we draw from the natural world
showground oxen – by artists such as George are subtly changing. The quality that Esso
Garrard and Thomas Weaver. [7] Beef, already now expect us to associate with their tiger is
a national symbol from the sixteenth century, ‘watchfulness’ – over forecourt prices – and
henceforth became as infallible sign of Richard Rogers’ re-working of the imperial
Englishness and its consumption a national eagle for his new Reichstag building in Berlin
duty.[8] transforms it into a far more palatable ‘fat
The Victorian era was one of hen’. The media coverage of the war in Iraq
acquisition and sentiment in both art and was rich in all the usual imagery of ‘hawks’,
nature. By the 1830s it would have been ‘doves’ and, surprisingly, a ‘poodle’.
possible to walk from exhibitions at the Royal During the early years of the last
Academy or the new National Gallery to century a preoccupation with realism

24
 Franz Marc
The Large Blue Horses, oil on canvas, 1911, 105.7 x 181.1 cm, Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis.

increasingly became the prerogative of the pathos of an unrecognising, imperfectly-

photographers and a new understanding of met gaze, ‘The animal scrutinizes him (man)
form was explored in painting and sculpture across a narrow abyss of non-
by artists as Fraz Marc and Constantin comprehension… The man too is looking
Brancusi, drawing on animal subjects. During across a similar, but not identical, abyss….’
the Sixties and Seventies, at a time of
significant social change, artists started to Endnotes
address nature in new ways through
‘environmental’ art, and live animals entered
the galleries in performance and installations [1] For a historical overview see Barbara C. Matilsky Ecologies,
New York 1992.
by such artists as Joseph Beuys and Jannis
Kounellis. [2] The remark was made by James Pilkington, the
Over the past decade, artists have Elizabethan bishop.
increasingly again drawn on symbolic ideas [3] Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing
involving animals: the immediate subject of Attitudes in England 1500-1800, London, 1983.
those ideas being not the animal itself, but
[4] Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam, section LVI, 1850.
rather the artist using the animal imagery to
make a statement about human identity. [5] Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, London 1998,
Artists’ use of new technology can help Chapter 9.
us to visualise the empathy we feel to [6] See essay by Christiana Payne, Love, Labour & Loss: 300
animals, rather than fear that keeps us Years of British Livestock Farming in Art, Carlisle, 2002, pp. 13-
apart. John Berger, in ‘Why look at animals?’, 31.
the opening piece of his 1980 [7] Ibid. essay by Juliet Clutton-Brock and Stephan J. G. Hall,
collection About Looking writes about an pp. 33-51.
absence of contact which is epitomized by
[8] Ben Rogers, Beef and Liberty. Roast Beef, John Bull and
the English Nation, London, 2003.

25
[9] Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, London, 1996,
pp.560-570.

[10] Graham Harvey, The Killing of the Countryside, London,

1998.

[11] Evan Eisenberg, The Ecology of Eden, New York, 1998,

pp. 301-3.

[12] Philip Mirowski, National Images in Economic Thought,

Cambridge, 1994.

Clive Adams’ career has spanned almost 40 years, starting at

Arnolfini, Bristol in the 1970s, during which time he has
curated dozens of contemporary and historical exhibitions
aimed at addressing our relationship to nature. Recent major
exhibitions include ‘Love, Labour and Loss: 300 Years of British
Livestock Farming in Art’ for Carlisle and Exeter museums and
‘The Impossible View?’ for The Lowry, the latter winning the
Museums and Heritage Award for best UK temporary
exhibition. In 2006 he established, and is currently Director of,
the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World. This
attracted around 40,000 visitors/participants a year until
2013, when it moved to the Campus of the University of
Exeter. In 2009 he was appointed a Fellow of the Royal
Society of Arts.
26
 ORNITHOLOGY AND
ALLEGORY:
WALTON FORD

Walton Ford has had a strong interest in art and the natural world since childhood. A graduate of the Rhode Island
School of Design, he is the recipient of several national awards and honors including fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His first major one–man show was at the
Brooklyn Museum in 2006. After living in New York City for more than a decade, Ford and his family have settled in
the southern Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts.
Text by Barbara Larson

W
alton Ford uses the visual closer inspection, secondary creatures or
language of early naturalists to activities also claim our attention, with a hint
comment on the various ways in of dark narrative. Animals and birds might be
which humans see animals and beset by other creatures or engaged in
birds through their own cultural destructive behavior within a species group.
lenses. That includes the perspective of the Because many of Ford’s creatures are now
scientists themselves, their interpretation of extinct, there has been a tendency to
fauna to mass audiences, and the interpret his work as a strident chastisement of
formidable legacy of their ideas on human destruction of habitat. In fact, his
subsequent generations. Some of Ford’s works are far more complex than that: Some
sources have been primate dioramas at the of his prints and watercolors complicate
American Museum of Natural History in New received ideas about nature and the
York with their patriarchal and traditionally scientist–heroes that have shaped our
gender-based organization; the illustrations of understanding of natural history, some
Audubon with their sometimes manic qualities suggest alternative scenarios for creatures
(as if verging on the moralizing anthropomorphic that defy our expectations, and still others are
tales of Aesop, Beatrix Potter, or J. J. metaphors for human foibles.
Grandville), and western settings for the Ford has been most interested in
display of exotic, geographically displaced naturalist–artists whose illustrations recognize a
creatures willfully pried from their natural hostile nature, the case with Edward Lear or
habitat for the edification of the west. Audubon. La historia me absolverá (hand–
The intensive detail of the creatures he colored etching with aquatint and drypoint,
renders and a frequent tendency towards life- 1999) features the now extinct small Cuban
size scale make Ford’s recent watercolors and macaw which disappeared in the middle of
related prints nearly as riveting as one might the nineteenth century. Perched on a broken
imagine a first–time close-up encounter with branch and peering over a shoulder from an
a stuffed gorilla for the uninitiated and appear oblique angle as if to maximize the impact of
to take on the history of specimen display. On its spectacular appearance, it immediately

27
Walton Ford
28
La Historia Me Absolvera, 1999, six color hardground and softground etching, aquatint, spit-bite aquatint, drypoint on
Somerset Satin paper, Edition of 50, 44 x 30 inches, 111.8 x 76.2 cm, Courtesy the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery
evokes the classic Victorian “bird–and– Glossy Ibis from different genera (Threskiornis
branch” illustrations employed by many early aethiopicus and Plegadis falcinellus
ornithologists and perhaps more specifically respectively) interlock in an impossibly placed
the book of rare parrots Illustrations of the thrust of heads and legs. Such acts of
Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots (1830—32) violence with sharp–focus detail are frequent
that launched Edward Lear’s career. Lear was in Audubon’s work as in plate seven from Birds
one of the first to work from captive live of America (1827—38) where two red–tailed
models rather than specimens, but the hawks engage in bloody combat over a
allusion to native habitat is reminiscent of hare. Both ibises once populated the shores
Audubon. Yet closer inspection reveals not so of the Nile, but their geographical histories
much details of tropical flora, but a series of changed in the nineteenth century. The light–
traps and snares. Like Lear’s most celebrated colored Sacred Ibis, formerly venerated and
parrot “Red and Yellow Macaw” (Scarlet even mummified by the dozens through its
Macaw), Ford’s similarly colored variant of the association with the god Thoth, disappeared
genus ara cannily eyes the viewer as if from Egypt over a century ago. Ironically,
revived from extinction and considering a individuals kept as pets in Europe
strategy to escape the hunt. Cursive script subsequently formed feral populations there
suggests the tendency of both Audubon and and are currently considered a damaging
Lear to make personal notes on color and invasive species that has decimated
landscape in early stages of illustration, but populations of terns, egrets, and even cattle.
this text partly reads “…woe to the misguided The Glossy Ibis is thought to have expanded
creature that dares to test [their] efficacy…”, its territory beyond Africa to South America in
which comes from W. Hamilton Gibson’s the nineteenth century. Their ranges and
Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of migratory routes were changing even as
Trapping of 1881 (originally published as The Victorian adventure–seekers like Alexander
Complete American Trapper in 1876). Kinglake, referred to through a quote on the
Revealing a still dense nature where clever print, were undertaking dangerous travel
traps could result in heaps of skins, feathers, routes through Egypt. Fear of the plague
and food, the guide for woodsmen followed brought by those on long–distance journeys
a late American frontier mentality. Further text could result in the same ruthless termination of
beside the macaw suggests that Ford’s life (as in being instantly shot for breaking
doomed bird is a personification of Castro, quarantine laws noted by Kinglake in a text
the “red” dictator, a would–be victim of that appears on Compromised) as habitat
numerous attempts at assassination. The title competition among kindred species. Unlike
of the work is a reference to Castro’s famous the Cuban macaw, the Sacred and Glossy
statement, “History will Absolve Me”, before Ibis have ultimately survived through
being jailed in 1953 (later released and until changing their circumstances.
recently president of Cuba). A final inscription In the nineteenth century, populations
refers to the American naturalist Thomas of passenger pigeons were so dense and
Barbour, author of Birds of Cuba and self– fecund that their eventual extinction was
declared “devoted friend of the land [of unthinkable, a fact alluded to in Visitation
Cuba] and its people” who makes mention of (hand–colored etching with aquatint and
a missing specimen from Havana of one of drypoint, 2004) and Falling Bough (watercolor
the last of the Cuban macaws. and gouache, 2002). In Falling Bough the
While the parrot has long fascinated “bird–and–branch” genre becomes a
humans by their brilliant plumage, longevity, nightmare of over population and self–
cleverness, and ability to imitate human destruction as a packed branch of passenger
speech, the ibis was tied to human culture pigeons hurtles to earth. In Visitation pigeons
though its mythological, sacred status. In blanket a field strewn with corn, hazelnuts,
Compromised (hand–colored etching with acorns, and fruit, gorge themselves, and
aquatint and drypoint, 2003) a Sacred and

29
Walton Ford
Compromised, 2002, six color hardground and softground etching,
30 aquatint, spit-bite aquatint, drypoint on Somerset Satin
paper, Edition of 50, 44 x 30 inches, 111.8 x 76.2 cm, Courtesy the artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery
appear to die by the dozens. Both works refer
to Audubon’s experience of having witnessed
billions of migrating pigeons at one time in
the fall of 1813. Quoted at the top of the
image are the words of colonist Thomas
Dudley, seventeenth-century governor of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony who, upon seeing
a seemingly endless migrating flock of
passenger pigeons that blackened the sky,
wrote “What it portends I know not.” Having
just written about his small colony’s harrowing
experiences of survival in the new world,
Dudley’s superstitious fears would ultimately
be resolved in the direction of white territorial
expansion and the destruction of habitats of
both Native Americans and the once plentiful
passenger pigeon. In the lower center of
Visitation one pigeon feeds another with an
impossible cornucopia of food, a direct
allusion to plate sixty–two of Birds of America
in which a female passenger pigeon fills the
beak of a male. While the grotesque world of
overwhelming numbers and plenty is not
apparent in the Audubon illustration in which
only two birds appear, Ford’s image is closer
to Audubon’s written description, “Whilst Walton Ford
Visitation, 2004, six color hardground and softground
feeding, their avidity is at times so great that etching, aquatint, spit-bite aquatint, drypoint on
in attempting to swallow a large acorn or nut, Somerset Satin paper, Edition of 50, 44 x 30 inches,
111.8 x 76.2 cm, Courtesy the artist and Paul Kasmin
they are seen gasping for a long while as if in Gallery
the agonies of suffocation. On such
occasions, when the woods are filled with
these Pigeons, they are killed in immense
and having just been startled into dropping
numbers, although no apparent diminution
the intended meal, squirrels distract the adult,
ensues.” Ford has noted an allegorical aspect
and one of their own kind approaches the
of this image is that humans tend to blame
nest of the as yet unsuspecting offspring.
victims for their own destruction.
While Beatrix Potter’s Victorian animal story
Some ornithologists preferred not
which provides the title is a moral tale of
specimen–like images that filled the picture
respect for hierarchical order (the owl bites off
plane or scenes of violence, but a
the squirrel’s tale to teach it a lesson), Ford’s
peaceable, domesticated representation of
print suggests a different scenario where
fowl as is the case with John Gould. While
many small creatures in a united group effort
Ford’s The Tale of Johnny Nutkin (hand–
appear to be capable of toppling the
colored etching with aquatint and drypoint,
mighty. Featuring a Barred Owl with one wing
2001) has perhaps a point of departure in an
lifted to reveal the stripes and soft edges of
illustration like that by Joseph Wolf and H.C.
each individual feather, the print also recalls
Richter of an eagle owl who presents a small,
Audubon’s own Barred Owl from Birds of
dead creature as a meal for trusting offspring
America, which not only is in a similar
that claim the foreground of a plate for
animated posture, but incorporates a squirrel
Gould’s Birds of Britain (1862—73), Ford’s owl
which it closely inspects. The squirrel, a late
takes anthropomorphism into the realm of
addition and originally a separate painting,
stories for children. With one eye swollen
appears to “grin” at the owl, seemingly
31
unconcerned with its approach. As dusk
approaches in Ford’s print, events may
actually be about to change. Audubon wrote
of the relationship of the barred owl and the
squirrel, “I have observed that the approach
of a squirrel intimidated [the barred owl] if one
of these animals accidentally jumped on to a
branch close to them, although the owl
destroys a number of them during the twilight.
It is for this reason that I have represented the
Barred Owl gazing in amazement at one of
the squirrels placed only a few inches from
him.”
Ford began his natural history studies
based on a childhood fascination with
Audubon’s illustrations and writings. As a
mature artist he found in this celebrated and
well–known French–American scientist along
with other naturalist–illustrators a valid entry
into a discourse with historical representations
of nature. His many subsequent paintings of
mammals never displaced his fascination
with ornithology; Ford continues to regard this
branch of naturalism as one of the most vital
sources of his work.

This essay has been previously published by the National

Academy of Sciences (Cultural Programs) to accompany the
exhibition Natural Politics: The Prints of Walton Ford, November
2009 to March 2010, Washington D.C. and is here reprinted
with permission of the author, artist and Paul Kasmin Gallery.

Barbara Larson is Associate Professor of Art History at the

University of West Florida where she specializes in connections
between science and visual culture. She has published
internationally in major exhibition catalogues and journals on
art and scientific imagery as they relate to the fields of
microbiology, astronomy, and evolutionary theory, among
other areas of study. Larson is author of The Dark Side of
Nature: Science, Society and Visual Culture in the Work of
Odilon Redon (Penn State University Press, 2005) and is lead
editor of The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms and Visual
Culture (University Press of New England, 2009) and Darwin
and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History (Ashgate Press,
2013).

32
 PROMETHEAN
BOLDNESS

The store-room of the Natural History Museum Berlin, houses an amazing collection of birds, witness to the collection
mania of the 19th century. To be confronted with this plethora of specimens- dead animals, eerily life-like - is quite an
unsettling experience. The paintings and drawings pursue a poetic potential of natural history that is inherent in the
practice of collecting and scientific research- the accompanying desire to revivify the mass of dead animals which were
categorized and to create a self-delusional communion with the animals.
Text by Nikola Irmer

F
or Charles Waterton 'Promethean witness to the collection mania of the 19th
boldness' was a scientific as well as an century. To be confronted with this plethora of
artistic virtue: His Wanderings in South specimens- dead animals, eerily life-like - is
America, 1825, “contained instructions quite an unsettling experience.
on how to become 'in ornithology, In the pursuit of knowledge, scientists in
what Angelo was in sculpture'. In order to the 19th ct. were driven to amass specimens
attain a Michelangelesque fusion of in a search for new species and for new ways
anatomical accuracy and classic beauty, the of classifying them. So a vast number of
taxidermist must ‘pay close attention to the animals were hunted, killed, shipped to
form and attitude of the bird... the proportion Europe, prepared as specimens and
each curve,... or expansion of any particular assembled in the collections. The animals'
part bears to the rest of the body... you must individual bodies were of interest primarily as
possess Promethean boldness, and bring representatives of their species. The process
down fire, and animation as it were, into your of preparation ('stuffing' or 'pickling') turned the
preserved specimen.’ This act of revivification animal into a specimen and as such it carried
paradoxically involved discarding the bird’s meaning only in the context of a sequence or
perishable body, retaining only the skin and a a system of taxonomy, homology etc.
few bones.“ [1] Man’s relationship to animals manifests
The taxidermist’s art is a key technique of itself in these collections as dominated by an
the Natural History collection. The specimens attempt at controlling and taming the
are very artificial constructs- in order to make abundance of nature by systems of
one bird it is often necessary to use the classification, ordering and collecting.
feathers and body parts of several different But the viewer today can have quite a
birds. So even if they look startlingly ‘natural’ different experience when seeing the exhibits.
they are highly sophisticated artefacts. The This is what the paintings and drawings try to
store-room of the Natural History Museum show. Fully aware of the intended meanings
Berlin, houses an amazing collection of birds, and history of the collections, the paintings

33
 Nikola Irmer
Secret Seraglio, 2011, oil on linen,180cm x 150 cm  Nikola Irmer

are yet an attempt to tell a different story. That the birds’ bodies come to life and it is possible
looking at the specimens in the store-room to look at them as the remains of something
can be an uncanny encounter: when lit up, that was once alive, that had a life history and

34
Nikola Irmer
Secret Seraglio, 2011, oil on linen, detail, 180cm x 150cm
Death in Ragged Plumage, 2011, oil on linen, 140cm x 200cm  Nikola Irmer
35
 Nikola Irmer
L’attitude de Repos, 2011, oil on linen, 140cm x 200cm  Nikola Irmer

character. In the medium of painting I am

mediating this divide by the fact that I am
looking at something highly artificially
constructed, which exerts a strange
fascination and invites my engagement. The Nikola Irmer studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute,
the Glasgow School of Art (BFA, 1995) and Hunter College,
irony here is of course heightened by the fact New York (MFA, 1998). Since 1999 her paintings and
that a painter could never dream of painting drawings have been exhibited in Europe and the United
States. In 2012 her work was part of dOCUMENTA 13’s Worldly
something as elusive as birds unless they were
House.
dead. Taxidermied animals oscillate between the state of
The paintings and drawings pursue a thing and animal – between constructed assemblage of
poetic potential of natural history that is dead bodies and their expressive and unsettling potential.
Nikola’s work is an avenue of inquiry into this in – between
inherent in the practice of collecting and space. Another focus of the work is the tension between the
scientific research- the accompanying desire idea of order underlying taxonomic displays in collections-
to revivify the mass of dead animals which and the tendency to chaos in the specimens’ afterlife in
storage. She has worked in the collections and store - rooms
were categorized and to create a self- of the Natural History Museums in Berlin, Vienna, Gotha,
delusional communion with the animals. Oxford, and Florence’s Specola.
In the context of this body of work Nikola has
contributed drawings for the journal Kritische Berichte, issue:
Bildende Künste und Dynamiken der Natur (3.2012) and the
Endnotes monograph Promethean Boldness, published by The Green
Box, is forthcoming.

1: Donald, Diana, p. 59, Picturing Animals in Britain (Yale, For more information please visit: www.nikolairmer.com and :
2007). www.nikolairmer.blogspot.it

36
 THE MATERIALITY OF
PAINTING AND THE
SUFFERING ANIMAL

André Krebber looks at the work of Zhonghao Chen in which the relationship between material and content, meat and
decay is explored through painting. In this particular instance, Krebber focuses on a series dedicated to paintings of
chicken for the purpose of highlighting the relevance and currentness of painting in human-animal studies debates.
Text by Zhonghao Chen & André Krebber

T
he claim of the death of painting Just as ready-made meals, merely heated in
stems from exuberant attention given microwaves, deform our understanding of
to the conceptualization of the edible substances, so too does industrialized
medium, rather than close manufacturing of paint and its ready-made
observations of and engagement with character today reflect a detachment of the
paint as substance and the painting as painter from her or his own material, in
physical object, and their properties. Painting contrast with the messy process of mixing
is not merely an image-making tool. It is a paints oneself. Instead, the basic quality of
process that constitutes a configuration of painting is the interaction of different physical,
physical substances – paint and surface. material properties and the depicted. A
Moreover, the canvas that provides physical painting consists not merely of the application
support for the paint and image identifies the of various styles of representation, but is a
painting as a three-dimensional object, in multi-facetted being enlivened by the
contrast to a simpler two-dimensional pictorial interaction between its intellectual content or
agent such as photography. This materiality is image, its surface and its physical objectivity,
especially important to emphasise today, created from application and manipulation
when photographic depiction, filmic narration of the physicality of the pigment. Reading of
and screens generally interfere with and re- a painting requires distinguishing between
shape our everyday experience and correlating these basic properties, and
dramatically: the prevalence of flat-screen masters like Rembrandt, Chaim Soutine or
TVs, computers and touch-screen devices in Francis Bacon show us its importance and
our daily lives reduces our perception of aesthetic vigour.
images to a perfectly flat, sleek surface. The In order to transport the physicality of
surface becomes a neutral agent that is objects on canvas, Rembrandt sculptures
substantially detached from the reading and their surfaces with pigments, physically raising
meaning of images. The function of imagery them from the illuminating pictorial space of
itself is reduced to simply an illustrative agent. the canvas. Hereby, he captures the

37
 Zhonghao Chen
Uncle Fidget’s Scientific Chicken, 150cm x 150cm  Zhonghao Chen

appearance of the object through the use of impasto arouses hunger and the gusto
materiality and physicality of the pigment, for flesh. The combination of visceral gestures
while at the same time addressing the and imagery distortion makes up the mood
substance of painting in a literal manner. The and feeling of the painting and lets us guess
subject-matter of the painting is not only its maker’s frame of mind. Soutine’s painted
being illustratively represented, but recreated carcasses are not simple depictions of dead,
through the world of paint, surface and the dismembered bodies—they are physically
viewers imagination that is stimulated by the flayed, materially gutted, and expose the
image and its textured presence. Soutine’s painter’s hunger-caused longing for

38
 Zhonghao Chen
The Weigh of Being, 100cm x 100cm  Zhonghao Chen

something substantial. The observer devours surgery of paint and his life size subjects on
the depicted carcasses. The expressive power top of untreated canvas create the brutal
of the painting, the mediation of its maker’s "suffering" of the image by suffocating the
desires and moods towards its content is medium. Applying paint directly onto raw
achieved not only by means of its depiction, canvas, Bacon fabricates dehydrated lumps
but through the specific way Soutine handles of oil paint, which are suffering themselves
paint as a substance. He evokes the desire to from depletion, and torture the picture plain
consume the painting via the desire to materialistically and symbolically. The
consume the substance paint. Bacon's painting’s surface literally falls victim to his

39
practice. Simultaneously, the interior structure viewers are provided with a spontaneous
of the image suggests that the thickly painted experience of these contradictions and
human-like forms scream out against the obliged to reflect upon them. Thus, despite
calculatedly flat areas of pure and thin layers refusing a literal comment of any form,
of acrylic colour, which threaten to collapse Chen’s works nonetheless refers to societal
into the stylised spaces at any moment. In realities. Their comment, however, is put forth
front of his works, we are not only seeing the by the dialectical, independent existence of
damage of the protagonist as a distant the paintings, which consists of the interaction
observer, we are physically relating to it, its of the painting’s different parts, and its
pain thrusting unto us. The physical, relief-like relationship to the viewer. It thus creates an
surface of the applied layers of paint emotional experience. Accordingly, the works’
dialectically engage with the painting’s meanings arise from a continuous, open-
imagery, space and our own object-ness. ended reciprocal engagement with them (cf.
This brief excursion exemplifies the Adorno, 2004 & 2009).
different elements of painting that exist within The strength and relevance of Chen’s
the sphere of imagery and materiality: animal paintings, in this respect, stem from
painting as tool of image making that the way the compositions unfold a life of their
employs eclectically depictive vocabularies; own that engages and provokes the viewer,
painting as medium that works with and is as well as from the particular imagery that
bound to the surface; and painting as object they contain. Considering the constant
that relates to us materialistically, physically presence of objectified animals in culture, it is
and existentially. The realisation of the no surprise that animal carcasses find their
physical properties of painting allows for a way onto Chen’s canvasses. Moreover, Chen
more comprehensive understanding of the spent a reasonable period of his
medium, as well as the relationship between adolescence in New Zealand, with its
the material world and our own progressive imposing communal propinquity of
meanings in it. It is a form of creation that Europeanized, animal-based agriculture.
connects our seeing and comprehending Within his paintings resonates an urge to
with being. Besides all the formalistic aspects mediate the different Asian and European
of painting, the meditative character of the presences of animals in culinary culture. Birds
manufacturing process and the practical are the most present animals, but we also
relationship between material and maker also encounter a fish-like creature, and objects
symbolically refer to conditions of both impossible to identify. The protruding tubes on
human and material existence in the world the latter could be as much a chicken-head
today. as an eel or ferret, and the rotting mountain
Zhonghao Chen’s animal series draws on of material these worms plough presumably is
and captures these particular qualities. The composed of all sorts of creatures. The
artist emphasises that these works were not pigments are slathered onto the canvas, set
created with the intention to comment on against white surfaces, creating a rich and
social issues, but to examine the materiality of protruding texture. The physical effect of paint
painting and the interrelation between the becomes particularly vivid in the depiction of
artwork’s various elements, which yield their Hanging Birds at different stages of their
indefinite meaning. Thus, Chen wards off any processing into meat. The thick painted
literal or definitive reading of the works. Yet texture of the chicken cadavers, extending
artists cannot help but mediate, consciously onto the top of the frame, retrieves the
or unconsciously, the objective world through rawness and brutality of this process.
their subjective artistic experience and Gravitating initially to the most prominent,
practice. This mediation reflects on the gutted, de-individualised, yet familiar
conditions of the reality the artist encounters, stretched piece of meat on the right, we are
potentially unveiling its underlying then gradually led back to a rotting, still
contradictions. In encountering artworks, feather-bearing yet already blunt, unfocussed

40
Zhonghao Chen
Ocean Being, 161cm x 121cm  Zhonghao Chen
41
dead gaze of a still recognisable individual. In presenting the de-individualization through
The chicken as individual and the chicken animals, the continuity in submission of
turned into de-individualised meat are animal and human individuals to the dictate
simultaneously present. By positioning the of modern, capitalist society is highlighted.
birds above and against a simple, pale Max Horkheimer emphatically registers this in
background, the process of de- describing current society using the analogy
individualisation is placed above the of a skyscraper, finishing “underneath the
individual viewing the painting, subjugating rooms in which the coolies of the earth croak
the viewer to it, but also placed out of sight by the millions, where the indescribable,
and consideration, confining the viewer to an unconceivable suffering of animals, the hell
empty void. Rather than terminating the of animals in human society would have to
engagement, the viewer’s comprehension be shown, the sweat, the blood, the despair
constantly and eternally oscillates between of animals” (1987, p. 380, own translation).
these different states, setting the process of Yet, the significance of animals for Western
de-individualisation into motion, without a culture lies not only in the exploitation of their
hope of redeeming innocence, or expressing bodies, but extends deep into the
the emptiness, and following terror, of this understanding of the human self. In Dialectic
process. of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Theodor
The objectification and equalization of Adorno register that throughout “European
the individual subject is wrought further in the history the idea of the human being has been
works Bird Pile and The Weigh of Being. While expressed in contradistinction to the animal.
in the former, we can still decipher remnants The latter’s lack of reason is the proof of
of individual bodies in the knotted mass of human dignity” (2002, p. 203). This distinction
bird limbs, the de-individualised rotting runs alongside an urge to dominate nature,
mound of the latter absorbs every memory of which is inscribed in our culture, psyche and
individuality. The colours and the thick texture, instrumental reason, and provides society’s
in contrast to the white background and lack exploitative reproductive foundation – it is not
of orientation of the images, enhance the nature, however, that threatens current
chaos of the process of disintegration and the anthropological, capitalist praxis, “but the
sensory stimulation. Instead of simple remembrance of nature” (ibd., p. 212). In
figurative representation, they arouse a Ocean Being, the viewer is detained in a
sensual experience, emotionally evoking the dialogue with the painting itself, now
process of de-individualisation through mark- subjugated to the creature’s stare. Unable to
making and paint application. Both these evade its paralyzing grip, the only possibility is
paintings, as well as Uncle Fidget`s Scientific engaging with its expression, reading what it
Chicken, are impossible to pin down to a has to disclose. It resonates with indictment,
rationalised reading. Rather, their quality irreconcilability, disgust and steadfastness. In
persists in providing gestures of conceptuality fact, the creature itself, flattened on the
that recede as soon as one believes he or surface of the canvas, appears trapped on it,
she has found a handle to seize their but its gaze does not communicate
meaning. It is this operating at the edge of resignation. While the disfigured face, the
understanding and recognition, rational and distorted mouth, and the skewed position all
emotional response, the anchor the exhibit suffering, the eyes seem unswayed.
composition provides and withholds from the Thus, it reflects the repressed nature in the
viewer, which reflects the objectification of subject itself. Unwilling to accept this
the subject in capitalism and forces this repression, its gaze stares the viewer down,
powerlessness onto the viewer. Uncle Fidget`s demanding recognition. By comprehending
Scientific Chicken, in particular, mocks all our its suffering, viewers reconcile with their own
attempts to ontologically register, or nature.
phenomenologically decipher the world. Through their specific imagery and

42
Zhonghao Chen
Hanging Birds, 800cm x 1100cm  Zhonghao Chen 43
 Zhonghao Chen
Bird Pile, 1200cm x 1200cm  Zhonghao Chen

materiality, Chen’s paintings engage the relinquish the repression of our own nature,
viewer in a dialogue with the animal exposing our subjugation to and
depictions. They emotionally mediate the objectification by the capitalist production
processes of human alienation from nature process and the physical destruction of the
and de-individualisation of humans and human and animal body on the one side,
animals, as well as their resulting suffering in and our own animal-likeness on the other.
the unleashed capitalism of advanced Chen’s works do not merely register a state,
modernity. They demand the viewer to reflect but they also foreshadow redemption from
on these processes. Ultimately, though, totalitarian terror through emotionally
through a harrowing conversation, they captivating the viewer and requiring him or

44
her to reflect upon and comprehend this
condition.

References

Adorno, T. W. (2004). Aesthetic theory (R. Hullot-Kentor, Trans.).

London; New York: Continuum.

Adorno, T. W. (2009). Ästhetik (1958/59). In E. Ortland (Ed.),

Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung IV: Vorlesungen:
Band 3 (pp. 7-342). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2002). Dialectic of

enlightenment : philosophical fragments (E.
Jephcott, Trans.). Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ.
Press.

Horkheimer, M. (1987). Der Wolkenkratzer. In G. Schmid Noerr

& A. Schmidt (Eds.), Philosophische Frühschriften:
1922 – 1932 (pp. 379-381). Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer.

André Krebber is currently finalising his PhD thesis "Animals Zhonghao Chen (b. 1984) is an independent artist working and
and Aesthetics: Towards reconciling humans and nature" at living in New Zealand and China, who explores through his
the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies (University paintings the tension between the physical and the pictorial. His
of Canterbury, Christchurch). Through an analysis of the works art practice is driven by a vicious progressive nature and is
of different Enlightenment philosophers and artists, his eclectic in terms of the media and art vocabulary he
research explores constitutional processes of the human deploys. Some of the major features of his art are the use of
materials in their raw state and the expression of emptiness or
subject in its relationship to animals and the different roles
"void" through visual forms. The fundamental dualism of his
science and art occupy in this, in order to challenge current
creations evolves from allowing his interest in existentialist, Zen
societal relationships between humans and animals as well and Tao philosophies to resonate with his visual
as nature. His broader research interests include cognition, production. Zhonghao has been exhibiting extensively and his
Aesthetics, Critical Theory, the Enlightenment, animal works are hold by private and public collections in New Zealand,
cognition and behaviour as well as the impact of China, Germany and Japan. Additionally, he has started and
neoliberalism and the ecological crisis on the individual. participated in artist initiatives both in China and New Zealand.
André graduated in Environmental Studies from the University
of Lüneburg, Germany.

45
 PICTURING THE PIG IN
PORK AND PORKY

I had recently offered a lecture on animals in children’s film, and decided to work up an article on pigs in the cinema –
well, not actually in the cinema - but on the big screen. I wanted to consider a selection of “family” feature films, and the
familiar blind spot between the affectionate pig tales produced in the cut and splice of the editing suite, and those
rendered in the slicing and dicing at the delicatessen.
Text by Jane O’Sullivan

Jane O’Sullivan
Pig?, acrylic on paper  Jane O’Sullivan

46
C
inematic pigs, terminated by the friendly films I’d viewed in the past, including
snap of the clapper board – “that’s the 1954 and 1999 versions of Animal Farm,
a wrap!” – are a far cry from the lives Babe, of course, little Wilbur in Charlotte’s
of others, rendered as segments, Web, and Piglet in the most recent version of
placed in equal portions on polystyrene trays, Winnie the Pooh. I then turned to reading a
and stacked onto shelves marked, “Farm variety of articles written by a mix of
Produce.” This process – so gruesome – put academics and practitioners working in and
me in mind of my first night class in painting around film, children’s literature, child-
and drawing. psychology and education.
As an introductory exercise, I was Horrors-a-plenty stalk the cute creatures
presented with a small table piled high with a in each of the films of Orwell’s farmyard fable,
pallid collation of chops, sausages and other be it in the original cartoon format or in the
unidentifiable body parts. It was to be a more recent one, produced by computer
lesson in still life. assisted animation, or, animatronics. In each,
“Stilled life, more like,” I muttered and the horses, sheep and sheep dogs make
began to sketch the freestanding lamp, set to cows’ eyes at the camera, while others bill
illuminate the carnage. and moo their way into our affections. As for
The jumble of flesh, exposed to the the poor old pigs - saddled as they are with
artist’s critical gaze, lay cold and vulnerable, near-human hearts and sizeable, self-serving
the upward swing of the haunch a fulsome brains - they must bear the burden of an
Brett Whitely nude, or a rump of roo, offered uncommonly unflattering anthropomorphism,
to the glare of headlights. Sausages, when the animals’ brave new world turns
speckled with bruised blue, coiled as a nasty. Brave and new, but in no way nasty,
shocking simulacrum of innards. We’d been the world of the main protagonist in Babe is a
spared the horror of the head; eyes hollowed whole different story, and this little piggy’s
out or closed in an attitude of sleep – egalitarian ethos and pre-pubescent burbling
perchance to dream of pumpkins and piglets see him la-la-la his way into our hearts and
and possibilities. Like the hog’s head in the minds and an assortment of generic
butcher shop window, nestled on a bed of textbooks for “Cinema 101,” then onwards
parsley: eyelashes still glistening, cheeks and upwards to the heady heights of
flushed, the apple wedging the mouth into an academic scholarship.
unlikely grin. And the trotters, arranged in Like Animal Farm before it, Babe has
pairs, pointing like ballerinas in pink tights. been seen to mean, or at least to function as
Motivated by the huff and puff of my meaningful for, a range of scholarly purposes.
indignation, I returned to the task at hand. I For Joseph Champoux, Babe illustrates the
was going to write a paper on the pig in pop valuing of diversity, and for Janet Sayers and
culture, one that would serve as an entrée to Lara Ruffolo, the film invites a discussion of
a more extended discourse on the inter-cultural adaptation strategies. Indeed, in
problematic aspects of the representation relation to a wide range of animal-centred
and commodification of non-human animals narratives, Gail Melson has argued that,
more generally. I wanted to find a way of because children closely identify with
positioning the animal – in this case, the pig – infantilised animals in prose and cinematic
as a central player in my narrative and to fictions, such narratives can be used as
somehow allow it to speak for pigs. A tricky educational tools for social development,
enterprise but at least I could give it a try. and as therapeutic aids in some post-
My initial task was to decide how to traumatic treatment of children. All these
present – or plate-up – my pig in a tantalising scholarly articles detail quite valid and
but tasteful manner. Thinking that I’d start with purposeful deployments of animals in films.
positive and appealing tales, I made some but, while reading them, I didn’t feel I was
brief notes on my recollections of how pigs getting any closer to the pigs themselves, so
have been represented in children’s or child- much as to the humans they ostensibly

47
symbolised. I guess it is not surprising to note length with horizontal stripes), I set about my
that Babe and his four-footed friends don’t pig. First, I selected a “Brilliant Alizarin,” but as
wend their own way into cinemas and lecture the crimson paint glistened on the pallet, I
theatres; as it happens, pigs can fly – when feared it would be far too pink, even when
transported on the wings of allegory. mixed with a generous squeeze of white. I
True enough, many animals, such as gave it a try though, and selecting a fairly fine
the pigs in Animal Farm, have at one level sable brush (imitation, of course), I loosely
operated as allegorical figures, and the outlined my subject.
political parallels of Orwell’s narrative are well Two things were wrong from the start: it
known. But, as suggested by Naama Harel, was ridiculously round, resembling a pigmy
representations of animals in fictions need not hippopotamus, and the colour was decidedly
necessarily and always function as moral more petunia than pig. “Cadmium Red”
fables about human foibles. As I mulled over proved a better choice as the lighter scarlet
the essence of my article, it seemed mixed with white produced a paler and more
important that I stress the possibility (and sanguine hue. This time I took up a larger,
responsibility) of considering the animals as hard bristled brush and attacked the canvas
representing their own circumstances and with more vigour. In a few sweeps of the
entitlements – that I should argue the case for brush, the rosy rotundity of the prototype was
choosing to see the animals themselves. It quickly swallowed up - quite literally (and
was time I revisited the films, and, fuelled by figuratively). Encircled and largely obliterated
my pig-focused interests, I headed for the by a paler, more attenuated or leaner
nearest DVD outlet and home to not-so-small version, it was transformed into a more “to-
screen. market-to-marketable” product for the
My five films served up a colourful contemporary palate. By the time I’d mixed
assortment of pigs - variously cute, cruel, another batch of scarlet and white, thickened
inquisitive, indolent, greedy or generous. They with a good daub of impasto medium, my
came in various shapes and sizes, including pig was bristling on the canvas. As I knifed on
plump pink piglets, paunchy and purpling the ruddy coagulation, more and more the
elder-porcines or those of practically no belly resembled a lash of streaky bacon. A
pigment at all – a.k.a. “the other white meat.” more angular head emerged, blunted with
Pigmentation, or the lack thereof, put me in the addition of a blackened clot of crimson,
mind of the relative invisibility of any ostensibly and as a dribble of black scorched the white
real pig amongst the mix of animations and to an ashen grey, I smeared it over the pig’s
otherwise automated creatures littering these back, using my fingers and the heel of my
audio-visual farmyards. This virtual barring of hand.
pigs from the cinema steered me towards Still, two things were wrong: The pink
what would be the first point of a three- pot-on-legs monstrosity was gone, but the
pronged approach to my article – to deliver a snout appeared soft and tender and the tail
searing critique along the lines of “cinematic curled up like Christmas ribbon - or crackling.
pigs (colon) non-threatening fetishes and A couple of little dabs of “Arylamide Yellow”
absent presences.” The second prong, also and the tusks were in place, giving my pig a
suggested by “pigment,” would draw upon touch of the to-be-taken-seriously. Now, I had
my newfound pastime, and less deadening second thoughts about trying to straighten his
approach to the representation of non- tail. It could have been risky, so I left it. My pig
human animals, and that was painting them. was finished, but I knew enough about pigs
Perhaps, the physical act of massaging and and commodification to know I hadn’t really
moulding oily substances-made-flesh could got him. As I wiped my hands, I gave a
produce a kind of “life drawing.” And so it was moment’s thought to the variously violent and
that I came to paint a pig for publication. always already provisional nature of
I selected a canvas and having representation, then grabbed the canvas and
donned my butcher’s apron (yes, it is full- carried it across the yard towards the kitchen.

48
 The moment I stepped through the
doorway the canvas tipped sideways, caught
the bench and slapped against the door
before sliding to the floor. As I stood there in
my butcher’s apron, wiping the red and
blackened drool from the paintwork and
bench top, I wondered how anyone could do
this for a living. As for the real pig I’d been
looking for - and this is my third and final
prong – he’d largely disappeared. Having
been shaved back through layer after layer of
Babe, Miss Piggy and Porky to an inflamed
mess of warm tones, and the pink-white
bones of canvas beneath, he was more
ragout than van Gogh. Like so many before
me, I’d made a complete pig’s ear of
representation.

References
Champoux, Joseph. “Seeing and Valuing Diversity Through
Film.” Education Media International. Volume 36. Issue 4
(2010): 310-16.

Harel, Naama. “The Animal Voice Behind the Animal Fable.”

Journal for Critical Animal Studies. Volume VII. Issue 2 (2009):
8-20.

Melson, Gail. Why The Wild Things Are: Animals in the Lives of
Children Cambridge, USA: Harvard UP, 2001.

Sayers, Janet and Ruffolo, Lara. “What Lessons Can We Learn

from Babe, a Sheep-Pig, about Cultural Adaptation?” Massey
University. Department of Management and International
Business Research Working Paper Series. Number 7. (2007): 2-
16.

Films
Animal Farm. Joy Batchelor and John Halas. Associated
British-Pathe Ltd, 1954.

Animal Farm. John Stephenson. Hallmark Films, 1999.

Babe. Chris Noonan. Universal Pictures, 1995.

Charlotte’s Web. Gary Winick. Paramount, 2006.

Winnie the Pooh. Steven J. Anderson and Don Hall, 2011.

Jane O’Sullivan is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts at the

University of New England, Australia, where she is also a member of
the Posthuman Literary and Cultural Studies Research Group, which is
concerned with understanding human and non-human subjects in
comparative ecological perspectives. Currently, she is exploring a
critical and creative exchange between processes of painting and
writing, and bringing these to bear on cultural constructions of
human-animal interactions. In another related project she
interrogates aspects of the representation of horses by constructing a
painted and written conversation between a work by George Stubbs
and one by John Constable. Her ongoing and interrelated teaching
and research interests in literary studies, film, popular culture, and
critical animal studies inform this work.

49
 (however slightly) the humdrum consumerism
of a near-

TWO BY TWO

The Red Paintings have just released their long-awaited album The Revolution Is Never Coming. Six years ago,
Matthew Chrulew went along to document their "Animal Rebellion" march.
Text by Matthew Chrulew

J
uly 6th, 2007. A procession of black- Melbourne CBD afternoon. A flash mob for a
cloaked figures in animal masks parades long overdue flood.
down Bourke Street mall. Giraffes, Of course, the “animal rebellion”
elephants, pigs, wolves – or what passes theme carries a certain degree of farce.
for them – follow Noah through central Everyone knows that only humans can be
Melbourne, much to the delight or dismay of political actors. Not that farce is necessarily a
passersby. Their white-bearded leader bad thing. Think of Orwell’s Animal Farm,
encourages them along in booming voice, featuring Bolshevik pigs and proletarian
staff in one hand and stereo in the other. After horses, or Dana Lyon’s song “Cows With
all, the animal apocalypse needs a Guns”, where chickens in choppers
soundtrack, too. andguerilla cows fight for “bovine freedom”.
Rocking the endtimes is orchestral art Think too of Paul’s peculiar multispecies
rock band The Red Paintings, known for their messianism in which “creation groans”
sci-fi themes, elaborate costumes and (Romans 8:22), or its apocalyptic precursor,
prominent string section. This “Animal the flood tale(s) from Genesis 6-8, where
Rebellion” march is part of their “Feed the animals gather in the ark in multiples of two
Wolf” tour, the third curcuit in a trilogy that and seven to take refuge from the deluge.
previously saw nine foot robots – some of Writers and artists since have had little trouble
them crucified on huge crosses – stalk subverting this myth, twisting, revising, or
through the Australian capitals. Other shows simply presenting it in all its bizarre detail. After
have been inspired by Andy Warhol or Mark all, farce is never far away when you’re
Ryden, “The Nightmare Before Christmas” or squeezing every species on the planet into a
“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, or indeed 140m boat, not to mention keeping them
Aliens vs Virgin Mary. The march is a chance alive – just ask the Creation Museum in
to connect with some fans and disrupt Kentucky. I suspect the biblical authors were

50
Matthew Chrulew
Untitled, 2007  Matthew Chrulew

51
 Matthew Chrulew
Untitled, 2007  Matthew Chrulew

not entirely unaware of this, either. to horse mane. Penguin-chicken and pig-dog
Our procession plays with these walk the streets in taxidermic haphazardry.
familiar, farcical tropes. A robed and Nor is this a comforting tale of long-
bearded Noah leads pairs of animals through gone disaster, with the reassurance of a
the streets, and they follow, two by two, in an rainbow at the end. They’re not relating the
unexpectedly ordered procession. The story but repeating it, renewing the myth amid
rebelling creatures are not entirely animal, but another time of threatened creation – global
human bodies, cloaked in black, only their warming, climate change, habitat loss,
heads theriomorphically transformed. Papier- species extinction, reads our hurried newsbar.
mâché masks depict miscegenated animals; And once again, we are to blame. The
one species is combined with another; band’s instigator Trash McSweeney remarks:
mythical qualities are interbred; foreign genes “Humans believe that they are on top of the
are spliced and engineered. There are food chain, better than any living creature on
feathers, scales, beaks, horns. Rational this planet … We are the chosen ones. Or are
arrangement seems always on the verge of we?” The dislocated creatures of the march –
breakdown. The dozen eyes of a ram watch hybrids of human, animal and monster –
as blood drips from the eye of a bird. Insect testify to a broken creation, to the human-
green is stitched to bunny white, human hair driven destruction damaging their lives.

52
Moogie Blight
Untitled, 2007  Moogie Blight
53
This hybrid troupe marches through the malls, in the foreground while behind him an urban
gathering followers and onlookers. At one silhouette deteriorates into a smear of black
stage, the parade descends into a and red. The moon oversees two troupes of
McDonald’s store, much to the amusement humanity’s disturbing “Others”: at the foot of
of the teenage staff. The Ronald statue the buildings some canine figures are visible,
maintains its smile. A few minutes later, the mirrored above by a squad of UFOs.
staff (and security) of Myer are less History doesn’t record whether this
accommodating, ushering the mass of particular Noah, having seen his beloved
cloaked youths (and especially their cameras) animals safely into the ark, ended up, like his
out of their bright-white, hyperreal biblical forebear, in a compromising situation
environment. We know which end of the plank as a result of too much wine (Genesis 9:20-
they’ll be on when the revolution apocalypse 27). But he does make another appearance,
flood comes. later that night at the show. Himself grey-
The Melbourne parade finishes up at wigged and robed, he stands among the
the west end of Bourke St mall where a kimonoed string-section in Geisha make-up
makeshift ark is erected and Noah stands to and the volunteers decorated with full body-
one side and calls his animals through: “It’s paint, in front of apocalyptic background
time to go… My beautiful animals, I love you visuals, as guitars and drums mingle with violin
all… You’re the best creatures a Noah could and cello, and takes a break from painting to
ask for…” Like some perverse Adam, he add a spoken word interlude during “Dead
names or nicknames each as they enter – Adults”, reading from a children’s book version
“bandicoot and cobra, and you fluffy of the ark story: “To save yourselves you must
bunnikins” – wishing them good luck before, build this big boat… three stories high …
finally, he too follows them inside. Playing every snake that crawls … all the animals …
from the stereo is the piano refrain from The yada yada yada… horses, rain, cattle… even
Red Paintings’ elegiac “We Belong in the Sea”, some carrots… and some rabbits… and they
but the background of this painted ark is not marched two by two … up the ramp … TWO
the typical image of green creation BY TWO!”
inundated by floodwaters (a destruction God
promised, with his rainbow, never to repeat),
but a decaying urban environment, burning
with flames that flicker from buildings and lick
around the edges of the boat.
This collaborative exuberance will be
repeated at the gig that night, when (as at all
of the band’s shows) visual artists will share the
stage with the musicians and paint both
traditional and human canvases. Each tour
has resident painters (such as our Noah) who
work while the music is performed, and often
the audience is also supplied with canvases
and paints, encouraged to try their hand. The
“Feed the Wolf” tour features Little Red Riding
Hood prominently, and some paintings reflect
this, figuring sinister wolves and werewolves
and other sexual animals. Others are more
abstract; one conjures gaping mouths of Matthew Chrulew is an associate lecturer in the School of
indeterminate species, placing hubristic Humanities at UNSW. His essays have been published in New
humans back among the rest of the carbon- Formations, Foucault Studies, Humanimalia andAustralian
Humanities Review. He is coediting forthcoming issues
based life forms, so many maws to fill. In one of Angelaki and SubStance, and is an associate editor of the
piece a particularly sagacious Noah is poised new journal Environmental Humanities

54
 TWO CHARACTERS
IN SEARCH OF A
TITLE

Collaborations between artists have been a part of the process of making art since art first started being made.
Whether at a lower level of the conceptual and creative process, when many of the contributing artists should more
rightly be described as assistants rather than real participants, or at a higher level, when a balance of the work and
creativity is evident, there have been many examples of art produced by two or more people that have benefited from
multiple insights and inputs.
Text by Scott Contreras-Koterbay

F
or whatever reason, however, with the become an affirmative one at some point in
transition into a modern and the future, and that we may have no recourse
postmodern zeitgeist, collaborative art but to doubt whether two people could share
has increasingly become an the same artistic vision equally, is a frightening
exception rather than a prospect. There has been, in recent years, a
commonplace event, and its presentation move towards relational art that is affected by
often sets up a rivalry of competing senses of the community, and many examples have
inventiveness, rather than a true balance of been done as collaborations between two
artists giving and taking from each other in artists, but the reification of the relational has
equal parts in the joint hope of producing often been just as much of a hindrance as
works of art that reflect a duality of sensibilities. validation.
Emphasizing individuality has become the If all of that sounds apocalyptic -- as if
bane of community formation, with repeated there’s something wrong with a little bit of
assertions that the singular voice is inherently scare-mongering and hysteria every once in
valuable precisely because it is unique. The awhile -- a recent exhibition of work by
illusion of community has become even Suzanne Stryk and Ann Ropp seems like a
more insidiously corruptive in the age of social perfect panacea. Presented along the walls
networking; to the point that the very idea of of the Tipton Gallery in a structured but
being social has been irrevocably altered. dynamic fashion, images of plants, ants and
Amidst all of this, is collaboration still viable? other insects, and suggestively organic
That seems like an absurd question, of course, abstract shapes, created an almost narrative
since we haven’t become so isolated from structure that was equally beguiling and
each other just yet that the possibility of real, resonant. Spaced linearly in the case of larger
meaningful artistic communications built on formats, with the smaller work grouped
collaboration has disappeared entirely. But it together in ways that invited speculation
is striking that the question itself is viable. That about a story line, the work appeared both
we can start to worry that the answer might whimsical and deeply personal, amusing but

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Ann Ropp & Suzanne Stryk
Untitled, 2011, watercolour and acrylic on paper  Ann Ropp & Suzanne Stryk

56
Ann Ropp & Suzanne Stryk
Untitled, 2011, watercolour and acrylic on paper  Ann Ropp & Suzanne Stryk

57
also intensely serious, beautiful and, even, a only by the content of the work, but also by
little bit harrowing. In many instances there the nature of their collaboration. Each image
was clearly a story being told -- often ants is analogously related to those produced by
would be interacting with each, nibbling away naturalists and taxonomers (Auguste-Henri
at splotches of color, following one another in Forel and Jean Henri Fabre come to mind),
a determined fashion as if seeking meaning almost as if the artists wanted to create
to their lives in ways that seemed almost images of idealized creatures in their artistic
philosophical -- while in other instances the habitat. Equally so, the drawing of a stag
emphasis would fall more on formal beetle by Durer and the paintings by Jan van
arrangements with patterns of almost Kessel or even Audubon seem appropriate
geometric regularity, but each painting comparisons, given a stretch of one’s art
deserved more than a passing glance. historical background. Yet, thinking critically
No obvious efforts were made to back again to the evolutionary model, the
anthropomorphize the insects, thankfully, but related concepts of inclusive fitness and kin
Instead, there was an openness about each selection seem more relevant and important
painting that invited a personal to understanding this work as the product of a
response. cooperative process. “Inclusive fitness” is a
Stryk’s and Ropp’s work clearly exhibits term used to describe not only how many of
a partnership between each artist that began one’s own offspring can be supported, but
in the spring of 2011, with markedly also how many additional offspring of others
identifiable signature styles laid over and as well; while “kin selection” refers to
mingled amongst each other. In speaking to productive strategies aiding related
both artists, it became clear that they had individuals in a way similar to ant colonies
started to work together almost by chance, when all of the females except the queen are
but they quickly realized there was a great sterile and assist in her survival. It’s not too
deal of potential in bringing together their very much of an interpretative strategy to see that
different styles. Ropp notes: “[I]t started with the exhibition seems to parallel these natural
Suzanne offering to work on one of my processes artistically. Stryk notes: “When we
pieces. I was telling her I did not know how to began I worked on Ann’s shapes, but after
finish. I thought it was a good idea and gave about 6 of those I felt I should do some for her
her some more unfinished work.” From that, to respond to. So I painted ants or cicadas, or
both artists developed a very specific perhaps a big tilting bird’s nest, on a sheet of
strategy, giving unfinished pieces to each paper. When I had 10 or more, and she had
other to be completed separately, never some more for me, we’d meet at one or the
painting together in person but responding to other’s studio and make an exchange. I
what they had in hand. always really looked forward to seeing what
Both Stryk and Ropp are very clear that she’d come up with.”
this method was initially accidental, but Here, the final outcome -- the body of
developed spontaneously as a dialogue work and the exhibition itself -- can be
between Ropp’s animated abstract shapes metaphorically conceived as the “queen,” or
and Stryk’s figurative additions, evolving as the primary organism, and both Stryk’s and
naturally. Indeed, the collaborative process Ropp’s processes as organisms that act
that both artists went through echoes selflessly to forward the quality of the overall
analogously the coevolutionary pathways in exhibition. This selflessness is reflected in
the development of ant species, who conversations with both artists, and Stryk also
themselves are intriguing creatures because notes: “I hoped—but didn’t know for sure until
of their eusocial nature that appears to be the show opened—that the pieces might
counterintuitive to Darwinian processes. surprise and engage viewers as they had Ann
If raising evolutionary biological issues and me. People responded first by expressing
in an art review seems strange, looking at the surprise that two artists so different could
work invites this type of discussion, initiated not create something that worked so well. Then

58
Ann Ropp & Suzanne Stryk
Untitled, 2011, watercolour and acrylic on paper  Ann Ropp & Suzanne Stryk

59
 Ann Ropp & Suzanne Stryk
Untitled, 2011, watercolour and acrylic on paper  Ann Ropp & Suzanne Stryk

they got more into the individual pieces, are always imperfect vehicles, and
seeing them from all different angles, ranging collaboration is a process of art making that is
from enigmatically narrative to abstract.” inherently fraught with peril, but this exhibition
While every piece is obviously done from a served as an excellent example of what can
personal perspective, there was also an be accomplished at the highest level
element of surprise, of valuable discoveries between two highly talented artists.
and chance triumphs that drove the
productive process further along. The
audience gains just as much -- if not more --
from the artists’ labors in the end as from the
artists themselves.
The title of the exhibition is telling, in that the
artists presented themselves as characters
rather than as themselves, actors within the
process rather than as driving forces with
unmovable egos. They were individuals
looking forward and looking out for what the
other would do, searching for a label that
best suited the integration of each other’s
personalities and artistic impulses. Analogies

60
 Ann Ropp & Suzanne Stryk
Untitled, 2011, watercolour and acrylic on paper  Ann Ropp & Suzanne Stryk

Scott Contreras-Koterbay studied at the University of St. Andrews and Suzanne Stryk has had solo exhibitions in locations throughout the US,
now teaches at East Tennessee State University in the Departments of including the National Academy of Sciences (DC), the Morris
Art & Design as well as the Department of Philosophy, focusing on Museum of Art (Augusta, GA), the Eleanor B. Wilson Museum
contemporary art and aesthetic ontology. He is the author of The (Roanoke, VA), and Gallery 180, The Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago.
Potential Role of Art in Kierkegaard's Description of the Individual and Among the public collections that own her work are the Smithsonian
his art criticism has been published in Art Papers, Number: Inc, and (DC), The David Brower Center (Berkeley, CA), The Seattle Museum of
the SECAC Review. History and Art (WA), and The Taubman Museum of Art (Roanoke, VA).
Her series of drawings Genomes and Daily Observations was
selected for the Viewing Program at The Drawing Center (NY, NY).
Ann Ropp has shown her paintings in numerous solo and group She is the recipient of a 2007 George Sugarman Foundation grant,
exhibitions both nationally and internationally. In 2004 her “Body of and a 2011 Virginia Commission for the Arts Individual Artist
Water” series was shown at the St. James Cavalier Center for Fellowship for a mixed-media ecological survey of her home state
Creativity in Valletta, Malta. Her work is in the collections of the New titled “Notes on the State of Virginia.”
York Public Library, The Evansville Museum of Arts and Science (IN),
The Printmaking Workshop in New York, and the Tom Peyton Memorial
Arts Collection (Alexandria, LA). She holds an MFA from Columbia
University in New York, and her paintings have been featured three
times in the annual anthology New American Paintings. She is the The piece ‘Two Characters in Search of a Title’ was originally
recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and several published in Number: Inc, issue No.69, Fall 2011, pp.19-20 and is
artist residencies, including one at Moulin a Nef, Auvillar, France. She here reprinted with permission.
currently lives and maintains a studio in Nuernberg, Germany.

61
 THE NEO-POP ANIMAL
a portfolio by
MOHAMED KAHOUADJI

Mohamed Kahouadji was born in Algeria in 1979. He has two-headed

passion, being painter and house surgeon. By night, he’s a passionate painter
spending the remainder of his time creating vibrant neo-pop inspired works.
The work of Mohammed Kahouadji oscillates between humor and irony.
Constantly playing with the famous personalities from our society– rock stars,
politicians, cartoon characters, but still these paintings are never mere
caricatures, let alone the mechanical reproduction of a situation.
Mohamed Kahouadji is a 33 year old artist born in Algiers (Algeria) and
currently living and working in Saint Nazaire (France) after studying medicine
(maxillo facial surgery). Kahouadji began painting from the age of 11,
starting with graffiti, which he describes as "a kind of pop surrealism with a
touch of post impressionism... Or a kind of under realism... " We asked
Kahoudji about his art and what he sees when he looks in the mirror?

62
Mohamed Kahouadji
Eat Me If You Can  Mohamed Kahouadji

63
Mohamed Kahouadji
L.S.D.  Mohamed Kahouadji

64
Mohamed Kahouadji
ALPHA, BETA, GA-GA  Mohamed Kahouadji
Purlpe Rain  Mohamed Kahouadji

65
 HEADS OR TAILS: GÉRICAULT’S
HORSES AND THE PAINTING OF
(NATURAL) HISTORY

The horse, it might be claimed, is one the few, if not the only animal who has, throughout the ages, been deemed worthy
of historical representation. In visual records of heroic action, the horse appears either as a literal support, carrying men
into battle, or as a “symbolic animal” who figures the defiant forces of nature that man has harnessed to his control. As
in art history, so in the first natural histories, horses were placed at the top of the animal kingdom — closest to man
through their service to him or their ability to reflect his power and nobility, though assuredly distanced from him as part
of the natural world.
Text by Kari Weil

A
s finely argued by Alex Potts, the culture of the nineteenth-century that would
conventions of natural history and art be increasingly dominated by women riders
history in England, as in France, were and by the sport of racing. Caught within this
mutually influential when it came to shift, however, Géricault‘s particular way of
depicting the animal order and man’s place painting the horse, or more precisely, horses
within, or rather above it. But if the long and humans together, defies easy labels of
tradition of history and equestrian painting gender, species or class. This is because the
gives clear evidence of Buffon’s horse, in his work, is neither simply an
pronouncement of the horse as the “most accessory to historic (and virile) conquest, nor
beautiful conquest of man” – evidence and an aestheticized possession. Up until the final
symbol of his (and I use the masculine stages of his shortened career, Géricault
deliberately) power over nature as over paints the horse as an other who can be
history – then the work of Théodore Géricault, I neither conquered, nor fully controlled.
want to argue, paints a different picture of Indeed, I will argue that the horse is a queer
the horse and of history; one that defies the other who reveals to the artist and his viewers
human separation from nature, as it confuses the limits of their knowledge and dominance
hierarchies of human and horse as conqueror in the world.
and conquered respectively. My use of the term “queer” draws upon
With regard to the long tradition of recent interest in “queer ecology” (or
equestrian painting and illustration in France, “ecologies”) that brings together ecological
Géricault is a transitional figure. Visible in his criticism and queer studies in order to contest
work is the shift from the homo-social horse accepted notions of a “natural order” that
world of the Ancien Régime, where riding excludes non-normative sexual relations on
offered privilege and prestige to aristocratic the grounds of their being somehow against
and military men, to the bourgeois horse nature. Queer ecology is understood as a
necessary corrective to accepted notions of
66
 Fig.1 David
Le Premier Consul Franchissant les Alpes, 1802-3, oil on canvas, 236x231 cm

the “natural” in both environmental and queer But such a separation of human and natural
studies, such that non-normative sexual worlds and the valorizing of nature as
activity (within or between species) is “normative” goes against the very meaning of
regarded as outside of or against nature.[i] ecology, which, as Timothy Morton writes,
67
“demands intimacies with other beings that relation to the viewing subject standing
queer theory also demands.” Such outside it, there is no allowance made for the
intimacies, he argues, moreover, prove the possibility that the world – or more specifically
anti-essentialism of evolution itself, in so far as for my purposes, the animals within that
it is a process that “abolishes rigid boundaries world, might return the gaze, or have a
between and within species.”[ii] This is the viewpoint of their own. In this way, moreover,
queerness that I want to trace in Géricault’s Enlightenment conventions painted animals
painting of horses and horse-human as part of a “natural order” that is continuous
relations. Géricault, we know, was deeply with the perceived social order — the animal
intimate with horses — not only did he paint body was clearly separable from the human
them attentively throughout his career and even as it enabled the human mind to
keep a horse head sculpture in his studio, he perform its work. Indeed the importance of
rode with what has been called a “suicidal the horse in historical and aesthetic
passion,”[iii] and died from wounds inflicted representation was due to his role as literal
from a fall off his horse. What or who are his support. In visual records of heroic action, the
horses? horse carries men into battle and figures
those once defiant forces of nature that man
I Painting History with a Horse has harnessed to his control.
Potts cites the work of English artist
Géricault, of course, paints at the beginning George Stubbs as marking a first departure
of the nineteenth-century, before Darwin, and from these Enlightenment conventions
before the theory of evolution promoted a because of the weight given to the portraits of
view of the animal order as nature “in tooth horses and humans. “We may explain this
and claw;” a nature whose savage sexuality weight attaching to Stubbs’ depictions of
needed to be separated from humans, or horses by their social significance as signs of
tamed before entering our households. Pre their owners, but we can still, from time to
theories of sexual selection (pitting male time, find ourselves faced with the figure of an
against male for the female), Géricault is animal that seems to stand in an uncanny
also post certain Enlightenment conventions relation of literal equivalence to the figure of a
that pictured animals as either objects of human being.”[vi] While such “equivalence”
anatomical knowledge, or extensions of the in Stubbs is largely a matter of the physical
human world. The prominence of animal likeness between human and animal
illustrations in natural history, argues Potts, anatomy, Géricault extends such analogical
coincided with an “idea of picturing [that] possibility to the matter of expression. In his
functioned in Enlightenment science as an equestrian portraits and military paintings,
important general model for the systematic horses are depicted less as steeds, tamed by
observation and representation of natural men to carry them into honorable battles,
phenomena. The aesthetic dimension was than as physical and emotional partners in
seen as integral to its scientific function as a fear. Caught in events of unknown
clear and coherent display of proportions and unknown outcomes, his
knowledge.”[iv] Potts’ use of the term horses and riders more often than not move
“picturing” has echoes of what Martin in opposed directions, sharing expressions
Heidegger has called the “world picture,” or and sometimes physical stances, but rarely
“the world conceived and grasped as purpose or act. Thus, to the extent that these
picture.”[v] In his essay, “The Age of the World Enlightenment paradigms sought to tame
Picture,” Heidegger links the growth of modern otherwise unruly relations between human
Western science to a new objectification of and animal, I want to argue here that
the world by and before a viewer who frames Géricault challenges this picture of the natural
what is to be seen, a viewer who is made order in two ways. First, he unbridles the
subject through this view. As the picture horse’s gaze to allow it to look back and defy
renders the world knowable and calculable in the viewer’s objectification of the natural

68
 Fig.2 Géricault
Le Premier Consul Franchissant les Alpes, 1802-3, oil on canvas, 236x231 cm

world. Second, he implicates a shared picture. Géricault thus turns the question of
corporeal, if not erotic bond between the the picture back onto its picturing subject,
artist/viewer and the unknowable (and raising doubts about the very possibility of a
indomitable) animal bodies within the world picture made from an outside,
69
objective position. reaffirms man’s power over nature, as over
Known to move excitedly if awkwardly history. Such was Hegel’s description of
from a range of passions, Géricault’s horses Napoleon as a world-historical hero who,
reveal a growing, Romantic effort to capture “sitting on a horse, reaches out over the world
a certain “liveness” of the animal, whether in and dominates it.”[ix] In Géricault’s paintings,
illustration or in painting, and to move away however, historical domination is put into
from the “static objectification” that was so doubt; in scenes where the outcomes are
important to earlier natural histories, such as anything but certain, the burden of history
the Comte de Buffon’s Histoire appears to fall not on man, but on the horse.
Naturelle (completed between 1745 and Indeed, in many of his paintings we might
1788), and Thomas Bewick’s 1790 History of say that the matter of history itself shifts from a
Quadrupeds. An illustrator by trade, Bewick depiction of past events, to an uncharted
understood picturing animals to be integral to exploration of inter-subjective relations in
knowing them, and like Buffon, relied on which men are thrown from dominance to
illustrations to reveal the essence or “totality” land in a position where horses are their
of an animal. Curiously, this essence was primary interlocutors.
understood as derived from an animal’s While Géricault’s most famous painting
static, physical form and said to be distorted if may be his huge Raft of the Medusa (1819),
animals were represented in motion, or equines dominate the rest of his oeuvre, but
characterized by those movements “towards in a way that distinguishes his work from the
which [the animal ] naturally inclines when popular horse paintings of his first teacher,
excited by needs or agitated by Carle Vernet, for whom the horse functions
passions.”[vii] Géricault’s departure from his primarily as a nod to English fashion. Neither
neo-classical predecessors is especially visible can his work be easily assimilated to the
in his attention to those emotions and French tradition of equestrian portraiture,
passions that make one alive, especially as which depicted the horse as, in Buffon’s
they are witnessed in horses. Such concern terms, “the most beautiful conquest of
with liveness as emotion signals the end of nature.” In the beginning of the nineteenth-
what Stephan Germer has called “artistic century, even as riding would begin to lose its
practice as active enlightenment,”[viii] and associations with royal or aristocratic
the beginning of an art of sentience, an art, breeding, it could signal virility and power —
moreover, that establishes at once the power claimed through opposition to and
possibility for a psychological equivalence control of the horse. Thus, Napoleon
between humans and horses, if not for an informed his court painter, David, that he
emotional or even erotic relation between wanted to be painted “‘calme sur un cheval
them. Indeed, what is singular in Géricault’s fougueux” [calm on a spirited horse].”[x] The
horses is not the way they look, but that they result (Figure 1), David’s Le Premier Consul
look, and look in a way that seems to defy our franchissant les alpes (1800), is a composite
capacity to develop a singular world picture. of historical narrative and equestrian
This becomes especially apparent with portraiture that renders both event and
respect to the traditions of history painting and animal together as a fixed, idealized picture
equestrian portraiture into which Géricault before the viewer. Emperor and horse
inserted himself early on, and where the function together as a union of opposites:
melding of classical and natural history calm and frenzy, mind and body. The frenzy,
paradigms is especially evident. Within these of course, is reined into a classical dressage
traditions, the power to paint an accurate pose by the dominating control and gaze of
narrative of history derives from an the future emperor, who thus leads the horse
enlightenment view of man’s place at the top and the French to victory.
of the world order, looking out over the events When we compare David’s painting
he commands and brings to a coherent with Géricault’s Officier de chasseur à cheval
close. The soldier on horseback, in particular, de la garde impériale chargeant of 1812

70
 Fig.3 Géricault
Le Cuirassier blesse (Wounded Dragoon) 1814, oil on canvas, 358x266 cm

(Figure 2), the first of his paintings to be to free itself of its harness.[xi] One might read
admitted into the salon, we find a very into it an opposition of animal body or instinct
different relation between man and horse, if and human mind, but given that horse and
not also man and power. The painting is said rider appear to be moving in different
to have originated not in vision of history, but directions, one cannot say that one
in a street scene of a horse rearing as it tried dominates the other, nor can they say that
71
they cannot be said to function as a unit. As strange foreshortening and occlusion of the
a portrait, it is janus-faced — horse and rider horse’s hind end and Géricault’s “failure to
looking left and right, their eyes registering articulate the key areas of muscular exertion
equally, if differently, the destruction around necessary to complete the action.”[xvi] The
them. There is no indication here that the result is that horse and rider are brought into a
officer’s contemplative gaze is a match for status of “uncanny equivalence,” similar to
the horse’s energetic vitality, or even able to what Potts speaks of in regard to Stubbs.
carry the bearskin hat and plume that seems Physically, their bodies mimic one another:
on the verge of engulfing his head. Where the horse’s front legs – one bent and raised,
Napoleon points his right hand forward to the the other straight to the ground – are
future, this officer, perhaps to right the repeated in the soldier’s. It is a precarious
imbalance of his twisted body and out flung stance for both the horse and the soldier, and
leg, points his sword towards the genitals of only temporarily supported either by the
the horse: inadvertently gesturing towards the counterparts of the horse’s barely visible (or
material sign of the power he lacks. Wrapped useful) hind leg and the soldier’s sword (now
in and surrounded by animal furs that are used as a cane). Emotionally their eyes
nevertheless unable to compensate for the register a similar state of fear and
human body’s weakness, that action falls on anticipation, even as they look again in
the horse.[xii] In so far as Géricault has different directions. Indeed, one could say
merged the single focus of equestrian that the focus of the painting is not the
portraiture with the huge scale of historical specific event (which is unclear), but the inter-
narrative in a painting where both the subject subjective relations established between two
of the portrait and the historical event are beings caught in a history that both
unknown, either the idea of a heroic event experience physically, but neither can know.
itself, or the possibility for knowing and That the horse may be the soldier’s primary
representing that event, seem to be in interlocutor, not just his means of
question.[xiii] “A War effigy? Certainly!” writes transportation, is made apparent in the
Regis Michel, “…. But charge or retreat? 1815 Portrait de Carabinier (Figure 4). Here,
Victory or defeat, Realism or propaganda? even though the officer meets our gaze, his
Allegory or Portrait? For or against the Empire? defiant stare and inflated armature appear to
…. We don’t know.” [xiv] guard against, or compensate for, the
Through this uncertainty surrounding knowing and vulnerable look of the horse that
the representation, the status of the viewing is barely visible in his shadow.
subject as “one who knows”[xv] is subverted, This brings us back to Géricault’s
both in Géricault’s Officier de la garde, and to transgressions of the genre of equestrian
an even greater degree in the Figure 3, The portraiture, if not of that of the portrait
Wounded Cuirassier of 1814 — a painting itself[mw1] . What is the function or even the
intended to act as an antithesis to the first. subject of these portraits? Henri Zerner
Here, Napoleon’s reversal of fortune is remarks that while Romantic portraiture, under
signaled by the fallen officer, his body, like the influence of Lavater, took on new
that of his horse, faces the opposite direction importance as a “document of human
of that of the officer and his horse. Once psychology,” Géricault was never much of a
again, Géricault has merged genres of physiognomist. Indeed, his work often
portrait and historical narrative in a way that appears to deliberately transgress
subverts our knowledge of either — not only of physiognomy’s efforts to read identity or
the genre, but also of identity – Who is the character in a face, or, as in the work of Pieter
soldier?; What and where is the situation?; Camper, to found the great chain of being
Which way are they moving, up or down, on the angle of the face. A follower of
backwards or forwards; And whom, between Lavater and anatomical illustrator, Camper
horse and rider, is leading and supporting insisted that the more the angle from
whom? Much has been written about the forehead to chin is vertical, the more human

72
 vacancy, nor the averted gaze found in
many of Géricault’s portraits, this alert, but
melancholic look lingers on me and beckons
me. This is the face described by Levinas:
“[I]n its expression, in its mortality, the face
before me summons me, calls for me, begs
for me, as if the invisible death that must be
faced by the Other…, were my
business…”[xix] This may be due to a certain
nakedness in the horse’s expression — what
Michael Fried might call its anti-theatricality —
that, as in the Portrait de Carabinier, stands in
stark contrast to man’s defensive glare and
armor.[xx] We don’t believe that horses can
pose, but the Napoleonic wars showed, pace
Levinas, that they were certainly capable of
sacrifice.[xxi]
One might say then that in these early
equestrian works, horses function as an other
through whom history, and history painting,
becomes a private affair. Unlike the symbolic
Fig.4 Géricault animals of natural history and neoclassical
Portrait de Carabinier (A Caribineer) 1814-15, oil on
canvas, 64.5x54cm
painting, Géricault’s horses do not confirm the
“conquest” of man, but reveal instead the
limits of that conquest. Judged, beckoned,
it is; the more horizontal the angle, the more and seduced, Géricault’s subject is thrown
animal — a belief that placed white from his stable position above or before the
Europeans at the pinnacle of being.[xvii] animal, to a confused and conflicted
What then to make of Géricault’s “Head of a situation of passionate connection with
White Horse,” Tête de cheval blanc (1815) animals. In this rejection of the Enlightenment
(Figure 5), a painting that is as striking for the tradition of animal picturing, horses are
verticality of the horse’s face, as it is figured not as machine, but as conscious,
mesmerizing for its insistent, if inscrutable, emotive subjects. Thus the possibility for
subjectivity. This head appears to express measuring their distance from us all but
what the Carabinier portrait only hints at – it disappears.
avows that which philosophy, and animal
picturing, has disavowed: that the animal can II Queer Intimacies
look at me. “It has,” as Derrida writes, “its
point of view regarding me.”[xviii] Whereas, in the early works, the passionate
This is not the look of the symbolic connection between men and horses is
animal, not “l’animal,” as Derrida discusses in elicited primarily by the face and expression,
his essay. Rather, it is the singular look of this in the works produced in Italy during the years
or that cat, dog or horse who has been a of 1816-17, that connection is increasingly
particular companion. To be the object of located outside the conscious or emotive,
this horse’s gaze changes the status of the outside the self-aware and theatrical, and in
representing, viewing subject. Indeed, even a more physical, bodily liveness. This physical
though this horse looks at the viewer with a liveness is at its height in his Italian project.
directness that is rare in Géricault’s oeuvre, Later works of severed limbs, or of the vacant,
the fact that we cannot focus on his/her two passive stares of monomaniacs evoke a
eyes simultaneously, reminds us of the subjectivity that is between or outside of both
limitations of our vision. Neither the expressive mind and body,

73
Fig.5 Géricault
Tête de cheval blanc (Head of a White Horse) 1816-17, oil on canvas, 65x54 cm

74
animal.[xxii] But in the unfinished Rome discuss the central place occupied by the
project, entitled “Course de chevaux libres” equine body that is lovingly explored from
(Race of the Riderless horses), the throughout Géricault’s career, from forelock to
inseparability of being alive and being fetlock as it were. She cites an anecdote
animal (if not being childlike) is the product of where Géricault patted a friend on the back
a hyper-masculine, heroic fantasy where saying, “We two X …we like big a__s.”[xxiv] But
differences of sex and of species are elided whose ass is he referring to? Must we say that
through violent, erotic contact (Figure 6). the horse’s ass stands in for the feminine?
Liveness here, in a disregard for neo-classical Indeed, Géricault’s interest in the
codes, is a function above all of movement, horse’s rear appears an idée fixe in his work: It
and of movement whose heroic quality is is present in his work, Officier de chasseurs à
inseparable from its animal and sexualized cheval chargeant (Figure 2), where the sword
status. Men and horses are stripped of of the otherwise distracted officer directs the
clothing and tack, their muscles gleaming as viewers’ eyes to the horse’s hind at the center
they run in uncharted directions. They are of the painting. It also appears in his 1813 to
thrown into an “uncanny equivalence,” not by 1814 studies of horse hinds (Croupes, Figure
their expressions, but by the entangled thrusts 7), with variously coiffed and fetishized tails.
of their bodies. As a physical, if not psycho- Additionally it is found in his painting of horses
sexual connection is brought into graphic led to market (Marché aux Chevaux, Figure
display, moreover, the ethics of 8). It stretches too to his later (1821)
companionship give way to a bestial erotic; lithographs of work horses entering mines
knowledge of the other is sought not in the (Entrance to Adelphi Wharf, Figure 9). In each
face, but beneath the tail. the massive haunches (croupes or fesses) are
One might call these displays the mark of their power and of their
homoerotic given the hyper-masculine status attraction. What is different and remarkable
of human and equine, but queer might be a in the Race series is the shared musculature
better term, given that what I want to argue is of horse and human, created through a
both a sexual and a “special” (as in species) common modeling of light and shade that
uncertainty or instability. The race of rider-less, highlights areas of strength: haunch, chest,
or free, horses, was a local Roman event. biceps; as also those unexpected details of
Géricault’s plan to represent the event in a seductive beauty, such as a glistening tail or
monumental mode, however, had no lock of hair. It is a fantasy picture of shared
precedent and its genre has perplexed art physical potency.[xxv]
historians. Abigail Soloman Godeau has In these Rome paintings, horses in
written that Géricault’s subversion of the laws general, and the horse’s rear in particular,
of genre is related to a “disturbance in the take on a greater share of libidinal investment
field of gender…[and] has certain than in Géricault’s earlier work, and this can
consequences for the representational only be partly explained by the apparent
stability of sexual difference.”[xxiii] I would cause for his trip to Italy — a scandalous affair
add that the breach of genre has that the artist is known to have had with his
consequences for the representation of uncle’s wife. In the unfinished project of the
species difference as well. Linda Nochlin’s “Course de chevaux libres” — the horse is at
1994 article on “The Absence of Women” in once an eroticized object and an idealized
Géricault argued that horses, in particular, are rival. The passionate connection between
a “displacement of the feminine” in his work, men and horses that is elicited by the face
and, more importantly, are a means to and expression in Géricault’s earlier horse
represent women surreptitiously, with the portrait, or even in the mounted portraits of
corporeal and erotic power and presence soldiers, is here located outside the conscious
that they were otherwise denied in painting. or emotive, outside the self-aware and
“What we have here is ‘femininity without theatrical, and in a more physical, bodily
women.’” Nochlin writes as she moves on to being. Indeed, physical liveness is at its

75
 Fig.6 Géricault
Course de chevaux libres, (Race of the Riderless Horses) Paris, Louvre, 1817

height in his Italian project that is situated the otherwise historical territory of horse-
before his most famous work, “Raft of the human relations, here expressed as what
Medusa,” (which, nevertheless borrows from might be called a queer fantasy. Eitner has
it), and the even later works of severed limbs, commented on the development of the
or of monomaniacs whose vacant, passive series from observed experience, evident in
stares register a slow drainage of lifeblood. the first sketches, to an idealized “heroic
Here, by contrast, is a heroism that is vision” concerning the primordial conflict
registered through an animal vitality and between animal fury and human
movement that is shared between men and volition.”[xxvii] But the denuding of the humans
horses, stripped of clothing and tack to that accompanies this development, like the
expose the gleam of their muscles as they run switch to a neo-classical rendering,
in uncharted directions. Designated as emphasizes less the contest between human
“riderless,” the horses are liberated from any and animal than their shared musculature
functional value and thrown into a horizontal and energy. Unlike his military men, whose
equivalence with the men, one that is bodies are effaced beneath an inflated
registered, not as before, in their expressions, armature, the men of the Race series are
but by the entangled thrusts of their bodies. idealized in and through their own bare
While the project began as a genre strength, their Michelangelo-esque
painting representing a local Roman event, muscularity. In his progression of sketches for
the eventual erasure of any specific reference the project, Géricault first eliminated
to the race transformed it into a “baffling” spectators and eventually all signs of a public
composition, according to Lorenz Eitner: spectacle to position the viewer as participant
“neither genre nor history; of grand style, but rather than spectator. At the same time, the
without definable subject.”[xxvi] Géricault focus shifts from heads to tails, or from face to
abandoned the historical event to focus on haunches, hips and buttocks – the seat of

76
 to see it: “…the most crucial and constitutive
dramas of human life are those that can
never be viewed head on, those that can
never be taken in frontally, but only, as it
were, approached from behind.”[xxix] We
could say, then, that it is with behindsight that
Géricault envisions a sexuality that is at once
bestial and idealized in these scenes of
athletic men and boys, grasping and lifting
the tails of horses as they thrust themselves
Fig.7 Géricault towards them. In such forceful, eroticized
Croupes 1813 oil on canvas, 63x19cm
scenes, sexual difference is subsumed by
species difference, but species difference
physical and sexual power. Thus, one of the loses any clear and stable markers or value:
earlier painted sketches, now hanging in Lille men and horses rise diagonally on two legs;
(Figure 10, Le Départ), depicts what appears men and horses share the power to take and
to be a contest of psychological stamina the possibility of being taken. Here the artist
visible in the eyes and face. That test of will is turns away from the emotional demands
apparently won by the white horse at the elicited by the face, but at the same time, no
center. As we move to the “Cheval retenu participant in the fantasy is simply taken from
par des esclaves” (Horse Restrained by Slaves) behind.
(Figure 11) and the final stage of the “Course” Géricault never realized the final,
hanging in Paris, the face and eyes lose monumental version that he is said to have
importance, if not visibility, and the focus planned of the Race project, perhaps
moves, essentially, to the rear. because the vision was too personal, or
The various stages of the Race thus perhaps because his heroic fantasy could not
read as foreplay to a sodomitical fantasy withstand his return to France. The next large
where desire and identification are work he would begin was if not anti-heroic, a
inseparable: wanting to be and wanting to document of the death of the heroic — The
have appear, at once, as the will to Raft of the Medusa (Figure 12). It is
penetrate and to embody the massive hind interesting, nevertheless, that the bodies he
of the horse. Human, horse, masculine and paints aboard the raft are not the emaciated,
feminine alternate positions, such that sexual, sickly bodies reported to be found in
as well as species, differences lose their newspaper accounts, but the strong,
value. Is this a primal scene represented muscled, and beautiful bodies of the race
otherwise? In Freud’s “Wolf Man,” a case that series, now striving desperately to maintain
is relevant in that it deals with the their verticality to survive. It is as if the
displacement of affect between humans and identification with equine or animal bodies is
animals, we learn that the primal scene is still there, although now made evident not in
always viewed as taking place “from behind” manifestations of physical power, but in a
— “a tergo” as is the case with animals. The conception of “bare life,” or perhaps a
fear (and perhaps also attraction) of that Benthamite recognition of the capacity for
scene is described as a fear of “coitus more suffering. “Nos espèrences et nos désirs ne
ferarum,” or sex in the position of sont vraiment ici-bas que de vaines
beasts.[xxviii] As Lee Edelman has explained, chimères,” Géricault wrote to his friend
one of the interesting, if for some, disturbing Dedreux-Dorcy. “S’il est pour nous sur terre
aspects of this scene is the way the partners quelque-chose de certain, ce sont nos
involved are sexually undifferentiated — peines. La souffrance est réelle, les plaisirs ne
perhaps because the anus shows no sex. He sont qu’imaginaires.”[ Our hopes and desires
coins the term “(be)hindsight” to describe that are nothing but futile dreams here on earth. If
formative scene, as well as the way we come there is anything certain on earth, it is our

77
 Fig.8 &9 Géricault
Marché aux chevaux (Horse Market) 1817 chalk, pencil, watercolor and gouache on paper(23x30cm)
Entrance to Adelphi Wharf 1821 (lithograph)

pain. Suffering is real, pleaures are only these are different animals — work-horses and
imagined.] [xxx] race horses, and in either case, subservient
Horses would not disappear from his and/or commodified beings, their power and
work, indeed they will become, once again, energy harnessed and contained for
the central actors in the paintings and purposes of labor or entertainment. Gone is
lithographs made in London after 1820. But any physical or emotional connection,
78
 Fig.10 &11 Géricault
Courses aux chevaux libres, Le Départ (The Start of the Race), Lille 1817, oil on paper, mounted on canvas (45x60cm)
Cheval Retenu par les Esclaves (Horse restrained by Youths) 1817,Oil on paper mounted on canvas(48 x 60 cm)

except that accomplished by the whip. De- most famous of the works of this
individualized racehorses are stretched period, Epsom Derby (Figure 13) the horses
horizontally beneath their equally anonymous are differently colored imitations of one
riders, or covered with elegant, initialed sheets another, down even to their common glance
that evoke the feminine gendering prevalent towards the spectator. They move in a
in both literary and popular discourse. In the synchronized, but oddly motionless gallop.
79
 Fig.12 &13 Géricault
Le Radeau de la Meduse (Raft of the Medusa), detail, (1818-1819) oil on canvas (491x716 cm)
Le Derby d’Epsom (Epsom Derby) 1821 oil on canvas (36x48 in)

This is the horse turned whore, no longer the horse, Nana: “Elle luisait à la lumière comme
embodiment of the artist’s fantasy, but that of un louis neuf.”[She shined in the light like a
his paying public. Liveness becomes matter, new coin.][xxxi]
not through death, but through Géricault’s work in London is strangely
commodification, indicating already what premonitory for his generation. In his
Zola would write sixty years later of the race lithographs, as in the Epsom downs paintings,
80
 the rear of the wagon mimics the hind of the
horse, if not a human’s hind, minus the tail.
Here then, Géricault both cites and pokes fun
at his own queer obsession and invites the
viewer to part the slightly opened canvas and
enter through the rear.

References

[i] Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona and Bruce Erickson

eds., Queer Ecologies (Bloomington, Indiana UP[i], 2010).

[ii] Timothy Morton, “Queer Ecology” PMLA 125.2 (March,

2010), 273, 275.

[iii] Régis Michel, Géricault, l’invention du reel, (Paris:

Découvertes Gallimard, 1992), 144 (this and all following
translations are my own unless otherwise specified).

[iv] Alex Potts, “Natural Order and the Call of the Wild: The
Fig. 14 Géricault Politics of Animal Picturing.” The Oxford Art Journal 13:1, 1990,
Various Subjects Drawn from Life and on Stone, 12.
frontispiece, 1821 (lithograph)
Le Derby d’Epsom (Epsom Derby) 1821 oil on canvas [v] Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The
(36x48 in) Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New
York: Harper Colophon, 1977), 129.
he assumes the position of the Romantic artist
grown up — the gelded artist who [vi] Potts, “Natural Order,” 29.
acknowledges the necessity of containing or
[vii] Cited in Potts, 23.
displacing his (sexual) energy; the disillusioned
artist whose ideals of love and beauty now [viii] Stefan Germer, “Pleasurable Fear: Géricault and
uncanny trends at the opening of the nineteenth-century” Art
turn to thoughts of money. In a letter from
History Vol. 22, no. 2 (June, 1999), 170.
England to Dedreux-Dorcy, he wrote,
“J’abdique le cothurne et la Sainte Ecriture [ix] Walter, Kaufmann, Hegel: A Reinterpretation (Notre Dame,
Ind., 1978), 318-19 and cited in Christopher
pour me renfermer dans l’écurie dont je ne
Prendergast, Napoleon and History Painting (Oxford:
sortiai que cousu d’or.” [I give up Greek Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 188.
tragedy and Scripture in order to enclose
myself in the stables from which I will only [x] Napoleon also instructed David in the rules of classical
“picturing,” suggesting that “it is not the exact reflection of
emerge rolling in riches.][xxxii] In this, perhaps, features, warts on the nose, that makes a likeness; it’s the
he joins other Romantic writers like Stendhal, character and what animates the physiognomy, that needs
and later Flaubert, who found compensation to be painted.” Cited in Albert Elsen, Purposes of Art (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston: 1962), 242.
for the loss of their illusions in a newly acquired
ironic outlook on the world and the self. In Le [xi] Cf. Lorenz Eitner, Géricault: Sa Vie, Son Oeuvre (Paris:
Rouge et le Noir, we may remember, Julien Gallimard, 1991), 36.

Sorel learns that he must turn his passion for [xii] On the body’s weakness, see Thomas Crow, “The Heroic
horses into discursive capital by making a joke Single Figure,” Géricault Régis Michel, Ed. (Paris: La
of his otherwise embarrassing morning’s fall Documentation Française, 1996) I, 48.

into the mud.[xxxiii] Turning his London [xiii] On genre bending in Géricault, see Michael Marrinan,
lithographs into a book, Géricault displays a “Narrative Space and Heroic Form: Géricault and the Painting
similar ironic vision in its frontispiece, on which of History, and Henri Zerner, “Le Portrait, plus ou moins,” in
Michel, ed., Géricault, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau,
we find the image of a horse-drawn covered “Gender, Genre and Géricault,” in Serge Guibaut, Maureen
wagon viewed from behind (Figure 13). With Ryan and Scott Watson, eds., Théodore Géricault, The Alien
the title written over it, the end is transformed Body: Tradition in Chaos (Vancouver, Morris and Helen Belkin
Art Gallery, 1997).
into the beginning.[xxxiv] More provocatively,

81
[xiv] Régis Michel, “Le Nom de Géricault,” in Michel [xxxi] Emile Zola, Nana (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1977) 374.
ed., Géricault, I, 5. My translation.
[xxxii] Cited in Philippe Bordes, “L’écurie dont je ne sortiai que
[xv] According to Heidegger, “The subject as ‘representer of cousu d’or: Painters and Printmaking from David to Géricault,”
all representing’ is rendered ‘safe and secure’ through the in Serge Guilbaut et al eds., 130.
‘certainty of his representations,” Heidegger, “World Picture,
50. [xxxiii] See Weil, Kari “Men and Horses: Circus Studs, Sporting
Males and the Performance of Purity in Fin-de-Siècle France,”
[xvi] Crow, “Heroic Single Figure,” 50-51. French Cultural Studies 17, 1 (Winter, 2006).

[xvii] On Camper and the role of the facial angle, see Elfed [xxxiv] See also the suggestive description of this print in
Huw Price, “Do Brains Think? Comparative Anatomy and the Guilbaut et. Al., 246.
end of the Great Chain of Being in 19th-century Britain,” History
of the Human Sciences ( (25(3), 2012), 41.

[xviii] Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I am. Trans.

David Wills (New York: Fordham UP, 2008), 11.

[xix] Levinas, “Ethics as first philosophy, “The Levinas Reader,

(Sean Hand ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 83. For Levinas, of
course, only the face of the “other man” could summon me
to my ethical responsibility to the other. For Géricault, that
summons comes, at least potentially, from the horse.

[xx] Cf. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting

and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: UC Press, 1980).

[xxi] The popularity of War Horse, both on stage and in film,

seems to attest to a current fascination with horses as
sacrificial subjects (if not erotic partners), as well.

[xxii] Stephan Germer has written of the common

“symptomatic character” of the fears triggered by Géricault’s
portraits of living dead, not-to-be domesticated pets, and
sexualized children. “They involve a confusion between and
erasure of what, within that social context, was is considered
to be “alive, ‘animal’, or ‘childlike’ respectively.” (Germer,
160).

[xiii] Solomon-Godeau, “Gender, Genre, Gericault” in

Guibault et al. 94-114.

[xxiv] Linda Nochlin, “Géricault, or the Absence of Women,”

October 68 (Spring, 1994), 56.

[xxv] The biographical details of Géricault’s retreat to Italy are

not without relevance here. Escaping both the depleted
heroics of the Restoration, brought home by a brief stint with
the Grey Musketeers—an elite body of the Royal Cavalry who
rode magnificent grey horses, and the consequences of a
scandalous affair with the wife of his uncle, it is easy to read
the chiaroscuro of thrusting naked bodies as a release of
frustrated virile energy.

[xxvi] Lorenz Eitner, Géricault, His Life and Work (London: Orbis
Publishing: 1983) pp.119-20.
Kari Weil is University Professor of Letters and Director of the
[xxvii] Ibid. 159, 153. College of Letters at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She
is the author, most recently, of THINKING ANIMALS, WHY
[xxviii] Sigmund Freud, “An Infantile Neurosis, ”The Standard ANIMAL STUDIES NOW? (Columbia UP, 2012) and co-editor
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, (London: with Lori Gruen of the recent special issue of
Hogarth Press, 1955), Vol. XVII, 57. HYPATIA entitled "Animal Others," (Volume 27, Number 3
2012). She has also published widely on feminist theory, on
[xxix] Lee Edelman, “Seeing Things: Representation, the Scene literary representations of gender and on the riding, breeding
of Surveillance, and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex,” and eating of horses in 19th century France. The latter work is
inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss part of a current project entitled, ‘The Most Beautiful
(New York: Routledge, 1991), 95. Conquest of Man’ (sic): Horses and the Conquest of Animal
Nature in Nineteenth-Century France.
[xxx] Cited in Eitner, 177.
82
 BORDER CROSSINGS
a portfolio by
PATRICIA J. GOODRICH

Border Crossings crosses artistic disciplines of painting and poetry. In the process lines
are blurred between the conscious and subconscious, and ultimately between others
and self. What began as my creating a series of paintings in response to particular
poems has led to writing poems in response to each painting, creating a cycle rather
than series. The paintings are a combination of layered Venetian plaster, poured
acrylics and India inks. The poured bodies themselves resemble rivers and maps.
What seemed to be a simple exercise has become an exploration of not only my
connection to those creatures, but also to the multiplicity and essence of who I am.

83
 (Bird) Patricia Goodrich-before
i n k

a woman walks
on broken wings
she has not learned
she cannot fly

a feathered quill
bends crushed still
its hollowed tip
does not run dry

oh woman woman
somehow you know
inside you’ll find
the sky
both black and blue

both wet and dry

84
Patricia Goodrich
Bird (ink) Venetian plaster, acrylic and ink on board, feather, 22” x 28”, 2010  Patricia Goodrich

85
 (Bird) Patricia Goodrich - after

Hope

seldom thought of in our better days

as if extraneous, the fallen feather of a bird
not noted by the bird herself, picked up by a passerby
or at least the impulse there, beaten back
for fear of avian flu or something worse;
it is in the worse hope flies near.
It is the reach not the grasp
that gives it lift, that tenders flight
Is it hope drives the mother
to push her young out of nest?
You know they all do not survive the fall;
wings are broken along the way.
Just when we need reassurance most,
find it missing, there hope comes
with no return, without a guarantee.
Yet hope comes and reaches
far beyond humanity
to where my daughter’s black retriever
scratches her empty bedroom’s door.

86
 Patricia Goodrich – before

Fox

There was no need to be sly

at the edge of the wood
within yards of a creek.
No reasons to think
the hole rooted out
at the base of a tree
would not be safe.
That the discs padding
from the field and
out to the stream,
that the smooth slip
where the body entered
its underground pod,
that this packing of snow
would be noticed
among the veed
trails of deer.
Perhaps the shy partridge
who favor this place
made you secure
with dinner at your door.
A wise choice.
A place I would choose
for a home.
That’s how I found you here.

87
Patricia Goodrich
Fox, venetian plaster, acrylic and ink on board, 22” x 28”, 2009  Patricia Goodrich

88
 Patricia Goodrich-after
Fox II

Orange and white body curled into a ball,

a white-tipped tail masks all except
yellow eyes that track me everywhere
and reflect nights of trotted fence lines,
pee on stray straw and stick, marking Mine!
Furtive or sly—words not worthy
of you. The pose, a copy of a painting
I gave my brother Mike, who was most
at home with creatures in the quiet woods.
How like he was, covering his grin, hiding
teeth blackened by a childhood fall.
Maybe what I am doing here,
pouring out these lines and pools,
is laying claim to you from death.
Didn’t you leave prints across my brother’s grave,
stand boldly roadside in broad daylight?
Didn’t you follow me home?
Don’t you stand guardian nights
at the foot of my drive
in a circle of light?

89
 Patricia Goodrich - before
Bear

The bears came back last night

though the night itself was starless.
I saw them from a distance—
two cubs closer and a sow
emerging from the brush—
but their presence was enough
to make my body grow rigid
like the hairs that guard
their humpback necks.

When I was young,

they came near every night
till I feared the terror
that waited behind closed eyes.
Brown bears sprung from rivers,
huge paws spearing fish
until they spotted me.
Black bears laid hillside ambush.
Surrounded, I had to travel.
There was no other way.
I’d wake shaken,
exhausted by my flight.

They say you can’t hunt bear long

before he’s hunting you.
He circles, creeping up behind.
Despite his size, he moves
with stealth, quietly.
Years have lapsed
since they lost my trail—
marriage and children covered track—
but now they have my scent again.
Now the bears are back.

Perhaps their appearance is a message

from some restless Chippewa spirit
bound by broken treaties.
Perhaps the bear lives within,
banished to some secret place
all those years I was secure.
Perhaps I’ve grown weak.
Perhaps he senses wounds,
and I seem a likely prey.
I’ve heard that if you strip
the fur of bear away,
the naked frame looks human.

90
Patricia Goodrich
Bear, Venetian plaster, acrylic and ink on board, 22” x 28”, 2009  Patricia Goodrich

91
 Patricia Goodrich-after

Bear II

The penis is the thing.

Do not mistake
the blood for the bear.
It is the weeping
of a young girl
who isn’t there—one
who sat on the edge
of a back bedroom bed,
not knowing how to say no
to the grizzled stranger
while her father lay
drunk, head on the kitchen
table a room away.
What or who led her mother
to leave her job waiting
tables early and
come before blood
to her side?
This is not a memory,
nor is it a dream.
It is a story
told to a daughter
forty years late.
How much it might
have explained.

92
 Patricia Goodrich-before

The Left Hind Foot

A Sunday afternoon sitting

on a neighbor’s couch,
my father draped an arm
over my stiff shoulder, my back
erect, my eyes searching
for a place to look,
so uncomfortable with the unfamiliar
closeness. Did he say
he loved me or just that
he’d kill any bastard
who laid his hands on me?
I was twelve.
And I believed him.
After all, how many times
had he cut the left hind foot,
the lucky one, off a rabbit
and given it to me
for being his good girl.

93
Patricia Goodrich
Rabbit, Venetian plaster, acrylic and ink on board, 22” x 28”, 2010  Patricia Goodrich

94
 Patricia Goodrich-after

Muse On Painting a Rabbit

A winter rabbit waits my brush,

but I choose a pallet knife.
I am as frozen as he
might have been, crouched
camouflage against fresh snow
within yards of his windfall hole....
that is not the picture I’ll make.
It will be moments after,
after the 12 gauge blast, the beagle’s
snouting of the fur. The hand that holds
it upside down, cropped out of sight;
its left leg hacked, leaving
a bloody loose joint, limp body,
ears almost supported by
the picture’s perimeter.
Yet, all the while I work
I question Is this right?
Neither death nor what I make of it
is so precise. Perhaps the death
I chose for it, too small.
Must I allow the brown jacket
under the neon orange vest, acknowledge
the hand itself? Is this the error,
and is Venetian plaster
not the medium to capture it?
Is this death too smooth?
To give full due, must it be messy and large,
splattered across raw canvas? Or am I
not so wrong except in the naming?
Is this white on white,
severed limb, crimson smear
not of death, but of life,
of what’s left dear?

95
 (Pig) Patricia Goodrich – before
Three Roses

I hadn’t sent flowers.

There was no phone call
except mine,
ringing unanswered
in an empty room.

There was no letter,

no moments, no moment.
My father left
as he lived,
out of touch.

Today a pig scream pierces

bird chitter, its throat
slit ear to ear,
a gurgling brook
as the pig swallows
its own blood.

Morning air swooshes,

consumed by a flame-
thrower that singes skin.
It blankets the birds’ new song,
They sing the death
of the pig.

These sounds—
the pig’s death
and the bird mourning
that follow—
are familiar.

The surprise is
the three roses
vased on my sill,
even in morning shadow,
all face the direction
of its dying.

Father, despite the distance,

how could I not
know yours?

96
Patricia Goodrich
Pig, venetian plaster, acrylic and ink on board, 22” x 28”, 2009  Patricia Goodrich

97
 Patricia Goodrich-after

Pig

Born of a butchering in Romania, you were

the first, taking the place on smooth plaster
of a pretty landscape I’d planned to paint.

Your gutted body became its own delta,

rivers, tributaries. A landscape of its own.
Somewhere you became my father.

A cocky hat he never wore took shape.

But it covered him. His death
I hadn’t fully mourned until I painted

this rage, the ochre black mustard

red hoofed you, the body bled.

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 Patricia Goodrich – before

Moose Encounter

Had I been the moose disturbed from

my morning’s mudding at the roadside bog,
perhaps I might have demonstrated

an equally indignant demeanor, imitated

his haughty stare, turned my rump,
and stiff-legged an ungracious exit.

What I’d interrupted was not some idle

wander, but an adolescent’s abandoned romp,
hoof prints left like a housewife gone mad,

gouging rising dough. “Housewife”, granted

a word near gone extinct, but one I suspect
embedded still in New Hampshire’s granite hills.

For miles I had read the roadside signs

--Moose Crossing, 170 Collisions—
and heard the radio’s dumb-moose jokes.

Not a likely beast to emulate.

Yet, how can I fail to admire an animal
who, given mud, makes pleasure of it.

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Patricia Goodrich
Moose, Venitian plaster, acrylic and ink on board, 22” x 28”, 2010  Patricia Goodrich

100
 Patricia Goodrich-after

How the Moose Got To Be

Purple is beyond me.

Green, I understand, the necessity
for camouflage, though this painterly
effect is more splotched, poured
as it was before the purple fully dried.
As for cream corn antlers—
or are they horns?—those racks
could support half-a-dozen canvas coats.
They’d never drag, touch the ground.
These stilted legs like clothesline poles,
knees knocked just enough above hooved feet
would make even the most serious trophy
hunter break his action into grin and
wallow in the absurdity of puberty.
How much we have in common, the glory
of a crown near ridiculous if you want
to browse around, a lock in love
for which there is no key
From head to hoof what matters most,
heart’s center of gravity.

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 Patricia Goodrich – before
In Praise of the Dolphin

To talk of butchering a dolphin on the beach

seems to trivialize it, but to understand
the skull and bones sunning on my slate patio,
you need to have seen it first
from a distance, the carcass washed ashore,
its great head curled like the crest of a wave,
looking out to sea, one flipper beckoning,
the other leaning into the sand, a crooked seating,
albeit one with dignity.
You would know then,
my first impulse was not to turn away,
but to admire the graceful vertebrae
and wonder where the great lower jaw,
the smile giver, had gotten to,
and why so few ribs remained.
I might have walked away
satisfied with those few links. Instead,
there was a furtive burying, saving the body
for a return with friends,
and the dismembering we visited upon it
to harvest the skull and scapula,
the backbones and ribs.
The thick, black hide
resisted the blade of a butcher knife.
White worms and dark maggots erupted.
Avoiding those areas of infestation and decay,
three of us took turns sawing, thankful
for the strong wind that carried the stench away.
We purified the remains
in buckets bubbling with bleach.
Then soaked ourselves in salt water—
two artists and I
laughing, released,
glad to be rolled by the waves, carried
in their curl, reckless women, pulled by an undertow.
My shed prosthesis, left safe behind, now far down shore.
Picture-taking, me legless
for the first time in a photo, a lop-sided
mermaid smiling between friends.
The photographer, a composer keeping a measured distance.
Finally, we all kneeled,
scooping sand with purple and pearl clam shells
to keep the entrails from marauding gulls and fiddler crabs.
A painter, who had washed his own father’s bones
in a ritual of respect as a boy in China,
staked a driftwood cross.
We circled the mound with shells and our own bodies.
Fists funneled sand, thumbs pointing up.

102
Patricia Goodrich
Dolphin, venetian plaster, acrylic and ink on board, 22” x 28”, 2010  Patricia Goodrich

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 Patricia Goodrich-after

Dolphin

There is your wide jaw. Somewhere

in my attic your bleached skull and vertebrae.
But here in this painting I prefer
to find you awash in white-capped, cotton candy blue.
Some would say your sea should be glass smooth,
but I know you—the way you like
to splash and play.
See the smile I’ve given back.
Burnished silver bones,
upright posture, proud
of being the center of attention,
you remain a shining beacon, signaling
true beauty lies deep beyond the flesh,
purely happy with not even a nod
toward death.

Patricia Goodrich recently exhibiting at the Izmir Bienniel, Turkey, and Mouseem Culturel, Morocco. She is a recipient of
fellowships and residencies through the Andy Warhol Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Europos Parkas (Lithuania), Inter-Art
Foundation (Romania), Knidos Culture & Arts Center (Turkey), Leeway Foundation, Makole Sculpture Symposium (Slovenia),
PromArt (Haiti), Puffin Foundation, Santa Fe Art Institute, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. Her poetry has been translated into
Chinese, Lithuanian and Romanian. www.patriciagoodrich.com

Selected poems previously have been published in Red Mud (2009) and How The Moose Got To Be (2012), Virtual Artists Collective
(VAC) Press.

104 Study of a Baboon, 1953

Back cover image: Francis Bacon,
 Antennae.org.uk
Issue twenty-six will be
online on the 21st of September 2013

105