Animals in Art catalogue (excerpt)

ANIMALS INDYR ART DYR I KUNSTEN I KUNSTEN

Knud Højgaards Fond

ARKEN

ANIMALS IN ART

Knud Højgaards Fond

Kohei Nawa, PixCell-Deer#44, 2016

Contents

5

Preface

84

Christian Gether

7

Cute Animals, Wild Animals, Human Animals Inter-species Living in Contemporary Art

The Giraffe Bengt Holst

86

The Pig Lone Frank

Dorthe Juul Rugaard

61

Animals in Art Symbolism, Presence and Absence

88

The Cat Anne Katrine Gjerløff

Giovanni Aloi

73 A Hybrid Pack in the Art Axis Paola Pivi’s Feathered Polar Bears

90

The Wolf Mikkel Sinding

Lisa Sjølander Andresen

82

The Fly Thomas Pape

92

List of Works

Paola Pivi, Here it comes the hunter, 2013

Preface

A man and a penguin stroll along the city streets. A police officer stops them and tells the man to take the penguin to the zoo immediately. The next day, the pair are out walking again and run into the same officer, who says, ‘Didn’t I tell you to take the penguin to the zoo?’ ‘Yes,’ says the man, ‘and I did. Now we’re on our way to the amusement park.’

The exhibition Animals in Art is about the animals in our lives – and about the animals’ lives with us. As far back in human history as we are able to see, we have turned animals into prey and livestock, gods and symbols, enemies and family members, exotic mysteries and popular entertainment on TV, the internet or in the circus and zoo. We mass produce animals and allow them to be offered as a commodity – in the pet shop or on the meat counter.

Some we exalt. We let them sleep in our beds and create cute, synthetic versions of them with fluffy fur and abnormally large eyes. We have no qualms about killing off the animals that annoy us or carry diseases, while buying fashionable accessories for those animals we choose to bring into our lives and our homes as pets. Or we set out into the wild to look at animals while our own way of life is well on the way to destroying the basic living conditions of many species.

In short, we live with animals, on animals, in a state of love of animals and at the expense of animals. Often, we humans forget that we are just one species among many; at other times animals remind us of this fact when their actions and responses reflect our own behaviour and psychology. It may be a silly joke, when the man and penguin have such fun at the zoo that they want to go to the amusement park, but it deftly demonstrates how deep the gap has become between us and the animals and, on the other hand, how powerful the fantasy of equal coexistence between species can be.

At present, contemporary art is keenly interested in investigating the relationships that we and the animals enter into. Animals in Art touches upon a wide range of aspects within this field, incorporating critiques of human manipulation of animals as well as cheerful celebrations of how amazing animals are: from Paola Pivi’s neon-coloured and feathered polar bears, presented separately in the museum’s large Art Axis, to the comprehensive group exhibition in

the museum’s side galleries. Featuring sculpture, installation art, painting, video art and photographs by 30 international artists and artist groups, the exhibition forms a sensuous, thought-provoking and engaging menagerie.

This catalogue provides a range of perspectives on the animals featured in the exhibition. Following a research-based introduction by Dorthe Juul Rugaard, Italian art historian Giovanni Aloi explores the long history of animals in art, after which Lisa Sjølander Andresen takes a closer look at Paola Pivi’s polar bears. In addition, a number of experts have contributed texts for a small ‘animal encyclopaedia’ which opens up new and surprising aspects of animals we thought we knew so well. We wish to extend our thanks to Thomas Pape, Bengt Holst, Lone Frank, Anne Katrine Gjerløff and Mikkel Sinding for their exquisite contributions.

Animals in Art can also be enjoyed at Rødovre Centrum shopping centre, where a pop-up exhibition brings contemporary art out into the public space. We greatly appreciate the huge commitment displayed by Head of Marketing Charlotte Andersen and her professional team at Rødovre Centrum.

Thank you to the curators of the exhibition, Dorthe Juul Rugaard and Lisa Sjølander Andresen, and to curatorial assistant Rebekka Laugesen and all the other members of the team who have worked intensively for a year and a half on the development and realisation of this exhibition.

We wish to extend our warm thanks to the artists, lenders and other collaborators at galleries and museums for the kindness and support with which we have been met. Special thanks go out to Julie Morhange and Daphné Valroff from Galerie Perrotin for making introductions and creating opportunities that have paved the way for this ambitious exhibition.

Particularly deep thanks go out to Augustinus Fonden and Knud Højgaards Fond, who saw the importance of this project and supported the exhibition very generously. Without this support it would not have been possible to present the exhibition. We are deeply grateful for the confidence and trust they have placed in us.

Christian Gether Director, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art

Ill. 1: Sophie Calle, Souris Calle, 2018

Cute Animals, Wild Animals, Human Animals Inter-species Living in Contemporary Art

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Dorthe Juul Rugaard

as if awakened, she turns her face to yours; and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny, inside the golden amber of her eyeballs suspended, like a prehistoric fly.

Black Cat (1923) by Rainer Maria Rilke1 When French artist Sophie Calle’s beloved cat Souris (French for ‘mouse’) was put down in 2014, the artist asked her friend, avant-garde pop icon Laurie Anderson, to write a tribute to Souris. Calle began collecting contributions from various French and international musicians, forming a collection of songs that was eventually released in 2018 as a triple album about Souris (ill. 1). The list of musicians includes famous names such as Pharrell Williams, Jean-Michel Jarre, Michael Stipe and Bono, who, on the track Message to Souris, reads aloud the poem Black Cat by Rainer Maria Rilke on Calle’s voicemail with one of U2’s own songs as background music.

The album is a catalogue of other people’s voices, variations on the same intimate narrative. With this work, she publicly processes the grief of her personal loss of an animal. Poised between reality and the represented, she makes her story ours. 2

From flies to elephants Like Rilke’s beautiful poem, Animals in Art is about how humans and animals engage with the world, form part of nature and act in each other’s company. The exhibition unfolds how humans consume,

look at, speak about and anthropomorphise animals, offering many takes on how we understand ourselves through other animal species. At present, contemporary art evinces an acute awareness of biological life and of how the boundaries between nature and culture are constantly mutating, eroding and collapsing. ARKEN’s exhibition examines this dynamic field. The exhibit pans from Paola Pivi’s feathered, brightly neon-coloured polar bears cavorting in the museum’s vast Art Axis to Mark Dion’s stuffed wolf on a trailer in Mobile Wilderness Unit – Wolf (illustrated p. 67). From the playful, anthropomorphic bears, we move on to a study of how we try to control and manipulate wild nature.

Poised between these extremes, the exhibition presents us with animals ranging from flies to elephants.

There are stuffed, filmed, painted and staged animals here, all of them part of artistic explorations of how we humans love animals and subject them to our whims and ideologies. The exhibition thus explores how we project our social and psychological behavioural patterns onto them, and how we either protect them or manipulate their biology.

The artists raise key questions that can help us navigate our present-day ‘menagerie’ of animals.

They call attention to how we interact with and think about our pets – and about those animals which, in a Western context at least, are not seen as potential domesticated companions. The artists investigate these social and psychological dynamics between humans and other species by activating the realm of emotions and empathy that is often aroused in us when encountering animals. At the same time they

Ill. 2: Martin Eder, Lunacy, 2018

Ill. 3: Martin Eder, Catastrophe, 2018

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showcase how the complex power structures and fantasies of coexistence associated with the realm of emotions are significant factors in our understanding of nature, animals and human beings. When analysing these artistic strategies, we may apply the American cultural theorist Sianne Ngai’s concept of the cute. Sianne Ngai has examined the cute as an aesthetic category that permeates our late-capitalist and consumer-driven societies, awakening mixed emotions of devotion and aggression in us.

She points to the cute as an aesthetic category that is growing increasingly prevalent in our society, prompting a need to consider how we enter into relationships with other animal species. The cute is everywhere in our consumption and entertainment culture as a filter through which we experience the world, and we categorise and value animals based on how they arouse our empathy and appeal to our most basic emotional apparatus.3 Similarly, we may use Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species in an analysis of our connection to other species. The American ecofeminist points out the extremely complex and significant bond that exists between humans and other species.

Applying a broad focus that spans the biological and microbiological, as well as plants and cyborgs, she demonstrates that nature and culture are inseparable. In The Companion Species Manifesto (2003), she particularly explores how humans and dogs – for example pet dogs and breeding dogs – are historically and biologically linked, but in her analysis she considers all living organisms in order to explore ethical ways of inter-species living.4

Cutie and the beast It is small and harmless. Weaker than you. Passive.

Vulnerable, sweet and soft. You press its paw, and it says ‘I love you’. Although its eyes are plastic and its only internal organ is a battery pack with a small speaker, you nevertheless sense an appeal in its gaze, a plea to be loved in return. You buy it and take it home, where it will be hugged, dressed up, pretend-fed and slept with at night. It may also be that its eyes are not plastic, that it is in fact a biological life form, a sensing, feeling and intelligent animal. Still, you do the same thing: you become its owner. You enter into a loving, intimate relationship with it, a relationship where you love and protect it, while it submits to your needs, terms and conditions as regards behaviour, hygiene and communication.

Sianne Ngai points out how the cute object can appeal to our inherent sentimental and hidden sadistic fondness for the small and weak, for the infantile, feminine and non-threatening – a seemingly powerless object for which we will feel even greater tenderness if it can also be perceived as helpless, hurt or restricted. 5

We come across cute animals everywhere.

Cuteness infects, charms and seduces us in colourful toy departments, in YouTube’s massive selection of animal videos and in the rabbit cages at the pet store. But cuteness also pertains to how we feel and act in our encounter with other objects, subjects and modes of expression, for example, how we respond emotionally to works of art that explore other qualities than, for example, beauty, transcendence and perfection.6 It is difficult to find kittens more fluffy and adorable than those depicted by the German artist Martin Eder in the hyperrealist painting Lunacy (ill. 2).

They are, quite simply, cute with their round, babylike heads, fine fur and soft paws. One of the two small animals directs its crystal-hued blue eyes at one of the butterflies fluttering in front of it, while the other stares passively straight ahead. However, the painting is nearly four metres wide, giving the kittens eyes as big as teacups, if not bigger – and suddenly, their sweetness takes on a neurotic edge. The cute animals become disturbing, even monstrous.

Furthermore, they are arranged in a landscape of psychedelic colours and a swarm of artificially attached bright butterflies. It feels as if the monster kittens are a giant ‘meme’ – a photoshopped cocktail of synthetic elements with a close kinship to the Internet’s ceaseless stream of images.7 The kitten to the right even has an extra paw, a photoshop error which highlights the painting’s origins in the Internet’s ever-expanding flood of amateurish images. In other words, we don’t just share our physical everyday life with domesticated cats. The cat has also gone online, becoming an internet mascot. Just look at phenomena such as ‘LOLcats’ and the recently deceased Grumpy Cat, whose weak jaw gave it a special cuteness.8 We are major consumers of our own, manipulated representations of animals, and we celebrate their cute vulnerabilities and peculiarities.

In the video work Drei Klavierstücke op. 11, British artist Cory Arcangel has recreated the composer Arnold Schönberg’s first atonal piano concerto by combining and editing brief sequences from 170 YouTube videos of pet cats playing the piano (ill.

4).9 The absence of tonal focus or harmony in the original music is amplified, forming a cacophony of piano keys pressed by soft cat paws. The animals strike the keys arbitrarily as they playfully lounge on or saunter across the instrument, or they are forced to play by their owners, who sit by the piano with a firm grip on their front legs. In some cases, they are lured to the instrument by dancing laser dots. If we apply Ngai’s concept to an analysis of this situation, it does not simply represent a straightforward imbalance of power: the weak object, such as the cat in a YouTube video, can in fact leave us with a cheap, unpleasant feeling of having been manipulated or exploited ourselves. In other words, cuteness unfolds as a complex relationship of power where the weaker party also possesses dynamic energy.10

Ill. 4: Cory Arcangel, Drei KlavierstĂźcke op. 11, 2009 (video stills)

Ill. 5: William Wegman, Looking Right, 2015

Ill. 6: William Wegman, Hansel and Gretel, 2007

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While Eder’s painting challenges classic aesthetic virtues such as beauty by giving us an overdose of monstrously adorable kittens on digital acid, Arcangel points, among other things, to how we share and cultivate cuteness online, engaging in a power play between owner and owned. Here we humans may well be the manipulative, humiliating and consuming party, but we are also subject to the animal’s power over our emotions and attention.

Man’s best friend?

A bench near the entrance to the Central Park Zoo in New York boasts a sentence by Gertrude Stein: ‘I am I because my little dog knows me’. Man is not alone in knowing their animal, as the animal knows its human in turn. We may feel greatly reaffirmed and validated in our co-habitation with animals and experience great grief when we lose them. Animals often help us understand and navigate our own mental lives,11 and a pet animal thus enters into a complex relationship of power with humans, one that reaches beyond Ngai’s contentions regarding the cute object in itself. This relationship intersects with existential and psychological aspects of human existence and shapes our self-image.

Complex power relations and mutual psychological transferences between animal and human can yield fruitful collaborations. One example is provided by American artist William Wegman, who has, since 1970, created iconic photographic portraits of his Weimaraner dogs, beginning with Man Ray, who has since been succeeded by thirteen other dogs; currently Flo and Topper (ill. 5, 6).

The dogs are aristocratic, disciplined and intelligent. They are pointers, a breed of dog skilled at standing still when indicating the presence of prey for hunters, and this trait is also an advantage when working in front of a camera. Their appeal stems from the traits reinforced by Wegman’s tight and inventive stagings of the animals. There is an engaging, surreal quality to Flo and Topper looking past the camera with perfect, nonchalant confidence in Looking Right.

A dynamic interaction arises between artist and animal in Wegman’s studio; a balancing act where the dogs’ will and motivation have as much impact on the process as Wegman’s ideas. Who is the subject and object in this relationship? This is not clear, because Wegman and his team also take directions from the dogs as the animals take the lead with professional ease, creating new opportunities as they work.12 Applying Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species, we may say that these dogs are not so much pets as they are ‘companion animals’ living with humans in relationships that have meaning and significance for both species. According to Haraway, dogs should be regarded as fleshy, material-semiotic presences that are not:

surrogates for theory; they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote.13 Wegman’s practice does not lend itself to a simple conception of the dog as man’s best cute friend, a coexistence that often entails both domination and affection, love and abuse, or cruelty and kindness from the dog’s owner.14 At first glance, it seems that Wegman, as the dominant party in the relationship, anthropomorphises his dogs in order to say something about human existence. But one might just as well argue that the dogs, by virtue of their specific, physical presence and participation, demonstrate how neither they nor he has precedence or dominance in the relationship. Wegman himself says, ‘I’ve always thought of working with the dogs as parallel play. The dogs play their game and I play mine’.15 Perhaps this has always been the way with humans and companion species; we each have our own motivations and needs for engaging in close relationships with our significant others in a reality infiltrated by nature and culture alike.

Telling stories with animals Busted! A pastel-coloured owl stares with roundeyed panic into a spotlight that has suddenly been switched on. Holding a coloured pill in its beak, and with the table underneath full of many more pills, it shamefully takes flight away from the scene of the crime. The acute embarrassment of being caught in the act immediately transplants itself into our own bodies. Created by Swedish artist duo Natalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, A Thief Caught in the Act (Pink Owl), is one of several theatrical installation pieces that embody the long-lived myth of thieving birds eager for human possessions (ill. 7, 8, 9). The birds are a parade of spectacular, imaginative species not necessarily found in nature. They are created in the same grotesque-expressive style used in the artist duo’s clay animations, which pull you deep into a surreal world of fantasies and urges. Artists as diverse as Djurberg & Berg, John Baldessari and David Shrigley incorporate animals into their works to create visual narratives that explore metaphorical and symbolic conceptions of human characteristics, rather than of the animals’ own.

The smooth, white, life-sized camel looking up at the eye of a colossal needle poised with its tip on the floor is an installation by American artist John Baldessari, who has pared back the complexity of his subject to something resembling a pictogram.

Called Camel (Albino) Contemplating Needle (Large), the work refers to the Biblical parable of how it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God (ill. 10). The installation creates an absurd and

Ill. 7: Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, A Thief Caught in the Act (Pink Owl), 2015

Ill. 8: Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, A Thief Caught in the Act (Red Pelican), 2015

Ill. 9: Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, A Thief Caught in the Act (Magenta Duck), 2015

Ill. 10: John Baldessari Camel (Albino) Contemplating Needle (Large), 2013

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amusing situation. The animal’s pose, the narrative metaphor and its simple visualisation all help create meaning in a sculptural piece which encompasses didactic, poetic and philosophical aspects. What does it mean to be rich? Are those of us who visit museums and look at Baldessari’s works rich? What about those who own such precious works of art?

And what do we use such narratives for – and is a camel even capable of contemplation?

When artists turn to animals to say something about the psychological and spiritual dimension of human existence, they often draw on features of the fable, meaning the literary convention of conveying psychological, social, moral and philosophical insights by letting animals act as humans in a fictional tale. Critics of the fable – among which we may count Donna Haraway – see this narrative device as an oppressive, overly simplistic, even aesthetically primitive instrumentalisation of the life and mind of animals, one that places man at the top of the chain of existence.16 However, just as ‘cuteness’ involves the possibility that the oppressed and manipulated pet (or object) has the oppressor in its powerful grasp, the imaginative and anthropomorphic traits of the fable may, in the hands of artists such as Baldessari and Djurberg & Berg, foreground our notions of coexistence with other species and the ties that bind us together, for better or worse.17 In I’m Dead, British artist David Shrigley confronts us with a stuffed cat in a boldly playful study of the death of a pet (ill. 11). The animal holds a sign saying ‘I’m dead’, a statement that is simultaneously an absurd joke and existentially irrefutable, cute and disturbing. The work is like a three-dimensional ‘LOLcat’ while at the same time playing heavily on what art historian Giovanni Aloi, in his book Speculative Taxidermy, calls ‘the uneasy appeal of death disguised as life’.18 Taxidermy is the professional term for stuffing animals so that they look alive. While there is a widespread tradition of stuffing wild animals, it is still most common for pets to be cremated or buried when they die, even though our standards for how one may preserve concrete, physical memories of one’s pet are changing.19 Shrigley’s sculpture was presumably someone’s beloved pet once. Now it is a hollow shell to which we cannot reasonably attribute feelings or behaviour (doesn’t it look a little lost, though?). Yet there it is, so very lifelike, assessing its own state as a fundamental condition to which we are all subject.

Standing on two legs, as is only suitable for a creature that has mastered the human language. The sculpture is like a little fable, a cute ‘meme’ about an animal that, even in death, insists on communicating with us, pointing out the discrimination inherent in how we treat the dead bodies of humans and other species. In an interview about his work with stuffed animals, Shrigley unfolds this relationship with deep irony:

I think there is a certain perversity to taxidermy that appeals to me, a certain awkwardness to treating the remains of a once-living thing. As human beings we get rid of our remains, but with lesser beasts we are quite happy to take off the hide and make it look vaguely lifelike as a curious decoration. It is at odds with the way that we treat our own remains, so there is something slightly comic, something slightly inappropriate, about the way we then deal with the remains of an animal through taxidermy. 20 Through humour, Shrigley’s ‘lesser beast’ causes a shift in our view of the small companion animal.

High in impact and disarming charm, the work addresses our projections and conceptions of animals, our human weaknesses and the emotional ties between species. A similarly satirical use of a dead animal transformed into a fiction of life through taxidermy can also be found in Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, whose famous work, Novecento, is a large, stuffed racehorse hanging limply from the ceiling in a harness, having surrendered to gravity and its ultimate fate (ill. 12). The title of the work refers to Bernardo Bertolucci’s eponymous 1976 historical film, which revolves around the advent of fascism in Italy after World War I. With the dead horse as his vehicle, Cattelan speaks of power and powerlessness in the cruel world of man.

Zoo, circus and museum Wanna come to the zoo? Modern zoos are controversial places – all across the world they are popular destinations for one-day outings, especially for families, and we flock to such places to meet animals that are, in our eyes, cute, weird, wild, dangerous, funny, nasty or beautiful. At the same time, zoos face criticism for oppressing the animals on display, even if many modern zoos carry out extensive scientific research into the genetics and conservation of species. In ’Why Look at Animals?’, art critic John Berger points out that, ‘The zoo, to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters’.21 He argues that we wander from one enclosure with animals to the next, as if looking at paintings in an art museum, only to be constantly disappointed because the marginalised and isolated animals, often apathetic or hyperactive in their artificial surroundings, never meet our gaze – unlike Rilke’s black cat. These animals are not our companions in a reality of closely interwoven nature and culture.22 In the photographic series Zoologische Gärten, German artist Candida Höfer adopts a sober, rigorous and investigative position with her camera (ill. 13, 14). She photographs the artificial habitats of penguins, elephants and giraffes, thereby allowing us to discover the illusionistic tricks, architectural devices

Ill. 11: David Shrigley, I’m Dead, 2011

Ill. 12: Maurizio Cattelan, Novecento, 1997

Ill. 13: Candida Hรถfer, Zoologischer Garten Hamburg I 1990, 1990

Ill. 14: Candida Hรถfer, Zoologischer Garten London III 1992, 1992

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and distinctive props of these spaces for ourselves.

Her images document the animals’ surroundings, which come to appear alienating through her lens, telling us more about our own architectural structures than the animals’ natural habitats. We see the penguins in their recreational water park, the giraffe on the painted savannah, the elephants in their bedsit flats. 23 While Höfer’s animals give off a very distant air, their eyes vacant or averted, we come very close to the elephant featured in American video artist Douglas Gordon’s monumental installation Play Dead; Real Time (this way, that way, the other way), 2003 (ill. 15, 16 and illustrated p. 60). The artist wished to cinematically explore what it looks like when an elephant lies down, which it rarely does in the wild. Accordingly, he arranged for Minnie, an elephant from the Connecticut Circus, to be transported to the Gagosian Gallery in central Manhattan.

Prompted by its trainer, the animal proceeded to take up various poses that are unnatural for elephants, including lying down on one side and playing dead.

Gordon filmed the event in virtuoso fashion, using two cameras moving in circles around the animal in opposite directions. The results perfectly capture the animal’s heft, volume, vulnerability and presence.

The footage is screened on double-sided screens the size of the animal itself, placed diagonally in the room, and in one corner a small monitor slowly zooms out from a close-up of her eye. 24 The elephant is as adorable as it is awe-inspiring.

She rumbles around, she sits down on her rear end like a child, her trunk is a marvel of sensitive movement, and her feet yield against the concrete floor like soft, cushioning soles. The entire scene arouses our empathy, and we are torn between mild indignation that someone might even think of putting her in a barren, alien gallery space, and deep fascination with having such privileged access to studying her physique, her stillness and movement, her mind. And we become aware that we are active participants in the situation as we move around the animal in our own gallery space to make sure we see it all. ‘Even when a cute object looks lifeless, or totally passive, it feels cutest when we see it to be playing dead’, claims philosopher Simon May. 25 When Gordon’s circus elephant plays dead, it obeys its trainer, but at the same time we feel it captivating us in its submission. A complex relationship arises between elephant, trainer, artist and audience, one where vulnerability and the exercise of power, interdisciplinary cooperation and participation are at stake.

The zoo and circus are not the only culturally defined spaces in which we seek out animals in the hope of observing them up close. Each in their own ways, natural history museums, art museums and galleries can also set up such encounters. Here we find various representations of animals, and a range of scientific, cultural-theoretical, aesthetic or philosophical content pertaining to the biology,

behaviour, mythology and natural and cultural history of the animals. Just as in zoos and circuses, humanity’s assertion of its own position through the way in which animals are represented is the main, though not always transparent, backdrop of natural history museums. It is not the elephant that is the elephant in the room. However, in this context art museums and galleries play a different role: artistic practices have a special potential to make the scales drop from our eyes and expose or offer new perspectives on our self-understanding as one species among many.

In a modern ‘wilderness mobile home’, big-city families can venture out to experience open countryside and wildlife in perfect comfort and safety, enjoying amenities such as a shower, dining table and comfortable beds. In his Mobile Wilderness Unit – Wolf (illustrated p. 67), American artist Mark Dion turns the scenario upside down. A beautiful wolf stands proudly and vigilantly with its paws buried in moss and ferns and a broken, decaying tree behind it. However, the entire landscape has been cut out of the wilderness, as if collected by some field researcher taking outsized samples, and transplanted onto an ordinary trailer, which in turn is placed within a setting that is every bit as culturally defined as the zoo and circus: a museum exhibition room. Natural history, our conceptions of unspoilt nature, the preservation of nature and the framework in which we experience it are central fields of study in Dion’s artistically and ethically aware practice. As in this case, he creates cabinets, dioramas and tableaux to give us new ways of looking at nature, animals and our relationships with them. He activates and utilises natural history’s own methods of archiving and representing nature. In particular, he explores how humankind, through our history writing and representations of nature and animals, has established human sovereignty at the expense of animals. 26 The choice of the wolf, close relative of the dog, is obviously significant – it is at one and the same time a wild predator and a highly mythologised animal that encompasses all of human evolution, from prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies to today’s urbanised life. A true companion species with which we share evolutionary history.

Up until today, we have evolved far away from the wolf, but at the same time we have, through early domestication and subsequent artificial selection, turned its descendants into dogs with wagging tails, well-developed eyebrow muscles and significantly smaller teeth, ranging from small, fashionable and cute handbag dogs to Wegman’s Weimaraners. 27 Dion holds our constructed notions of convenient and manipulative nature up to us like a mirror, showing us that any idea of a pure, unmediated connection between us and the other animals is a fantasy – and probably as difficult to establish in the wild as in the zoo.

Ill. 15: Douglas Gordon, Play Dead; Real Time (this way, that way, the other way), 2003 (video still)

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Flies like us In Rilke’s poem, it is not the animal we meet in the moment when the cat turns its head and faces our investigative gaze. We meet ourselves: ‘tiny, inside the golden amber of her eyeballs, suspended, like a prehistoric fly’. Our relationship and coexistence with other species – in social, biological and evolutionary terms – is put into staggering perspective in the light of present-day developments within biotechnology. Here, work is done on a whole new scale and with unprecedented speed to create new relationships and exchanges between human and non-human life.

Standing before – or perhaps right in the midst of – this phase, it is more relevant than ever to investigate what we do with and to animals, and to delve into the conditions and mechanisms behind it all. The artistic explorations in Animals in Art show how contemporary art can contribute to this effort.

Analysed by way of Ngai and Haraway’s concepts of the cute and companion species, it is evident that the arts contribute important insights to this complex field. From their distinctive positions, Ngai and Haraway point out that there are many ties between animals and humans that unfold as complex relationships of power and coexistence, governed by both human and animal psychology, social conditions and cultural contexts. Seen through this lens, artists like Dion, Eder, Shrigley and Gordon show that such companionship is not just beautiful and harmonious,

but involves good and bad alike. Contemporary art has many different takes on how the positions between human and animal, subject and object, leader and companion can be renegotiated.

However, they all point to humanity’s construction of and relationship with the animal’s significant otherness, thereby demonstrating how the animal, in spite and by virtue of its cuteness, powerlessness, vulnerability, wildness and culture, turns to us and raises its gaze to us like a mirror.

Allow me one small concluding remark: The exhibition’s smallest – and most numerous – animal is the fly, specifically the housefly, thousands of which make up the biomass of Damien Hirst’s Carcinoma (2007) (illustrated p. 83). Close up, the flies form a sticky, shiny slab of dead pests. Since prehistoric times, the fly has spread to most parts of the world and adapted to living with humans. To us, they are an undesirable companion species that we diligently fan away or kill. In Hirst’s work, the flies are a reminder of the fleeting, arbitrary nature of human life, but perhaps we can also use them to reflect on how we and the other species can evolve in each other’s excellent company.

Dorthe Juul Rugaard holds an MA in Art History and is a curator at ARKEN.

Ill. 16: Douglas Gordon, Play Dead; Real Time (this way, that way, the other way), 2003 (video still)

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1. Excerpt from Black Cat in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. & transl. Steven Mitchell, Vintage Books, 1989.

2. Mette Thobo-Carlsen, Performative selvbiografier.

Selvfortællinger i samtidskunst og -litteratur, Multivers, 2015, 167.

The conceptual framework of the article draws on Sianne Ngai’s questioning of classical aesthetic categories and her presentation of a new, broad theory of aesthetics through the analysis of twentieth-century trends within aesthetics and popular culture, including the zany, cute and interesting. It also applies Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species and her post-humanist critique of anthropocentrism, which holds a central position within Critical Animal Studies – a field of theory based on a critical and interdisciplinary dialogue between academic and activist positions. Finally, the article draws on various studies concerning animals as well as cultural theory and academic fields such as anthropology and popular science.

3. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories. Zany, Cute, Interesting, Harvard University Press, 2012.

4. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto.

Dogs, People and Significant Otherness, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.

5. Adam Jasper, ‘Our Aesthetic Categories. An Interview with Sianne Ngai’, www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/43/jasper_ngai. php. Accessed 18 September 2019.

6. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 54.

7. ‘Memes’ are user-created images, video clips and texts with humorous or emotional context distributed online.

8. LOL is internet slang for ‘laughing out loud’. Also see www. thoughtcatalog.com/leigh-alexander/2011/01/why-the-internetchose-cats/ and www.journal. media-culture.org.au/index.php/ mcjournal/article/viewArticle/794.

Accessed 18 September 2019.

9. The artist’s website is a rich source of technical information about the production of the work: www.coryarcangel.com/ things-i-made/2009-003-dreiklavierstucke-op-11. Accessed 18 September 2019.

10. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 11, 25.

11. Kevin L. Ferguson, ‘Pets in Memoir’, Representing the Modern Animal in Culture, eds.

Jeanne Dubino, Ziba Rashidian & Andrew Smyth, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 82.

12. William A. Ewing, ‘People like us / People we like’, William Wegman. Being Human, ed.

William A. Ewing, Thames & Hudson, 2017, 10.

13. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 5 and Cecilie Agnete Thorslund & Anne Katrine Gjerløff, ‘Dyrisk og dyrebar’, Dyrisk og dyrebar. Kæledyret i et samfundsvidenskabeligt lys, eds. Cecilie Agnete Thorslund & Anne Katrine Gjerløff, Nyt fra Samfundsvidenskaberne, 2014, 21, which also refers to Haraway’s concept of the companion animal.

14. Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection. The Making of Pets, Yale University Press, 1984, 102.

15. ‘A Conversation. William A. Ewing and William Wegman’, William Wegman. Being Human, ed. William A. Ewing, Thames & Hudson, 2017, 337.

16. Joshua Schuster, ‘The Fable, the Moral and the Animal’, Representing the Modern Animal in Culture, eds. Jeanne Dubino, Ziba Rashidian & Andrew Smyth, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 138.

17. Ibid.

18. Giovanni Aloi, Speculative Taxidermy. Natural History, Animal Surfaces and Art in the Anthropocene, Columbia University Press, 2018, 13.

19. The vast majority of pets die from being put down by veterinarians, even though a growing number of people believe that they have no right to make decisions regarding the animal’s death. See Christina W. Bojlén, ‘Kærligheden ophøjer. Når kæledyret dør’, Dyrisk og dyrebar, eds. Thorslund & Gjerløff, 74-5, 85-8. Taking her point of departure in Haraway’s concept of pets as ‘fleshy material-semiotic presences’, Bojlén examines what we do to our pets’ bodies when they die up through history to the present day.

20. See interview with David Shrigley regarding his approach to the use of dead animals in art: www.britishcouncil.org/arts/ shrigley/curator-conversation.

Accessed 18 September 2019.

21. John Berger, ‘Why Look at Animals?’, Documents of Contemporary Art. Animals, ed.

Filipa Ramos, Whitechapel Gallery & The MIT Press, 2016, 66.

22. Also see Tuan, Dominance and Affection, 82-3 regarding audience behaviour in the earliest zoological gardens.

23. Hanna Hohl, Candida Höfer.

Zoologische Gärten, Hamburger Kunsthalle & Kunsthalle Bern, 1993, 9.

24. Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, ‘Gordon’s Circus’, Douglas Gordon, eds. Susanne Gaenseimer & Klaus Görner, Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, 2011, 188 ff.

25. Simon May, The Power of Cute, Princeton University Pres, 2019, 30.

26. Aloi, Speculative Taxidermy, 21. The same book includes a text by Mark Dion and Robert Marbury, presenting an ethical standard for artists working with stuffed animals. Ibid., 257-9.

27. Niels Hein, Ulv! Dyret – myten – fremtiden, Gyldendal, 2015, which addresses the wolf not just in terms of biology and evolutionary history, but also as represented in mythology and in the present-day situation in Denmark where the wolf has recently returned, prompting a time of re-orientation as Danes must once again learn to live alongside the wolf. Also see an article in The New York Times about new research into the eyebrow muscles of dogs, the evolution of which is believed to have been governed by the dog’s cohabitation with humans: www. nytimes.com/2019/06/17/science/ dogs-eyebrows-evolution.html.

Accessed 18 September 2019.

Bidrag vias mennesker kan skue tilbage i historien, har vi gjort Contributions dyr til by: af: As far backSå in langt history we humans can see, we have turned animals byttedyr nyttedyr, guder ogfoes symboler, fjender og familiemedleminto prey and pets,og gods and symbols, and family members, mer, eksotiske mysterier og populær underholdning påthe sendefladen.

Giovanni Aloi exotic mysteries and popular entertainment.

Animals in Art is about Giovanni Aloi LisaAndresen Sjølander Andresen Dyr lives i kunsten handler liv – og os.

Lisa Sjølander animals in our – and about om the dyrene animals’i vores lives with us.om dyrenes liv med Lone Frank Lone Frank Anne Katrine Gjerløff på dagsordenen med klimakrisen Anne Katrine Gjerløff Animals areDyrene high onstår thehøjt agenda, as the climatei disse crisis år, andhvor newvigenetic Bengt Holst ogtechnologies nye manipulerende teknologier til Holst Bengt modification require us to rethink må our gentænke relationshipvores with forhold Thomas Pape den mangfoldighed afwith andre arter,we som vi deler planeten med. Denne Thomas Pape the wide variety of other species whom share the planet.

This Juul Rugaard afspejles kunstnerne er stærktDorthe opta- JuulDorthe Rugaard is reflecteddagsorden in contemporary art,i samtidskunsten, where artists arehvor keenly investigating Mikkel Sinding af at undersøge de we relationer, vi ogtake dyrene the variousget relationships in which and thesom animals part.indgår i. Mikkel Sinding Dyrpresents i kunstenhistorical byder påoverviews historiskeasvuer aktuel debat, Animals in Art wellog as topical discus-og de otte forfattere åbner op for nye og overraskende sider af de dyr og den sions as each of the eight authors presents new and surprising aspects kunst, vi troede, kendte. we knew so well. of the animals – and art – wevithought