TERRITORIAL PISSINGS
brie trenerry
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm 1945
I wanna fuck you like an animal. I wanna feel you from the inside. I wanna fuck you like an animal.
My whole existence is flawed. You get me closer to God.
― Closer. Trent Reznor, 1994
The territorial pissings of governments around the world are becoming more evident in the visible rise of Nationalism, the tightening of borders through harsh immigration laws and rejection of policy around climate change, raising questions that impact all animal life. The anxiety around these questions is evident in headlines from every nation globally dealing with the climate crisis and every anthropocenic art exhibition since the early 2000s inclusive of work about the world ecology crisis, population growth and mass species extinction.
Referred to by most scientists and academics as the Anthropocene epoch, this period in history is one of change comparable to the Great Ice Age or the End Permian, “the great dying”. The inception of the epoch was debatably as early as the 15th century, but widely accepted as beginning in the 17th century after a long period of climate stability during the Holocene, with the advent of mass migration, germ transmission and the acceleration of industrial practices. An alternative approach to theories of human impact on climate describes this epoch as the Capitalocene, a term coined by World System theorist Jason W. Moore who argues that Anthropocene science “reduces the mosaic of human activity in the web of life to an abstract, homogeneous humanity” that does not take into account the forces of culture, class or capital. [1] In doing so, Moore shifts the focus, defining the Capitalocene as signifying “capitalism as a way of organising nature-as a multi species, situated, capitalist world-ecology”, essentially re-positioning capitalism as a part of nature. [2] This distinct approach has ramifications regarding the approach to climate solutions, by placing the emphasis for change on an analysis of the structures of power, wealth and production rather than seeing the consumer as responsible for the solution to the climate crisis.
The artists in this exhibition respond to the complexity of these questions using various strategies. Most have not made representations of animals, instead, through working with a menagerie of media and references drawn from mythological, historical and pop-cultural sources, they imply a philosophical relationship with animalia. Contestations of physical territories are fleshed out in the context of Western colonization, citizenship, capitalism, invasion, religious beliefs and conquest. Psychological territories including feminist narratives, anthropocentrism, questions of animal consciousness, post humanism, and ethics regarding sentience and consumption, are threads suturing together the flesh of the works in an artistic pre-mortem that responds to the current issues inherent to anthropogenic activity.
In his print edition Guts for Garters 2019, Stewart Cole provides the only recognisable representation of an animal in the exhibition, reading as a cautionary tale in his nightmarish, undead sacrifice, resurrected in print from the slaughterhouse- silently screaming as entrails unravel in fleshy loops beneath a shorn, exposed ribcage. A death metal album cover with the raw sophistication of a Chaim Soutine butchered carcass, Cole’s recasting of the religious sacrificial ‘lamb of God’ is of the walking dead, passing from industrialised farming to the plate. Whilst his lamb also has powers of resurrection through screen-printed clones, the image represents a more sinister take on the disparity between the experiences of humans and animals.
Since George Romero’s apocalyptic 1978 Dawn of the Dead, set in Monroeville mall Pennsylvania, late capitalism and consumption have been inextricably linked to zombies and visions of a Biblical apocalypse populated with our undead, flesh-eating counterparts.
Three decades earlier, writer George Orwell had anticipated mass political apathy and had similar misgivings about the future of systems created by humans, the only animals known at the time to be capable of the articulation of complex social, cultural and political ideas. Capitalism, communism, socialism, and anarchy were all subject to Orwell’s scrutiny in his use of anthropomorphism to satirise ruling bodies in his speculative dystopian novella Animal Farm. Published in 1945, Orwell’s text was an easily understood parable meshing politics into a body of work that “…tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.”[3]
The works of Orwelll, Romero and the embodiment of the sacrificial lamb were superseded by Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution, which upset the notion that two legs were superior to four (and that humans purpose was to go forth and multiply) effectively arguing that humans are descended from amoeba or more sensationally ‘slime’. Darwin’s Origin of the Species, is still contested today, for many reasons explained by author Douglas Adams in 1984 book So Long and Thanks For All The Fish. The anxiety around questions of evolution and belief in a divine being are best articulated in the words of disgraced pastor Ted Haggard, who upon being questioned on matters of faith, the complexity of the eye and moral issues, responded with anger:
“….you just called my children animals...” [4]
The idea that animals represent the base tendencies of humanity, encompassing matters of the flesh, the actions that comprise the most basic elements of existence – food sex and death, or less delicately; eating, fucking, shitting, dying; have long been the subject of philosophical and religious debate, particularly in the western tradition and continental philosophy. In antiquity, Pythagorus argued for animal rights on the basis that humans and animals are kindred souls. This was in opposition to Aristotle’s conception of the hierarchy of animal beings, humans taking pole position based on the attributes of art, language and the written word. In First Nations people across the world the spiritual relationship between human and animal, sacred and profane, plant and earth tends toward an attitude of respect, intertwined and bound to country, the land. The bonds to place and memory are unbreakable and humans are temporary caretakers. The problem or question in Western thought invariably lies with the issue of weighting consciousness with suffering and how this thinking can be experienced by another sentient being. The most unanswerable moral question to date. The centrality of the premise that humans are superior to animals tends towards the achievements humankind has made in conquering not only the physical territories of the natural world, but also in transcending the basic requirements of survival, however this discourse discounts the complexity of animal communication and consciousness.
Modeled after William Blake’s print Nebuchadnezzar 1795c-1805 one of The Large Colour Print series and drawn from the prophecy of the King of Babylon in the Biblical book of Daniel, Gnasher Mongrel is Michael Needham’s “…thought experiment anticipating significance in the contemporary return of such a beast, extracted from the obscurity of history or myth or even moral narrative”. By all accounts, Nebuchadnezzar related a disturbing dream to Daniel the prophet, of becoming a beast due to his arrogant, wasteful conceits and moral failings to his subjects. Not heeding the advice of the prophet Daniel to reject his sinful ways, embrace God and distribute wealth to the poor he "was driven away from people and ate grass like the ox. His body was drenched with the dew of heaven until his hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird." (Daniel 4:33) This punishment from God was to last seven years, until he looked towards heaven and praised God, after which he returned to his reign. [5]
Needham’s exploration of the mythical character Nebuchadnezzar reflects Blake’s equating of the senses and the sensual with the baser elements of existence in a contemporary context. Drawing parallels between wealth distribution, economics, corruption and environmental impacts from the latter, but also the growing rejection of science and a return to looking for answers in the realms of superstition. The 18th Century thinking from the period of The Enlightenment and the scientific discoveries providing rational explications for much of the mysteries of the natural world were anathema to Blake’s concept of artistic creativity and expression, “for Blake the bestiality of the man who has become a slave to the senses. Pure sensuality, like pure reason, is seen by the artist as antipathetic to Imagination.”[6]
The base urges associated with human desire are explored in Katja Mouvlin’s painting ULTRAFRAGOLA. Rendered in soft apricot and stark black and white, a veiny lifelike dildo powered by a corded drill is wreathed with a daisy chain and points earthwards. The title wallpapers the background in a puffy font and when I look up the term fragola, I discover that it means strawberry in Italian and deeper excavation unearths the Ultrafragola; a mirror designed by architect Ettore Sottass in 1970 characterised by an exaggerated perspex and neon illuminated frame that suggests long wavy hair. President and director of Urban Architecture in Memphis USA, Keith Johnson states that “Ultrafragola translates to ‘ultimate strawberry’ in Italian,…“And if you mention a woman’s ‘strawberry’ in Italy, everyone knows what you’re talking about.”[7] Despite the creepy connotations of Johnson’s observations, in this complex layering of carefully controlled symbols and incongruous elements, Mouvlin points to “how bestial sexual urges and desires intersect, with an absurd and dangerous conclusion on how to satisfy our animal drives”. The daisy chain on first glance seems representative of innocence and purity but has sexual connotations beyond this simplistic reading that make sense of the earthward bound dildo and need for extra stamina in drilling with a power tool; drilling of oneself as suggested by the mirror of the same title? Or by a multitude of partners as suggested by the daisy chain?
In Talitha Kennedy’s work, supple black leather is meticulously, ritualistically, hand stitched to create organic sculptural forms that visually mutate between animal, plant and landscape depending on the space of encounter. The works in her series My Hand to Make a Hand 2019, allude to the relationship between material, subject and dexterous technique involved. The titles; Pincers, Feelers; tactile references to the process and final hand-like forms. Kennedy’s preoccupation with humankind’s uneasy, disjointed relationship with the natural world is expressed in relating to the leather as industrialised dead animal skin, albeit “flesh like her own” that she re-animates through the process of touch and re-formation and in doing so acknowledges her existence as possibly one with the natural world. In her words;
“I am interested in our cultural failure to know ourselves as part of the natural environment and I make comfort devices for this separation anxiety.”
Each unique sculpture alludes to the complexity of the hand, a powerful evolutionary marker, however these are not the hands of primates, the opposable thumb is not privileged and no finger-prints define the individual. Instead, forms closely resembling marsupials are presented with digits vertically extended; these pacifying simulants are designed to be held and may also be seen as tentative clawings to ascend from the baser aspects of existence whilst simultaneously holding them in a mindful embrace.
Throughout history, animals and their body parts have often been used as entertainment and decoration for the fashionable and wealthy parlors of the upper classes or recast as symbols equating the nobler characteristics of ‘the beast’ within members of elite circles. Some natural curios were collected without harm done to the animal- cast feathers, shed skins, shells or bones but many others were acquired more brutally. The elephant foot umbrella stand, the ivory tusk hairbrush, the lion head of a trophy, the taxidermied eagle, the horns and antlers sawn from their owners. All symbolic of man conquering nature, relics from a time when this would have served a purpose, a time when the fire going out may have meant death from the wild beasts. In the 21st century these pursuits still exist with a different pressure, to appear strong, powerful and wealthy to peers on social media– the big game hunters. However posing with a dead giraffe is generally now seen as not only uncouth 😳, a threat to the planet 😞 and as increasing the risk of extinction for the species represented.😠
Harking back to eras where such specimens were the height of fashionable interior design Kate Rohde’s painstakingly created Rococoesque ‘cabinets of curiosity’ do not exploit animals in her neo-neon plastic remnants of a past time. In the colours of uranium or carnival glass, radioactive no more, they are vibrant and vital. Black Mirror 2018 is a departure from Rhode’s plasticised zoomorphic specimens and instead, turns the gaze back toward us, the human animal. Like the large glass in Mike Flanagans’s 2013 psychological horror Oculus, it is hard to look away and we are forced to view atrocities from the past we would rather ignore. Rhode’s mirror was initially shown as part of the exhibition Odile, 2018 curated by David O’Halloran and inspired by the symbolism of the black and white swans in Tschaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Rhodes mirror seemingly holds a sentient presence- and it does- ‘us; me; you; I’- reflected back in its shadowy depths. Crowned with two swans in deference to the opposing protagonists in Tschaikovsky’s endlessly mutable ballet, the work features a multiplicity of disembodied human eyes staring implacably from the pine tree studded ornate frame, lurking in a rhinestone encrusted Gothic forest. The polarization and conflict inherent within our humanity is clearly delineated in the positioning of these reliefs, alongside our own dark reflection.
A different reflection is evinced in Darren Tanny Tan’s body approximate photographic meditations on the nexus between embodied and spiritual human suffering, offering a different mirroring, formed through “an antithetical process of creation” involving the destructive rupturing of the surface of his phantasmagorical prints. In Hollow 2018 a decapitated torso is rendered in low- key shadowy sepia and sickly jaundiced yellow tones, reminiscent of the bondage aesthetic of Nine Inch Nails Closer 1994, with its severed rotating pigs heads and monkey bound to a cross. In Ambrose 2018 the macabre element lies in the tortured puncture marks on the body, more ice pick than bullet wound, or holes left by post mortem insectile midnight feasts. In Slew 2019, Tan turns his focus to the “curious relationship between humans and pigs” in a religious context, eschewing the mediation of the photographic process and proceeding straight to the body of a slaughtered animal. Tanning and curing the skin is transformative, in his words “an alchemical process” that absents the body from the equation, leaving behind the covering membrane, separated from the difficult territory between mind and body, conscious and corporeal sensation. Having the hide to tan a pig speaks to a multitude of earthly sins.
“I imagined them saying to themselves “what is this? Do we fuck it or eat it? Whatever it is, it’s all mine!” [9]
Liss Fenwick questions how white settlement has impacted place and purpose, in her autobiographical 2018 Meat Tray series. The body of work was created in the surrounds of her childhood home in the small agricultural town of Humpty Doo, in Australia’s Northern Territory a locale subject to extreme climate conditions. Meat Tray VII 2018, juxtaposes the natural world with ornamented domestic objects, depicting swarms of competing northern meat ants consuming offerings of feral buffalo meat placed on posh platters. The plates, garnered from the family’s ‘special occasions cupboard’ had particular significance and Fenwick recalls “The trays represented to me a story we’ve told our Western selves that has lost its plot line, exposing us born here [in Humpty Doo] to deep confusion about our place.” This sense of confusion and frustration is reflected in the ants insectile aggression as they devour the chunks of flesh but in studying the ants form of communication [stimergy], Fenwick notes that “collaboration between simple agents, who lacked intelligence and memory, but had a clear purpose, seemed comforting amid the rural emptiness.” As she points out there is also a sense of the absurd or madness in the metaphor of desperate insect activity; “This is a sad, ironic narrative, an absurdist piece about decay, madness and the inevitable failure of any vainglorious notions of frontier in the tropical, far north”.
Liss Fenwick. Nuptial Flight 2018, 150 x 120cm, pigment print on fibre paper
Referring to another work from the series titled Nuptial Flight 2018, Fenwick describes the realisation of the significance of flying ants martialed en masse on a cap emblazoned with her family’s business logo. The ants were about to embark on a nuptial flight which take virgin queens and males to new territories: destructive for human built urban environments but vital for the rebirthing of new trees. Knee-jerk responses to thinking around territory, are a constant in current attitudes toward non-human life. Spread principally by mosquito species Aedes aegypti, an outbreak of Zika virus caused a small, yet significant proportion of women in the Americas to birth children with Microcephaly. Within months, mosquito eradication became a primary goal of scientists attempting to preserve human life above all else, inadvertently this lead to the widespread, annihilation of bee colony populations. In Fenwick’s photograph, the corporate logo is swarmed and subsumed by the insects, the remnant of a capitalist entity overtaken by nature. Visually here, Fenwick metaphorically addresses economic value versus the cost to the environment through a sharp, intensely personal lens.
In contrast to the clarity of this tightly focussed photographic image, strangely eroded surfaces, like incomplete 3D scans or magic eye optical puzzles, comprise Travis Ficarra John’s recent series of digitally constructed Giclee prints on canvas. Perseus With the Head of Medusa I 2018 ruptures surface reality, penetrating an interior space beyond human optics but operating as “a site of tension between a virtual space and a flat plane, a threshold as both boundary and bridge”. Using imagery found from the web of Benvenuto Cellini’s sculpture of the same name circa 1545–1554 Johns reiterates small fragments of the ‘original’ facsimiles. Examining the detail, it becomes evident that the sculpture has been viewed, mashed and recaptured from multiple angles; moving back, it devolves to create the almost incomprehensible flotsam of a psychedelic rorschach. In Greek mythology the snake haired Medusa turned those who gazed upon her face to stone, a power retained after beheading. Inviting a prolonged viewing experience of his fragmented, illusory surface Johns asks the viewer to contemplate humanity in the face of a digital divinity, shifting the boundaries of the virtual to the speculative.
Expanding on hypothetical futures and post-nature, post human territory with his free-standing sculpture Totemism and Exogamy 2019 Christian Bishop suggests that his work perhaps resembles an inverted ornamental plant or bush, one you might see in an Australian suburban backyard. Bishop asks “…does this plant represent hope, rebirth, renewal? Or invasive growth, symbolising suburban homogeneity stemming from the period of Australian colonisation?” Natural materials, including sticks and hair are juxtaposed with metal, to construct his animal/plant hybrid and defensive territorial marker. This notion of hybridity has roots in reality with the recent announcement by Japanese scientists that they have created a human/animal hybrid embryo that can be implanted into surrogate animals and brought to full term. The function of these experiments is to create organ farms for human transplant. Apart from some of the more obvious ethical issues, of concern is that “human cells might stray beyond development of the targeted organ, travel to the developing animal’s brain and potentially affect its cognition.”[6]
In cinema, the fraught relationship between science, technology and human cognition has been a persistent trope. Often the source of dread is extra terrestrial but the biological functions of the interloper are based on human understanding and observations of the natural world. Writer Alex Garland’s body horror Annihilation 2018, explored hybridity borne of military bio-engineering in fictitious space Area X, and serves as a reminder of the influence of animal and insect forms in the development of technology. The H.R.Giegeresque alien in Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien, and the creature in John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing are Creature Feature embodiments of parasitic life-forms, wasp like larvae feeding on the nubile flesh of young caterpillars. Body parts are appropriated from deep sea creatures like the mesopelagic Angler fish with its hooked spiny teeth crowded into a gaping prehistoric jaw. The flashing green LED screen that starts the Brundle-fly mutation sequence in Cronenberg’s Kafakesque The Fly 1986 forever challenged views of consumption after a seminal acidic, vomitous scene. Built in radar used by certain fish and birds has laid the groundwork for military developments such as drone warfare that identify enemy craft, adversaries and invaders to destroy them at a clinical distance. Humankind yet again using the otherness of animal characteristics to control and acquire territory, whilst simultaneously ‘othering’ animal consciousness and agency.
This ‘othering’ of animal consciousness informs Youjia Lu’s frenetic, disorienting and unsettling multi-layered projection Super(im)position: Eclipsing 2019. Lu proposes a para-conscious self as psychological territory potentially existing in the liminal space between human and animal experience. Her intense, strobing videos suggest a connection to the early cinematic experiments of Eadward Muybridge in 1877-88 that sought to capture animal locomotion using multiple cameras. Lu’s films seemingly invert this process through disrupting the video frame, offering a subjective vision rather than observational objectivity perhaps ‘becoming animal’ through the cutting and splicing of the image. Rendering the screen as a strobing, visceral skin is akin to the experience of viewing the internal dermis of the eyelid. In Lu’s films, human representations are schizophrenically fragmented through aggressive cuts and temporal displacements, where only glimpses of body parts are viewed, twitching spastically, eyes rolling back like a spooked animal next in line at the abattoir.
Ben Laden is the dark horse, blinkered and ready to run... his one-off durational performance Humananimal set in a custom built ‘nest’ hidden high in the darkness of the gallery space. His previous performative works have explored the human animal through challenging temporal limitations and the use of ‘transformational techniques’ in heightened sensorial states, drawing on his training in mime, circus, theatre and dance. For the duration of opening night, Laden will ‘perform the beast’ in his hermetic ‘hidey hole’ whilst being filmed with infrared cameras. In embodying animal behaviours, Laden plays on the fear that exists not only of being audience to interactive performance art but between human and wild beast, a negotiation of territory that will play out over the duration of the work within the gallery walls.
The various territories explored in Animal Nation perhaps point to the multiple perspectives required to tackle the issues that face humanity at this pivotal moment in the earth’s history. If anthropogenic activity as part of the web of life is not to be reduced to an abstract, homogeneous view of humanity, there is a need to carefully trace the systemic paths that led to this point in order to map new directions. In this mapping, a reassessment of our relationship to animals is needed at the forefront in terms of consciousness and citizenship and what this means to more pragmatic concerns of economics and consumption. In working with these issues using non traditional materials, utilising metaphor and challenging conventional thinking, the artists involved in this exhibition display an unwillingness to control the ‘animal’ in their work and beyond. Allowing animals a voice beyond the human and simultaneously with human experience, can be difficult territory to navigate.
[1] Moore, J.W., 2017 The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44:3, 594-630, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036 p.2
[2] Moore, J.W.,(2015) “Putting Nature to Work: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and the Challenge of World-Ecology,” in Cecilia Wee, Janneke Schonenbach, and Olaf Arndt, eds., Supramarkt. Irene Books, p7.
[3] Orwell, G. 1946, Why I Write, Gangel, Great Britain, p.7
[4] Dawkins, R. 2006, The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
[5] https://arthive.com/williamblake/works/257774~Nebuchadnezzar
[6] Gambling, S., Dyson, A., Ellis, L., Livingstone,. M. 2000, William Blake, Tate London, Britain.
[7] Reid, H. The Strategist How Did This Become Everyone’s Favorite Selfie Mirror? Aug 20, 2019. p.1
[8] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02275-3
[9] Fenwick, L., 2019 quote from artist statement for Animal Nation.