Unsettling animals

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Can contemporary artists be trusted with animals? asks Steve Baker

Artist/Animal by Steve Baker

The format of the title might suggest an equality of relationship between animals and artists but it also hints at the ambiguities apparent in that interface.  Steve Baker poses the question, ‘Can contemporary artists be trusted with animals?’ The question is far from rhetorical because it is clear that they are working in a territory shared by moral philosophers, experimental scientists and animal rights activists who subject the participating artists to a greater degree of ethical scrutiny than they generally experience. Emotions often run  high  and the various interest groups tend to speak past each other, as the author notes, rather than to each other.

Baker’s proposition is that on the whole artists can be trusted and he sets out a number of case studies revealing the wide range of contemporary practice,  taking examples from America, Europe and Australasia. His method is almost anthropological; his initial concern is to elicit through interviews and observation the motivations and procedures of the artists, quite separately from any discussion of the critical and ethical issues thrown up by the work.

 What the selected artists demonstrate is an attempt to reframe conventional  conceptions and representations of animal life. The collaborative pair, Olly and Suzi  see themselves as environmental messengers reporting back on the lives of endangered species, even when this requires the difficulties and hardships of drawing under water in the Antarctic.  Angela Singer creates challenging objects of hybrid taxidermy. Parts of various animals, derived from recycled trophy specimens, are re-assembled and augmented with glass, wax and jewellery, with results that simultaneously attract and repel.  Sue Coe produces graphic works in books and posters that seem closely sympathetic to animal rights agitational  propaganda but that generally demonstrate greater wit and complexity of narrative presentation.  Eduardo Kac, in his GFP Bunny project, engaged with the science of genetic engineering. He sought to introduce synthetic genes into the makeup of an albino rabbit with the intention that it would glow green under certain lighting conditions. He seems to have been motivated by a critique of the capitalistic laboratory culture that engages in transgenic research sometimes for apparently dubious purposes but also, more controversially, to co-opt these transgenic procedures for the territory of art. 

Even where the conceptual and contextual elements of the work are central to its purpose, there is generally a compelling visuality present in the examples of animal centred art  selected for the book.  An enchanting but totally artificial ‘jungle’ environment is invented for inhabitation by cockroaches – perhaps the creatures least likely to attract human sympathy – in Catherine Chalmers’ American Cockroach  photographs.

Steve Baker has made a particular study of this direction of contemporary art practice, with all its particular ethical complexities, over a number of years as both practitioner and theorist and has been able to draw together his ideas very successfully in this book. In addition to the illuminating case studies that he examines, he offers an authoritative commentary on the theoretical discourse that impinges on the topic.  His essential contribution to this debate must be his plea that philosophers, scientists and animal advocates pay closer attention to the insights that artists can offer – they deal in the productive tokens of uncertainty, of ambiguity – their role is not to settle issues but to unsettle. 

Artist/Animal by Steve Bakeris published by University of Minnesota Press 2013. 304 pp.  64 colour illus.ISBN 978-0-8166-8067-2

Robert Radford