ART&RESEARCH


A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods

Volume 1. No. 2. Summer 2007
ISSN 1752-6388

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir/Mark Wilson

In conversation with Steve Baker and Ross Birrell (04/05/07)

Spike Island Installation nanoq

On Animals, Death and Derrida’s Cat

Steve Baker: There clearly are at least a small number of artists working with animal themes and animal materials who are very concerned with the way in which dead animals - or dead animal body parts, or animal materials - should be treated, and have a sense that they should be treated with a particular kind of respect; there are certain things that you can do to them that are ok and other things that are not. That issue interests me because, at one level, you are talking at that point simply about material. And it’s not to pretend that materials don’t carry connotations that are very difficult to prise away from the materials, but it’s a very different thing from working with living animals, for example, and the issue of how far we want to hang on to that notion that the fact that at some point this did come from a living animal still means that it can’t be treated quite the way that clay would be treated or the way that canvas would be treated.

Mark Wilson: I think with nanoq we were very conscious of mobilising some of those very factors. In a sense, superficially at least, treating them or using them in a kind of continuum from the moment that they were captured or killed, or whatever, and all the way through to them being exhibited, or even exchanged between museums, there has been a sort of continuum of function which is about display and so in that sense, by hijacking them for that installation [in Spike Island] - and we’re talking specifically about the installation here and not the photographs, I think that is a different issue - that was a kind of continuum of display strategy, just diverted slightly. So I think in that sense we probably felt that we were actually not interfering, we were deliberately not changing them, we were deliberately not messing with them or doing something that they weren't already doing; that very subtle diversion was one of the dynamics of the work.

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir: But I think in the beginning when the project started there was a sense, because we discovered these initial animals in a hidden-away space in the basement, where everything seemed to be rotting away, there was some sense of feeling like, well if you find them all and you make them all visible, some kind of dignity is brought back. But then you learn through the process that that is something that is not important and an impossible task.  And when you talk about the skin itself, what is left of the ‘animal’ is the skin although for many of them, depending on when they were stuffed, there is bone material as well. Does the fact that it has its own skull change how we read the specimen? When handling the specimen is there a different understanding of what it is when there is weight to the object? The recent fibreglass models are very light but also usually more accurate in that they have been measured and replicated in every way from an actual animal.

SB: In a way I think that’s a question for you to answer. I mean my answer to it would be, no, I don’t personally think that does make a significant difference.

MW: Isn’t there something quite particular and special about the skull, inasmuch as the skin has a degree of currency, but the skull actually has more agency than a head stitched over a Styrofoam model?

SB: I don’t know if it does. I mean one of the things that interested me talking at the time of the Mike Kelley show at Tate Liverpool, which was called The Uncanny, where he’s collected this material from a whole variety of sources including some pieces of taxidermy from the Liverpool museum. At one of the talks held around the exhibition, they got the taxidermist who had worked on some of these creatures largely at the level of maintenance, rather than having taxidermied the creatures in the first place. He was just keeping the collection in good order. And I was talking to him about what view museum taxidermists took of what contemporary artists, for example, are doing…

MW: …. They both worked on our project either directly or indirectly, James and George.


SB: … I was wondering what they thought about the increasingly widespread use of these polyurethane forms now, as opposed to older methods. And he was saying, ‘no they’re absolutely fine,’ you know, ‘they work perfectly well they’re just as good as any other method’. And I think the combination of that and the fact that when you read handbooks on taxidermy, that you are always getting this stuff about ‘it’s the eyes that bring the animals to life’ and, of course, there are these huge collections of glass eyes that they very carefully select from to get the right ones and the whole issue of how they’re embedded in the head, making sure that they’re not sunk too far or they’re not too protuberant. In that almost slightly silly sense, it’s the bit of completely non-natural external surface, the glass eyes, that are perceived to be the things that bring the creature to life if the taxidermy is working well. So in that sense, what there is inside doesn’t seem to me to somehow make the creature more real if there’s more of it left. I mean I’m still very struck by that statement that Michelle Henning said in her paper at the conference, and I think it maybe in the essay as well. She talks about these creatures ‘that are trying so hard to be polar bears’, which wasn’t how I read them at all. I mean I don’t find it at all odd to think of the fact that you’ve got a mere skin, as it were, left of the creature over something that is otherwise not an animal. I actually think the fact that there is some material from the creature, whether we’re talking about a fur coat or whether we’re talking about a piece of taxidermy that makes it very different from other forms of animal representation, I think that link back to the material reality of the living body carries a huge amount of weight. And you were talking Mark about those slight shifts that you made in the course of the nanoq project to affect people’s perceptions and I think that that’s really very important, because the fact that you’ve got, as it were, in that rather crude sense, the trace of the actual animal, it does open up both the thing that you were specifically interested in about changing perceptions of the history of these creatures and draws attention to their history in a way in which their museum or country house display didn’t overtly seem to do, or deliberately didn’t try to do.

MW: I think that’s right because that was a very important instant, because in the installation those histories were available for the respective bears. And it was that frisson between the skins, or ‘the real’ as Michelle put it, and these specific histories pertaining to their removal from their environment until today. And that relationship was hugely important, absolutely, that individual represented by that skin.

SB: But also there’s the very small conceptual jump, that I think at some point you’ve mentioned to me, and that once I got it in my head seemed quite important to me, that the reality of the material that you were displaying in Spike Island could also prompt a thinking about the fact that there are, or were at that time at least, three living polar bears still in British collections and that the presence of the taxidermic bears indirectly pointed to that, in a way that some painted representation of a polar bear wouldn’t have done. Now, how one teases out quite why other forms of representation won’t do that quite as compellingly I’m not sure, but my hunch is that the material does make a difference.

MW: It’s the relic, it’s the sacred relic, it’s the saint’s bones, it has all those connotations, that it’s the real thing.

BS: It’s the real thing but it’s no longer there and, of course, in that endless circle of knowledge, the very fact it’s in front of you know that it’s dead basically or it has been killed but there was a point where it used to be alive and is no longer. Whereas when you look at a photograph, you don’t think that it might have died the minute the photograph was taken, you don’t think about that. You think, this is an animal alive, you know, and you like to imagine it in place in that world, and I think that’s the difference. And, therefore, people started to be confronted with this situation, this space between these two things. And I think also later on, it wasn’t so much during the Spike Island installation but later on in the project, obviously the whole discussion about polar bears in the world today escalated.

Top of next column


Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson have been collaborating since 2001. Their work, characteristically rooted in the north, explores issues of history, culture and the environment in relation to the individual and his/her sense of belonging or detachment. Recent projects use the relationship between humans and selected animals, as a springboard to posit questions on cultural and individual location between 'domesticity' and 'wilderness'. Their work is installation and process-based, utilizing photography and video.

Steve Baker is Professor of Art History in the Department of Humanities at the University of Central Lancashire. Author of The Postmodern Animal and of Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation, his research on questions of visual identity and on attitudes to animals in 20th and 21st-century art, philosophy and popular culture now draws increasingly on his interviews and correspondence with contemporary artists in the UK and abroad. His forthcoming book, Art Before Ethics: Creativity and Animal Life (supported by AHRC research leave), proposes a distinctive link between creativity and ethical responsibility in the manner in which contemporary artists engage with questions of animal life.

MW: And I’ve also got a funny feeling that somewhere bound up in that and bound up in the response to the installation of the ten bears, is something to do with that relic and that sense of sanctity, particularly, which is being fed now by this attention and awareness of a fragility and significance to do with an arctic environment. And I think there’s something there, which we’ll reap. Even three years ago, when it wasn’t such a hot topic, I think it still triggered something, some kind of reality about that - even if, perhaps, it was a subliminal thing.

SB: It’s a separate point, but it interests me quite a lot that because we’re talking about animals that one of the things that seems distinct about this area of contemporary art practice is that it appears to sit rather uncomfortably with contemporary tastes in terms of approaches to art theory and cultural theory, where there’s still a considerable disquiet about using words like real and reality. And your thinking about issues to do with animals or that have any bearing on animal lives, assumes that, actually, questions of the real or of the actual or of the living are crucial issues. I mean one could avoid dealing with them but that would really be to render irrelevant the way in which there could be a discourse about this.

BS: Maybe I’m not quite understanding what you’re saying, are you saying that in critical theory today, these are kind of sort of taboo subjects to put it bluntly?

SB: Yes, in that I suppose since, let’s say the 70s or 80s onwards, in a post-Baudrillard environment, to talk glibly about notions of reality and notions of the real is assumed to be theoretically naïve.

BS: But if you changed those concepts into the notions of death or living, do they still fit, in your opinion, because I’m thinking about some of Derrida’s writing and Agamben’s The Open, that at this junction of death there is an opening of a space that is about some form of being and living. So, for me, I can’t see that this isn’t relevant or actually being highly debated in these discussions today.


MW: Surely the problem isn’t necessarily discussing the real or the actual, surely it’s the issue that these realities or these actualities can be constituted by different things and there isn’t a single reality, there isn’t a single actuality; but it doesn’t preclude us from actually talking about this kind of truth or that kind of truth, and they can co-exist. Wasn’t the issue that you were raising there about some kind of absolutism and that we’ve shifted away from that into a more plural situation? I thought that with that acknowledgement, you simply acknowledge that there are many realities, that’s all, and that it didn’t preclude you from talking about the real.

SB: One of the things that interests me in how artists are engaging with these issues is that you don’t get stuck in some of the circularity of a lot of philosophy. And I say that not in the sense of my being hostile to what philosophers are doing at all. But I think those dimensions of Derrida’s work on the animal that are so tied up with issues around death are kind of at the point where I lose interest in what he’s doing, and I’m actually far more interested in him reflecting on his relationship with his cat and what that does to how he thinks about philosophy than him using the whole idea of the animal as a way of extending a philosophical discourse about death.

BS: An interesting thing here is what Michelle Henning wrote in the book about the relationship between photography and taxidermy, particularly looking at the history of photography in the early development of the media when these two kinds of exploration could be said to be travelling hand in hand, i.e. the one with the camera and the one with the gun. I see that as some kind of starting point in looking at the notion of the death of the animal, that’s where my interest in it comes in because, in a sense, the death of the animal is then manifested on this film, which is then ever living; I mean we don’t look at the photographs of these animals thinking that the minute after that photograph was taken this animal lay dead there on the ground. We think about this as an animal at the moment it was captured. And so, in a sense, it goes beyond death - if there is something like death as such - into another way of existing. And it’s in that shift that this notion of death interests me in relation to animals. I was also interested in you mentioning Derrida’s cat, which Donna Haraway also mentions.

SB: Really what he’s describing, and the philosophical context in which he’s most immediately trying to place it, is to say at the point where – bizarrely, given however many years he’s been living with this cat - the point where he first explicitly stopped to acknowledge the fact that his cat did sometimes look at him whether or not he’s naked at the time…

BS: … He was.

SB: One of the things that he was struck by was not only, you know, the John Berger position of ‘here’s all these humans looking at animals but animals aren’t really able to look back in any particular way’ or certainly not, as Derrida said, to look back as a form of address back to the human. And one of the things it prompts Derrida to do is to realise that the entire history of philosophy, in his view, is built on the assumption that it’s humans who do the active looking, who do the addressing - and that most western philosophers just haven’t even countenanced the notion that the animal may be perfectly able to look just as actively.

MW: To direct their gaze.

SB: To direct their gaze, to be addressing their gaze to a human being. And this is, as I understand it, the basis upon which Derrida is saying that he feels that much of the philosophical tradition - and certainly his own contribution to that tradition - needs almost to be thought over again, almost rewritten on the basis of realising that, actually, the animals with which humans interact should have formed a much more active part of philosophical thinking than they have done.

Continued ->