Post by Admin on Mar 19, 2024 23:09:09 GMT
Animal Mirrors
dark-mountain.net/animal-mirrors/
Erika Howsare's newly published The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors is an unflinching look at the wild and mysterious creature that has run through our physical lives and imaginations since the Palaeolithic era, and now faces us with the complexity and violence of the Anthropocene. Here, for our Kinship with Beasts series, Erika introduces an extract from her four-year journey where she visits the Korean-American 'deer artist' Meesha Goldberg.
Iwatched my niece play a game a few days ago in a noisy arcade, the object being to lasso cows on a video screen, watched by a chorus of cowboys. If you missed, the cows would laugh at you. But if you got your rope around the animal’s neck, the onlookers would cheer and wave their hats while the cow herself evidenced pain: bulging tongue, crossed eyes. I found myself rooting for the cows and thinking about all the millions of little ways this culture puts itself at arm’s length, or rope’s length, from the animals with whom we share the Earth. Agriculture is part of it, yes, but so is representation. Someone had to programme that game. Someone decided they’d done a good job when the cow’s limbs went akimbo, just so.
For the last four years or so, as I immersed myself in research about deer for my book, The Age of Deer, I found them to be objects of prolific representation. In art history, they all go back to the caves at Lascaux. How had we programmed the deer, so to speak? How were we training ourselves to see them and think of them? I noted a peculiar throughline in these images: most of the deer, whether noble stags, bucolic ornaments, or fleeing quarry, were not looking back.
Inoted a peculiar throughline in these images: most of the deer, whether noble stags, bucolic ornaments, or fleeing quarry, were not looking back.
Some had been shown in the act of being hunted: too busy running for their lives to notice anyone but their pursuer. Some were already dead, like the buck being scavenged by Audubon’s black vultures. Others were shown in moments of rest – like Edwin Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen, who calmly surveys his masculine domain – but still not meeting the eye of the viewer. Many simply served as icons: vessels to hold human meaning, stamped onto consumer products or positioned between trees in stylised illustrations.
It seemed we’d collectively forgotten that deer have eyes of their own, a reality of their own. Art historians have often noted the significance of female subjects – like Manet’s Olympia – who possess a direct gaze, their eyes boring into the eyes of the viewer, creating a relationship between the person on the canvas and the person in the gallery that is akin to the relationship between two live humans. It’s a power move; Olympia rejects the role of object or outline, there to be visually consumed; she gives as good as she gets. You could say she insists on being a mirror instead of a window.
A species like deer shares with us a deep evolutionary affinity, much more similar to us than different. They are our cousins, and our mirrors.
If humans refuse to grant deer in art the capacity to look back, what does that say about the power we claim over a species that is as large as us, mammalian like us, and far older than we are? What would it be like if deer in art possessed the ability not only to be seen, but to see?
In the deep past, we all knew deer and other animals as fellow actors in the play – beings to be considered, honoured, and addressed. Many Indigenous groups have maintained that connection even as Western culture has turned animals into objects. But there are pockets of the modern world in which people nurture practices – certain kinds of hunting, tracking, the use of deer parts, and artmaking – that bring them into kinship with deer: something more like a dance between equal partners.
dark-mountain.net/animal-mirrors/
Erika Howsare's newly published The Age of Deer: Trouble and Kinship with our Wild Neighbors is an unflinching look at the wild and mysterious creature that has run through our physical lives and imaginations since the Palaeolithic era, and now faces us with the complexity and violence of the Anthropocene. Here, for our Kinship with Beasts series, Erika introduces an extract from her four-year journey where she visits the Korean-American 'deer artist' Meesha Goldberg.
Iwatched my niece play a game a few days ago in a noisy arcade, the object being to lasso cows on a video screen, watched by a chorus of cowboys. If you missed, the cows would laugh at you. But if you got your rope around the animal’s neck, the onlookers would cheer and wave their hats while the cow herself evidenced pain: bulging tongue, crossed eyes. I found myself rooting for the cows and thinking about all the millions of little ways this culture puts itself at arm’s length, or rope’s length, from the animals with whom we share the Earth. Agriculture is part of it, yes, but so is representation. Someone had to programme that game. Someone decided they’d done a good job when the cow’s limbs went akimbo, just so.
For the last four years or so, as I immersed myself in research about deer for my book, The Age of Deer, I found them to be objects of prolific representation. In art history, they all go back to the caves at Lascaux. How had we programmed the deer, so to speak? How were we training ourselves to see them and think of them? I noted a peculiar throughline in these images: most of the deer, whether noble stags, bucolic ornaments, or fleeing quarry, were not looking back.
Inoted a peculiar throughline in these images: most of the deer, whether noble stags, bucolic ornaments, or fleeing quarry, were not looking back.
Some had been shown in the act of being hunted: too busy running for their lives to notice anyone but their pursuer. Some were already dead, like the buck being scavenged by Audubon’s black vultures. Others were shown in moments of rest – like Edwin Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen, who calmly surveys his masculine domain – but still not meeting the eye of the viewer. Many simply served as icons: vessels to hold human meaning, stamped onto consumer products or positioned between trees in stylised illustrations.
It seemed we’d collectively forgotten that deer have eyes of their own, a reality of their own. Art historians have often noted the significance of female subjects – like Manet’s Olympia – who possess a direct gaze, their eyes boring into the eyes of the viewer, creating a relationship between the person on the canvas and the person in the gallery that is akin to the relationship between two live humans. It’s a power move; Olympia rejects the role of object or outline, there to be visually consumed; she gives as good as she gets. You could say she insists on being a mirror instead of a window.
A species like deer shares with us a deep evolutionary affinity, much more similar to us than different. They are our cousins, and our mirrors.
If humans refuse to grant deer in art the capacity to look back, what does that say about the power we claim over a species that is as large as us, mammalian like us, and far older than we are? What would it be like if deer in art possessed the ability not only to be seen, but to see?
In the deep past, we all knew deer and other animals as fellow actors in the play – beings to be considered, honoured, and addressed. Many Indigenous groups have maintained that connection even as Western culture has turned animals into objects. But there are pockets of the modern world in which people nurture practices – certain kinds of hunting, tracking, the use of deer parts, and artmaking – that bring them into kinship with deer: something more like a dance between equal partners.