Straulauerplatz fountain
friends and friends and pictures
mrbaby.surfclub
draft, show text
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Many of us live with animals even if we don’t own pets—the Internet teems with YouTube videos of sneezing panda cubs and narcoleptic dachshunds, as well as photographs of cats with childishly-spelled text captions. Many contemporary artists have turned to animal imagery as well, among them Kelly Rae Burns, Kristina Felix, Margot Holtman, Jules Buck Jones, Jonathon Keats and Jill Pangallo.
Anthropogenesis: Recent Work from Six Artists offers an exploration of the abundance of animal imagery appearing in contemporary art practice. For talented draftsmen such as Burns, Jones and Holtman, it’s possible that depicting animals offers an anatomical challenge akin to the nude of an earlier century. Perhaps the image of the animal provides opportunities for extended observation of a subject removed from the uneasy terrain of identity and alterity; maybe we see animals as apolitical.
But to think on the animal means to meditate on what it means to be human. As Giorgio Agamben demonstrated in L’aperto. L’uomo e l’animale (2002), the distinction or lack of it between animals and humans is a chronic concern of human existence. Since antiquity philosophers and scientists have distinguished us from animals by our capacity for language, our supposition of an immortal soul and our ability to resist instinctual imperatives; however, each of these ideas draws the line between man and animal in a different place. It’s not surprising then that many of the artists featured in Anthropogenesis blur the distinctions between animal and human, for example, Burns’ drawings feature totemic half-animal half-human beings. Pangallo uses her cat as a stand-in for a woman modeling the summer’s sexiest accessories, the cat’s lack of passion for visors, sunglasses and pantyhose acts as a wry commentary on women’s fashion. Felix stands in for a hunted animal in her sculpture and video installation; here human-animal relations act in part as a metaphor for male-female relations. Keats, alternatively, creates a ballet for honeybees to perform. Visitors to Anthropogenesis are privy to The Honeybee Ballet’s documentation, but the ballet itself is performed by—and perhaps for—honeybees. All in all, it may be that animals, in their openness and ambiguity, as well as their vulnerable relationship to human society WHAT
2 DO
- create a photo checklist of everything we have
- price and figure out frames for Margot (22-29th in Austin)
- create a “plan” re: the ArtLies cross-promotion
- get vitrine info and permission for ArtLies magazines
- sketch out the “hanging”
- figure out the DEAL with Jules’ costume
- make K. Felix decide what she wants with her dresses
