Looking at the Pain of Animals
From killing thousands of creatures, to dyeing a single fabric, to art being created to save insects – it seems we’ve come a long way in our relationship with animals. But although artists willingly present themselves in the role of animal allies, they still often commit fratricide on their lesser brothers.
‘If we were stubborn and energetically set to work, we could annihilate every major species down to the last specimen within two or three years and, with greater cooperation from the bureaucracy, even within five years,’ wrote Wisława Szymborska about the dependency of animals on humanity’s domination of the Earth. The methodical killing of various creatures is as old as civilization itself and sometimes lies at the source of its most sophisticated elements. It is enough to mention the innocent sea snails, thousands of which were caught, crushed and boiled in vats to dye a fabric Tyrian purple, the most valued shade in ancient Rome. Even today, images passionately defending the life and dignity of other species are painted with animal-hair brushes and on canvases prepped with glue made from ground animal bones.
It can be said that, when it comes to making the murder of animals a public spectacle, science has been ahead of art by several dozen years. In order to prove the dangerous properties of alternating current (and at the same time to ensure a humane execution for a person sentenced to death for killing another human animal), Thomas Edison set up the murder of Topsy the elephant in January 1903 on Coney Island using the precursor of the electric chair. In Polish art, the first victims were more inconspicuous.
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‘Dialog z Rybą’ (A Dialogue with a Fish) by Zbigniew Warpechowski, 1973, Lubelska Wiosna Teatralna, photo: courtesy of the artist / Zachęta National Gallery of Art
In 1971, Zbigniew Warpechowski presented the first performance involving, or rather using, a fish, which he placed on a board with the inscription ‘Water’. He served real water in glasses to the audience. Fish appeared several times in the work of the Polish performance pioneer. Although the contexts of the works changed, their fate did not change – each time, they were pulled out of the water and suffocated.
In Woda (Water), the suffering of the fish is still seemingly involuntary; it is a brutal element of the conceptual game. In Dialog z Rybą (Dialogue with a Fish), a year later, in which the performer whispered tender words to a suffocating carp cradled in his arms, it becomes a key element of the work. ‘I wondered what people would consider more important: the choking of the fish or my acting,’ Warpechowski said.
At a time when Warpechowski showed unreciprocated ‘tenderness’ for a carp pulled out of the water, the direct presence of animals in a work of art was a clear novelty, although their role remained essentially unchanged in comparison to representations from hundreds of years ago. In line with a long tradition, including moralistic fairy tales and Dutch still-life paintings with animal carcasses hanging on hooks, animals appeared as personified symbols in the works of contemporary artists.
In Eastern Europe, this symbolism usually applied more or less directly to Soviet oppression. In the same year in which Warpechowski took a fish out of an aquarium in the gallery for the first time, István Harasztÿ closed a parrot in a cage constructed in a certain way. When the bird sat on the perch, the door of the cage opened; as soon as it jumped up to fly through it to freedom, the mechanism slammed the door shut.
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‘Pyramid of Animals’ by Katarzyna Kozyra, 1993, installation, Zachęta National Gallery of Art collection, photo: Jacek Gładykowski, courtesy of Zachęta National Gallery of Art
Although the Brothers Grimm could teach the creators of today’s slashers how to abuse protagonists picturesquely, their story of a group of animals – a donkey, a dog, a cat and a rooster – escaping from death and carrying out a daring attack on the robbers’ cottage, where they finally live and lead a peaceful life away from people, is exceptionally benign. Katarzyna Kozyra treated the real incarnations of Grimms’ Musicians of Bremen less kindly.
The 1993 Pyramid of Animals is actually closer to the spirit of many other stories written by the Hessian authors, using the macabre as a kind of didactic tool. At the same time, taking this strategy to the extreme, it stands between two eras – the final objectification of animals and their death, which became the cause of an unprecedented media scandal that paradoxically foreshadowed the subsequent subjectification of other species.
Like Warpechowski before her, Kozyra also sensed the spirit of the times. Two years before The Pyramid of Animals, Damien Hirst created The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living – an almost five-meter-long shark preserved in formaldehyde. And two years later, Maurizio Cattelan created Love Saves Life, also a reference to The Musicians of Bremen, a sculpture similar to The Pyramid created with stuffed animals (much more thoroughly, it must be admitted, than in the work of the Polish artist) standing on top of each other: a donkey, a dog, a cat and a chicken. In Love Lasts Forever, created in 1997, the Italian artist repeated this form using only skeletons.
While preparing to work on The Pyramid of Animals, Kozyra’s graduate thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, she circled the villages and shelters near Warsaw like a vulture looking for animals that were about to die. In accordance with the thesis assumptions, they had to be dead animals, not sculpted – because the point was not the symbolism of individual species but the approach to death, drawing attention to the killing of animals that takes place out of sight of the wider population every day on a massive scale, to a kind of circle of life, and finally to individual feelings when dealing with death.
In this last respect, the artist’s emotional attitude to the animals making up The Pyramid seems to gradate just like the scale of the animals. Kozyra experienced the death of a horse and its skinning recorded on video in a veterinary clinic. The cat’s corpse stored in the freezer made her feel very uncomfortable (she eventually adopted two cats while working).
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‘Honorata & Sasko’ by Honorata Martin, 2020, photo: artist’s materials
‘The problem I had was, shouldn’t I, in the name of consistency, also buy live dogs and cats and kill them with a hammer? What stopped me? Emotions. I couldn’t do it, at least then,’ said the artist, but a moment earlier she had admitted that the death of a rooster or even two did not arouse comparable emotions: ‘I killed two roosters. I didn’t know which one would be better, the big one or the small one’. The Pyramid may lie at the opposite emotional pole in relation to works such as Honorata Martin’s video Honorata and Sasko – in which the artist walks in the middle of a multi-lane street carrying a sick dog in her arms, showing the closeness and fragility of both of them – but it stems from similar feelings.
Unlike Warpechowski two decades earlier, Kozyra knew well that her work would be met with harsh reactions:
The ‘murder’ took place for reasons other than making shoes or eating meat, thus exceeding norms that are considered binding and humane. The killing of animals in a civilized and industrial way takes place anonymously and away from the eyes of their later consumers. Taking the life of an animal in a manner that is open and performed by an individual causes outrage and stigmatization. I consciously exposed myself to the consequences.
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‘Away from the Flock (Divided)’ by Damien Hirst, detail, 1995, photo: Prudence Cuming Associates, Copyright Damien Hirst & Science Ltd. All rights reserved DACS 2013
Yet the scale and viciousness of the attacks must have exceeded all expectations. In subsequent attacks, details about her work were regularly confused, colorized and demonized, and the word ‘artist’ was fondly written in quotation marks. This was achieved by supplementing the stuffed animals themselves with a film showing the putting down and stuffing of a horse, just as information about murders arouses much greater emotions when accompanied by real death depictions – so-called snuff movies.
One of the first voices condemning Kozyra’s work was a letter sent to the Academy of Fine Arts by the local district of the Association of Polish Artists. This union, reactivated after martial law, was already firmly entrenched in its conservative positions and quickly ceased to represent the actual artistic community. However, the letter regarding The Pyramid of Animals is difficult to dismiss simply as a historical testimony of the battle between artistic dinosaurs that are receding into the shadows and progressive critical art.
Today, the vast majority of the artistic community would probably agree with the statement that ‘playing with the lives of animals, tormenting them and murdering them is not allowed’ at an art school. In the early 1990s, however, the division was quite clear – on one side of the barricade were traditionalists with truth, beauty and goodness on their banners; on the other, an environment advocating risky critical art. One side assumed that an artist should be a kind of romantic bard, elevated above society; the other side also attributed a unique status to them, but it was that of a debunker and social commentator who is allowed more.
The use of a close, individual perspective allows us to go beyond the pitfall of these two extreme attitudes, although they converge in the special treatment of art. As Dorota Łagodzka wrote:
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Is referring to the widespread social acceptance of killing animals and the ubiquity of products made from their dead bodies a good argument for the permissibility of killing animals for art? Society is not a monolith but a set of individuals, each of whom makes decisions and makes choices, also of an ethical nature. Animals are also not just a uniform entity called fauna but a set of individuals, each of which has its own life and death. […] Accusing the viewer of hypocrisy, formulated from the position of postulating absolute freedom of art, puts them in a paradoxical situation in which they have no right to defend animal life.
Work that uses death directly – and it has internationally included electrocuting lobsters and fish, setting fire to a cage of live rats and even starving a stray dog – simply does not work as a critical commentary on industrialized, hidden-from-sight killing. By giving the death of an animal a tangible dimension within a work of art, instead of extinguishing one fire ignites another – a discussion about what is allowed in art itself. Today, Kozyra’s graduate thesis is beginning to be questioned precisely because a change in the approach to the life and welfare of animals is taking place independently of it.
The sculptor-ant & the connoisseur-canary
One might consider one of the latest works by the Czekalska + Golec duo to be a much more contemporary and imaginative critique of animal exploitation. At their 2020 exhibition at the Arsenal Municipal Gallery in Poznań, curated by Bogna Błażewicz, viewers were greeted by an ostrich-skin bag thrown down on the stairs, which at first glance could be considered to be a visitor’s abandoned property. Inside could be seen, among other things, a phone in a leather case, a rosary made of pearls, a make-up brush of badger hair, medicine containing gelatine and cod liver oil, a fur key ring … Even the lipstick was not ‘innocent’ here – the dye used in it is made from cochineals. This camouflaged pyramid of animals includes birds, insects, fish and several species of mammals, showing the scale of the commodification of animals, treated as mere raw material, without resorting to direct violence against them.
After all, Tatiana Czekalska and Leszek Golec would be the last artists capable of taking an animal’s life for the sake of their work. Instead, they often make animal welfare and their activity independent of humans a part of their work. The same exhibition in Poznań included a wooden figure of a putto from a Baroque altar holding a bunch of grapes – a buffet for the fruit flies in the gallery.
In Avatars from the 1990s, artists constructed devices to save insects, like orthodox Jainists moving around with special brooms so as not to accidentally step on any living creature. They also like to emphasize animal co-authorship – one of the duo’s most famous works are two wooden, 17th-century busts of Saint Francis, picturesquely carved by small sculptors –generations of small beetles. In fact, they lend the figures a uniquely dramatic air and individual character – Czekalska and Golec present them as the joint work of an anonymous woodcarver and insects.
Piotr Lutyński conducts similar aesthetic ‘negotiations’ with animals in his own works. As part of his practice, the artist, among other things, observes birds, from geese to canaries, tries to learn their aesthetic preferences, and based on these paints pictures for animals. If we trust his diagnosis, birds like the New York ambience of the late 1950s and 1960s, i.e. colourful geometric abstractions in the spirit of Frank Stella and Carmen Herrera. Zygmunt Rytka’s series of photographs, Contact, comes from the same year as The Pyramid of Animals. The artist photographed minimalist compositions made of pieces of thread moved and twisted by walking ants.
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‘Symbiosity of Creation, Day 1119’ by Elvin Flamingo, photo: courtesy of artist
Rytka’s modest, conceptual series of photos found its spectacular development in Elvin Flamingo’s long-term project Symbiosity of Creation, started in 2012. Instead of a few ants moving a thread, it is created by colonies of several thousand farmer and weaver ants, a complex ecosystem enclosed in glass incubators. The artist described, for example, their agricultural, processing and funerary strategies:
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Farmers are extremely tidy; everything is in its place in these mushroom gardens; what’s more, they conduct highly specialized waste segregation. They divide it into dry, wet and toxic, and when subsequent generations of workers die, they create cemeteries for them, and all this can be seen in the incubators I constructed.
And although the creator emphasizes his role as one of thousands of ‘workers’ involved in the symbiotic life of the colony, he necessarily plays the role of the first mover in it, who first constructed this entire maze of glass flasks and tunnels, ‘like Professor Corcoran growing artificial brains’ in one of Stanisław Lem’s stories, as noted by Izabela Kowalczyk. He did it by trial and error, and before establishing a proper still-functioning colony, several ‘prototype’ ant clans died along with their queens a few days after moving to the incubator.
The duo Nomadic State, Stach Szumski and Karolina Mełnicka, suffered from a similar paradox. At the exhibition at Trafostacja Sztuki in Szczecin in 2019, curated by Daria Grabowska, the artists presented works whose central elements were, among others, axolotls – predatory amphibians also called Mexican salamanders. In their natural environment, these animals, somewhat resembling prehistoric forms intermediate between marine animals and the first land vertebrates, occur only in two Mexican lakes. In their most common laboratory form, axolotls take on an albino, pinkish colour. In both forms, they are animals that are critically endangered, threatened with extinction.
Accordingly, the artistic duo first created an appropriate environment for the animals inside the gallery in the form of (among other things) sculptures-hideouts, and as a result they transformed the entire institution into a kind of temporary sanctuary where endangered animals sold on the grey market could wait to find a home with suitable living conditions. The work by Nomadic State is therefore both a consequence and an antithesis of the art developed around bodies in The Pyramid of Animals – an action that, instead of replicating violence in order to make it visible, highlights prior abuse in order to try to repair it within the gallery walls.
Translated from Polish by Michał Pelczar
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