Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective

Gorgeous BEASTS

Nigel Rothfels and Garry Marvin

GENERAL EDITORS

ADVISORY BOARD:

Steve Baker

University of Central Lancashire

Susan McHugh

University of New England

Jules Pretty

University of Essex

Alan Rauch

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Books in the Animalibus series share a fascination with the status and the role of animals in human life. Crossing the humanities and the social sciences to include work in history, anthropology, social and cultural geography, environmental studies, and literary and art criticism, these books ask what thinking about nonhuman animals can teach us about human cultures, about what it means to be human, and about how that meaning might shift across times and places.

Other titles in the series:

Rachel Poliquin The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Culture of Longing

Gorgeous

BEASTS

ANIMAL BODIES IN

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

EDITED BY

Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee,

& Paul Youngquist

THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

UNIVERSITY PARK, PENNSYLVANIA

Funding for this project was provided by the Penn State Institute for Arts and Humanities.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gorgeous beasts : animal bodies in historical perspective / edited by Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and Paul Youngquist.

      p.   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Summary: A collection of essays examining the place of animals in history and culture and their influence on life and art, from the Renaissance to the present—Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-0-271-05401-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Animals and civilization—History.

2. Human-animal relationships—History.

3. Animals and history.

I. Landes, Joan B., 1946–.

II. Lee, Paula Young.

III. Youngquist, Paul.

QL85.G67 2012

590—dc23

2012009331

Copyright © 2012

The Pennsylvania State University

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

Published by

The Pennsylvania State University Press,

University Park, PA 16802-1003

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

Designed by Regina Starace

contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and Paul Youngquist

ONE

Animal Subjects: Between Nature and Invention in Buffon’s Natural History Illustrations

Joan B. Landes

TWO

Renaissance Animal Things

Erica Fudge

THREE

The Cujo Effect

Paul Youngquist

FOUR

On Vulnerability: Studies from Life That Ought Not to Be Copied

Ron Broglio

FIVE

The Rights of Man and the Rights of Animality at the End of the Eighteenth Century

Pierre Serna

TRANSLATED BY

Vito Caiati and Joan B. Landes

SIX

Calling the Wild

Harriet Ritvo

SEVEN

Trophies and Taxidermy

Nigel Rothfels

EIGHT

Fishing for Biomass

Sajay Samuel and Dean Bavington

NINE

Daniel Spoerri’s Carnival of Animals

Cecilia Novero

A CONVERSATION WITH THE ARTIST MARK DION

Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and Paul Youngquist

Notes

Bibliography

About the Contributors

Illustrations

Index

illustrations

acknowledgments

The editors thank the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Dean Susan Welch, and the College of Liberal Arts for support of this publication, and the members of the Visualizing Animals Interdisciplinary Project and the Finding Animals Conference, from which the book developed.

We are deeply indebted to Mark Dion for his generous contribution to this project. Emily Ruotolo, assistant director of the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, Fabienne Leclerc and Antoine Laurent of In Situ/Fabienne Leclerc Gallery, Paris, and Matthias Bildstein and Marie Duhnkrack, of Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna, all offered invaluable assistance in identifying and providing photographs of Mark Dion’s works. Similarly, we greatly appreciate photographer Amy Stein’s contribution to this endeavor.

We are grateful to the many archives, libraries, and galleries that provided images for this book, including Sandy Stelts, curator of rare books and manuscripts, Pennsylvania State University Libraries, and Carol Togneri, chief curator at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. It has been a pleasure to work with Kendra Boileau, the editor-in-chief of Pennsylvania State University Press, and editorial assistant Stephanie Lang. We are pleased to appear in the Press’s Animalibus series and warmly acknowledge the support of general editors Nigel Rothfels and Garry Marvin.

Introduction

JOAN B. LANDES, PAULA YOUNG LEE, AND PAUL YOUNGQUIST

Lately there have been foxes. Outside the office window appeared the agouti shape of a lithe interloper. She basked in the winter sun, half-asleep on a stone seat in an adjacent amphitheater, comfortable and incongruous. Later, in London, the wind a hard slap to the face, she appeared again: fluffed and taut, her eyes flashing as she slid through shadows around trash bags, into the dusk. Who is this furred phantasm with her wily flesh?

To encounter an animal, especially unexpectedly, is to wonder, "what is this beast doing here?" It’s a question for which there are surprisingly few answers. Perhaps this fox is simply living, persisting in her vitality, doing her thing. Why she should do it between a Cineplex and a tube stop is perplexing, but there you have it. She persists, welcome or not. This fox comes to trouble comfortable assumptions about human privilege and animal obeisance. She lives beyond these distinctions, much like the fox captured in photographer Amy Stein’s image Passage in her Domesticated series (fig. 1). Seated motionless atop the gravel-graded opening of a drainpipe, seemingly suspended between nature and culture, she evokes our paradoxical relationship to the wild: our desire to be part of nature while simultaneously taming it.

Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective names a desire as much as a discovery. Animals realize a life that exceeds the small circle of our so-called humanity, a full and feral life irreducible to reason and its pale twin, propriety. While incessantly alluring to humans, indeed necessary to human existence, the proximity of animals to humans is a source of both their suffering and our delight. The title foregrounds the doubleness of human relations to animals, that is, the contradictory connections between human and nonhuman animals in different social contexts and places, ranging from early modern to contemporary times. The essays in this collection find animals abundant and audacious: horrific, fierce, tender, or vulnerable. Animals occasion new emotions. They attract and repel. They seduce, while too often becoming objects of unacknowledged violence. They dismantle old beliefs and also challenge humans to devise new ways of living in concert with and among easily overlooked or undervalued species. The book’s contributors address various ways in which humans and animals are linked within specific sociopolitical and intellectual contexts, including aristocratic and capitalist class structures, colonial trade and racial domination, liberal theories of rights and modern science. They call attention to the paradoxical ways in which animals have been assigned to the categories wild or natural and have been consumed and appropriated for different human purposes. These essays also reveal that animal-human relations are shaped by animals’ responses to, sympathy for, and interest in their human partners. Gorgeous Beasts draws generously upon visual as well as textual sources, integrating artistic with analytical, scientific, or literary responses to animal bodies, and showing how vision and curiosity play a significant role in human responses to animal beauty.

Picture a fox. In a simple sense, this is an act of imagination. A fox, or an image of one, appears in your head, and it represents real-life foxes. The image fox (whiskers, teeth, tawny fur, and bushy tail) stands in for the elusive, real, and absent thing. So an imagined picture of a fox is like a fox, only less so—the next-best thing to having one of your own, better, maybe, since foxes are not easy to domesticate. An imagined fox is cute, docile, clean: fox lite.

This is where things get tricky.¹ Foxes may be hard to domesticate, but they come home in pictures. Representations domesticate them, turn them from living beings into signs of life. An image of a fox is a kind of compromise between its life and ours, a mingling of traces that produces a hybrid: neither quite fox nor quite human but something in between. This hybrid is a sign. It bears a resemblance to a fox. But it shows too the active touch of the imagination that produced it. One might ask of any given image of a fox, which fox does it signify? All foxes? Just a few? One particular fox in a Soho dumpster or a photograph by Amy Stein?²

The work of the artist Mark Dion helps one see how much is involved in seeing animals. His installations and assemblages show how encounters with them take place on many registers at once. Animals are never just there to be seen, felt, or known. History situates them. Culture appropriates them (fig. 2). Science defines them in one way, affection in another. Dion’s work reveals how much work it takes to see a fox, how much baggage one brings to any encounter with animal bodies. An installation titled The Delirium of Alfred Russel Wallace, originally staged in Vienna in 1994, illustrates the point with intelligence and wit (fig. 3). At its center is a fox, stuffed and lying on its back in a hammock (color plate 7). Shrouded in mosquito netting, the hammock hangs between two trees, one living and one dead. Flanking each is an old steamer trunk surrounded by the tools of the naturalist’s trade: butterfly nets, specimen boxes, binoculars, maps, books, a shotgun, a bottle, and more. The scene resembles the campsite in Malaysia of the great explorer, naturalist, and co-discoverer of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, with one key difference: Wallace is the fox. An audible recording of Wallace reflecting on his life in the field completes the identification. Dion forces his viewer to question human encounters with animal bodies by substituting an animal body for that of a historically particular human.

To see the body of a fox here involves perceiving it in human terms. A panoply of discourses, technologies, and customs make it visible. Natural history frames the whole encounter, which is to say that nature is a historical invention. The scientific bias of that invention appears in all the gear for measuring and recording its details. But other kinds of tools are involved, too: a pot for cooking, a bottle for drinking, a lantern for driving back the dark. The animal body at the center of Dion’s installation appears as the object not so much of science as of the various histories and habits that sustain science as a form of knowledge. History unfurls a British imperialist backdrop to the great naturalist reposing in Malaysia. Culture packs the scene with European accoutrements. That fox in the hammock is the creature of a whole arsenal of tools and beliefs.

To encounter this fox is to acquire an awareness of the complex historical and cultural heritage that enables perception. Dion’s soundtrack doubles that awareness, as Wallace confesses his own inescapable bias: I will often set foot on a land which no European eye has beheld, or see animals unknown to our world, or be treated to customs completely alien in origin; yet none of it stands in the foreground of my mind. My thoughts may be occupied by visions of the English countryside, or filled with fragments of an absurd and detestable children’s song, running a course in my head. London Bridge is falling down.³ Such is the delirium of this naturalist in the field: part exotic sensation, part national identity, part foolish memory—and part fox. The spectacles resting on its black snout bring its stuffed body into focus as a complex object, composed as much of taxonomy, dream, and desire as of fur and flesh. Dion’s crowning irony is the impossibility of the perception his installation nevertheless documents. As the father of bio-geography and the author of Geographical Distribution of Animals, Wallace knew what his scientific treatise established: in Malaysia there are no foxes. Yet there one sleeps, conjured by science, culture, and delirium. The animal bodies encountered in Gorgeous Beasts share these contingent origins.

Marks of the Beast

Encountering animals turns out to be a much more complicated process than it looks. Representing them in signs requires a lot of stage setting before one can say with assurance, "oh, that fox, oh, that cat." For the sake of simplicity, let’s say it involves at least two registers of perception, one erotic and the other historical. An old adage is worth pondering: people see what they want to see. Seeing involves desire.⁴ The (misogynist) popular history of the word fox makes the point obvious. Images, words, signs get tinged by the desire that invokes them. To focus perception on this particular object rather than that is to mark it as wanted. Seeing animals means marking them, making and remaking them in the image of desire. The other register of perception is historical. Any given image comes trailing a long history of representations that enables us to identify it with a fox or a cat. One important implication of this observation is that seeing is an act of history.⁵ Seeing animals means seeing them through a long, complex, invisible history of representations that name them, locate them, and value them, making it possible to exclaim, "that’s a fox!"

Animals inhabit environments altered by contact with human societies, just as human relationships are mediated by animals co-present in their various locales.⁶ Consider another familiar (domesticated) beast, the horse: an animal that has cohabitated with humans for millennia, playing a prominent role in human society. In agriculture, horses pulled plows, provided fertilizer and even food—as any visitor to a French boucherie chevaline, specializing in horse meat, can attest. Horses facilitated long-distance trade and played a decisive role in military conquest. Their hides provided leather to human populations. Given that we commonly think of horses as part of either a natural or a rural landscape, the horse’s role in modern urban life and industry can come as a surprise. The authors of The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century present the nineteenth-century city as the climax of human exploitation of horse power, crediting the horse with helping to build that age’s giant, wealth-generating metropoles. Yet this is not a simple story of animal as object or victim, human as exploiter. Surprisingly, horses also benefited from the new human ecology: Their populations boomed, and the urban horse, although probably working harder than his rural counterpart, was undoubtedly better fed, better housed, and protected from cruelty. To the extent that it can be determined, the urban horse was also larger and longer lived than were farm animals. Thus the relationship was symbiotic—horses could not have survived as a species without human intervention, and dense human populations frequently relied on horses. … The European horse survived because it found an ecological niche as a partner for humans. In a sense this was co-evolution, not domination.⁷ Co-survivor, co-evolver, and (no matter how lopsided) companion animal: the horse’s integration into the story of the nineteenth century’s emergent metropolis demands a more complex account than everyday assumptions allow, particularly when those assumptions require us to draw lines between what is domestic and what is wild, what is cultural and what is natural.⁸

Amy Stein’s Domesticated series brings these issues into focus. In an image titled New Homes, two bobcats range unexpectedly into human territory (fig. 4). One sits on a poured concrete foundation, sheltered by a skeleton frame made of wood. Another sits atop a wrapped package of lumber lying next to a pile of exposed planks. Predators at rest, these bobcats are seductive diplomats of danger, night watchers in daylight waiting for prey: rabbits hiding in tall weeds. Arrestingly lucid, the photograph resembles the kind of Otherwhere images published in National Geographic, which often highlight quixotic creatures wandering on the socioeconomic margins. The photographer is skilled. The viewer may feel admiration for the quicksilver reflex of the shutterbug’s eye. There seem to be luck, patience, and a story here, an allegory regarding the largesse of carnivores. The apparent poetry of the scene suggests abandonment, as if humans have departed forever, letting other predators take their place in nature’s hierarchy.

The story is all too familiar. The everyday experience of animals comes filtered through these sorts of waiting-room images. The brilliance of Stein’s photograph blooms in its familiarity, much like the famous bunch of grapes painted so skillfully by Zeuxis that birds tried to peck at them. According to the Roman historian Pliny, Zeuxis turned to his rival, Parrhasius, and asked him to reveal his own masterpiece. Pull back the curtain! Parrhasius ordered. Certain of his superiority, Zeuxis reached forward. Only then did he realize that there was nothing to pull back: the curtain was a painted image! Conceding defeat, Zeuxis muttered that his own work had fooled animals, but his rival had fooled another artist. Stein’s photograph adds the latest wrinkle to this famous challenge. This isn’t a lucky snapshot in the genre of travel photography but a staged tableau that exposes norms informing animal-human relationships. We are Zeuxis gazing blindly at Parrhasius’s curtain. The bobcats aren’t bobcats. They are taxidermic specimens, closer to stuffed handbags than to cunning killers. Photographically alive, they are technically dead. To see them as objects on display transforms the homes they haunt into mausoleums under construction. This purring paradox of the animal image stalks our backyards.

At first glance, Stein’s photograph Dead End Street