The Owl of Minerva and recent art
Over the past two decades or so, contemporary visual culture has turned towards critical and theoretical reflections on the question of how the experience of late-modem corporeality has reconfigured much older fundamental questions of human identity and mortality. If the visual interpretations of questions pertaining to 'The Body' are now among the familiar features of our critical domain, there has been a recent shift in emphasis toward a reassessment of the links between the human body and those of the animals who are our closest physical and cultural point of connection with the non-human world.
Since the earliest human images were of animals, and human-animal relations are much older than history itself, there is nothing essentially new about this line of human enquiry. Nonetheless, issues of identity arising from the debates on corporeality, along with questions arising from eco-philosophy, the developing interest in ecological sustainability and widespread anxiety surrounding genetic engineering have imbued these old questions with a new sense of relevance.
Internationally there has been a renewal of interest in how the idea of the animal in art can be reconfigured. Recent shows such as the 'Animals' exhibition in London in 2004 (at the Haunch of Venison Yard Gallery), or media interest shown in the self-consciously 'feral' performance art of Oleg Kulik are cases in point. In I bite America and America bites me (1997) Kulik 'became' a wild dog-an attempt to get under the skin of the animal which made Joseph Beuys' famous 'dialogue' with a wild coyote for a few days in a New York gallery in the seventies look relatively tame by comparison. Theoretical interest has been rekindled through interest in writing on animality by influential... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline