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| Urban Animal 2009. Exhibition view at the ABSA Gallery. |
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| Urban Animal 2009. Exhibition view at the ABSA Gallery. |
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| Urban Animal 2009. Exhibition view at the ABSA Gallery. |
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| Urban Animal 2009. Exhibition view at the ABSA Gallery. |
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| Urban Animal 2009. Exhibition view at the ABSA Gallery. |
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| Urban Animal 2009. Exhibition view at the ABSA Gallery. |
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| Urban Animal 2009. Exhibition view at the ABSA Gallery. |
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| Urban Animal 2009. Exhibition view at the ABSA Gallery. |
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| WILMA CRUISE POOR HORACE: (WATCHING THE HOURS) 2009 Acrylic Resin and mixed media 2 670 x 1 550 x 800mm (ht x l x w) |
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WILMA CRUISE POOR HORACE: (WATCHING THE HOURS) 2009 Acrylic Resin and mixed media 2 670 x 1 550 x 800mm (ht x l x w), (detail). |
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WILMA CRUISE POOR HORACE: (WATCHING THE HOURS) 2009 Acrylic Resin and mixed media 2 670 x 1 550 x 800mm (ht x l x w) |
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| WILMA CRUISE PROGRESSION I - NURSE OF THE MAD (I - IV) 2009. Monotype on Hanemuhle paper 1/1 530 x 390mm |
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| GAVIN YOUNGE AND WILMA CRUISE CESIUM 137 2007 Taxidermied sheep, resin-cast fish 1100 x 950 x 350mm State VeterinaryCertificate supplied. Taxidermist: Jacques Gilbert, France. |
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| GAVIN YOUNGE BLONDE 2009 (Edition of 5) Embroidery, 600 x 600 x 150mm |
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| GAVIN YOUNGE BLONDE 2009 (Edition of 5) Embroidery, 600 x 600 x 150mm, (detail). |
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| GAVIN YOUNGE |
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| GAVIN YOUNGE AFTER KOONS: PUPPY VASE 2009 Stencils on tanned animal hide 820 x 970 x 15mm State Veterinary Certificate supplied. |
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| GAVIN YOUNGE AFTER KOONS: BALLOON DOG 2009 Stencils on tanned animal hide935 x 920 x 15mm State Veterinary Certificate supplied. |
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ANN-MARIE TULLY ANIMAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1 2008 Oil on photographic canvas. 1 000 (W) x 600mm (H). |
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DIORAMA WITH FERAL DONKEYS 2009 DIORAMA WITH BUCK 2009 Oil on museum grade acrylic Perspex 370 (W) x 180mm (H) |
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DIORAMA WITH FERAL DONKEYS 2009 Oil on museum grade acrylic Perspex 370 (W) x 180mm(H) |
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| JOHN MARK MOORE THE BURDENS WE CARRY: COUNTRY LIFE 2009 (edition of 20) Black and white linocut 1 100mm x 1 500mm |
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| JOHN MARK MOORE THE BURDENS WE CARRY: CITY LIFE 2009 (edition of 20) black and white linocut 1 100mm x 1 500 mm |
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| SONJA BRITZ ISSA (FIRST PORTRAIT) 2008 Oil on canvas 760 x 910 cm |
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| SONJA BRITZ Oil on canvas 760 x 910 cm |
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| ROSEMARIE MARRIOTT GEGERF (BUSHED, BUNCHED) Animal skin and wax 1 290 x 850 x 300mm |
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ROSEMARIE MARRIOTT GEGERF (BUSHED, BUNCHED) Animal skin and wax 1 290 x 850 x 300mm, (detail). |
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| ROSEMARIE MARRIOTT GEHUL (ENVELOPED, WRAPPED) Animal skin and wax 1 340 x 810 x 480mm |
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| ELMARIE PRETORIUS ILLUSTRATION 2009 Pigment print on cotton paper 900 x 705mm |
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| SIOBHAN MCCUSKER POOZER 2009 Etching with chine colle book pages on BFK Rives, ed of 3, AP Image size: 125 x 100mm Paper size: 375 x 300mm |
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| SIOBHAN MCCUSKER YAK 2009 Etching with chine colle book pages on BFK Rives, ed of 3, AP Image size: 125 x 100mm Paper size: 375 x 300mm |
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| WALTER OLTMANN CHAFER SUIT (Series) 2009 Ink, bleach and crayon 300 x 215mm |
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| WALTER OLTMANN CHAFER SUIT III 2009 Ink, bleach and crayon 300 x 215mm |
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| WALTER OLTMANN CHAFER SUIT IV 2009 Ink, bleach and crayon 300 x 215mm |
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| PAUL STEPHEN COOPER and MY Appropriated found object and wooden base 170 X 200 X 110mm, (detail). |
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| PAUL STEPHEN COOPER and MY Appropriated found object and wooden base 170 X 200 X 110mm, (installation view). |
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| PAUL STEPHEN COOPER and MY Appropriated found object and wooden base 170 X 200 X 110mm, (detail). |
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| JACKI MCINNES TROPHY (installation view) 2009 Pigmented acrylic resin and wood. Cast, hand tooled and coloured. |
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| JACKI MCINNES TROPHY I 2009 Pigmented acrylic resin and wood. Cast, hand tooled and coloured. 450 x 350 x 300mm |
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| JACKI MCINNES FALLEN I 2009 Burnt tyre soot and oil 1 020 x 640mm |
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| PAUL STEPHEN COOPER HOME SWEET HOME (Hummingbird installation) 2009 Coloured polyester resin cast bird shapes, vinyl lettering, gallery space. Installation size: variable. Each bird shape: 210 x 100 X 190mm |
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| PAUL STEPHEN COOPER HOME SWEET HOME (Hummingbird installation) 2009 Coloured polyester resin cast bird shapes, vinyl lettering, gallery space. Installation size: variable. Each bird shape: 210 x 100 X 190mm, (detail). |
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| PAUL STEPHEN COOPER MY ONE AND ONLY (RED RIBBON) 2009 Appropriated found object and wooden base 170 X 200 X 110mm |
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| PAUL STEPHEN COOPER FAMILY PORTRAIT 2009 Framed colour photograph 320 x 270 x 20mm |
Urban Animal was opened by Michelle Pickover on the 7th October 2009 at 18h15
“Art is continually haunted by the animal” - Deleuze and Guattari
The group exhibition Urban Animal was conceived and curated by Sonja Britz and Ann-Marie Tully. It included the following South African artists: Paul Cooper, Wilma Cruise, Elmarie Pretorius, Rosemarie Marriott, Sibohan McCusker, Jacki McInnes, John Moore, Walter Oltmann, Landi Raubenheimer and Gavin Younge.
An urban animal is any creature living in close proximity to human beings in an urban environment. However the constituency of urban animals has changed dramatically over the past two centuries. Prior to the nineteenth century relations between human beings and animals were integrally linked to social, economic and cultural factors, thereby forming what John Berger termed “the first circle of what surrounded man” 1 He believed early forms of industrialisation led to animals being regarded as machines, whereas today post–industrial societies treat them as raw materials. This reduction of the animal to a commodity and invisible social presence has both philosophical and econo-historical roots.
More recent writers have re-assessed and expanded on Berger’s “cultural marginalization” 2 of the animal. Derrida proposed that by generically naming non-human creatures animals we created the animetaphor: anti-metaphor and animal metaphor. This term signifies the limits of our understanding of animals and foregrounds the complex ways in which animal representation is always haunted, vexed, reworked and enfolded by the ‘real animal’. 3
Animal theory is also concerned with the animal gaze and what Michel de Montaigne had already identified in the sixteenth century, as the animal’s right to communication and signification based on its ‘capacity to respond’.4 This relationship is further explored in Derrida’s ecce animot. 5
Urban animals are drawn from a wide range of categories: pets, vermin, insects, zoo animals, wild and feral animals, animals as food and commodity and simulated animals. Human beings often have ambivalent relations with urban animals; some pets are revered and respected, whereas others are abused and abandoned. Post-colonial zoos claim to protect species for future generations by preserving potentially extinct species and end up creating sanctuaries for the ‘living dead’.6 Animals to be consumed are taken to abattoirs and hidden from view, while advertisers represent them as ‘animals of the mind’7 that are happy as means of food production and apparently close to ‘nature’.
The curators of Urban Animal thank the generous sponsorship of ABSA Bank Gallery. 40% of the work sold on the exhibition was donated to the NPO Animals in Distress.
Notes
1 Berger, 1980:3
2 ibid, 15
3 Lippit 1998: 1111-1125
4 Montaigne cited in Derrida 2002:375
5 ‘The animal that therefore I am.’
6 Glavin 2007:35-37
7 Berger 1980:1
Opening Address
Thank you to the organizers, curators and not least of all the artists for putting this wonderful exhibition together and for allowing me to open it.
The Urban Animal Exhibition not only reflects, but is a powerful representation for human societal conditions within the Metropole. The works challenge us to think differently about human relationships with nature; the relationships between nonhuman animals and human animals; the impact of animals on humans in human-animal relations; and cultural views toward animals.
Globally and locally, the oppression and exploitation of animals is rooted in hierarchical human social arrangements and belief systems and the entanglement of human and animal oppression. Oppression of humans causes much of the mistreatment of other animals, and the awful treatment of other animals fuels human exploitation.
There needs to be a heightened awareness that humans and animals occupy the same temporal space - their fates organically bound together within the same planetary ecology. We are part of the earth and the earth is part of us. When we harm the earth, we harm ourselves. When we demean animals, we get on a moral rollercoaster downwards where human rights are also eroded. And we can’t engage with the notion of the “urban animal” without locating our relationship with nature and animals within the context of the corporate capitalist complex and systemic power, greed, plunder, profits, exploitation and consumption.
The very history of who we think we are as humans is tied up in distinguishing ourselves from the ‘other’, who we have named and subjected for the sake of claiming subjectivity as our exclusive property. This history, this autobiography of the human, has nevertheless reached an unprecedented moment that makes questioning it imperative. The global ecological crisis, deepening with each passing year, threatens the world as never before. It goes to the core of industrialism and modernity.
SO WHAT ARE THE SYMPTOMS OF US AS URBAN ANIMALS AND THE ANIMAL IN THE URBAN?
For one, there is the Hidden Factory Farm and Slaughterhouse – in which currently 60 billion land-based animals are killed. Global economic arrangements separate people from the means of production, so the brutal exploitation of animals is largely unseen and ignored. We humans often see ourselves as being outside of life processes other than our own and superior to other life forms. We colonise animals and have turned them into property, and the places where they are abused are hidden from public view. Layers of sanitised, legal, institutionalised customs and practices hide the abuse, and the situation is made to appear normal so that the bulk of humanity can consume and exploit with a clear conscience.
The urbanisation of humans means more suffering for animals as the production processes to service human wants increase. Animals are conveniently kept in large amorphous groups and then disassembled and packaged in ways that reinforce the collective and conceal their individuality. Packaged meat is a supreme example of the "process" disappearing in the "product." Increasingly urbanized and alienated from a life lived in nature, among animals, we have no daily experience of the means by which an animal is converted into meat.
Other animals are viewed as a source of income, or as part of an aesthetically pleasing landscape - mere scenery. Their individual lives are conveniently transformed into apparently inanimate objects that have no connection with us. They are refigured into a trace of their former selves, devoid of identities and, to all intents and purposes, almost invisible and imaginary.
Abattoirs, for example are simultaneously visible and invisible features of the urban human animal continuum. And this is perfectly illustrated by JM Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello: her ability to know about the cruelty done to these creatures without needing to see it happen. This is a kind of knowledge that has nothing to do with visibility. In Costello’s own words, "I was taken on a drive around your town this morning I saw no horrors, no drug-testing laboratories, no factory farms, no abattoirs. Yet I am sure they are here. They must be."
And the same animal nightmares produced routinely by agribusiness, the meat industry, and fast-food companies also brutalize humans, as employees facing harsh working and living conditions as well as consumers suffering the toxic health effects of a meat-centered diet. The animal-food economy also devours massive resources in the form of water, land, and energy while consuming nearly half of all grains and vegetables produced in a world facing imminent and drastic food shortages and generating more pollution and dangerous wastes products than any other economic sector.
But as urban animals we are also active agents of social change as individuals, acting as both citizens and consumers, we can revolutionize the current food production system, making it healthful, humane, ecologically sound, and equitable. Ultimately it is up to us to question institutionalised abuse and do something to change it. Because there is a continuity between human and animal experience, we should be working not only for a sustainable and just future for ourselves but also for one where there are real prospects for the individual animals with whom we share the planet. As individuals, we need to take responsibility and take action. We need to reimagine and reinterpret our everyday life and instil into it an ethos of care.
And what about Companion Animals?
Companion animals, even when we treat them as quasi equals, did not freely choose to be with us. We chose them, buy and acquire them in a manner similar to the way in which human slaves were bought and sold. They are dependent on us and they epitomize the dualistic ways in which we regard and treat animals.
Companion animals benefit millions of people by the deep affection given and received, many animals helping their human guardians and caregivers cope with grief, death, loneliness—emotional needs that other animals have in common with us. Companion animals are popular because they can and do have great empathy; they can mirror our emotional state. They link us to those deeper, more ancient, instinctual states that in the wild heart’s core pulse with the needs, appetites, impulses, and imperatives that mean survival, health, joy and fulfillment. Companion animals in this light are clearly part of our healing and, some would say, salvation and redemption. But only if they are respected and loved in and for themselves and not for how good they may make us feel.
Our interaction with animals as companions and members of the family has helped promote the social acceptance of animals having rights and of being worthy of moral consideration. This is seen as a significant threat to various animal-based industries in the US
The companion animal HUMAN constituency is massive – millions upon millions of people and their millions upon millions of animals – not only dogs and cats but fish, rabbits, reptiles, birds, mice etc. And within our artificial urban construct there is also a dark side to human/animal animal companion relationships and that is the cruelty to companion animals in a dysfunctional society.
Globally, there is strong evidence to suggest that where cruelty to animals exists, children and women are often suffering in the same household. In many if not most of these cases, animal cruelty and domestic violence go hand in hand. There are numerous examples of when animal organizations in South Africa are called in to rescue animals who have been violently abused they have found that the abusers, often children as young as four years old, had been directly exposed to horrific incidents of human-on-human violence. If we are serious about addressing rampant crime in our cities, we need to give more than a patronizing nod to animal welfare. Addressing animal cruelty cannot be done in isolation from addressing other social issues. Nor should animal cruelty be addressed purely because it can lead to anti social behaviour against human beings. All living beings have a right to protection from violence and abuse.
We also need to think about where these animals come from: puppy mills, directly from the wild and from abusive and neglected environments and the impacts that these have. The pet industry is growing globally and is first and foremost focused on selling ever more products and services, from food, to drugs, snacks and toys that cater more to owner/caretaker/guardian needs, fears, and phobias than to the animals’ needs and interests. And because the pet food industry is moving towards a constant increase of production, manufacturing and marketing, we also need to think about where the food to feed them is coming from and the impacts this is having. Well it’s coming from the wild and from factory farms, that’s where. To give you an example 3million tons of fish is used globally by the global cat food industry every year. Most of the fish fed to cats are the same fish that provide the foundation for a food chain that supports the larger fish like cod, tuna, swordfish, as well as marine mammals and birds.
Let’s turn to wild animals
Modernity, urbanization , agricultural development and the cultivation of crops created a new world order which not only turned humans in to supposed “managers” but permanently transformed landscapes, altered the relationship between humans and other animals but was the root cause of biodiversity and habitat loss.
State-sponsored revenge killings, poisonings, persecution and genocide against homeless companion animals, wild animals and those conveniently labeled as “vermin” are a feature of Urbania and the predatory character of humans. Appropriation, Removals, Dispossession, Genocide and military-type cleansing operations are also at the heart of the European expansion in Africa, the violent destruction of wild animals and the dispensibility and consumption of nature and animals – they are the direct consequence of urbanization, which is a physical symbol of subordination, subjugation, control, colonization, domination and violence against the existing land users and occupiers and the conversion of other animals into property and tools.
And a key component of this domination is zoos –they are spaces that represent and epitomize the urban animal like nothing else does. When the zoo was invented in 1826, the British wanted to show themselves to be the masters of the entire world and every animal from every corner of the world was gathered there in the urban heart of the Empire. We are doing the same kinds of things now.
During the 19th century South Africa Europe were penetrating deep into the interior’. Big-game hunters were seen as the harbingers of civilisation and the symbols of patriotism and expansionism. There was a frenzied, indeed almost manic, slaughter of wildlife that took place to make way for urbanised humans. By the end of the 1890s European rule and merchant capitalism had, by their efforts to subjugate nature, brought about the almost complete destruction of wildlife on the sub-continent. As a result ‘the demands of commercialism, which got under way after settlement began, rapidly transformed hunting into a war against animals’. Today the slaughter continues, in an updated post-metropolis form, with all its added weaponry, vehicles, comfort and sophisticated technology, within the current political framework of ‘development’ and the economic context of the flow of resources from South to North. And this ritualised killing is supported and legitimised in our conservation policies.
To conclude: This exhibition creates spaces where we can re-imagine our relationships with nonhuman animals through kinship and where animals are “subjects of a life” – the ‘another’ rather than the ‘other’. Questions of animal agency; contemporary interpretations of animal-human relations; the ways in which real animals are typically collapsed into species and specimens rather than encountered as individuals; and how cultural representations of animals have influenced society and impacted actual animals….are all implicit in this exhibition.
Urban Animal is definitely contributing to our increasing global awareness that we cannot go on as we have been: killing the earth, killing the animals, killing ourselves.
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