Diana Thater: pet fixations.

Willems, Brian

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The question of what it means to be human leaves an unpleasant taste in the present post-humanist age. But the question has not gone away. Instead of becoming extinct, it has simply been resurrected, or more concisely re-buried, in the shape of the "animal question." Are animals sentient? Are they capable of thought? Of communication? Of suffering?

Is the slaughter of animals for food, pelts and lab testing a direct form of speciesism? Is Homo sapiens even capable of perceiving non-human intelligence? Besides, what might the possibility of animals recognizing us really mean? Such notions have a much greater contemporary relevance than the old humanist, top-of-the-food-chain perspective: What, above all, makes us special? Why have we seemingly evolved so far beyond the animal? Why don't animals speak like us? Yet both questions, the human and the animal ones, inevitably address the same basic problem: humanity's role in a world that is larger than humanity itself.

The current resurgence of the animal question stems from two major intellectual traditions: Charles Darwin's canonic work on species development, and Martin Heidegger's 1929-30 lecture course (published as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude) on the different ways animals and humans relate to their environment. Both thinkers, along with those inspired (or incensed) by them, are immediately central to Diana Thater's recent "gorillagorillagorilla" exhibition at the Kunsthaus Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum (through May 17), which was organized in conjunction with "After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions" at London's Natural History Museum (through November 29) as part of its bicentennial celebration of Darwin's birth. The London exhibition featured, apart from Thater's video installation, a Jeremy Deller, Matthew Killip and Richard Wiseman collaboration, and works by Bill Viola, Tina Gonsalves, Mark Haddon, Rudh Padel and Gautier Deblonde.

Thater's gorillagorillagorilla (2009) has its roots in an invitation she received from the Cameroon Wildlife Aid Fund and Bristol Zoo Gardens to film Western Lowland Gorillas, whose scientific name is Gorilla gorilla gorilla, in Cameroon's Mefou National Park. (A lot of useful information about the expedition can be found in Bergit Arends's catalogue essay "Becoming Gorilla," whose author accompanied Thater during the filming.) The park was created as a sanctuary for gorillas, chimpanzees, baboons and a number of monkey species, all of which are often poached for their meat. In this respect, Thater's multiple, intersecting views of gorillas and their human companions undulating through and across architectural, biomorphic forms is an obvious attempt to raise awareness about an endangered species and the global environment responsible for it. However, gorillagorillagorilla is also about the context in which such an attempt at consciousness raising takes place. The Victorian-era Kunsthaus used to be a natural history museum, at least until its renovation in 1999. In a sense, Thater's work capitalizes on earlier "nature" displays of mollusks and minerals, showing how their (scientific or cultural) constructedness was not so very different from her own purposely "art" perspective.

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Such environmental issues are not new to Thater's work. She is currently artist-in-residence at The Dolphin Project, which actively intervenes in the capture of dolphins for animal shows and facilitates their return to the wild. In addition, earlier works like Electric Mind (1997), The Best Animals are the Flat Animals (1998) and Knots + Surfaces (2001) attempt to confront the viewer with the imperceptible line between nature and culture. For example, Knots + Surfaces explores mathematician Barbara Shipman's discovery that the curves produced when a six-dimensional flag manifold is turned into a two-dimensional hexagonal drawing assume the shape of a bee dance. This has led to much conjecture on how bees are able to experience the world in six dimensions. Thater explores this newly discovered "quantum bee" through multiple hexagonal projections on the floor, walls and ceiling, simulating this multifarious environment for the more limited human experience.

Something of this approach remains in the way gorillagorillagorilla is mounted. The curved walls highlight the artificiality of the documentary-style nature footage on display. Similarly, a complete lack of sound creates an eerie alienation effect: it cheats the viewer out of the more familiar elements of a jungle recording, mainly the screeches and howls of nature in the raw. But one question remains: how does simply emphasizing humanity's artificial role in nature allow humanity to be open to an animal gaze that can see us from a world larger than our own?

This term "open" is in fact rather loaded, and if anything establishes the crux of much of the discussion contained in the catalogue. Diana Thater: gorillagorillagorilla (Koln: Koenig, 2009) contains introductory texts by curators Peter Pakesch and Adam Budak, with contributions by Bergit Arends, Frans B.M. de Waal, Laurence A. Rickels, Giorgio Agamben, Jason Smith and Rainer Maria Rilke, all of which are given in both English and German (except for Agamben's text, which is English-only). The book also contains a photographic essay by Thater plus production stills documenting the filming of gorillagorillagorilla in Cameroon.

Rilke's eighth Duino Elegy, which is the last selection offered, begins with the lines: "The creature gazes into openness with all/ its eyes. But our eyes are/ as if they were reversed, and surround it,/ everywhere, like barriers against its free passage." The animal, in other words, with all its potentially wider sensual scope, sees "openness," while humanity turns away from it, reflexively, remaining sensitive only to obstruction and impasse. What these lines address is not dissimilar to German biologist Jakob von Uexkull's 1920s studies in the field of biosemiotics. As his core concept, Uexkull explored what he terms an animal's Umwelt, literally the "world around" or "function circle," the residue of its unique sensory input or subjective space-time (see, for example, the comparative superiority of certain senses in the different kinds of beings). Conversely, a creature cannot respond to anything outside its Umwelt. A dog cannot react to images beyond the range of its color spectrum, while a human will ignore a high-pitched whistle that drives a dog crazy. For his part, Rilke suggests a substantive difference in the way animals and humans see each other, not excluding the human fixation on barred openings: "O bliss of little creatures/ that stay in the womb that carried them forever:/ O joy of the midge that can still leap within,/ even when it is wed: since womb is all."

Rickels's essay "Pet Grief" proposes a way of seeing that allows us to have access to the other, to the animal outside the humanized world of our Umwelt--namely, the relationship we have with pets in the experience of mourning. Reading Freud, Rickels argues that just as you can never find a love object, but only re-find it, you can never get a new pet but only, in the language of the film The 6th Day (2000), a "re-pet." This "re-" comes about because, in treating animals as pets rather than sustenance, humanity initiates a relationship of mourning, because pets, as animals that escape being killed, carry with them a hint of finitude. As Rickels says, "Letting the animal live is the emotive and mournful moment in our decision to keep certain animals close to us."

Thus the animal, in a certain sense, functions as a substitution totem for the death that life can no longer accommodate through mourning. However, in the shift from grief over a person to grief over an animal, a new set of coordinates is assumed. This is because when your pet dies, it is treated differently from the human equivalent. According to Rickels, "Everyone likes your adorable pet and spends quality time giving the animal an inter-special context for life. But when the loved one goes: shut up and get a replacement." This replacement can be seen in the re-pet of the Schwarzenegger action film, which has a "real life" counterpart in the "Best Friends Again" program of pet cloning (under the auspices of BioArts International). The re-pet can also be seen in the tendency to give successive pets names with roman numerals, which is usually reserved for royalty and popes. However, at the same time that we hold certain animals close to us, we continue to devour their kin. It is from this dual relationship with the animal, the relationship between holding close and murdering or eating, that an economy of mourning can be developed, an economy that allows us to have access to an other no longer obstructed by ritual closure. "It is because we eat animals and cut their losses with the paternal economies of sacrifice, substitution, and successful mourning that we can face the animal as other."

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In "Structure's Adventures in Wonderland," Budak traces the role of the editorial or ideographic index in Thater's work. More importantly, Budak stresses how Thater uses the index to foreground nature's non-narratological character; how nature at bottom is nothing but a summary of births and deaths. But an index is also a sequential arrangement of material in alphabetical or numerical order: "The index is situated somewhere between the poetic stylistic and the mathematical formula." Moreover, due to the proximity of so many different references in the index, it permits the emergence of multiple viewpoints or voices. Budak quotes Thater as saying that it "removes one from a single point of view and allows for a kind of polyphony--a group of things that seem to exist all at once--because the index is a compressed re-sequenced version of the book and one is not sure where in the time of the actual text the references will appear. The real time of the index is effaced."

One of these indices is included in the gorillagorillagorilla catalogue. Titled "There Are Their Names," it takes the form of short definitions or commentaries running along the bottom of photographic spreads of the Cameroon gorillas. There are entries like "anthropomorphism, becomes inevitable," and "philosophical thinking, denies the animal." However, the interesting thing about this particular index is that it isn't one at all. An index does not provide definitions of its terms, which is instead the function of the glossary. Yet not all the terms provided are given definitions, as with the specific names of the gorillas. The same is true for the exhibition's title and the last term on the list, "zoopoetics." Budak touches on a certain taxonomical confusion without at the same time glossing its implications: "Thater's index ... is a particular collection, as if dictionary entries that constitute the conceptual skeleton of her new work." Yet the taxonomical difficulty of deciding whether or not this is a true index seems part of Thater's strategy. By including the name of the work itself, and hence the work as a whole, in its own index, Thater calls to mind Jorge Luis Borges's "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins." In this story, Borges describes a Chinese encyclopedia of animals that, as part of its index, includes an entry concerning those "included in the present classification." The stress on inclusion rather than difference would be one reason for Thater's convoluted "index."

Frans B.M. de Waal's "Are We In Anthropodenial?" (first published in Discover magazine in 1997) approaches the animal function from the opposite direction. He argues for greater acceptance of "the humanlike characteristics of other animals, or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves." Much of de Waal's essay attempts a kind of reverse-engineering of human morality through the animal detour, while also tapping into Darwin's 1872 text on the expression of the emotions, which focuses on tracing common emotional responses among animals, individual persons and different human races from around the world.

To close the circle, Heidegger's reflections on the animal function are treated at length in an extract from Agamben's book The Open: Man and Animal (2004), which focuses on the human connection with death. At one end of the spectrum, inanimate objects--such as rocks--don't die, and so they have no finite relationship with dying. Human beings, at the other end, know they are going to die, and are therefore able to relate to it via a second-order, or "reflexive," level of intelligence. Animals, however, are caught in the middle. They die, but don't know it. They might fear death, but they cannot philosophize about it. Thus the perceived relationship they have to their world, being inevitably founded on poverty (Armut), is phenomenologically limited compared to ours. A principal argument of Agamben's book, which is only partially brought out in the present selection, concerns the erroneous belief that humankind subsists in a state of consciousness about death, and indeed Heidegger's description of the impoverished animal function is actually a description of what is also the most human function. Jason Smith, in his essay "Letting the Animal Go (Outside of Being)," ends his analysis of Agamben and Heidegger with a similar argument. Smith shows how forgiveness for the human being, our "letting go" of an assumed as-is relationship to the surrounding world is actually, at least in Agamben's view, a possible way through the dichotomy of the open and the closed.

Instead of attempting to reclassify humanity's time-honored worldview, or to expand it in some way, to "become-animal" or whatnot, perhaps the greatest achievement of Thater's gorillagorillagorilla is how it materially delineates the limitations of humanity's Umwelt, or how it makes the poverty of humanity's function circle perfectly visible. And perhaps it is this poverty that is also what is most human. So being open is not so much being open to a greater understanding or analysis of the world, but being open to our own boundaries, deficiencies and, most important of all, pet fixations.

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BRIAN WILLEMS teaches literature and media culture at the University of Split, Croatia. He is the author of Hopkins and Heidegger (Continuum, 2009).