Arts
Animals in the Art Gallery
There’s a little stir up in Vancouver right now over an artwork by Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping at Vancouver Art Gallery. The piece is a container shaped like a turtle’s shell. In it are tarantulas, scorpions, crickets, millipedes, and lizards. The environment is bare, and the intervention nil. The animals are fed, but otherwise left to their own devices in their little microcosm. It’s called Theater of the World (1993).
This is far from the first time an animal has been seen in an art gallery. Just recently, the Vancouver Art Gallery itself showed Brian Jungen’s closed-off room containing birds resting on products from IKEA. Probably the most famous example is from 1974, when German artist Joseph Beuys sat in a gallery for three days with a coyote. Theater of the World is not Huang’s only piece with a live animal; another one involves a lone tarantula.
There’s something necessarily unsettling about animals in a gallery or a museum. They’re serving at the pleasure of humans. But the artists who use this device purposefully invoke its taboos.
I couldn’t find an image of Huang’s Theater of the World on the Vancouver Art Gallery’s web site, but here’s what the piece looked like when it was installed previously at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which organized the traveling Huang retrospective:
In Vancouver, The Globe and Mail reports that animal activists have complained about Theater of the World on principle. But to me their view sounds like a prognostication based more on the bloodshed and devastation happening in the human world, rather than an understanding of the artist’s intent or the actual conditions in the gallery.
“It’s pretty clear that the intention is that the observer is intended to witness potential conflict between the animals, which frankly I think is kind of sick,” Mr. Fricker [of the Humane Society] said.
(The Globe and Mail also calls Vancouver “an animal-loving city”—is the implication that residents of other cities are coldhearted bastards?)
I haven’t seen the piece yet. To test Fricker’s hypothesis that it is nothing but a voyeuristic bloodbath, I called the Walker to find out exactly what happened inside the cage in Minneapolis. Did the animals kill each other? Was it like a Shakespeare play in the end, with no one left standing? When an animal was killed, was it removed for reasons of decorum or left as a tough testament to the authenticity of the artificial ecosystem? Did people torch the place? If the microcosm was a symbol for the world, which animal came closest to behaving like the United States?
Doryun Chong helped to organize the show at the Walker and is curating the international tour. (The 40-work show closes in Vancouver Sept. 16 and goes after that to Beijing.) He admitted that while the show has many works, Theater of the World was transfixing for viewers. “It’s kind of a showstopper,” he said. “You would see people going around the exhibition and they would just stop and congregate around it. And we had people coming back to see the exhibition because they were interested in seeing what was going on in Theater of the World.”
Hearing about Chong’s experience with the piece is fascinating. He learned that crickets are very resourceful—some mysteriously escaped from the piece, probably when the snakes were being removed to be fed or when water was refilled. He learned that hissing cockroaches and African millipedes are antisocial. They congregated in their own corners and hardly moved. Scorpions were the Americans of the bunch. They went after tarantulas. Most of the aggression was limited to the early part of the exhibition, when the animals were acclimating.
Chong saw a scorpion molting, its exoskeleton splitting open. It didn’t survive the process.
When the animals got killed or died, they were left alone, not removed. Some disappeared, having been eaten. Some died naturally, “and I couldn’t exactly tell what happened,” Chong said. “There were a lot of things that happened in there that I couldn’t understand how it happened.”
Chong said the fights were fascinating, but also a little scary. It sounded like the same could be said of the entire installation, of not knowing what would happen, of the mixture of artificiality and human control with alien animal instincts and natural orders.
The Walker got a complaint on its blog, and that blog commenter contacted the Humane Society and Animal Control shortly before the show closed; representatives from those organizations visited the show and approved the conditions. “On the one hand, I can understand the outrage, but human interventions are always interrupting ecological systems, and always creating new ecological balances, disruptions, and microcosms. We put animals to human use all the time,” Chong said.
Before the show began, curators met with Bruce, the owner of the local exotic pet store, in order to procure the animals. The artist based his list of animals on an ancient recipe from southern China for a magical potion—created by putting five venomous creatures (centipede, snake, scorpion, toad, and lizard) into a pot and leaving them there for a year. Huang also wanted locusts and spiders; he ended up with crickets and tarantulas.
The museum asked Bruce to be on-call constantly during the exhibition and to check in twice a week. For his part, he told the museum that he’d only feel comfortable providing animals if they all came from the same ecological region so that they weren’t entirely alien to one another. All the animals at the Walker came from Africa.
On the Walker’s blog (unfortunately, the Vancouver Art Gallery does not have a blog), Bruce issued a call for people to resist anthropomorphizing so much: “It gives people who go there and look at [Huang’s work] with an open mind the realization that, yes, they are predator and prey and they can cohabitate together—the lion sleeping with the lamb. Most animals don’t kill for the sheer pleasure of killing. It’s either defense or obtaining prey.”
Theater of the World just opened a week ago in Vancouver. The Vancouver Province reported Sunday that the museum was missing two toads. I called the museum, and spokesman Andrew Riley was cagey as hell (pun intended), probably tired of dealing with dim accusations regarding animal rights but coming off as defensive. He couldn’t say what was going on with any of the animals. For that I’d need to speak with chief curator Daina Augaitis. I waited all day. Unfortunately, she never called. At the very least, I can’t wait to hear more, and to see the show. Huang is one of the most radical artists to come out of China in recent years, and the Vancouver Art Gallery was smart to take the show.
Comments (22)
"Save the tarantulas!" "Save the scorpions!" "Save the cockroaches!"
Posted by flamingbanjo | April 12, 2007 5:59 PMGood God.
Sounds like crap- your rationalizations don't convince otherwise.
Posted by RKJ | April 12, 2007 6:10 PMThere probably isn't nearly as much outrage as there might be (what? no PETA-ians chaining themselves to the museum umbrella stand?) because it's full of creepy-crawlies, not cute fluffy things.
Posted by SeattleExile | April 12, 2007 6:26 PMThere was a big protest (well, at least a dozen people big, not WTO big) in Seattle in the 70s?80s? when Anne Hamilton, one of my art idols, filled a walk-in room at the Henry with canaries and one died. Here, I'm sure people are just glad that they're in a cage.
Oh, and I just love it when people say things like "It’s pretty clear that the intention is (blank)" or "It's obvious the artist meant (whatever thing we don't like)". The only obvious forms of art are plain portraits and porn. If it's off-the-wall (pun intended) enough to include live animals, it's probably not meant to be whatever pops into your head first.
Posted by SeattleExile | April 12, 2007 6:30 PMCome on, guys. The animals didn't even have water in there. Is it just ok because they're not fluffy? If it was cages of dogs and cats laying there with no water occasionally killing each other, that'd be just fine?
I'm not down there protesting, but I was glad to hear that the SPCA got involved and had a vet come through.
Yes... and if you throw two fighting dogs into a pit and one kills the other in self-defense, the person who intentionally put the dog in there is guilty of animal cruelty. These are animals that don't normally co-exist and that have been put into displays that require them to be in close contact. They have no means of retreat. Posted by wench | April 12, 2007 7:30 PM
That photo looks a lot like this Escher: http://tukey.upf.es/various/some-pictures/escher_lizards.gif
Posted by Daniel K | April 12, 2007 7:38 PMIt's nauseating to do that to living creatures.
Posted by dkj | April 12, 2007 8:14 PMThat photo looks a lot like this Escher: http://tukey.upf.es/various/some-pictures/escher_lizards.gif
Posted by Daniel K | April 12, 2007 8:23 PMSounds more like a horribly designed diorama at a fourth rate natural history museum or drive through zoo than anything that should count as art. If you want to see real animal art, look up britches the monkey.
Posted by johnny | April 12, 2007 8:45 PMCultural relativism doesn't require that we accept "unclaimed" human bodies exposed in our museums or exhibits with animals taken out of their native environments and left to fight each other or cower in a corner defensively.
One day in a big Chinese city in a boiling hot day I saw a group of people staring at a shallow box with 20 or so chicken chicks. Some chicks were clearly dead, with more to come because there was no water or shade. No one was doing anything. They just stared. Maybe it was art? What I do know is that it represented a different way of looking at animals than I have. In any case, I expect this here piece is not as "culturally daring" as you think.
You could probably make and "artistically meaningful" piece involving the torture and live bloodletting of a puppy, maybe intended to be about how socialism (or capitalism) sucks the life out of the innocent individual. To most people though, it would just look like gratuitous puppy torture.
Posted by fillibuster | April 12, 2007 9:15 PMCultural relativism doesn't require that we accept "unclaimed" human bodies exposed in our museums or exhibits with animals taken out of their native environments and left to fight each other or cower in a corner defensively.
One day in a big Chinese city in a boiling hot day I saw a group of people staring at a shallow box with 20 or so chicken chicks. Some chicks were clearly dead, with more to come because there was no water or shade. No one was doing anything. They just stared. Maybe it was art? What I do know is that it represented a different way of looking at animals than I have. In any case, I expect this here piece is not as "culturally daring" as you think.
You could probably make and "artistically meaningful" piece involving the torture and live bloodletting of a puppy, maybe intended to be about how socialism (or capitalism) sucks the life out of the innocent individual. To most people though, it would just look like gratuitous puppy torture.
Posted by fillibuster | April 12, 2007 9:15 PMCultural relativism doesn't require that we accept "unclaimed" human bodies exposed in our museums or exhibits with animals taken out of their native environments and left to fight each other or cower in a corner defensively.
One day in a big Chinese city in a boiling hot day I saw a group of people staring at a shallow box with 20 or so chicken chicks. Some chicks were clearly dead, with more to come because there was no water or shade. No one was doing anything. They just stared. Maybe it was art? What I do know is that it represented a different way of looking at animals than I have. In any case, I expect this piece here is not as "culturally daring" as you think.
You could probably make and "artistically meaningful" piece involving the torture and live bloodletting of a puppy, maybe intended to be about how socialism (or capitalism) sucks the life out of the innocent individual. To most people though, it would just look like gratuitous puppy torture.
Posted by fillibuster | April 12, 2007 9:16 PMSORRY.
When I posted my comment it gave me weird pink box and told me there was something wrong with my "id", so I thought it hadn't posted. So I posted again. And the computer again personally insulted me with pink flavored attacks on my id. So I posted again...now I'm sorry.
Posted by fillibuster | April 12, 2007 9:20 PM@5 Your analogy is flawed. You put two fighting dogs into a pit and watch them tear each other to bits, and you're doing it for sport. You put together a piece like this and place it in the meaning-loaded context of an art museum, and you're doing it to make people think, to make a point.
It's not like I'm pro animal suffering in any way (vegetarian, won't buy leather, etc.), but if you're outraged by the animal cruelty in this piece, which I admittely haven't seen in person, I sure hope you're down there in the park at 4th and Yesler every Sunday night at 2 a.m. with blankets and warm meals, or at the SPCA every weekend adopting strays.
I think it's at least arguable that this piece does more to prevent animal cruelty than you're doing by decrying it.
Posted by Superfurry Animal | April 12, 2007 10:12 PManimals are not here for our entertainment.
Posted by ME | April 12, 2007 10:14 PMYes, you're right, animals are here to suffer and struggle to survive, just like everything else on this planet.
Posted by treacle | April 12, 2007 10:51 PMAnd they suffer and struggle whether we're there to watch or not. But is the existence of spectators sufficient to turn it into art? Or is it the artificality of the setting? Or what?
All in all, I think I'd rather leave this kind of thing to Catherine Chalmers.
Posted by Joe | April 13, 2007 1:06 AMI read about a petaite who advocated that humans be the "moral intervener" when a cat tries to eat a mouse. I actually wish them luck in that effort.
Posted by Bored | April 13, 2007 3:58 AMJust to clarify: the animals certainly did have water. Carry on.
Posted by Jen Graves | April 13, 2007 7:51 AMi'm not familiar with huang's work but theater of the world sounds like total shite.
Posted by josh | April 13, 2007 8:21 AMI'd like to see Huang Yong Ping put in that container with all those creatures, and then coldly stand there an observe the Art results. Just saying.
Posted by Sally Struthers Lawnchair | April 13, 2007 9:05 AM*yawn*
Posted by jameyb | April 13, 2007 9:52 AMComments Closed
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