vivalaviola

[performinganimalrights]

Bruce Nauman – ‘The True Artist Helps the World’ | TateShots

[performinganimalrights]

Bill Viola, "Ascension" (two-minute clip) from Wadsworth Atheneum on Vimeo.

[performinganimalrights]

MASS CRIMINALITY IN HUNTING COMMUNITY REVEALED THROUGH LEAKED WEBINARS

[performinganimalrights]

Fairground

Fall in to the darkness Metal bars surround Crammed together Heat rises Noise everywhere Shouts and squeals Mam’s out of reach Darkness starys Floor hardens Doesn’t give Time stops Then a sudden rush Speeding up ramps To flashes of light Roars and air blasts face No rest Stop Down the ramp quick Stop Crammed into a moving cage Creaking and hissing Screams Nearer to darkness To screams Insides burn No air Become screams Deeper darkness

Photo from me

[performinganimalrights]

My research has led me to an online part-scrapbook, part-live streamed performance installation Box of Shadows. This project holds a variety of performative media that probes the idea of bearing witness as an animal rights activist. While the live element will not be present when interacting with this space now, the scrapbook remains accessible.

[performinganimalrights]

Fevered Sleep, This Grief Thing (2019)

Theatre Company Fevered Sleep brings a unique performative lense to grief. Often seen as a private and personal experience, This Grief Thing invited participants to share grief through conversation and stimulus within the space. The emphasis lies in validating grief within the public conversation; sharing experiences and emotions, to avoid suppressing and hiding them which can lead to negatively effecting us in our everyday lives. Similarly slaughterhouse vigils by activists strive to make public their mourning for the non-human animals being transported to their place of death. By spending time grieving the often ungrieved, the non-human instrument begins to form a personhood that demands dignity and thought (Chez, 2016). Box of Shadows emphasises the re-configuring of attention onto the ungrieved non-human animal, evoking a perception of individuality and sentience within the shared windows of the sensory organs. Similarly, This Grief Thing facilitates the unspoken to be spoken and felt, brings the taboo into the public (Douglas, 2002), to find a healthy acceptance and untie it from inhibition.

Fevered Sleep have created an inviting and tactically accessible space, in the form of a high street pop-up shop in city centres. It’s function is partly shop, selling a ‘collection of clothing, accessories and cards’ (Fevered Sleep; 2021), and partly an event space for group conversation. Rather than profiteering from a private and often tormenting emotion around death, it’s role as a shop normalizes grief as part of the public fabric. Slogan tee shirts, as well as their billboards, speak to mainstream communications, aiming the subject to the forefront to our public peripherals. It is an act of activism, raising awareness of a taboo and hidden subject. The unique performance-shop-therapy-campaign hybrid fascinates in its subtle boldness. The facilitation of the project offers an enticing accessibility for participants and audience members. Through a similar hybrid lens Box of Shadows looks to create spaces of safety and enticing curiosity, to evoke participation and sharing of their experience through a non-human and trauma lens. As the participants witness is This Grief Thing their own and other’s grief, brings us closer to the emotion and thus compassion for ourselves and one another, as similarly experienced at slaughterhouse vigils by activists and passers-by (Lockwood, 2016). Box of Shadows concludes with a sharing and reflection of experiences of interacting with the performative elements of the piece.

Fevered Sleep’s facilitation of conversation in a welcoming and encouraging space inspires my work in facilitation, as well as pedagogy, with a mixture of group discussion, takeaways and interactive moments in the space, such as a wall of personal experiences. This mixture of both a collective and personal moments unmask the hidden emotions, allowing them to breath and encourage change in perception and process with grief. This catalyst for change is endeavored by Box of Shadows; to witness and perform the shadows of the non-human animal, witness thoughts and emotions from the experience, leading to sharing and processing the potential states, such as trauma of the non-human. Myself, as the activist in the space facilitates witnessing and sharing with the aim of dismantling the human-animal boundary (Cherry 2010). Through realising feelings towards the non-human animal there is opportunity to move away from systems that cause these feelings, such as the animal agriculture industry, through veganism and activism.

References

Cherry, E. (2010) Shifting Symbolic Boundaries: Cultural Strategies of the Animal Rights Movement1. Sociological Forum, 25 (3), pp. 450-475.

De Mello, M. (2016) Mourning Animals: Rituals and Practices Surrounding Animal Death. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press.

Douglas, M. (2002) Purity and danger: an analysis of concept of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge.

Fevered Sleep. 2021. This Grief Thing — Fevered Sleep. [online] Available at: <https://www.feveredsleep.co.uk/project/this-grief-thing> [Accessed 4 February 2021].

Lockwood, A. (2016) The Pig in Thin Air: An Identification. New York: Lantern Books.

[performinganimalrights]

Joseph Beuys, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965)

Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare draws heavily from symbolism, centered on his relationship and interactions with the body of a dead hare. The germanic symbol of incarnation, the hare, was manipulated and cradled by Beuys, as he describes pieces of art around a gallery. With gold leaf and honey smothered over his head, Beuys captures an idealism; a closeness with nature, ecology and the possibilities he advocated, which he explores in a televised interview (Beuys, 2014). Symbols of power and living knowledge, such as gold and honey, through a desire to communicate with another species, beyond life, gives an agency to the piece; a search for meaning. There is a childlike playfulness between Beuys and the hare’s lifeless body, as if a soft toy, a puppet. The body is very much manipulated like a puppet, with Beuy’s reanimating a once animate individual. Yet the individuals individuality is through Beuy’s, the puppeteer. The hare’s body is now an extension of Beuys’ body, an interspecies entanglement (Parker-Starbuck, 2013). He uses his mouth to hold and control the har’s ears, his hands to move the hare’s legs and head. The performed interaction relies on a compliant non-human, with a free-living (wild) non-human such as a hare needs to have lost their own agency and body autonomy, via death, to comply. The spiritual symbolism Beuys’ piece evokes is a fascinating study into an almost desperate search for meaning in, and beyond life. With Beuys centered as puppet master and gallery guide, this search is sentimental and personal.

Box of Shadows echoes Beuys’ search for meaning, through the use of animal symbols. Through bearing witness to ourselves in a contextualised, performative space that symbolises a space of dominion experienced by non-human animals, the audience explores what it means to be a non-human animal, alive, in an space (or umwelt) unfamiliar and avoided by the human animal. In contrast Beuys brings a free-living animal into the human umwelt, animating the being to interact with human-centred aesthetics, uncomprehended by a living hare, with vastly different umwelts, needs and desires (Agamben, 2004). Through his puppeteering, Beuy’s connects with the other non-human body, his sensual interaction between the bodies draws an emotional fascination from Beuys. His performance exposes the audience to the body of another, for an extended period. This given time allows dwelling on the non-human body. A body of a hare, and most free-living animals, are usually seen from distance when alive, and briefly when dead, such as roadkill (Monahan, 2016). Audiences observing and living through Beuys’ closeness with the hare’s body breathes space for emotions towards the body to occur, such as interspecies similarities, like sensory organs. The time spent looking at a deceased body can manifest feelings of sadness and curiousity, even grief for some (Chez, 2016)

Like Greenebergs Lepidopterophobia, the use of a non-human body as a tool of discovery complicates the idea of dignity in sentience, with some animals holding status of greivability over others. Questions rise whether the fascination and use of a free-living body would be condemned if the body of an endangered or companion animal was used instead (Chez 2016). With Beuys using symbolism, reflected in animal tools, including honey, in search for ontological answers around ecological and societal crises (Beuys, 2014), the objectification of nature beyond the human speaks to the modern root metaphor of nature as machine and conquering nature (Lent, 2017). Box of Shadows seeks to avoid objectification of the non-human through placing the human in the place of the objectified non-human. The human audience will perform the role of the objectified animal becoming subjects themselves, seeking a new root metaphor of compassion for nature (the current other).

References

Agamben, G. (2004) The open: man and animal. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

De Mello, M. (2016) Mourning Animals: Rituals and Practices Surrounding Animal Death. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press.

Lent, J.R. (2017) The patterning instinct. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.

Parker-Starbuck, J. (2013) Animal Ontologies and Media Representations: Robotics, Puppets, and the Real of War Horse. Theatre Journal, 65 (3), pp. 373-393.

YouTube. 2014. GB Joseph Beuys - English Subtitles - How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare 1/2. [online] Available at: <https://youtu.be/Mo47lqk_QH0> [Accessed 4 February 2021].

[performinganimalrights]

Miles Greenberg, LEPIDOPTEROPHOBIA (2020)

Our complex relationships with non-human animals materialises uniquely in Miles Greenberg’s duration performance Lepidopterophobia. The concentrated glass box brings a meeting of two species, a mammal human and insect butterflies, for a set time of five hours. Greenberg’s phobia of butterflies is confronted in laser focus, and at real time. His vulnerabilities are exposed, his spotlit, centered, semi nude body heightens his physical reactions to his phobia, as well as willing to meet his fear under a microscopic scrutiny. As Greeberg confronts his phobia by exposing his vulnerabilities through a performative lens, he draws a traumatic experience, clearly for himself and the audience. His endurance within this, as well as his past performances such as Pneumotherapy II (2020) and Hæmotherapy I (2019), point to a therapy and, as previously mentioned, an exorcism (Dinsdale, 2020). This ritualistic manifestation and trauma exposure speak to my work in performing trauma through the lens of animal rights. Box of Shadows asks the audience to witness and translate trauma, via sharing an experience – Lepidopterophobia invites the audience to the same. Although Box of Shadows is centered on the non-human animal, both pieces centre on sharing the human experience which in trauma therapy preconditions the construction of sensing a ‘meaningful world’ (Herman, 2015).

Like Box of Shadows Greenberg’s piece places a human body in a box, a limited space. Both are positioned to bring the human and non-animals together. Although Greenberg shares the physical space with butterflies, both performances are focused on what the non-human symbolises, such as the butterfly representing and triggering fear and death (Greenberg, 2020), thus bringing the focus on us, the human-animal. Lepidopterophobia unfolds Greenbergs vulnerability through a performative exorcism (Greenberg, 2020). His tensed body, both open in an active sitting pose, yet closed through his crossed arms, and slow purposeful movements. He smiles through obivous discomfort and repulsion. The absurdity of his phobia and, more so, his saturated participation in it, fascinates me as a human study. The complications of the aesthetic beauty of the butterfly and the physical harmlessness of them in their agency, intertwines with the affect these animals have on Greenberg: subjective, yet ‘incredibly real’, fear, disgust and thoughts of death (Greenberg, 2020). This affect and disgust exposes a captivating perspective of the ontology of human and non-human species, scrutinized in a limited, captive space. (Douglas, 1966; Hurley 2010). This interspecies relationship, based on phobia, centralises the narrative on the human performer, probing what other species mean to us; as a collective other and a specific species other (Braidotti, 2009), such as the insect family holding cultural connotations, as well as biological reactions from many human animals, in the form of phobia, fear and disgust.

Greenberg’s Lepidopterophobia asks questions of fear, biology, rationale and therapy. From an animal rights lens the questions turn towards the non-human in the space. Box of Shadows centres the non-human animal in the space, through their absence. Controlling and containing a non-human for human use, from food to entertainment, opposes an animal liberation theory (Francione & Anna Charlton 2017). Greenberg’s performance begins with him entering the glass box and releasing butterflies from translucent pencil cases. The journey, from birth to death, of these beings remains a mystery and not a point of focus within the performance. Greenberg confronts his vulnerabilities via taking dominion over a vulnerable species; human and non-human vulnerabilities collide. Yet Greenberg’s human supremacy dictates that the butterflies present have no choice in their exposure, and he does. The non-humans remain tools of human realisation (Cull, 2015; Haraway, 2004).

The question of sentience and agency of the non-human other becomes further granular when thinking about insects; whether they suffer and if it is moral importance (Linzey, 2013). Abolitionists take the cautionary approach; if there’s a chance, even minute, it should be avoided if it can. As an animal rights activist, I ask if Greenberg’s confrontation of phobia needs the participation of butterflies in this context. I would implore him to seek alternatives. Some of them may not be as aesthetically appealing such as exposing himself to butterflies in a purpose build ecosystem where butterflies are captive, yet live their full lives within their umwelt (Agamben, 2004), or better yet under a bush where many butteflies visit, free-living (wild). Abolitionist Gary Francione highlights that these minor inconvienences does not mean “ignoring important moral principles” (Francione & Anna Charlton 2017). Through Lepidopterophobia’s captive set the butterflies merely become props, which animal rights activists would argue is a large reason non-humans are used systematically for their bodies, while being denied agency and dignity to live their lives unconfined.

References

Agamben, G. (2004) The open: man and animal. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Braidotti, R. (2009) Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others. PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 124 (2), pp. 526-532.

Dinsdale, E., 2020. Miles Greenberg, mentee of Marina Abramović, on televising his nightmare. [online] Dazed. Available at: <https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/51350/1/miles-greenberg-marina-abramovic-institute-takes-over-sky-interview> [Accessed 3 February 2021].

Douglas, M. (2002) Purity and danger: an analysis of concept of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge.

Gary L. Francione and Anna Charlton (2017) ADVOCATE FOR ANIMALS!: An Abolitionist Vegan Handbook: Exempla Press.

Haraway, D.J. (2004) The companion species manifesto. 2. pr. ed. Chicago, Ill: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Herman, J.L. (2015) Trauma and recovery: the aftermath of violence - from domestic abuse to political terror. 2015th ed. New York: BasicBooks.

Hurley, E. (2010) Theatre & feeling. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Parker-Starbuck, J. and Orozco, L. (2015) Performing Animality. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

[performinganimalrights]

The Scream by Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes’ creative expression of humans in the natural landscape resonate with me and my practice. His visceral imagery married with ontological probing, draw out devastating contrasts with our, human, moral convictions and destructive actions, particularly to nature. This is seen most clearly in The Scream, part of the Cave Birds collection. My work resonates particularly around the revealing of the true destruction, which is hidden in plain sight, ignored, through romantic and cultural notions. Hughes crafts this with childhood and nostalgic imagery at the beginning, molding a romanticism of nature, with mountains lazing and worms in the ground. He transmutes this charm into the sinister whimsical, with crushed rabbits on the road being a sign of the unforgiving dominance enjoyed by the human species. The poem moves from the head, even egotistical, to the body, which refuses to collaborate with this human cultured world. His ‘praising’ open mouth exposes the opportunity of our true nature to burst through the cultivated layers, into a true reflection of our destructive behaviour – resulting in a vomiting scream. This visceral rejection of human domination of nature contrasting with the romantacised view that we are placed perfectly in this world, our world. The vomiting scream demonstrates the self-harm of our actions, nature using us as a conduit to express that the damage does not come without consequence (Hughes, T. and Baskin, L. 1978; 7)

Hughes draws upon the beginnings of how we human’s understand nature. In our childhood, we are surrounded by a curated narrative of what nature means to us; what it can do for us. Pictures of landscapes on the nursery walls, birds on the other side of the window, an animated film about chickens paint a positive picture of our role and position in this curation. Sociologists Matthew Cole and Kate Stewart highlight this socialisation process of perceiving non-humans in relation to their utility to us, with stark examples, such as the marketing for great escape animated film Chicken Run Burger King ran, to enhance the sale of their products, namely being non-human animal bodies, the very destiny the film characters were trying to (and succeeding) escape, with sympathy from the audience (Cole and Stewart, 2016) Here lies a coupled contradiction; to legitimize violence of the non-human body by categorizing it with entertainment and, outlandishly, the liberty of those non-humans. The irony seems to be a purposefully placed method in marketing. Cole and Stewart offer that children “exercise their ethical agency to resist this socialization process.” (Cole and Stewart, 2016; 9). Thus Chicken Run, and other children’s films featuring non-human animals, appeals to an innate desire to connect to non-humans. Yet because the fabric of our established cultural systems (enhanced by profit-driven marketing) is largely built on violence to both human and non-human bodies, children are enticed into participating in these systems through their empathies. I’ve seen this first hand as a secondary school teacher, having conversations with students understanding veganism and vegetarianism, as well as showing an enthusiasm with peers, only to be rebuffed by family members; being denied the opportunity to legitimize their feelings. Through these discussion with my students, I’ve found childhood to be a chance to explore veganism and animal rights without years of socialisation. Consequently my research and activism has a extensive focus on this arena, namely facilitating performative explorations into animal rights and veganism in schools. 

The Scream fitly explores the clashing of contradiction, which explored endlessly in animal rights with the popular line “You can’t love animals and eat them”, as well as more broadly with ontological probings around violence, such as Slavoj Zizek’s exposure of the stories we tell, to excuse our actions, to be a fundamental lie (Zizek and Wynne, 2010). It is an act of forgetting, ducking, beliefs when certain cultural actions occur which contradict the held identity (Midgley, 1995). Even when beliefs are upheld, actions are excused by deflecting to blame the victim, for example an identifying animal lover punishes their dog for going to the toilet in the house for a variety of reasons (anxiety, untrained, neglect). A more extreme version would be in someone excusing their consumption of a non-human animal because the non-human doesn’t have the capacity to escape or ask not to be eaten. This method of cognitive dissonance points to behaviours if applied elsewhere, such as a human to human relationship, would be classed as abusive.

I explore this wilful ignorance in my poetry. In Civil I draw the image of a sterile room, crowded with fake smiles, with just a curtain between them and the reality of suffering. The movable and thin material speaks of opportunity to cover, but also reveal – yet the consensus of the group keeps it shut, and covered. The general agreement to ‘export shame’ and remain in a ‘numbing comfort’ confers with the idea, popularised by vegan activist strategist Tobia Leenhart, that most people eat meat because most people eat meat (Leenaert, 2017). Civil concludes with the cyclical notion of repetition; stuck in a loop, a trap of denial and a form of cowardliness. There’s almost a gesture of forgetting, which Zizek calls a ‘fetishist disavowal’; a refusal to completely assume the consequences of their knowledge, so they can continue acting as if they don’t know it (Zizek and Wynne, 2010)

Civil The agreed curtain Blocking the bubbling The urges spitting Behind thick dense cloth Our hands together Keep it firmly closed Sheltering a beige symmetry Sealed at every exit Sterile vacuum All secrets are outside Cages and blood Screams and force Muffled by silicon smiles Guilt can't breathe Shame is exported Pointed to another The other side of the keyhole It all stays still The comfort of constant The numbing comfort Dull stares Glances at the curtain Hoping to peak There's no one daring All waiting for another Again and again

My poem Perhaps takes influence from The Screams exploration of pleasure in violence, such as the dominance felt at the sight of rabbit skulls crushed on the road. I question this pleasure as a fetish. The verse notions our self-destructive nature of our species. Our outward fascination with horror and violence, in fiction and historical events, as well as our actions causing violence to others, are almost excused if our innate plan is self-harm, self-hatred and extinction. This ontological critique can be more explicitly applied to capitalism, as a modern, greed-inducing system causing a desire tear down, almost as a symptom of an abusive experience (Braidotti, 2009, Herman, 2015). I again refer to the repetitive nature of everyday acceptance of our current trappings of a double-life, almost as marionettes, or clones of ourselves trying to escape to a more fulfilling purpose. Through gasping for an escape the subjects are screaming, much like Hughes’ vomiting scream concluding his poem.

Perhaps Maybe we want it Go out in a fireball Swelling the streets Passing the pedestrian soldiers Secretly hoping they squeeze Slice through the pathetic armor Or a hidden passenger With a machete Drenching the cobbles With our velvet blood Holding back the urge to leap While crossing the city bridge Anything to break the cyclone Spinning bland surfaces Barely breathing Until we fade Getting nowhere near High volume

I interpret the scream as an active expression and yearning to run, unstick ourselves from the violence we are enveloped in from childhood – an expulsion of lived trauma (Herman, 2015). The scream is a rejection our social situation. The feeling repulsion is manifested between the individual and the social, creating tension and renunciation of what is (Ahmed, 2014). The scream is embodied by activists. The expression is turned into action, for the scream to be heard, addressed and untangled, by providing the antidote(Cherry, 2010) This cure is two-fold: identifying and naming the problem, such as systemic racism in policing and speciesism, and providing solutions, such as defunding the police and adopting veganism. I write poetry as a performative activist voice, exploring the emotions where the tensions rise in the personal, cultural and social. The abrasion between nature and the modern human in Hughes’ poems, influence my descriptive expression heavily, and I believe serve the notion of both witnessing and acting fittingly.

References

Ahmed, S. (2014) The cultural politics of emotion. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Braidotti, R. (2009) Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others. PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 124 (2), pp. 526-532.

Cherry, E. (2010) Shifting Symbolic Boundaries: Cultural Strategies of the Animal Rights Movement1. Sociological Forum, 25 (3), pp. 450-475.

Herman, J.L. (2015) Trauma and recovery: the aftermath of violence - from domestic abuse to political terror. 2015th ed. New York: BasicBooks

Hughes, T. and Baskin, L. (1978). Cave birds : an alchemical cave drama. New York: Viking Press.

Leenaert, T., 2017. How to Create a Vegan World: A Pragmatic Approach. Brooklyn, NY: Lantern Books.

MidgleY, M. (1995) Beast and man: the roots of human nature. [Rev.]. ed. London: Routledge.

Zizek, S. and Wynne, F. (2010) Violence : Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books.

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[performinganimalrights]

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[performinganimalrights]

Stan

A red plastic bag lifts on the corner On a tight asphalt bend Stuck to the floor Inches from rolling rubber I roll past and reverse That bag sways and breathes On foot I see you A bullfinch Unable to fly or walk I wave by the cars Scoop you into my left hand While I drive with my right

Hay stuffed into a box A box laid into a tall cage A glass ramekin of water Another for seed You, Stan, into the box of hay No rest Sway and twist Lying contorted I play a video of bullfinches singing It soothes, until the adverts I help you into more natural positions Which you slip away from

Night comes With hope that you’ll heal Hop and fly Home to family To before But your brain is stuck Struck with unstoppable metal Swaying has stopped by morning With your life I take you to the woods Lay you in the long grass Whispering words of honor