The Savannah College of Art is known for its no-nonsense commitment to hands-on studio practice. So their most recent broadcast, announcing an open studio night on May 8th, contained a surprise. There were the expected offerings: wheel throwing demos from the ceramics department; an exhibit of new work from the painting faculty; a print making demonstration. Slipped in was “Animal Logic,” a student exhibit devoted to “investigating human desire to construct relationships with animals.” The show goes on to explore the use of animals as “a paradoxical metaphor” for humans in contemporary art.
Mull on that a minute. You thought it was enough to throw the pooch a Frisbee? Keep his bowl filled with porterhouse steak-flavored kibbles from Purina’s Chef Michael? That, and having their ears scratched, is pretty much what Fido and Tabby want from relationship with bipeds, right? Evidently, there is more. The simple satisfactions of keeping a pet are hardly enough to absorb the energies of higher education. Might it have something to do with the fast-growing popularity of personhood theory, with its denial of human exceptionalism and of the inherent dignity of human beings?
Go ahead, accuse me of over-thinking yet another sign of the paucity of mental rigor in art departments. But can you blame me? Ordinary people have relationships; only academics construct them. And, in the main, fine art students have no cultivated resistance to academic jargon. The standards by which their own production is judged are largely rhetorical. Phraseology is the gauge of seriousness, not sensibility, dexterity, an eye for tonal contrasts or any other aptitudes honed into high skills by centuries of dead white males.
And what of this use of animals as metaphors for humans? The device is as old as Aesop. There has to be something new about it to warrant an exhibit geared to inducing parents to consign their heirs to four years of immersion in similar profundities. Not having seen the exhibit, I cannot say much more. but I would be willing to bet that the moral milieu of those ancient fables and bestiaries is being displaced by something closer to evolutionary scientism. This is the spreading ism that confuses man’s starting point—the evolutionary context we share with other species—with his ending. And with his very nature.
Color me pleasantly shocked if art students are not among the first sentimental nihilists to embrace multiculturalism on the zoölogical level. Think of the creative and pictorial possibilities of zoöphilia, the logical terminus of interspecies relationship construction.
© 2010 Maureen Mullarkey
NOTE: The exhibition title borrows itself from Animal Logic, Richard Barnes’ photographic monograph on behind-the-scenes manipulations of the wild that constitute displays in natural history museums. The Savannah show and its stated intention has nothing in common with Barnes’ work.
