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Readings from whitechapel documents of contemporary art book on nature, edited by Jeffery Kastner. All the writings I have read involving animals.

Brian Maguire expressionist paintings address issues of social injustice and malfunction. He has worked with marginalised groups in institutions in Ireland, Poland and the US. Maguire represented Ireland at the São Paolo Biennale in 1998. He was appointed Professor of the Fine Art Faculty of the National College of Art and Design in 2000 and is an elected member of Aosdána.

https://crawfordartgallery.ie/remains-brian-maguire/

In 2019, Brian Maguire visited Dr Greg Hess, Chief Medical Examiner for Pima County, Tucson, Arizona. Dr Hess gave the artist access to some thousand visual records of migrant lives lost in the crossing from South and Central America and Mexico, into the United States.

Each discovery of a body in the desert creates a case and digital images. Using a selection from this photographic source, Brian began a new series of paintings, acknowledging the many unidentified victims who undertook this perilous journey.

In explaining his process in creating memorial works Maguire has said: “for the Juarez Femicides series I used the family photograph as an image upon which to base the commemorative painting. The mothers of deceased women and girls recognize that the portrait remembers their children as they, the mothers, remember their children.” Elaborating on Arizona, he says: “This project is different in that it is the death I record or memorialise. No family would like to retain this image of a loved one, except as needed by a process of seeking justice. My work since 1997 has become increasingly focused on lives lost, often with a political perspective on the event of the loss.”

Maguire’s most recent bodies of work directly confront issues of migration, displacement and human dignity in the face of the current global unrest. They are some of his most nuanced and ambitious to date, which he has crafted with larger brushes and thinned-down acrylic on canvas.

The exhibition features a short collaborative film Brian made with Mark McLoughlin of bangbangteo, an independent documentary production company. Previous collaborations between Brian Maguire and bangbangteoinclude the film BLOOD RISING, which focused on communicating stories of brutal femicide in Juarez, Mexico. The film, Remains - Brian Maguire, offers a window into the artist’s working methods and his motivations. Brian is filmed in conversation with people intimate with the complexities of life at the US/Mexican border.

Maguire has shown extensively in Europe and the US, most recently at the Museo De Arte de Ciudad Juarez, Mexico and the Rubin Centre, Texas University at El Paso, Texas (September 2019), at the United Nations Headquarters, New York, (in 2020), the Rhona Hoffmann Gallery, Chicago, (January 2021), and Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris (March 2021).

Dr. Stacy Alaimo

(she/they)

Professor of English, Director of Graduate Studies for English;

Core Faculty Member, Environmental Studies;

COLT Participating Faculty; CSWS Faculty Affiliate

University of Oregon

I write about the strange and often volatile relations between environmentalism, science, theory, literature, art, popular culture, and gender. My concept of trans-corporeality links material feminism, new materialism, environmental justice, and environmental posthumanism. While my first three books build one coherent theoretical argument, my recent work turns to ocean life, developing the "blue" or oceanic humanities along with marine science studies.

Current Project:

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The Abyss at Hand: Aesthetic Encounters in the Science, Art, and Literature of Deep Sea Creatures.

This book investigates the science, art, film, science fiction, and science writing about deep sea creatures, from the work of William Beebe and Else Bostelmann in the 1930s to the Census of Marine Life, which concluded in 2010. It investigates how aesthetic recognition of deep sea creatures scrambles scientific epistemologies and expands the terrain of environmental concern. I grapple with colonialist global visions, critique white masculinist narratives of exploration, analyze the categories of the surreal, weird, and alien; and swirl together emerging theories and methods in the blue humanities, while suggesting a more fluid and potent sense of the aesthetic. As the threats to ocean ecologies accelerate and the deep seas receive scientific, popular, and political attention, I hope this book will incite more discussion of the abyss at hand.

Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minnesota 2016) contends that the anthropocene is no time to set things straight. The book resists the temptation to engage in any sort of grand mapping that would be inimical to the embedded modes of epistemological, ethical, and political engagement that it traces, working instead through a surprising mix of theory, science, art, and activism. It begins by considering the pleasures of inhabiting places where the domestic refuses to domesticate and the walls decline to divide. It ends with an imaginary inhabitation of the dissolving shells of sea creatures who epitomize extinction in anthropocene seas. Along the way it considers queer animals, naked protests, the strange agencies of plastic pollution, and the gendered politics of climate change. Dwelling in the dissolve, where fundamental boundaries have begun to come undone, unraveled by unknown futures, can be a mode of ethical engagement and political inhabitation, which emanates from both feminist and environmentalist practices. Exposed locates new materialisms and material feminisms in fleeting ethical moments and compromised political sites that make up the massive temporal and geographical expanse of the anthropocene.[Cover art: Marina Zurkow, video still from "Slurb."]

Italian translation, published by Mimesis, 2023.

Korean translation, translated by Myung-Joo Kim, Chungnam National University Press, 2023.

Chapter,“Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture and Pleasure of “Queer” Animals,” translated into Greek by John Giannis/Rigas Ioannis, for a DIY activist zine, with new illustrations, 2017.

Inspired special issue of Simulacrum magazine (Amsterdam) “Practicing Exposure.” Including an interview with Max Litjens and Michelle Geraerts, 2019. http://simulacrum.nl/2019/call-for-papers-practicing-exposure-simulacrum-x-fiber-festival/

Special session, “Author Meets Readers” at the Association of American Geographers, 2018.

Podcast Interview, with Chris Richardson, This is Not a Pipe, February. 2018.https://www.tinapp.org/episodes/exposed

U of MN: Blog post: “Climate Change, Carbon-Heavy Masculinity and the Politics of Exposure” http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2016/10/climate-change-carbon-heavy-masculinity.html (October, 2016)

Culture of Energy Podcast, #39, with Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer, Center for Energy & Environmental Research in the Human Sciences, Rice University

Podcast interview: New Books in Environmental Studies, New Books Network: Feb., 2017.

Finalist for 2017 ASLE Book Award for Ecocriticism

Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Indiana UP, 2010). Environmental justice, environmental health, and material feminisms occupy the "trans-corporeal" sites where body, place, and substance intersect. Bodily Natures develops my new materialist, material feminist conception of environmental thought and practice. [Cover art: "Toxic Girl," Fawazo.]

Winner of the ASLE Book Award for Ecocriticism, 2011

Featured in New Books Network interview and podcast, 2013: http://newbooksnetwork.com/stacy-alaimo-bodily-natures-science-environment-and-the-material-self-indiana-up-2010/

Plenary book session at the International Association of Environmental Philosophy, Eugene, Oregon, 2013.

Korean translation,by Joon Yun, Konkuk University, Seoul, Institute of Body and Culture, published by Greenbee, as 말, 살, 흙, Word, Flesh, Dirt, 2018; second printing, 2018.

Chapters translated into Portuguese, Spanish, Polish,

Key concept, “trans-corporeality” taken up widely in humanities and social sciences, and included as an entry in Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman Glossary

Art exhibit, “Transcorporeality” at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne Germany, Fall 2019; published essay in catalogue, Fall 2020.

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Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space (Cornell 2000) Written during a time when academic theory spurned the concept of "nature," this book delves into the negative discursive histories of that term, while posing more positive visions for feminist environmentalisms. By drawing on poststructuralist feminist theory and cultural studies, I advocate gender-minimizing, queer, intersectional feminisms that recast nature as feminist space. Darwinian feminists, Marxist feminists, birth control activists, postmodern artists and novelists, and queer writers reinvent the concept of "nature," contending that culture, not "nature" is the ground of essentialism and gender normatively. [Cover art: Ana Mendieta.]

Excerpts on “Mother Earth” reprinted in Nuda Paper(commercial paper sold in Stockholm, Paris, Berlin, and London), Fall 2019.

Communication: We are not the only ones talking… Uillinn West Cork Arts Centre, Ireland

The opening event, featured a gallery conversation between the artist and Seán Kissane, Curator of Exhibitions at IMMA.

Focusing on his expanded film Communication: We Are Not The Only Ones Talking... the exhibition, which includes new installation works for Uillinn, explores languages in other species on Earth. Bolster grapples with the possibilities inherent in the discovery of syntax in other non-human species based on information theory and with the philosophical implications ensuing from the discovery of life on other planets.

The tapestry room piece featured above is the Impermanence of Protection: Big Bend National Park (2023) It takes the form of a panorama, these were popular as vehicles of wonder, often shown in cities throughout the 19th century to immerse people in the sublime. The landscape depicted within the piece is Big Bend National Park, a park like many that was at risk of change in the Trump era. This is an image of the border between Mexico and America, ranchers and farmers cross this boundary each day to look after their livestock. Bolster immortalizes the image of the type of uninterrupted nature that many of us will see disappear during our lifetimes, if they are not properly cared for through legislation.

Shannon Alonzo is an interdisciplinary artist who I came across in the 2023 Liverpool Biennial uMoya, focusing primarily on drawing, soft sculpture and performance.

Her practice explores themes of collective belonging, place attachment, historical erasure and the significance of carnival ritual to the Caribbean consciousness.

'Mangrove' (2023)

Referencing the entangled forms of Mangroves – a group or system of trees and roots which grow in coastal, tropical climates – Alonzo has created a site-specific mural of charcoal and paint which explores the Caribbean Carnival’s relationship to space: claimed and embodied, geographic and ideological.

Like the mangroves of Trinidad, an enmeshed root system living on the fringes of land and sea, the Carnival has historically provided a place of refuge and stabilization for countless marginalised peoples. Now taking place in various countries across the world, including places which were once foreign and hostile lands, Carnival celebrations exist to resist myriad forms of racial injustice and institutionalized oppression; a space for people of the Caribbean diaspora to assert their right to joy, self-articulation, agency, dignity, and ancestral legacy.

The motif of the Mangrove also pays homage to Frank Crichlow, a community activist and civil rights campaigner who became known as the ‘Godfather of Black Radicalism’ in London in 1960’s. Crichlow owned the infamous Mangrove Restaurant – a space of refuge for activists and creatives of the Windrush generation in Notting Hill, which also served as the informal head office for the Carnival.

Central to the mural is Elma Francois, a little known but revolutionary figure who began her journey picking cotton alongside her mother at an early age. The poor treatment she witnessed sparked her interest in workers’ rights, leading her to become a leader in critical labour movements of the1930’s in Trinidad, which spread throughout the Caribbean. Here, she claims space in the Cotton Exchange Building, bringing a divine feminine energy to a formerly male environment, driven by capitalist ideology. Her presence, alongside Alonzo’s ritual of erasing and redrawing the mural part way through the exhibition, is an offering to catalyse healing and a restoration of balance. Figures within the mural blur in and out of focus, acting as a nod to rhythm and movement but also emphasising the fragility of histories which are passed on through oral or performance storytelling. In places, it is difficult to tell where the figures end and the Mangrove begins

Why do humans make art? When did we begin to make our mark on the world? And where? In this film, Britain's most celebrated sculptor Antony Gormley is setting out on a journey to see for himself the very beginnings of art.

Once we believed that art began with the cave paintings of Ice Age Europe, tens of thousands of years ago. But now, extraordinary new

discoveries around the world are overturning that idea. Antony is going to travel across the globe, and thousands of years back in time, to piece together a new story of how art began. He discovers beautiful, haunting and surprising works of art, deep inside caves across France, Spain and Indonesia, and in Australian rock shelters. He finds images created by hunter-gatherers that surprise him with their tenderness, and affinity with animals natural world. He discovers the secrets behind the techniques used by our ancestors to create these paintings. And he meets experts making discoveries that are turning the clock back on when art first began.

Finally Antony asks what these images from millennia ago can tell us - about who we are. As he says, 'If we can look closely at the art of our ancestors, perhaps we will be able to reconnect with something vital that we have lost."'.

In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She eschews referring to our current epoch as the Anthropocene, preferring to conceptualize it as what she calls the Chthulucene, as it more aptly and fully describes our epoch as one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices. The Chthulucene, Haraway explains, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures. Theoretically and methodologically driven by the signifier SF—string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, so far—Staying with the Trouble further cements Haraway's reputation as one of the most daring and original thinkers of our time.

Peter Beard’s illustrated diaries, which he kept from a young age, evolved into a serious career as an artist and earned him a central position in the international art world.

He collaborated with Francis Bacon and Salvador Dali, made diaries with Andy Warhol, worked on books with scientists such as Dr Norman Borlaug and Alistair Graham, and toured with Truman Capote, Terry Southern, and the Rolling Stones – all of whom are brought to life in his work.

He delved into the world of fashion, taking Vogue stars like Veruschka to Africa. After spending time in Kenya and striking up a friendship with the author Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) in the early 1960s, Beard bought 50 acres next to her farm, with the stipulation that he would film and write about the land and its flora and fauna.

He witnessed the dawn of Kenya’s population explosion, which challenged finite resources and stressed animal populations – including the starving elephants of Tsavo dying by the tens of thousands in a wasteland of eaten trees. So he documented what he saw – with diaries, photographs, and collages.

He went against the wind in publishing unique and sometimes shocking books of these works, including The End of the Game. The corpses were laid bare; the facts were carefully recorded, sometimes in type and often by hand.

Beard used his photographs as a canvas on to which he superimposed multi-layered contact sheets, ephemera, found objects, newspaper clippings that are elaborately embellished with meticulous handwriting, old-master-inspired drawings, and often swaths of animal blood used as paint.

Turner Prize: Jesse Darling wins for 'delirious' art using tattered flags and barbed wire

By Ian Youngs

Entertainment & arts reporter

5 December 2023

Jesse Darling's work in Turner Prize exhibition at Towner gallery in Eastbourne

Jesse Darling has given crowd control barriers legs and made them look like they are running amok

An exhibition featuring crowd control barriers that have gone out of control, twisted railway tracks, barbed wire and tattered union jack bunting - all making a comment on modern British life - has won this year's Turner Prize.

Jesse Darling picked up the prestigious art award and its £25,000 cheque at a ceremony in Eastbourne, East Sussex.

He has spoken about being inspired by his view of the effects of austerity, Brexit and the pandemic on the town, and the "hostile environment" immigration policy.

The artist says he uses objects that are cheap and easy to find, but that hold meaning for viewers

Speaking to BBC News after his win, he explained: "You have to love something to be able to critique it. I was born in this country and I'm looking at what's going on here.

"I wanted to make a work that reflected that, and I wanted to make work about Britain for the British public.

"Whether they like it or don't like it, it was a great honour and privilege to be able to do something so public for the British public."

Barbed wire and a piece of net curtain hang above a crumbling mock checkpoint at the gallery entrance

The judges praised his use of common objects like barriers, hazard tape, office files and net curtains "to convey a familiar yet delirious world".

"Invoking societal breakdown, his presentation unsettles perceived notions of labour, class, Britishness and power," they said.

Darling said he would spend his prize money on dentistry and rent

The chair of the judges, Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson, added that his art was "bold", "engaging" and partly a reflection on "the state of the nation".

"It's one element of it, one layer of it. I don't think it's the whole story. There is some sense, from his point of view, that these are times of crisis."

Tattered and faded union jack bunting hangs from the ceiling

In his acceptance speech, Darling also spoke up for the power of teaching children art in schools, and said Conservative governments had sent the message that self-expression and culture were "only for particular kinds of people from particular socio-economic backgrounds".

"Don't buy in. It's for everyone," he said.

At the end of his speech, Darling pulled a Palestinian flag out of his coat pocket and waved it.

Jesse Darling was many of the critics' favourite for the prize. His room of jaunty crash barriers and union jacks is inventive and original.

Darling - who was born in Oxford but lives and works in Berlin - has said he is reflecting the hostile environment in the UK towards immigration in this work.

The exhibition entrances are turned into checkpoints complete with barbed wire. But the space itself feels alive and humorous.

That's down to the crowd control barriers Darling has sculpted at prancing angles. This is anthropomorphising writ large - the very things that are used to corral people by the police are given a life of their own, turned into creatures that can't be controlled.

We're also surrounded by frilly curtains and a maypole adorned with police tape and anti-pigeon spikes.

Darling has said British towns these days are showing the effects of austerity, Brexit and Covid. He's riffing on that in a show that tackles nationhood and British identity.

All the four nominated artists were reflecting what's happening in Britain right now. In the end, Darling was felt by the judges to be a cut above.

The other nominated artists were Ghislaine Leung, Rory Pilgrim and Barbara Walker.

The Telegraph's art critic Alastair Sooke called Darling's room at Eastbourne's Towner gallery "the most exhilarating presentation I've encountered at the annual exhibition in recent years".

Files are filled with concrete as a comment on bureaucracy

Sooke wrote that the artist "offers an unruly vision of contemporary Britain as both ruinous and suffused with impish magic".

"Compared with such sculpturally compelling work, which boils and bubbles with brilliant ideas and touches, the offerings from the other shortlisted artists seem lukewarm."

Jesse Darling's work in Turner Prize exhibition at Towner gallery in Eastbourne

However, the Sunday Times' Waldemar Januszczak did not like Darling's entry. "I suppose it's a glumly poetic interpretation of Britain today," he wrote.

"Where it fails is in its overall visual impact. It's too bitty."

Jesse Darling's work in Turner Prize exhibition at Towner gallery in Eastbourne

Rollercoaster rails appear to crash through the gallery wall

Darling, 41, who only went to art school in his 30s, was nominated for two exhibitions in Oxford and London last year.

A cabinet contains hammers that are decorated like toys, with colourful ribbons and bells

Ailbhe Ní Bhriain is an Irish artist working with film, computer generated imagery, collage, tapestry, print and installation. Ní Bhriain’s work is rooted in an exploration of imperial legacy, human displacement and the Anthropocene. These intertwined subjects are approached through an associative use of narrative and a painstakingly crafted visual language that verges on the surreal. She sidesteps directive positions and familiar binaries, exposing instead the layers of ambiguity and contradiction embedded in these fraught issues. The resulting worlds she creates are at once idiosyncratic, irresistible and deeply unsettling. Her work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally and regularly involves collaboration with musicians and composers.

She works and lives in Cork.

Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, 2023

29 April – 24 June 2023

Golden Thread Gallery is excited to host Irish artist Niamh O’Malley in our main space after the hugely successful Gather, Ireland at Venice 2022. Gather was the national representation of Ireland at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Temple Bar Gallery + Studios. The exhibition for the Golden Thread Gallery, opening in April 2023, is informed by O’Malley’s work for Gather and will explore the breadth of her current practice.

O’Malley’s work has often been described as ‘a call to gather’. As her work makes its way around the island, this call to gather invites a communality. O’Malley’s sculpture and moving image works are intended to hold us in the space for which they are made. She uses steel, limestone, wood, and glass, and shapes and assembles objects to create a purposeful landscape of forms in the gallery space. Her sculptures, tall and free-standing, ground-bearing and cantilevered, with paced and looped moving image, inhabit and animate the gallery.

The work in the exhibition splits the space with sculptural interventions. Steels rods which support sculptural objects have to be navigated, forcing us to move around, and in-between. These interventions encourage us to consider the space again, from new angles and through different, considered, frames.

“It is both lure and demand, for touch, encounter, and occupancy… a place of thresholds, windows, glass, holes, drains, vents, and a glimmer of water and daylight. O’Malley’s sculptures gesture towards enabling, offering protection, conveying sensations of touch, and more – of grabbing, holding, caressing surfaces, offering a moment of tether and precarious poise.”

The Morphology of the Other addressed a sense of fear of impending futuristic doom. The exhibition evoked the threat of what we humans might eventually morph into - creatures devoid of compassion and empathy. Barry’s inherent rebellion is targeted against the society in which we live, challenging our progress and lack of, and encouraging responsibility towards a ‘new world’ attitude. Barry’s philosophical interests lie with “the uncanny”. She frequently plays with the notion of the subverted female character in her film and performative works, referring to hysterical female creatures in Irish Gothic literature. This interest in the Gothic is a constant in Barry’s work, combining nightmare with humour, having the effect of equally enticing and repelling the viewer.

For this artist, the creative process begins with drawing – material comes to life by way of the drawings she conjures up in her fervent imagination. These images then become realised in animations, films and sculpture. Drawing continues to be an important entry to cultivating other ideas and mediums. One gallery in the exhibition is dedicated to a salon hang of her drawings, revealing the evolution of her sculptural output.

Aideen Barry’s practice is in some measure informed by a diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), which manifests itself in her obsession with cleanliness and dust free environments. Barry’s depiction of the contemporary housewife, nesting in celtic tiger suburban Ireland, is obsessed with perfection and sanitisation in an effort to attain control in a vulnerable society. The fear of ‘the other’ is the unseen germ, odour or dust particle, threatening the health and well-being of the family unit, without any thought given to the detrimental effects of chemicals incorporated into cleaning sprays. This new kind of Gothic germ is one we cannot see and one difficult to sanitise or control, for example. The artist proposes that this sterilising of the environment will alter ourselves both psychologically and physically in future generations. Barry’s interest in the contemporary hysterias of cleanliness has informed her creation of a Dystopian view of the future domestic, creating Shelleyesque creatures of a Gothic Horror disposition: half-hoover, half- housewife - sucking and consuming particles of dust, in a gravity-defying levitation. The artists diagnosis of OCD has propelled her research into the ‘uncanny’ repetitive gesture, or Tourette. Through playful manipulation of materials, a productive dialogue emerges between object and body, expressing human behaviour in the strange area between amusem*nt and discomfort, creating balance and tension at the same time.

Vacuuming in a Vacuum, A Film created in Zero Gravity, 2009 was informed by Barry’s residency at Kennedy Space Centre, NASA, in 2008. While preparing to undergo astronaut training, Barry shot films in parabolic flight while experiencing zero gravity. This project was a compelling follow on from Barry’s performative film Levitating, which played with the notion of authenticity and illusion, but also uncovered Barry’s Buster Keaton-like slapstick, evident in much of her work, and a healthy counterpart to her condition. The objects that were created in response to this experience simulated materials used by NASA’s precision engineers to create their own functional devices, in particular utilitarian objects that ‘hoover’ or suck dust, skin and excreted particles.

The Dystopian Domestic that Barry refers to is a very real space, merging the everyday with the futuristic. Barry proposes that the slippage between this future horror and our contemporary nightmares is evident now in television advertising, NASA TV, and in the suburbia in which we live. With her Weapons of Mass Consumption series, Barry takes the war on germs to a more militant level. Her long time dream to be the first Irish woman in space is a passion she keeps alive through the ambition and scope of her accomplished and visionary work.

About the Artist

Aideen is a practicing visual artist based between Ireland, Lithuania and the United States. In 2020 she was elected to the Royal Hibernian Academy as an ARHA member. She is also a member of Aosdána. Aideen teaches in several universities and schools of visual art in Ireland, America and Europe. She was Lecturer at Limerick School of Art & Design from 2010 to 2020 on the undergrad and post grad programmes. She received the Myron Marty Award from Drake University in Iowa in 2019 and in 2020 she will be a speaker as part of the Anderson Lecture Series at Penn State University. She has also been commissioned by Kaunas 2022, The European Capital of Culture, to make a site specific major moving image work. Aideen also has a number of international touring shows current in the United States at the Katzen Centre at the American University Museum, NYU, The American Film Maker's Co-Op in New York City, Oaxaca Film Festival Mexico. Later his year she will have works at Artissma in Italy and in early 2021 in ArtBA in Buenos Aires. She is also working on a special commission for the Bunting Archive for the Irish Traditional Music Organisation and Music Network in Ireland which will form a part of a series of solo shows and other international presentations in 2021 and 2022.

Selected projects include exhibitions at: Elephant West & Frieze Art Fair UK, Mothers Tankstation, The Drawing Room London, The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Oaxaca, Mexico, Louise T. Blouin, London, Moderne Mussett Sweden, The Loop Biennale, ESP, Matucana 100, Chile, Artissma, CHACO & ARCO Art Fairs, The Wexner Centre Ohio, The Royal Hibernian Academy, the Museum des Beux Arts, The Crawford Municipal Gallery, The Butler Gallery, The Banff Centre Canada, the Headlands Centre for the Arts San Francisco, Liste Art Fair Basel Switzerland, BAC Geneva, Art Basel BA and Catherine Clark Gallery, US. Barry has received numerous awards for her practice including recent awards: Culture Ireland Awards 2018 & 2019, 2016, 2011, 2012, Commissions from the Irish Government under the Department of Education & Skills, Shortlist for the 2020 Aceys Industry Film Awards, The Vermont Studio Centre Fellowship Award 2017, Project New Work Awards from the Arts Council of Ireland, Arts Council of Ireland Bursary Awards, Modern Ireland in 100 Art Works 2015 award from the Royal Irish Academy, the Silent Light Film Award, Travel and Training Awards from the Arts Council of Ireland, in 2010 was shortlisted for the prestigious AIB Prize.

Aideen Barry’s tutorial for using My Stop Motion Studio App.

The largest and most comprehensive survey ever held in the United States of the work of American abstract artist Cy Twombly (b. 1928), Cy Twombly: A Retrospective comprises nearly 100 works, including paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, which reveal the panoramic range of subjects and emotions addressed in his art. The exhibition redefines Twombly’s place as a singular master in postwar art, and establishes the critical role his work has played in the international development of contemporary art.

Installed chronologically in the Contemporary Painting and Sculpture galleries on the Museum’s third floor, Cy Twombly: A Retrospective ranges in date from 1946 through the present, and includes fifty paintings, thirty-seven works on paper, ten sculptures, and two prints. Only sixteen of these works were also shown in Twombly’s previous American retrospective, in 1979 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. A number of works in the current exhibition are on view for the first time in this country; these include little-known early works, key masterpieces of monumental scale, and several recently completed paintings. In presenting the full range of Twombly’s work, the exhibition demonstrates not only the consistent themes that mark the artist’s oeuvre, but a variety and diversity that are perhaps unexpected in an artist who has been, until recently, more widely appreciated and exhibited in Europe than in his native country.

Unlike his contemporaries and friends Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Twombly chose to cultivate the legacy of the Abstract Expressionists. He has pursued a form of painting that combines elements of gestural abstraction, drawing, and writing in a personal manner that is seemingly remote from the media-saturated world of contemporary culture. Suffused with references to poetry and the Mediterranean heritage that has surrounded him since his move to Italy in 1957, Twombly’s art bridges literary and painterly sensibilities, and links contemporary art to a rich cultural past of antiquity and Romanticism.

In the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, curator Kirk Varnedoe writes, “For all the complex linguistic structure of [Twombly’s] aesthetic and the rich web of his references, what his achievement may ultimately depend upon most heavily is the power he has drawn from within himself and from so many enabling traditions, to isolate in a particularly raw and unsettled fashion that primal electricity of communication in his apparently simplest acts of naming, marking, and painting.”

Cy Twombly: A Retrospective opens with assemblage sculptures from the late 1940s, which reveal the artist’s early interest in Dada and Surrealism, and paintings and graphic works from the early 1950s. These include two major paintings, Tiznit and Volubilus, made in 1953 following Twombly’s return from the trip he made to Europe and North Africa with Rauschenberg. Named after North African villages, these pictures show Twombly scratching and scoring wet paint in order to create a scarred, bristling surface. His next body of works, such as The Geeks, Free Wheeler, and Academy (all of 1955), further blurred the distinction between painting and drawing, and show the deliberate, repetitive piling up of abstract scoring and partially legible letters and words that would become a hallmark of the artist’s mature style.

Following Twombly’s move to Rome in 1957, his work becomes less encrusted and less harshly striated. Examples like Olympia (1957) are characterized by a new space, light, and color that yield a canvas that is at once reticent and expressive. The letters and words that Twombly inscribed on the pale ground of Olympia place his work at the nexus of art, language, and writing.

In 1961 Twombly’s paintings became grander in scale, more open in space, and more vividly colored. The exhibition includes an especially rich selection of these color paintings, such as Triumph of Galatea, Empire of Flora, and the slightly later Leda and the Swan (1962), an orgiastic fantasy of that fateful copulation. After this explosion of painterly intensity, however, Twombly’s work slowed down and became more spare, until he launched an entirely new cycle of work, in white lines on gray backgrounds, in 1966. The period of the gray-ground canvases, including several which evoke the time-motion agitation of Futurist paintings and the maelstrom drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, continued into the early 1970s, and yielded two monumental, untitled canvases (shown in this country for the first time), which seem intent on reconceiving the legacy of Jackson Pollock.

Later in the 1970s, and throughout the 1980s, Twombly’s art became more pastoral in its concerns, as his admiration for painters of nature, such as Claude Monet and J.M.W. Turner, became evident. Hero and Leander (1981, 1984), which deals with the classical legend of doomed love and tragic drowning, consists of a three-part sequence of liquid, melancholy seascapes that move from the turbulence of the fateful wave in the left panel through to mournfully still peace on the right. Also evident in this part of the exhibition is the theme of flowers, singly or in growing clumps, that has repeatedly attracted the artist in recent years.

Cy Twombly: A Retrospective closes with a monumental new series, The Four Seasons (1993–1994). Twombly begins the series not with the promise of spring but with the heady wine harvests of autumn, in a canvas marked by deep reds and purples. Winter and Spring, the former bleak and chilly, the latter soaring and open, are both layered with lines of poetry by George Seferis. Summer evokes the warm shimmer of misty light on water.

The Post-Human Animal

What’s behind the proliferation of animals in recent artworks?

In the late 1940s, the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève visited the USA. For Kojève – arguably the most influ­ential interpreter of Hegel in the 20th century, and one of the architects of the European Economic Community, a precursor to the EU – ‘history’ was predicated on political struggle. Like Hegel and Marx before him, Kojève believed that humanity would ultimately reach a consensus about its means of governance. This consensus (likely a mixed economy, or social democracy) would spell out the end-point of social evolution, what Hegel had called the ‘end of history’. This trip to the US, however, led Kojève to feel that any prospective future had already transpired. Upon observing the ‘eternal present’ of American society, Kojève claimed that ‘man’ had already disappeared, giving way to a creature that, though looking exactly like him, shared nothing of the human. The human, he argued, is predicated on a historical process, whereas this new being was one devoid of historicity and, therefore, humanity. For Kojève, this ‘post-historical Man’ had returned to an animal state, albeit retaining his civilized mores. Post-historical Man builds his edifices and works of art as ‘birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs’ and performs ‘musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas.’1

In 1959, Kojève took another trip, this time to Japan, where he underwent ‘a radical change of opinion’ on the subject of post-historical Man. He experienced how a society could live in a state of post-historical governance while retaining something of the human. Whilst the American lives in harmony with its inner animal, Japanese culture had given rise to mores that were fully formalized, where mannerisms and conventions override ‘content’ and are totally opposed to the ‘natural’ or the ‘animal’. The highly codified values of Japanese culture (for Kojève, a form of ‘snobbery’), the perfect expressions of which could be seen in Noh theatre or the traditions of tea ceremonies and Ikebana flower arrangement, had existed for centuries yet seemed strikingly postmodern. Japan was also the location for Pierre Huyghe’s most recent video, Human Mask (2014). The film’s exterior shots, showing a deserted and derelict town, were captured inside the f*ckushima exclusion zone by a camera affixed to a drone. Indoors, the camera focuses on a strange creature wearing a Noh mask whose demeanor and gestures are uncannily human. Seemingly absorbed in self-contemplation, it runs its clawed fingers though a lock of long dark hair and softly touches the plastic wrap around a flower bouquet. In an evolutionary timeline, humanity usually stands between the animal and the android. In this light Huyghe’s creature, half ape, half cyborg, might be seen as the perfect embodiment of the warped tempo­rality Kojève ascribed to the ‘post-historical’ condition.

Animals, we are told, have no history. In Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) and I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), in which the artist shared a room with a coyote for eight hours a day, the animal appears as a heteronomous Other. Whereas humans never cease to reconfigure their societies and their identities within them, a coyote, it seems, is always a coyote. The animal is in this sense a limit, the outermost edge of the human, a figure problematized by Jacques Derrida’s The Animal that Therefore I am (2008) and Giorgio Agamben’s The Open (2004). But ‘human’ and ‘animal’ are flexible concepts, able to connote the social as well as the biological. In 2005 Mircea Cantor brought a wolf into a gallery, this time paired with a deer. Both wolf and deer seem ill at ease, and whereas Beuys managed to finally embrace his coyote, in Cantor’s Deeparture there is no climax: wolf and deer remain eager to avoid each other. In 2003 Anri Sala filmed an emaciated horse standing by the roadside (Time After Time), seeming to bear the symbolic brunt of the collapsing Albanian state. ‘Every animal is a female artist,’ was Rosemarie Trockel’s 1993 response to Beuys’ ‘every man is an artist.’ Together with Carsten Höller, in 1997 Trockel built Ein Haus fur Schweine und Menschen (A House for Pigs and People) for that year’s documenta X. But it wasn’t until dOCUMENTA(13) in 2012 that the animal fully emerged as a multivalent concept for artistic speculation, which – drawing on Donna Haraway’s writings – was made to thoroughly renegotiate the human. For his 2014 projects Companion Species and The Companion Species Manifesto (after a 2003 book of Haraway’s), exhibited at dépendance in Brussels and Deborah Schamoni, Munich, Henrik Olesen sketched out the continuity between animal microchipping and human biometric IDs illustrated by a series of photographic collages displaying inter-species affection. Julieta Aranda’s Tools for Infinite Monkeys (open machine) (2014) uses the monkey – with reference to the ‘Infinite Monkey Theorem’ in probability – as a metaphor for the twin blades of randomness and probability. At the end of May the Fotomuseum Winterthur will open Beastly curated by Duncan Forbes, Matthias Gabi, Daniela Janser, Mallika Leuzinger and Marco de Mutiis; a month prior, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin will feature Ape Culture, an exhibition curated by Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg (also heavily indebted to Haraway’s thinking) which will cast primates as the porous border between animal and human.

But the flurry of interest in the animal and the revival of Haraway’s ‘post-human’ runs deeper than micro-trends in exhibition making. It seems to be motivated by the imbrication of political, economic and ecolo­gical crises of recent years and the awareness that these have failed to effect tangible political change. As Fredric Jameson put it in 2003, it is ‘easier to imagine the end of humanity than the end of capitalism’.2 The moment when nature is completely sublated into culture, what Hegel theorized as humankind’s destiny, has re-emerged under a more ominous heading, the Anthropocene, a geological epoch denoting the period from 1945, the year of the first nuclear detonation, and roughly coinciding with Kojève’s ‘end of history.’ Though political disaffection seems widespread, the theories that have emerged in recent years – speculative realism, Accelerationism and the notion of a ‘Post-Internet’ condition – fail to have an adequate grasp on the new social forms and categories that have resulted. As the privileged site where the distinction between the social and the political is contended, the animal in general, and the primate, in particular, has taken over the territory where battles over gender, race, sexuality and human rights are fought. The creature in Human Mask is a long tailed macaque called f*cku-chan who works as a waiter in a Tokyo restaurant.3 Though f*cku-chan is Japanese, the ‘masked-monkey’ act traditionally stems from Indonesia, where it is known locally as Topeng Monyet. Bred in captivity or captured as infants, the monkeys undergo a gruelling training process. To strengthen their hind legs they are often hung by the neck with both hands tied up for weeks on end, until they finally acquire a human-like posture, learning to handle props and perform human chores.4 In the exhibi­tion Ape Culture at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Human Mask will be shown along with Anja Dornieden and Juan David González Monroy’s The Masked Monkeys (2013–14), a video-essay in which enslaved monkeys appear as an allegory for social hierarchies. What emerges out of Huyghe’s video, rather than a grim commentary on Kojève’s post-historical condition or on animal exploitation, is the performative dimension of the human: as much as ‘female’ and ‘woman’ do not necessarily overlap, ‘humanity’ can be seen as the effect of reiterated acting, which can be either coupled or decoupled from the concept of hom*o sapiens.

In a somewhat unexpected pairing, Ape Culture also brings together Nagisa Oshima’s Max, Mon Amour (1986) with Primate (1974) by Frederick Wiseman, an unnerving documentary about animal research. In Oshima’s film, a bored upper-class housewife starts an affair with a chimpanzee named Max. The husband’s obsession with watching his wife have sex with Max mirrors the thorough descriptions of simian intercourse of the Yerkes laboratory scientists. But Max, who stands as a signifier for the bestial impulses hidden under the veneer of civility, is ultimately tamed and housebroken, whereas at the Yerkes labs the steely commitment to protocol trumps a moral dimension and potential empathy. In the ’70s scientific methodology began to approach Oshima’s satire. The chimpanzee Washoe (caught in 1966 at the age of ten months) was taught sign language by Beatrix and Allen Gardner. Washoe was followed by Nim (also known as Nim Chimpsy, a pun on Noam Chomsky, the linguist) who was raised by a human family, and subsequently by Koko the gorilla, who besides mastering human communication became known for keeping a kitten as a pet. The attempt to break the silence between species also extended to other animals, but all of these experiments, scientists and research assistants – invariably female and white – attempted to rehabilitate the wild animal into becoming human. Besides a hidden gender and racial dimension, interspecies communication was fraught with another bias: the human-animal relationship depending not on merit but rather on power. No matter how well the animals performed, they all ended up back in lab cages. In Beastly the human-animal encounter is shown to heal social rifts (as in the work of Marcus Coates); it is shown to have an erotic dimension or unbridled affection, as in Carolee Schneemann’s Infinity Kisses (1986), a photographic series with the artist and her cat Vesper. It can, alternately, take the form of antagonism or aggression, as in El Gringo (2003), a video in which Francis Alÿs taped himself being attacked by a pack of dogs or as display and spectacle, as in in Katja Novitskova’s animal cut-outs.

At times allegorical, at times raw matter, only seldom is the animal allowed to simply be an animal, like the cat in Fischli and Weiss’s Büsi (2001), Tue Greenfort’s sausage-eating fox (Daimlerstraße 38, 2001), or the dogs who sniff and snuffle through a church aisle in Bojan Šarcevic’s It Seems that an Animal Is in the World as Water in the Water (1999), inscrutable in their ‘dogness’. All examples from a pre-YouTube era, these works seem to anticipate viral videos such as ‘Russian fishermen feeding fox’ or ‘cat rides bus’ and the millions of other animal videos now online. It is easy to dismiss these clips as part of the increasing infantilization of everything or as symptom of our osten­sibly ‘post-critical’ condition. But our desire to watch animal videos might itself be more than a symptom of regression. For Beuys, art was work, and the proletariat the only universal class. With most of us barred from all but a consumptive relation to civil society, watching animal videos might also be construed as a form of pas­sive resistance. Whereas Kojève sought to oppose the ‘animal’ to the ‘construct’, in the diffuse world of Post-Fordian economies all these figures are up for grabs. If the question of political subjecthood can no longer be answered by recourse to ‘artist’ or ‘citizen’, whether we have all in fact become Kojève’s ‘Japanese’, ‘American’ or ‘post-human’ is hard to decide. Replacing an obsolete notion of the ‘human’, perhaps the animal has become the new face of humanity.