Visual Opinions Workshop

Speciesism in art is for a big part taxidermy in art

This site writes: “Well they are dead anyway” … http://www.ravishingbeasts.com/taxidermy-artists/

But they exactly use the dead bodies of nonhuman animals because these animals obviously have lived before. Using a dead body is a means to gain possession in a definatory way over the de facto existential part of a living being – even when the individual is dead. Obviously there is a meaning of the procedure and use to the makers and onlookers of “taxidermic art”, because otherwise they could be using their own skills to sculpt their ‘works of art’ instead of using the physical remains of an animal body.

Taxidermic “art” is a way to grievously ridicule the fact that nonhuman animals are victimized by the majority of the human societies (people used human bodies in a comparable objectifying way).

Taxidermic “art” stands on the side of the human speciesist majority, in that it implicitly supports the normalcy that this majority segment of society has established. You are allowed to see the animal body as an object – not more and not less.

Taxidermic “art” uses a dead individual’s body – a body: a temple of any living being’s existence. Anybody who omits this scale of animal subjectivity automatially sides with the speciesist stance.

The kind of artists/arts that employ taxidermy and their audience rub into your face what they feel is “art” to tell you something that I would sum up as: ‘Look what we can do, look what we do to the inhabitants of this world. We care, but in a destructive and derogatory way.’

Effectively this type of artistic expression is an attempt to mute animal rights and antispeciesism, their ignroance towards critique comes across like an attempt to push other stances into absurdity, by using the cynicical rethoric toward animality and by riding comfortably on the wave of the overall lack of self-critique in contemporary art.

Animal objectification is an accepted visual rhetoric that gives the artists a means to silence ethical non-relativism and any critical and moral standpoint on the display of animal bodies in art.

What this art also is doing is that it is catering to the oppressive patterns that we have in our societies. In a way much of the mainstream art does that today, simply by voluntarily reducing self-expression to speaking in just one single language of aesthetics, thus supressung basic individuality and plurality in artistic expression.

Speciesist and nature-derogative art marks the spearhead of ideological human destructiveness though. While amongst humans people tend to act as if they are “open for discussion” , speciesist and nature-derogative “art” seems to voluntarily or involuntarily make clear that the capacity of free thinking, that humans claim for themselves, is merely a hatred for the existential realities and the independence in the meaningfulness all other existence.

It’s a question of might.

Here is an interesting example of an artist doing what she calls “vegan taxidermy” : http://www.vegantaxidermy.com/. A nice and interesting artistic project. (One could imagine abstract forms of such arts too.)

I’ve been mentioning taxidermy in previous posts, many speciesist artists use dead animals or their body parts. One of the most famed ones being Bansky, who is considered infallibly subversive by his fanbase and media https://www.farangis.de/blog/wurst.

Speciesism and some form of aesthetics, they seem to inevitably go together. This might be so because aesthetics can help give an excuse to prolong a wrong stance that one has taken, a wrong stance that one is acting up to and aware of doing so.

Speciesism comprises the conscious element of violence and active or witnessed (onlooker-) brutality towards a nonhuman animal or nonhuman animals in general.

The consciousness in brutality in speciesism often get aestheticized by putting the act of violence in the frame of doing something supposedly noble, dignified, heroic, “cool”, smartly provocative.

Aesthetics can normally also be a part of a momentum that breaks any chain of self-deception, and be a vehicle to relate to the experienced world. The sense of aesthetics isn’t something value-free, it’s something that depends on the motivations in an onlooker or an artist.

Does the aesthetical understanding in a person seek to rectify her actions and worldview only, and is thus just a means to an end? Or is the sense of aesthetics really the sense of connecting to the outer real world that’s being perceived?

I can relate to the world in a destructive form through the will to destroy and demean it, and I can relate to the world by seeing what is really there.