Wurst

My life is your life

The only thing that’s being made clear in Bansky’s http://thevillagepetstoreandcharcoalgrill.com (archived website also see https://bit.ly/banksy_sausages) is that animals are seen here as pathetic in their Erscheinung and that it seems to be thrilling to ridicule their physics and their core existential problems. It seems that the primate used in that exhibition is made from a taxidermically preserved body or parts of an animal body. Exactly as if the usage of dead nonhuman animals in arts wasn’t a form of objectification.

What difference does it make to state that such arts have an ethical or political idea that drives them, when the only impact really generated is a self-serving feel-good factor about being human or belonging to the group that enjoys the privilege of not being specisitically put out as an proxy for anything else but yourself? Art likes to pretend that it has a moral weight, and it likes to misuse that moral weight it believes to instrisically purport.

The same usual necrophilia thing goes for http://pollymorgan.co.uk/ who is a taxidermcal artist and assures the visitors of her site that her art is motivated by some form of “love” for nonhuman animals.

The best of the worst I recently came across was yet another notorious example of the scientist + artist cross-overs: http://www.rachelpoliquin.com/#/ravishingbeasts/ formerly http://www.ravishingbeasts.com.

And to sum this all up and to branch it constructively out: Have you ever thought about the relation of taxidermy and why biology renders the world as nothing more than a scientifically dissectable blueprint? Whenever bodies or body parts have been preserved for an onlooker, disrespect and prejudice has been involved.

If nonhuman animals were not robbed of their natural rights to live, and if their dignity was being respected, we would consider any taxidermical or other comparable displays of an animal’s dead body as shocking, just as we view the displayal of human body parts / dead bodies … like the bodyparts for example of the dead Saartjie Baartman: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saartjie_Baartman (whom her abusers called the “Hottentot Venus”) which were preserved and exhibited. Or, remember the necrophile bodypolitics of nazism that led to the unbelievable: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/medmurder.html [1]

… I found this interesting article about taxidermy: “Second Skins: Semiotic Readings in Taxidermic Reconstruction”
Pauline Wakeham, http://www.indigenouspolicy.org/index.php/ipj/thesis/view/41 (was accessible in 2005 at
http://www.transcanadas.ca/transcanada1/wakeham.shtml)

It would be apologetic to explain why I take this position, but nevertheless I want to remind you that many people hold a humanocetric view, and that to them it is perfectly normal if nonhuman animals are being ab/used or degraded, to us at this project the world is a place that isn’t selecting humans as their choice species that can, without consequence, rob anybody else who is either different from them or/and holds a different view, of their rights.

Rights exist on a basis of a plural truth, also on an inter-species social basis. Rights aren’t a simple matter of decree but of social reality.