This Animal business

The animal business in art struck a chord with me, I've been writing about Georgian Poetry for a lecture I am giving on 20thC landscape photography, a brief description of the Georgian style would be that it was a pre World War One movement characterised by the use of plain language with strong pastoral elements - this type of poetry was stylistically ousted by the arrival of modernism (Eliot et al). The Georgians (named after George V) are usually dismissed by critics as "lark loving" (the bird that is) although others more positively describe the movement as representing "the crisis of lost subjectivity of the individual in the emerging confusion of modernism".

But the emerging confusion of modernism was merely the last stage in our dissociation from the animals. In the distant past when animal husbandry was time consuming and demanding of domestic resources we accepted murdering the beast for food was a ritual sacrifice. Because over their year(s) of nurture, the animals had become part of the family - the children had most probably given them pet names. This was the time when animals were frequently represented in art, although the zenith of this activity had been the paleolithic even up until the seventeenth century animals were as much a part of domestic life as the people. Perhaps the big shift came with the industrial revolution, when in consequence of abandoning the land for the city we also lost our association with the animals which we had been domesticating for the previous six thousand years. Interestingly the movement to the cities also saw the growth of "landscape painting" which did include animals as scaled motifs, but most of these landscape paintings were a romanticised description which ignored the harshness of an agricultural life; where for the peasant a harsh winter was often a life or death affair.

Apart from the great animal painters such as the scouser Stubbs who honourably painted the fine specimens owned by his patrons, by the end of the eighteenth century the portrayal of animals had almost entirely disappeared from visual art, the trend from Goya/Velasquez onwards would be that only pets (usually dogs) would appear in a picture with their master/mistress. I guess the heroic Victorian stags by Landseer deserve mention but which of us has actually seen a stag these paintings seem to presage the saccaharine school of African "wild life" painting, for the rest, in England at least, we have paintings of goats as christian metaphor or decorative pretty baa lambs. Apart from the horse depicted as a means of transport animals have ceased to be a part of the human landscape.

There was a brief artistic return with Picasso when he plundered motifs from Etruscan art. But Picasso's bulls are not cows, they are more Freudian symbols of Spanish machismo than anything Thomas Bewick may have etched. Nonetheless there is something admirable in the paleolithic shamanism of this period in Picasso's work, an evocation of the power and vitality of the beast which contrasts nicely with the libido of the rising class of civil servants and bankers of the era.

Finally we come to our own era where an artist employs fishermen to pull sharks out of the sea, not for food but as ..... and here I am lost for words - the spectacle of a species which has roamed the seas since the Jurassic meeting it's end pickled in formaldehyde for "art lovers"; if there is a metaphor here please explain it to me?

By contrast the Georgians of the early twentieth century seem eminnetly human in their attempt to reintegrate human life in a wider ecology, but as with today it's a marginal interest when compared to lifestyle shopping. No I am afraid that we are not only dissociated from any empathy with the animals, but increasingly with other members of our own species. How daily we hear the words "It's a matter of survival" and in consequence poverty in Africa or the outcome for the poorest countries of rising sea levels are now of marginal concern when asset prices are falling and our ill gotten good life is threatened. Gee yesterday I even found myself buying "Caged" hens eggs in Tesco's 82p per half dozen against my usual £1.52p for the free range (whatever that means) product.

Peter Hagerty
arklo.com
Liverpool