Cat gifs may be one of the most popular forms of online entertainment, but museums and galleries need to provide a more thoughtful analysis of our relationship with animals, how we see them and they us, and how this has changed over time.
“In historical art, animals were used to symbolise or represent something about human lives and society,” says Fiona Parry, the curator of Animals and Us, an exhibition at the Turner Contemporary in Margate (until 30 September). “Contemporary artists question our relationship with animals in the context of the extinction crisis and climate change, and with a greater understanding of animal cognisance and intelligence than in the past.”
There is huge diversity in the approach to the subject in Animals and Us. More than 40 artists, including Mishka Henner, Candida Höfer, Mark Dion, Kiluanji Kia Henda and Marcus Coates, reflect on animals in post-industrial and post-colonial societies, in the wild, as part of the food industry, as pets or in zoos, and everything in between. Older artworks by JMW Turner, George Stubbs and others counterpoint the interconnecting themes of the contemporary works to show how animals symbolised human concerns, status and characteristics.
“This is a broad show in which a number of artists explore how we relate to or distinguish ourselves from animals, and how they use aesthetics to make us think about them,” says Parry. “This ranges from Henner’s distancing techniques seen in his aerial portraits of Texas feeding lots, where cattle are fattened up before slaughter, to Marcus Coates, who goes to extreme, even comical, lengths to create empathy with animals, as with his work, Apology to the Great Auk, a bird that was hunted to extinction in the mid-19th century.”
The Angolan Kia Henda uses the visual rhetoric of Victorian dioramas, and many a modern museum display case, to interrogate colonialism in his series titled In the Days of a Dark Safari. The animals have black cloth draped over them so we only see their horns. It evokes a lost paradise where animals can’t be seen and therefore hunted by humans, but also one where they are killed as trophies or for their horns, which happened during the colonial era and still does in Africa.
Dion also shadows and subverts the practices of natural history collections with meticulous mock-ups of museum displays, and sometimes uses live animals. His Theatre of the Natural World at the Whitechapel Gallery earlier this year charmed many visitors with an aviary filled with live zebra finches flitting, chirping and defecating on books hung from branches and strewn on the floor.
But using live animals as works of art or inside museums also plays into our uneasiness about how we treat them. Dion’s display prompted many questions about the finches’ welfare, how they were captured, how often they were fed and what was going to happen to them at the end of the exhibition.
Strong response
Live animals were also used in Sheep Pig Goat, a performance project by the theatre company Fevered Sleep, as part of last year’s Wellcome Collection’s exhibition Making Nature: How We See Animals. Professional musicians played chamber pieces while animals watched like an audience. Beyond them, a human audience also watched. The aim was to observe any empathy or communication between the species, or whether such notions were a human construct.
The appearance of animals in exhibitions or performance can be controversial. Last year, the Guggenheim in New York attracted the fury of animal rights activists for displaying a video of pit bull terriers facing each other on treadmills. The work was called Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other, by the Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. Similarly, a Belgian artist received death threats for his performance piece that entailed hurling cats up the steps of Antwerp train station. While these works are clearly metaphors for aspects of modern life, people react strongly to animal cruelty, or at least what they perceive to be cruelty.
As artists use the forms and methodologies of museum displays to question human beings’ relationship with animals, venues are becoming more design conscious in their natural history displays. Visitors and critics alike have greeted with enthusiasm recent redevelopments at the Natural History Museum, London, and the Grand Gallery of Evolution in Paris, with its ark-like freestanding “caravan” of endangered African animals and atmospheric sound, lighting and weather effects. But many institutions remain unsure of how best to display such collections.
“People like big animals and it can be a challenge to display smaller species,” Ashby says. “Last year, when I was the manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology in University College London, we ran an exhibition called Museum of Ordinary Animals, for which we tiled one of the walls with 4,500 mice skeletons. These specimens were amassed by one researcher and created a breathtaking display. Museums are aesthetic, visual spaces too, and we wanted to bridge the gap between research and display.”
Deeper connections
Children and families constitute such a large proportion of visitors to natural history museums and to the animal displays in mixed museums that the temptation is to anthropomorphise animals, says Ashby.
“Of course, animals do lend themselves well to display graphics and social media as a way of interpretation, and museum mascots are a huge marketing tool, but this has to be done carefully. For example, most children assume that the animals in our collections were found dead, but this isn’t always the case, and we have to think carefully about how we display and present stories about live collecting. People are quick to come to conclusions and judgement.”
Natural history is, almost by definition, outdated as an approach, says Henry McGhie, the head of collections and the curator of zoology at Manchester Museum, part of the University of Manchester. “Museums can take a better and more nuanced approach to promoting our connectedness to the natural world, something that meets the needs of the 21st century and takes what is useful from a 19th-century model,” he says.
“The job of the museum is not just to connect people with it, or the material in it, but also to connect people with the world. Visitors flood into museums to see natural history displays not because they are necessarily keen on dead, preserved animals, but because they are interested in animals and other wildlife. Museums help them feel part of something larger, something beyond themselves in a kind of ecology.”
Manchester Museum’s taxidermy polar bear was recently on open display with the words “wild”, “free” and “powerful” projected behind it on a loop. “The polar bear is the poster animal of climate change, but television documentaries and video clips of the bears suffering, for reasons that we don’t necessarily know much about, can have a negative effect as they makes us feel like we can do nothing to help,” McGhie says.
An advocacy booklet called 7 Million Wonders, which was produced by the North West Natural History Museums Partnership for institutions with natural heritage collections, sets out how people need nature and vice versa. This work was extended recently in Encountering the Unexpected, a project led by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries in Leicester.
“Museums are brilliantly placed to help bring the Sustainable Development Goals – promoted by the Paris agreement on climate change – to life, helping support a better future for people and nature,” says McGhie. “Museums of all kinds, not just those with natural heritage collections, have something to contribute to this wonderful agenda so that we can be institutions of the future, not the past.”
“Berger writes about how the link between animals and humans has been severed since the industrial revolution and the growth of capitalism,” says Stephen Whittle, the manager of the Atkinson. “Berger’s thesis is that the relationship with animals has shifted so much they have become objects of commerce and industry rather than autonomous creatures, and therefore effectively a memorial to themselves.
“We wanted to examine this critical thinking and apply it to the structure of the exhibition. Surprisingly, the works that we thought would be most challenging were the ones that created the most debate and interest.”
A reworking of taxidermy specimens by Andrea Roe, and Laura Ford’s twisting of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic tropes by blurring the distinctions between human and animal characteristics, were popular, says Whittle. “Bedtime Boy, a boy in a dressing gown, which morphs into an elephant’s head, prompted a strong response, with children wanting to cuddle him. It was not a sentimental response, though, because visitors sensed the unease and emotionally disturbed nature of the work.” The Atkinson has bought this piece for its permanent collection.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer
“In historical art, animals were used to symbolise or represent something about human lives and society,” says Fiona Parry, the curator of Animals and Us, an exhibition at the Turner Contemporary in Margate (until 30 September). “Contemporary artists question our relationship with animals in the context of the extinction crisis and climate change, and with a greater understanding of animal cognisance and intelligence than in the past.”
There is huge diversity in the approach to the subject in Animals and Us. More than 40 artists, including Mishka Henner, Candida Höfer, Mark Dion, Kiluanji Kia Henda and Marcus Coates, reflect on animals in post-industrial and post-colonial societies, in the wild, as part of the food industry, as pets or in zoos, and everything in between. Older artworks by JMW Turner, George Stubbs and others counterpoint the interconnecting themes of the contemporary works to show how animals symbolised human concerns, status and characteristics.
“This is a broad show in which a number of artists explore how we relate to or distinguish ourselves from animals, and how they use aesthetics to make us think about them,” says Parry. “This ranges from Henner’s distancing techniques seen in his aerial portraits of Texas feeding lots, where cattle are fattened up before slaughter, to Marcus Coates, who goes to extreme, even comical, lengths to create empathy with animals, as with his work, Apology to the Great Auk, a bird that was hunted to extinction in the mid-19th century.”
The Angolan Kia Henda uses the visual rhetoric of Victorian dioramas, and many a modern museum display case, to interrogate colonialism in his series titled In the Days of a Dark Safari. The animals have black cloth draped over them so we only see their horns. It evokes a lost paradise where animals can’t be seen and therefore hunted by humans, but also one where they are killed as trophies or for their horns, which happened during the colonial era and still does in Africa.
Dion also shadows and subverts the practices of natural history collections with meticulous mock-ups of museum displays, and sometimes uses live animals. His Theatre of the Natural World at the Whitechapel Gallery earlier this year charmed many visitors with an aviary filled with live zebra finches flitting, chirping and defecating on books hung from branches and strewn on the floor.
But using live animals as works of art or inside museums also plays into our uneasiness about how we treat them. Dion’s display prompted many questions about the finches’ welfare, how they were captured, how often they were fed and what was going to happen to them at the end of the exhibition.
Strong response
Live animals were also used in Sheep Pig Goat, a performance project by the theatre company Fevered Sleep, as part of last year’s Wellcome Collection’s exhibition Making Nature: How We See Animals. Professional musicians played chamber pieces while animals watched like an audience. Beyond them, a human audience also watched. The aim was to observe any empathy or communication between the species, or whether such notions were a human construct.
The appearance of animals in exhibitions or performance can be controversial. Last year, the Guggenheim in New York attracted the fury of animal rights activists for displaying a video of pit bull terriers facing each other on treadmills. The work was called Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other, by the Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. Similarly, a Belgian artist received death threats for his performance piece that entailed hurling cats up the steps of Antwerp train station. While these works are clearly metaphors for aspects of modern life, people react strongly to animal cruelty, or at least what they perceive to be cruelty.
As artists use the forms and methodologies of museum displays to question human beings’ relationship with animals, venues are becoming more design conscious in their natural history displays. Visitors and critics alike have greeted with enthusiasm recent redevelopments at the Natural History Museum, London, and the Grand Gallery of Evolution in Paris, with its ark-like freestanding “caravan” of endangered African animals and atmospheric sound, lighting and weather effects. But many institutions remain unsure of how best to display such collections.
“Museums are not particularly good at displaying animals,” says Jack Ashby, the new museum manager at the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge. “Investment tends to be in temporary exhibitions at the expense of permanent displays, which in mixed museums can mean that while they are popular, they can look shabby.”
Fact-based, text-heavy displays can also be counterproductive, says Ashby. “The way we talk about animals in museums is similar, with the same facts trotted out. Dinosaurs and dodos may be popular, but what museums haven’t been doing is using them to talk about societal issues such as biodiversity loss and climate change.”
Ashby’s 2017 book, Animal Kingdom: A Natural History in 100 Objects, considers the hidden biases in natural history museums and why we prefer some animals over others. Male species counterparts far outnumber females in museums, as do big animals compared with small. “People like big animals and it can be a challenge to display smaller species,” Ashby says. “Last year, when I was the manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology in University College London, we ran an exhibition called Museum of Ordinary Animals, for which we tiled one of the walls with 4,500 mice skeletons. These specimens were amassed by one researcher and created a breathtaking display. Museums are aesthetic, visual spaces too, and we wanted to bridge the gap between research and display.”
Deeper connections
Children and families constitute such a large proportion of visitors to natural history museums and to the animal displays in mixed museums that the temptation is to anthropomorphise animals, says Ashby.
“Of course, animals do lend themselves well to display graphics and social media as a way of interpretation, and museum mascots are a huge marketing tool, but this has to be done carefully. For example, most children assume that the animals in our collections were found dead, but this isn’t always the case, and we have to think carefully about how we display and present stories about live collecting. People are quick to come to conclusions and judgement.”
Natural history is, almost by definition, outdated as an approach, says Henry McGhie, the head of collections and the curator of zoology at Manchester Museum, part of the University of Manchester. “Museums can take a better and more nuanced approach to promoting our connectedness to the natural world, something that meets the needs of the 21st century and takes what is useful from a 19th-century model,” he says.
“The job of the museum is not just to connect people with it, or the material in it, but also to connect people with the world. Visitors flood into museums to see natural history displays not because they are necessarily keen on dead, preserved animals, but because they are interested in animals and other wildlife. Museums help them feel part of something larger, something beyond themselves in a kind of ecology.”
Manchester Museum’s taxidermy polar bear was recently on open display with the words “wild”, “free” and “powerful” projected behind it on a loop. “The polar bear is the poster animal of climate change, but television documentaries and video clips of the bears suffering, for reasons that we don’t necessarily know much about, can have a negative effect as they makes us feel like we can do nothing to help,” McGhie says.
An advocacy booklet called 7 Million Wonders, which was produced by the North West Natural History Museums Partnership for institutions with natural heritage collections, sets out how people need nature and vice versa. This work was extended recently in Encountering the Unexpected, a project led by the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries in Leicester.
“Museums are brilliantly placed to help bring the Sustainable Development Goals – promoted by the Paris agreement on climate change – to life, helping support a better future for people and nature,” says McGhie. “Museums of all kinds, not just those with natural heritage collections, have something to contribute to this wonderful agenda so that we can be institutions of the future, not the past.”
All creatures great and small
The Atkinson in Southport received 52,000 visitors at its recent exhibition Why Look at Animals?, making it one of its most popular shows. The exhibition took its title and theme from a 1967 essay by the art critic John Berger.“Berger writes about how the link between animals and humans has been severed since the industrial revolution and the growth of capitalism,” says Stephen Whittle, the manager of the Atkinson. “Berger’s thesis is that the relationship with animals has shifted so much they have become objects of commerce and industry rather than autonomous creatures, and therefore effectively a memorial to themselves.
“We wanted to examine this critical thinking and apply it to the structure of the exhibition. Surprisingly, the works that we thought would be most challenging were the ones that created the most debate and interest.”
A reworking of taxidermy specimens by Andrea Roe, and Laura Ford’s twisting of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic tropes by blurring the distinctions between human and animal characteristics, were popular, says Whittle. “Bedtime Boy, a boy in a dressing gown, which morphs into an elephant’s head, prompted a strong response, with children wanting to cuddle him. It was not a sentimental response, though, because visitors sensed the unease and emotionally disturbed nature of the work.” The Atkinson has bought this piece for its permanent collection.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer
