Seeing animals

One of the most striking paintings coming out of the Dutch 17th century is Paulus Potter’s ‘The life of the hunter’, also known as ‘Punishment of a hunter’. Instead of a single image, the painting offers a gruesome collage. There is violence, humour, beauty. Goethe called it a painted poem. Surrounded by a variety of classic hunting images in which humans are calling the shots, are two central scenes in which the roles are reversed.

Does this painting reflect Potter's moral position on how we are to treat animals? Or are we merely looking at a common trope of role-reversal between humans and animals (see: Sofya Vorobeva, 2022) that was popularized in prints?

The piece has been interpreted as a fable, a metaphorical commentary on political affairs at the time, evoking the dangers of warfare. Moreover, hunting scenes were sought after by local elites, to decorate their country estates and estheticize their favourite pastime. But seen in his wider oeuvre and the ways humans and animals figure in it, this painting seems more than a mere carnivalesque diversion seeking to please a wealthy patron. These depictions do not lionize humans as noble stewards of the animal world, nor do they depict them as honourable stalkers of wild game. The viewer is led to side with the fierce cattle fighting off bloodhounds, and to sympathize with the monkeys whose curiosity and tendency for imitation is used by the preying humans to make them glue their eyes shut.

Paulus Potter is an enigmatic figure in the history of art, in which his highly detailed and intimate portraits of farm animals made for a new genre of painting. His famous giant canvas with a young bull elevated the animal to the scale of an important historical figure. The bull looks straight at the viewer. He is depicted together with cows and sheep. There are flies buzzing around his head. A skylark hangs in the air. A frog and even some manure sits in the foreground. The farmer figure on the side behind a tree stump appears passive and dull in comparison to the fierce, knowing eyes of the animals. Potter’s paintings offer a mise-en-scene that decentres the human as the key social being in the landscape of the day.

The cattle and horses in his works appear to have much more character, their expressions have more depth, their postures are more at ease, compared to the bland figures on horseback or the flat faces of humans hanging out in the margins of these animal portraits. Potter often ventured from his house in the Hague into the surrounding countryside to sketch animals, spending lots of time drawing them from close by. Through attention to detail and composition he developed his technique to render a variety of nonhumans vibrantly present. Generating imagery that still enables viewers to meet these creatures, to look them in the eye and wonder about their lives. And to get a sense of how walking around in this landscape was something done in the presence of animals, who would respond, look back. With his foregrounding of animals and his sensitivity in representing their character, Potter’s work derived from and actively reproduced a more than merely human experience of space.

Janis Rafa seems to draw on the same insight Potter had: the possibility of encountering an animal, to face one and see another being. Not merely as symbolic figures, where animals are a device to say something about humans. Animals in her films are more than silent extras, not just aesthetic decoration of what otherwise would be a dull background. These are actual animals. Like us.

Like the works by Potter, the cinematic collage created by Rafa offers a portal, another take on our reality that is produced by different eyes than only human ones. Revealing a world that is full of mysterious creatures who we, in our contemporary landscapes, mostly treat mindlessly. Enclose in barren spaces. Ignore. Looking at these animals brings home how we have created a world that lacks the possibility of seeing animals for what, for who they are.

Requiem for space

In these works we venture out into the post-industrial zones of mainland Greece. We follow peri-urban infrastructure and enter the unseen sites to which animal lives have been relegated. We go into a landscape that has taken the control, use and disregard of animals to unimaginable levels. The landscapes depicted in these scenes are what remains after modernization and neglect. As shown by Rafa, animals inhabit a bizarrely dominating space that not merely controls them but radically impoverishes our world and the possibility of encountering anyone other than humans, except on our terms.

In ‘Requiem to a fatal incident’, we drive on a highway at night and come across a toppled truck full of pigs whose bodies are spread out over the asphalt, spilling out of the vehicle that was presumably taking them to slaughter. What appeared as improvised footage filmed from a car of a tragic but mundane accident, gradually turns out to be a well-timed single take that ends in a panorama of fireworks erupting over the cityscape. Strangely poetic and darkly humoristic, the scene punctuates how the incidents animals routinely undergo are hardly noticed.

Some of the scenes exhibited in Eye seem staged and scripted – as far as the animals allowed - but are shot in places that appear ‘found’, generating a documentary but highly aesthetic feel. More than outright revealing cruelty or neglect, the camera is set up as a kind of artistic research into our creaturely existence. This a mode of film making that creates conditions for scenes to unfold, but also follows animals where they may lead, motivated by a curiosity that appears to require training the camera on animals, rather than the other way around. Instead of dominating animals to make them perform the script, it exposes the filmmaker to the quirkiness and interests of dogs, horses, chickens, who can then be found to determine our shared experience of a place.

With this sensibility, film can be seen to have the power to reveal an essential quality of modern landscapes: how these have become machines for preventing any unruly encounters with nonhumans apart from places that guarantee absolute docility and control.

One of the most haunting passages in the exhibition is ‘The Space Between Your Tongue and Teeth’. A race horse is running on a moving treadmill. It is night. A remote place. Apart from the sound of the horse running it is quiet. A beautiful animal is virtually abandoned in a technical installation geared to produce a trained horse. The animal is there to maintain its condition. To retain its value. The horse is alone. Running. Going nowhere. We have entered the behind the scenes of horse racing. Not to see the more obvious cruelty and suffering associated with that, but to be confronted by what we have done to these animals, and to the space we share. We have created environments geared around the complete absence of wonder, of love, of any interest in animals as characters. Where care is mechanical, automated and reduced to its bare necessity.

A horse is wearing a hood with plastic goggles. To protect the animal from hurting herself? To prevent us from looking the animal in the eye? To ensure they will not be able to see us? We see shiny metal objects used to control these horses, to be positioned in the space between their tongue and teeth, pre-empting the question of why they don’t resist, why they don’t refuse to partake in this grotesque masquerade of human domination.

Whereas the depiction of the confined horse on its forced fitness run appears to document a condition found by Rafa, in another scene we see a horse undergoing a washing session that suggests a very different form of relating

Metal bars and neon signs

In this exhibition, Rafa’s film scenes are accompanied by other types of media: metal bars and neon signs. The steel frames that keep cows in check are mounted as sculptures. They are on loan from a Dutch dairy farm. Until recently these constrained the bodies of cows. We can still see and feel the dirt and the traces where large warm bodies continuously rubbed. Parts of the cold metal appear cleaned by the licking of bored, powerful tongues.

This is the architecture that defines the spaces that animal bodies are allowed to occupy. We live in a world ordered and framed by technologies used to hold animals, to confine them and break their resistance. Barbed wire, concrete barriers, steel fences. Developed to control production animals, these now shape the way we relate to the landscape.

Language is largely absent in the scenes exhibited. Silence means consent. Or aren’t these animals silent? The exhibition’s title – Feed me. Cheat me. Eat me. - suggests animals are dependent on humans and subsequently betrayed. The title’s grammar implies humans are the ones doing this to them – but also that the animals are speaking out. Indicting us. Or inviting us?

Besides the steel frames there are neon signs scattered in the exhibition. Where the metal barriers are the indestructible infrastructure of physical control of bodies ostensibly preventing interaction, neon is the ephemeral medium used to symbolically address, to lure in, and produce, humans as consumers. The way we communicate with humans and confine animals – generating the possible space for making meaning – is materialized in radically opposite ways.

We have built a world that strictly separates between on one hand the controlling of bodies, with hard surfaces, barbed wire, and on the other hand the communication of language as purely symbolic, unreadable for animals. Meanwhile we ignore all their signalling, unseeing the potential richness of a multispecies world full of meaning making and receiving. While if we try, even on these hard media we can feel their traces, of lively bodies pressing against the barriers we installed.

Punishment

'Lacerate' shows the interior of a traditional country house where we see a group of dogs; hunting dogs resembling those painted by Potter. Water is leaking from the ceilings and down the staircase. One dog is bringing a piece of meat to her puppies in the bathroom. Some dogs are frantically gnawing on an elegant sofa.

Gradually, following the dogs tearing up a dead animal in the hallway and running up the stairs, we learn what may have happened. The camera portrays a man lying on the floor. Dogs are sniffing at his naked body, and the pool of blood around his head. In another room we see a woman who sits, breathing heavily, staring into the distance.

The punishment of the hunter here seems to have been performed by a woman, unable to move or speak. The dead man in the leaking house, ornamental ceiling falling apart, can be taken as a fable about resisting domestic abuse. This is about dismantling the patriarchy, in a long art historical tradition of female avengers of male violence.

But what if this was not just a parable about humans? What if we see, besides domestic violence, also the animals? Was this woman the agent of intersectional revenge, entering an alliance to topple the patriarchy and reverse relations between man and animal in a single blow?

The scene perhaps is an indictment, or a warning. Humans are silent. The animals have taken over the space, they determine the action. The dogs are running down the stairs passing an overflowing sink filled with an aesthetic still-life, a tableau of dead game. A head is dangling, elegantly-tragically. Human time appears frozen. Blood has been dripping from the neck of the naked hunter. Dogs are sniffing between his legs. And, in the final scene, we can see the woman walking through the hallway to head outside, accompanied by the dogs.

Landscape with animals

Seeing the ways animals are confined in contemporary space, it appears we have failed to appreciate and take up the sensibility evoked in Potter’s works. We have built a world intent on not-feeling: metal bars, asphalt, concrete structures, fences.

In this exhibition, Rafa’s works produce a genre of film that is driven by animals as central protagonists, without pushing them into preset human narratives. Seeing these films may help us realize how our feelings are trained, how our vision is oriented, how we learn viewing habits and inhabit cultures of sensibility, shaped through different media and genres. We see how the landscapes we inhabit allow for certain types of narratives that we can imagine, certain modes of encountering that speak to us.

More than ever, there seems to be a gap between on the one hand the ability of the arts, and of animals in these, to evoke profound encounters, a sense of the life changing potential of a wild range of other beings, and on the other hand a landscape and language of disconnect, neglect, ignoring and ignorance. The exhibition sketches a world defined by the stark choice between zones of indifference, control and domination versus a world that embraces reciprocity and sensuous intimacy with other bodies - which exposes humans to affective and bodily vulnerability.

In Rafa’s feature film Kala azar the human characters’ emotional lives are driven by the omnipresent animals. The sensibility to the presence of seeing beings other than humans changes the way we experience the environments we inhabit. This is not just about loving animals in warm and happy encounters, a harmonious utopia where all is well. As Kala azar shows, the intimate bond between humans and animals also opens up to dangers and fears, exposing us to a landscape that may harm and unsettle.

Paulus Potter died at the age of 28 from TB, a common disease at the time, transmission of which is associated with raw milk. Had he come too close to his subjects of fascination? There is danger lurking in opening up to the suffering of animals. But these paintings and films urge us to do so nevertheless. There is so much to see.