Sunday, July 11 to Friday, July 16, 2010

ART AFTERNOON ART EXCURSIONS – ART – THINKING ANIMALS:

Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence

While depicting the reciprocity between humans and animals is as old as the Lascaux cave paintings and Greek mythology there is a heightened urgency underlying the flood of such representations in today’s art, whether it’s Damien Hirst’s much-hyped “two-million dollar” shark in a tank of water (The Impossibility of Death) or David Altmejd’s The Index, an extensive sculptural installation at the Art Gallery of Ontario featuring a dismembered werewolf and several life-sized poultry-headed businessmen. Why is animal imagery so prevalent in contemporary art? American anthropologist Paul Shepard in his seminal book Thinking Animals brilliantly (and not uncontroversially) synthesizes examples drawn from anthropology, psychology, ecology and biology to address this and other questions relating to the human-animal dichotomy. Shepard expresses a certain ambivalence towards visual art’s obsession with surfaces and appearance, proposing that art has contributed to a near-universal psychic distancing from the realities of nature. Further he proposes that photography has speeded up the process of alienation, encouraging us to see everything around us in nature as fodder for a mechanically produced picture, that is to say, a representation distanced from the actual.