A Report to an Academy: Animality and Display

A REPORT TO AN ACADEMY: ANIMALITY AND DISPLAY

COCO LOPEZ

CONTENTS

I. THE MIMETIC ANIMAL .......................................................................................... 10

II. A LAZY MILITANT .................................................................................................. 44

III. THE VELOCITY OF WIC ......................................................................................... 70

IV. BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................... 109

“Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark

of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to

experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret

and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.” — James Baldwin1

07

A REPORT TO AN ACADEMY: ANIMALITY AND DISPLAY

Coco Lopez

08

09

10

On all accounts there was something a little different with the fabled fabulist of the

6th century B.C., Aesop.

I. THE MIMETIC ANIMAL

11

12

His ugliness and birth into slavery are standards points in the multiple constructions

of his identity from the first historical record of his life as scribed by Herodotus

to recent inquiries.

13

14

There is also his noted swarthiness usually tied to an etymologically dubious linking

of Aesop to an Ethiopian as popularized during the Middle Ages.2

15

16

Within a xenophobic outlook his physical appearance characterized a type of inferiority;

while his capacity to outwit others cemented his position as a superior mental figure.

17

The moral based fables ascribed to Aesop include a camel that would like to dance as a

monkey does, miserably fails, and is clubbed by the beasts of the forest.

18

19

Other favorites include an ass that starved to death trying to survive on dew as

grasshoppers do; and a plentitude of shadows confusing the animals that bear them.

20

21

As these examples show, the morals of his fables often suggest that going against one’s

nature will punish just as equally as submitting to it.

22

Aesop is one of many mythological, usually male, tricksters. In the U.S., folktales of

the Signifying Monkey (who dreams of reversing power relationships with the lion via

the elephant) and Uncle Remus’s tales of Bre’r Rabbit are examples of the trickster’s

manifestation during the institution of slavery –from the colonial era onwards.

23

24

25

26

27

Elsewhere, we see this figure appear again in folklore and through variations of Ifá

based religions including Santeria, Lucumi and Vodou.

28

The core of these archetypes is prevalent in narratives produced during instances

of transnational slavery. They are still present, constantly shifting to address

present concerns.

29

30

31

The ability to speak through others is a skill that comes easily to the aforementioned

figures, thus allowing them to be understood.

32

They are excellent ventriloquists. In these narratives, literal meanings are shunned

for figuration in an aspiration for an allegory. The fundamental impulse in such cases

is to redeem a lost moment that has passed.

33

As Craig Owens notes, “Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery; the allegorist does

not invent images but confiscates them. He lays claim to the culturally significant,

poses as its interpreter.” 3

34

To make any point clear in a capitalist structure one always speaks through someone

or something else in order to hide their inherent deformities.

35

36

However, such deformities are always unveiled, as Jacques Derrida notably states

“The fact that a trace can always be erased, and forever, in no way means---

and this is a critical difference---that someone, man or animal, can of his own

accord erase his traces.” 4

37

38

The inerasable trace is a cinematic favorite. David Lynch’s 1980 film The Elephant Man

dramatizes the biography of Joseph Merrick, a man with several physical impairments

who worked as a human curiosity who exhibited himself throughout Europe.

39

When Merrick screams out “I am not an animal. I am a human being,” after

being cornered by a group of men in the a train station, he illustrates that both

the dominated and dominator share the same need to push themselves away from

animality in order to gain power. 5

40

In that frame of thinking, anyone can have power, as long as one is human and

not an animal.

41

Of course to begin with Aesop, is to begin at an ambiguous place with an ambiguous

person.

42

43

The speciesist gaze is a predecessor to racism and its relationship to the categorizing

of difference. Following this lineage the act of categorization acts first as a technology

of power and then as one of control. 6

44

II. A LAZY MILITANT

The narrator in A Report to an Academy, Franz Kafka’s short story, tells an academy

his account of his transformation from an ape to a human through mimicry.

45

“I didn’t imitate human beings because they appealed to me; I imitated because I was

looking for a way out, for no other reason.” 7

46

Monkeys is a misnomer for primates—an easier designation to remember than what

can be had by following the biological classification of the order of primates—stems

from their global use in images that caricature people of African descent.

47

Unlike Red Peter, the narrator of A Report to an Academy, becoming an ape, not

human, is my way out.

48

How one identifies with this stain of a caricature, a floating signifier, can lead to vastly

different interpretations of its usage.

49

As Christopher Peterson notes in his comparison of the use of the trope of the ape in

Edgar Allen Poe and Richard Wright’s work, “The monkey as a signifier produces a

series of meanings that remain irreducibly multiple, divided, and inexhaustible. Given

these necessarily limitless significations, the correlation between ape and human is

not essentially and irremediably pejorative.” 8

50

51

Any image of a monkey now carries the deposits of its caricaturized violence in an

obscure manner that covers its traces of social tension.

52

In addition to the use of monkeys in folkloric traditions and in images that subjugate

groups of people through racist constructions of naturalist discourses, the trope of the

being-ape and its mimetic nature is one that fetishizes the option of being another.

53

An earlier use of the monkey as caricature can be found in the form of the French

Singerie; 9 and was most popular during the 18th century. It developed hand in hand

with the Chinoiserie and its orientalist complications.

54

55

The Singerie and other pre-Darwinian caricatures of primates were often based on

the animal acting human. After Darwin’s theory of evolution was popularized this

caricature is modified. It is no longer the monkey that becomes human through

mimicry, but the human who becomes their monkey self.

56

57

The speciesist’s logic was used to justify, amongst other atrocities, the display

of humans in ethnographic exhibitions that included sites such as museums,

carnivals, and zoos.

58

Of particular note is Ota Benga, a man from the then Congo Free State, who was

enslaved under the regime of King Leopold II and then recruited by an American

missionary for the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904.

59

Afterwards, when arrangements of his display at the American Museum of Natural

History as a curiosity failed, he was placed in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo

where he often assisted the animal keepers until public outrage over the exhibition of

a person stepped in. 10

60

On the cusp of World War I Benga committed suicide.

61

62

The exhibition of people such as Benga and Saartjie Baartman are traces that cannot

be erased from contemporary sites of exhibition-making such as museums.

63

They are present every time a country requests that a work or cultural remnant be

returned from the supposed safe haven of the museum.

64

Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s Les statues meurent aussi was made in 1953 under a

commission from the British Museum, the Museum of the Belgian Congo, and Paris’s

Musée de L’Homme.

65

66

The film purposefully criticizes the colonial relationship between Europe and Africa

by pointing to the commercialization of African culture. “But a moving black is still

black art,” is uttered by the narrator as an image of a man running is seen.

67

The definition of black art is cemented in the film as tied to movement —whether

it is labor, dance, or sports— and the experience of it as the viewer, participator,

or performer. 11

68

While the film points to the commodification of religious artifacts, masks, textiles,

dance and sports in a critique of colonialism it still tugs on the same sentimental

strings of curiosity it chronicles.

69

The irony of the film falls into the traps of the exact gaze it ridicules. It doubly exhibits.

The filmmakers criticize one type of exploitation over a group of people while engaging

in another form of the same exploitation.

70

The letters WIC may stand for the Dutch West India Company or the Women, Infants,

and Children federal nutrition program.

III. THE VELOCITY OF WIC

71

72

As the story goes, in 1613 Jan Rodrigues abandoned his Dutch ship in what would come

to be known as New Amsterdam a decade later. This black merchant born in present

day Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic is the first recorded immigrant to

reside in what is now Manhattan. 12

73

This historical trace influenced my pursuit of analyzing what it means to be a New

Yorker. Rodrigues symbolically complicates established narratives of the colonial

beginnings of this U.S. city.

74

The recent Mars One13 call for applicants illustrates the continued relevance of the

Netherland’s colonial past in our contemporary moment.

75

The Dutch influence in the Americas may be lesser than that of the British or

Spanish, however it is their influence that ultimately shaped the paths that New

York City would take.

76

77

The Dutch may not be the group that ultimately claims power on Mars, but they are

steadfastly attempting to be the first group to organize its colonization with a pool of

global applicants.

78

The showing or exhibiting of tropes such as those in Les statues meurent aussi is a

normalizing gesture that supports an effort to clean the past. While creating a space

for dominated groups to be represented, it still does not offer inclusion.

79

80

When only certain narratives are allowed to fill the gaps created by the missing pieces

of diversity, current frictions are dismissed. This dismissal propels stereotypes to

continue being the tool of choice used to organize roles of subjectivity.

81

The market requires a catalogue of subjects.

82

83

At the moment when everyone has become commodified, the staged self is thus

distributed in parcels that allow for the seemingly formless to be tightly controlled.

84

This allows the curious seeker to employ a strategy of emancipation that is not tied to

the desire of becoming a subject, but rather of asserting objecthood.

85

The paradigm of representation rests on the fallacy of the authentic subject. Hito Steyerl

asserts that by affirming one’s role as an object we take the role of Walter Benjamin’s

rubble of history as opposed to the angel of history that looks towards the past.

86

“Things are never just inert objects, passive items, or lifeless shucks, but consist of

tensions, forces, hidden powers, all being constantly exchanged.” 14

87

88

89

In the course from the Eighteenth century to the present, the curator has shifted from

the amateur with his cabinet of wonders to the PhD wielding professional.

90

The same postmodern impulse that invoked multiculturalism reformulated the

museum’s intuition of their audience into a spectacle that straddles both education

and entertainment.

91

After mass tourism and revolutionary attitudes converge upon each other post-1968,

questions of who the museum serves abound.

92

By supporting new audience groups, the museum supports a market that levitates

between education and entertainment in order to create a universal viewpoint.

93

94

The late capitalist museum is a factory with cultural workers that operate under the

same levels of mechanization as their industrial predecessors15. Its products are the

remnants of a biopolitical production that overwhelmingly encompasses all aspects of

social life from the economic to the cultural.

95

The museum has yet to shed its roots as a machine of categorization.

96

A museum, of art or otherwise, profits from those who have a voice.

97

The displaying of artifacts is the act in which such institutions narrate and construct

a history of those who would supposedly be lost in the transit of time.

98

This is somewhat similar to the attitude of “defending the defenseless” that is present

in some animal rights arguments.

99

Thus, the agency of the individual is replaced by the institutional power of the

museum and its sponsors.

100

Animality is at the crux of display practices. The regurgitation of violence looms over

the appropriation of its effects.

101

102

103

The natural history museum follows the ethnographic zoo-exhibition structure,

but so too does the art museum. The mechanics of exclusion and forms of

domination are inherent in the display of any thing. In effect, to point to one

thing is to ignore another.

104

Display, as the staging of the artist’s self, continues to be tied to market requirements

of authenticity and criticality.

105

Objects and the exhibition apparatus are used as a way for the viewer to create

a moment of self-gratification in their own subjectification during the act of

localizing the artist.

106

The proximity to an origin is central here.

107

1 Baldwin, p. 14

2 Baker, p. 561

3 Owens, p. 69

4 Derrida and Wills, p. 401

5 David Lynch, Director, Elephant Man. 1980.

6 In Without Offending Humans: A Critique of Animal Rights, Élisabeth de Fontenay defines the speciesist as “the one who does not take into account or takes insufficiently into account the interests of beings who are not a part of his species, the one who, in animal experimentation, for example, and in industrial breeding, treats animals as he would not treat certain men: flagrant inequality in the consideration of interests.” p. 54

7 Kafka, p. 254

8 Peterson, p. 5

9 This word is translated as monkey trick in English.

10 Burnham, p. 185

11 Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, Directors, Les statues meurent aussi, 1953.

12 Scheltema and Westerhuijs, p. 205

13 The Mars One Foundation is a Dutch not-for-profit that hopes to establish the first human settlement in Mars in 2023 via the private industry. It invites people to submit video applications online in a contest to secure a spot as part of the mission.

14 Steyerl, p. 55

15 According to Rosalind Krauss, “And it also does not stretch the imagination too much to realize that this industrialized museum will have much more in common with other industrialized areas of leisure—Disneyland say—than it will with the older, preindustrial museum. Thus it will be dealing with mass markets, rather than art markets, and with simulacral experience rather than aesthetic immediacy.” Krauss, p. 16

NOTES

109

Baker, Howard. “A Portrait of Aesop.” The Sewanee Review 77.4 (1969): 557-90. JSTOR. Web. 16 Sept. 2013.

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon, 1984. Print.

Burnham, Philip. “The Ethnographic Zoo, Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo Review.” Transition 60 (1993): 184-91. Print.

Derrida, Jacques, and David Wills. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Critical Inquiry 28.2 (2002): 369-418. Print.

Fontenay, Elisabeth De. Without Offending Humans: A Critique of Animal Rights. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 2012. Print.

Framer Framed and the Van Loon Museum. Symposium: Suspended Histories. Symposium: Suspended Histories. Framer Framed, n.d. Web. 3 Oct. 2013.

Kafka, Franz, and Nahum N. Glatzer. The Complete Stories. New York: Schocken, 1995. Print.

Krauss, Rosalind. “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum.” October 54 (1990): 3-17. Print.

Les Statues Meurent Aussi. Dir. Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. Alain Resnais & Chris Marker - Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die) - 1953. Youtube, 19 Aug. 2012. Web. 16 Sept. 2013.

Peterson, Christopher. Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality. New York: Fordham UP, 2013. Print.

Scheltema, Gajus, and Heleen Westerhuijs. Exploring Historic Dutch New York: New York City, Hudson Valley, New Jersey, and Delaware. New York: Museum of the City of New York, 2011. Print.

Shubert, Karsten. The Curator’s Egg: The evolution of the museum concept from the French Revolution to the present day. London: Ridinghouse, 2009. Print.

Steyerl, Hito, and Franco Berardi. The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg, 2012. Print.

The Elephant Man. Dir. David Lynch. Perf. John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins. StudioCanal, n.d. DVD.

IV. BIBLIOGRAPHY

With thanks to: Mom, Tatiana Lobos Huber, Paul Ramirez Jonas.

Copyright © 2013 by Coco Lopez

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