37: how owls

Dear Andrea, Gareth and Terike, 

Gareth shared your Taskafa film before the Istanbul Trip. I was moved by your resolved and tender more-than-humanist filmmaking. The kind attention you give to animals and their relations. When I was piecing together the images for this collection I’m calling Taskrabbit, I found myself wishing I had more voices. Taskafa does this quite beautifully. It's such a generous cinema. I wondered how to add more voice, more perspective, to these visual diaries. I returned to a talk that Terike Haapoja gave, which impressed itself on me, and I had saved in my bookmarks. When I placed the audio onto the timeline, it was filled with resonances, affinities and helped me think about how we converse today and the uses of these media. I suppose I’ve been thinking about what we mean when we say art and also what some have called possessive individualism.

The other day I was sitting in a tree with Agnes and I looked up at her perched high up in the branches and she appeared to me like a thought in the mind of the world.

Kindly,
Perry

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Dear Arnaud,

The owls are indeed not what they seem. 

Some years ago I had written something about owls that I wanted to share with you, it felt resonant. It took me a while to track it down. I searched through hard drives, PDF’s, old computers. While going through a project called the coliseum, where I thought it was, I began to feel a little like my art practice might be a little like a mental illness. And I shuddered when one of the drives wouldn’t load. How tenuous this all is... 

I found the line eventually in a document called charnel grounds or diminishingly yours.

When I read a wiki about the cultural symbology of owls I pretty much sober up from any nostalgia for techno-human cultures past.

That was the line. It seems smaller now. 

I’ll also wanted to include this unsettling GIF.

I’ve gotten to a place where I can no longer bear Lynchian horror. I walked out of Blue Velvet at the BFI last fall. Even the paperback covers outside on a book sellers table were too much for me. Even the pottery shards on the banks of the Thames. 

I also came across this journal entry in my search:

How owls have a way of announcing, 
demarcating the beginnings or endings of things. 
How owls. 

When my daughter was born, 14 years ago, an owl came the night before. It perched on the eaves and called for an hour before she went into labor. 

I found this print at a market in Mexico City and thought it would make a good cover for your owls. Part of me just wants to redesign book covers for texts I love. I imagine a future where we print our own, with chosen covers and type, with vegetable inks on compost paper and then put them in the garden when we’re finished. And also beautiful editions, made to last, cared for in spacious and hospitable libraries where people linger because compassionate and collective intelligence has organized the world as such. 

I’m perhaps one of these incorrigible sophists you describe, with a crude grasp of ethology, a strong ethological intuition, and a shared distrust of the regime of science. 

In your Latourian Hitchcock-zoom of scientistic ethological gains and anthro-technologically bound hubris, I found a resonant feeling. Situated in or at least inflected towards the capacious contemporary art field where we’ve found ourselves.

An accumulating repulsion is moving me steadily away from a contemporary art that seems largely determined by its neoliberal compatibility. Though for some reason I keep returning, sending up flares. 

The project of theoretically redeeming contemporary arts machinations feels increasingly futile, affirmative. Of course, it's always more than this. A gleaning. A porousness.

The popularity of Animism at the more critically-engaged peripheries of contemporary art has produced some interesting conversations, though I’m concerned this designation, Animism, may be more of a reverse indictment of the discipline. In a very unrigorous way I became interested in what I think of as western or popular animism (perhaps the only kind) which finds its articulation in a diverse and unexpected range of phenomena, including the animal videos of social media. I get a sense that these videos, which often circulate quickly and indiscriminately, hold promise for reanimating our relations. 

I started the informal Institute for Interspecies Sociality to simply arrange and score videos depicting animals in wondrous forms of relation. Relations that might, as you put it, escape the trawling nets of empirical science. The tenor of these videos are light hearted and friendly but that should not preclude their depths and epistemic potency. A video of a swan feeding a school of koi resolved in me a lingering ambivalence about pescatarianism. This swan feeding koi completely overwhelmed me with its beauty and compassion. I had already stopped eating birds after observing the startling depth of relations between my daughter and one of the chickens she cared for. Roxanne, as my daughter called her, would run up to Agnes after school, craning her neck around her in a loving embrace.

The departing point for the Institute of Interspecies Sociality is how stunningly self-evident animal mindedness and generosity is, as these millions of popular videos on YouTube demonstrate. Watching a video of two species socializing makes this as plain as day, and makes all the scientific and specialized jargon and posturing look a bit silly at times, no? I mean the rigor and depth of commitments in your book is anything but silly, I simply mean to say, it's a peculiar mode of address. I understand it perhaps best through media theory, historically produced by technologically-determined rituals. Your writing has offered me many helpful ways of describing these concerns as well as a generous reading list to explore. I experience your owls as a beautiful and moving act of care and concern. And I also have to thank you for making your lectures available publicly online. This is such a generous act and I can see how this spirit animates your teaching.

I struggle to understand how agnotology operates in the animal industry. Its practices and protagonists, as well as a more generalized kind of complicity. It's astounding, really. Also how quickly and arbitrarily one can have a shift in their ethical commitments. I suppose this capacity for change opens invitations to artists to socially address their concerns. I also see how much beliefs around animals ethics shift between cosmologies. In my own experience it’s been theories of mechanism and structural obfuscation at the intellectual and physical levels that served the role of protecting and perpetuating horrific animal practices, alongside a sophisticated advertising culture that misdirects further. Though as clearly as I feel about the horrors of animal agriculture from this juncture, it also feels difficult for me to extend these feelings towards any kind of universal ethical claim. I get the sense though we should definitely be staying with the trouble, as Donna might say.

The owl GIF isn’t helping. 

I have a set of concerns around what I call scopic chauvinism and what I’ve heard described as a bias towards charismatic megafauna. Or to put it another way, to what scale are we ethically bound? Is there something like a threshold of visibility at the human and technological level that determines our ethical commitments? The Jains won’t harm bugs or even pull up crops that would in turn disturb them. Ahimsa. I came across this article recently and learned that some Jains have an issue with fermentation, which really poses some problems for me. These concerns, at the very least, offer practices for widening our awareness and care towards our entangled world.

I’ve been developing these kinds of practices at an intertidal zone near my home, where I walk gingerly through the pools cultivating attention, wondering if my wonder is worth the imposition of my presence. I met a man there the other day who introduced himself as a docent of the reef. He shared with me gleanings of poetic study, about shark purses and intergenerational butterfly migrations, single-cell diatoms and their sedimentation. He suggested there was a great strength in the bonds formed by touch and wondered too if it was worth the trampling. He warned that we can’t even see the damage we’re doing. Trasjivs and nigodas for the Jains. I wrote down once in my journals, how does one take a step without violence?

What does a microbial ethics look like? Can you love and carry a parasite like a child? What does it mean to add plant intelligence to our considerations? I can also understand reciprocal relationships with plants. And the other way, or the non-dual way? How do we practice ethics at a Gaian scale? It’s quite a complicated picture... And for many, I imagine, especially those living in neoslavery, or chickens lets say, there is a need to explicitly redress these extreme conditions of bare life, right now. What are the approaches and containers that include the most? What are the most urgent needs?

I sometimes wonder if the dependence on meat is related to the crises of soil, as a result of industrialized farming, and the processing of foods with lots of toxic sugar. I understand these trends to have produced nutritionally-deficient, food-resembling vehicles for drugs which feed a capitalist food-medical industrial complex. I imagine that if people had access to a healthy plant-based diet cultivated from ecologically robust and diverse systems, in place of poisonous processed foods, there would be less of a craving for meat. I suspect meat is used to try to heal from the effects of these toxic food cultures. An indigenous American friend once shared with me that his tribe regards meat as medicine.

I imagine a transition from these horrific food systems towards remediative farming practices would benefit a lot from what indigenous knowledge has survived the more-than -cultural genocides. I’ve really come to see the colonial plantationcene as it's been theorized by Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway as the primary driver of so many of our problems. 

As someone who eats dairy and eggs, and can easily imagine reciprocal interspecies relations, I wonder what ethical practices with these animals might be. I go to farmers markets where I know animals have a better life than those that are industrially imprisoned and slaughtered. Though I imagine that many of these animals from whose bodies I consume are slaughtered for their flesh, which makes me complicit to a degree I’m unable to reconcile. The sacredness of cows in India may be instructive, where dairy is consumed and regarded as holy. I supposed I imagine something like a labor rights for animals, certain conditions regarding treatment, quality of life, shelter, time with their family and kin, retirement and so on. I suppose this is already the case, just with shamefully low standards. Is this too reformist? Perhaps legal structures follow something more, poetic? Like the way eating dogs in the States became totally abhorrent culturally, and then legally ratified (only in 2018).

As I wandered with your owls deeper into a speculative and spOOOky correlationist woods it occurred to me that contemporary art has likely not fully appreciated the implications of these new materialist and posthuman turns, or perhaps more significantly, sense the threat of these shifting paradigms to the sovereignty of their market-centric Art. Also this is the moment where your text emerges unambiguously as a r t for me. I feel, perhaps sympathetically with some new materialist thought, that art is provisionally codetermined by subjects, objects and times. This is an open and friendly criteria that can be extended beyond anthropocentric concerns. I suppose this is a long walk to say I find your owls art and poetry itself, perhaps not as more commonly understood as about it. 

Do you get the sense, while choosing your interlocutors across a rather esoteric timespace, for example Dommergue on Huyghe’s untitled human, that our sphere of interest—that is contemporary art—is like a small, strange but also quite powerful cult? It reminds me of early Christianity, and certainly on a related continuum, as Byung-Chul Han has been exploring recently. I’m noticing a co-option of contemporary art devices, as well as the excesses of poststructuralism, as part of the fascist revival. Will there be a contemporary art crusade? Is something like that at work when a big museum opens, changes the local culture, and displaces people from their communities? Other forms of sociality and aesthetics superceded by rarefied speculative financial objects in chilly modern necropoli. I felt a bit this way visiting Arter in Istanbul, where I also reveled in their ecopoetics and beautiful library. I wonder too, how many people really dwell intellectually in these quasi-religious sites of contemplation and discourse? Like how many people are really still thinking about the ethicopoetical implications of the masked macaque in Huyghe’s Fukushima film. My sense of scale is confused, deterritorialized, algorithmically distorted.

By the end of of your nonhuman worlds chapter, you invite Ana Teixeira Pinto to add some context for Huyghe’s ambiguous contemplation, and a declaration to move beyond rarefied, highly-coded ethicoaesthetical considerations towards the zoopolitcal—however entangled politics and visual culture may be today. I’m with it.

I dug up some writing about the Huyghe Lacma exhibition that I added to a discord community I probably should have avoided participating in.

There is something fascinating to me in someone with quotidian means giving themselves artfully in their irreducible and opaque way to the rendering of their preoccupations and contingencies. And then there is also the thrill of collaborative or institutional projects that succeed in realizing cultural events, alternate imaginaries and articulated subjectivities at larger, discursive scales. I locate this earlier work of Huyghe’s in the institutionally bloated omphaloskepsis valley between. I went with my daughter to his LACMA retrospective in 2015, an immersive, sprawling, lightly participatory, heavily mediated, extra human ecology with performers and animals enlivening the space. It was a not uncomplicated pleasure haunted by the feeling Anuradha Vikram formulated in her review. ‘Huyghe’s resistance to interpretation is also a resistance to accountability, and his juxtaposition of white, affluent humans at play with animals in a state of subjugation demonstrates the shortcomings of radical thought as understood by Eurocentric men of leisure with limited recognition of the autonomy of any subject — human or otherwise — except themselves.’ And as far as ways to spend an afternoon in Los Angeles, I found the experience filled with wonder and plenty of interesting themes to discuss—if not able to meaningfully address the material conditions that occasioned it.

This impasse suggests a recurring tension for me, and at the same time it has been in these contemplative aesthetic spaces where I’ve developed a provisional ethics that I then rehearse in actions, words and images. 

Yes, as your owls suggests, modern and contemporary arts’ treatment of animals is due its ethological reckoning. Looking back over my diaries I can track my own awareness and attitudes shifting. What a powerful episteme, this ethology that you're working with. The significance of giving shape and language to these urgent concerns.

I love your passages on Japanese primatology. Kyokan.

I’m filled with inspiration, gratitude and resolve. 

Thank you, Arnaud, for this beautiful work.

Kindly, 
Perry