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Contents
Columns
10
13
14
17
Main
19
21
22
26
30
31
33
36
40
47
50
53
56
60
64
65
69
71
73
79
81
85
Animals
90
95
97
102
104
105
108
112
116
118
124
Where the wild things are: An interview with Steve Baker Gregory Williams
Fifteen theses on the cute Frances Richard
Bee Modern: An interview with Juan Antonio Ramirez Eric Bunge
Mapping behavior Tomas Matza
Bunny Rising Angela Wyman
Audition for a pair of koalas Kathy Temin
Animals on Trial Jeffrey Kastner
Beastly agendas: An interview with Kathleen Kete Sina Naja
Central Meat Market, London Andrew Cross
Recollecting the slaughterhouse Dorothee Brantz
The mouses tale Karen Rader
And
128
Contributors
Beasty
Books
A pleasure to read
as well as being a
substantial work of
scholarship.
Andrew Johnson,
Environmental Values
From Mickey Mouse
to the use of jackass
as an all-purpose
insult, images of
animals are integral to
Western culture. Baker
examines how these
distorted images affect
how real animals are
perceived and treated.
www.press.uillinois.edu/f01/
baker.html
Paperback, $19.95
Regan responds
thought-fully to his critics
while dismantling the
conception that all and
only human beings
are worthy of the moral
status that is the basis
of rights.
www.press.uillinois.edu/s01/
regan.html
Hardcover, $24.95
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Columns
10
11
12
Colors
Ruby (and beyond)
Darren Wershler-Henry
The price of wisdom is beyond rubies.
Job 28:18
According to the Optical Society of America,
it is possible to identify somewhere between
7.5 and 10 million distinct colors. Ruby
is presumably one of them, but how would
we agree on which one it is? In his essay
How Culture Conditions the Colours We
See, Umberto Eco notes that the majority
of attempts to discriminate between colors
fail dramatically. In the Farnsworth-Munsell
test, which involves categorizing 100
different hues, 68% of the test subjects
(colorblind people excluded) make between
20 and 100 errors; only 16% of subjects
make fewer than 16 errors.1
Even if we could agree on a particular
shade like ruby (a dubious proposition,
evidently) odds are that we wouldnt be
able to discuss it. After pointing out that
the majority of the Farnsworth-Munsell
test subjects lack the linguistic means to
identify even the hundred colors in the test,
Eco observes that the largest collection of
color designations in English, A. Maerz and
R. Pauls A Dictionary of Color (New York:
Crowell, 1953), assigns names to only 3000
hues, and that of these 3000 names, only
eight occur in common usage. In other
words, average chromatic competence is
better represented by the seven colors of the
rainbow.2
The names of colours, concludes Eco (from
these and other scientic, linguistic, and
philosophical observations), taken in themselves, have no precise chromatic content:
they must be viewed within the general context of many interacting semiotic systems.3
So any useful discussions involving the
status of ruby must immediately move
over (the pun is irresistible) the rainbow and
into the realm of systems of cultural meaning and exchange.
Which brings us to the Ruby Slippers,
the most immediately identiable North
American cultural icon associated with
the color ruby since the making of the lm
The Wizard of Oz in 1939. But if we can
bracket Judy Garland and camp, and the
burning question of whether or not there
were more than seven pairs of slippers
made for the movie for just long enough
to compare the lm to the source text, L.
Frank Baums The Wonderful Wizard of
Oz, something much more interesting
becomes apparent: the ruby slippers were
originally silver.4
Ruby Road.
Photo Elena Grossman
13
Ingestion
The epic of the cephalopod
Allen S. Weiss
Consider the cephalopod represented in
Victor Hugos ink-and-wash drawing of an
octopus, Pieuvre (c. 1866), a black, nearly
formless stain that evokes the morbid,
lugubrious aspect of this animal, described
by Hugo: One would say a beast made of
ash that inhabits the water. It is spider-like
in form and chameleon-like in coloration.1
As is the case for the most extreme examples of zoological and botanical classes,
such animals touch on the limits of monstrosity, evoking worldly fears and unconscious anguish. One can, in fact, localize
the source of the octopus as monster par
excellence, as a creature of nightmares and
terror, an icon of the horrors of death: It
was the moment when Victor Hugo, in Les
travailleurs de la mer (1866), substituted the
local word pieuvre, used only in the Channel
Islands, for the more common term poulpe.
One should remember that in French, the
word for the living animal is usually different
from that of the carcass to be transformed
into food-stuff. Hugos differentiation
between poulpe and pieuvre takes this
transformative logic one step further, for
while normally man eats poulpe, in Les
travailleurs de la mer the opposite is true,
as pieuvre threatens to eat man, in the most
horrendous of manners.
This moment of inestimable horror occurs
when the protagonist, Gilliat, in the process
of exploring rock formations on the coast,
is caught in the grip of a giant octopus.
This animal is a monster, the very enigma
of evil, a viscosity with a will, a boneless,
bloodless, eshless creature with a unique
orice equivocally and disquietingly serving
as both mouth and anus. Endowed with
eight powerful tentacles covered with
hundreds of blood-sucking suction cups,
the octopus borders on the chimerical
a medusa served by eight snakes
as if coming from a world other than our
own. Its attack is pure terror:
It is a pneumatic machine that attacks you.
You are dealing with a footed void. Neither
claw thrusts nor tooth bites, but an unspeakable scarication. A bite is formidable, but
less so than such suction. The claw is nothing
compared to the sucker. The claw, thats the
beast that enters your esh; the sucker, thats
you yourself who enters into the beast. Your
muscles swell, your bers twist, your skin
bursts beneath this unworldly force, your
blood spurts and frightfully mixes with the
mollusks lymph. The beast is superimposed
upon you by its thousand vile mouths; the
hydra is incorporated in the man; the man
Victor Hugo, Pieuvre, 1866.
14
15
16
Leftovers
Evangelical currents
Curtis C. Ebbesmeyer
Im an oceanographer specializing in
currents and what they transport. By day
I earn a living by tracking things like sewage
for a company whose reports are sold to
agencies. By night I track otsam. I rst
began following spills from cargo containers in 1990 when a ship spilled 80,000
Nike sneakers in the Pacic Ocean. A spill
of 29,000 bathtub toys (including yellow
duckies) kept me busy in 1992, and 1997
saw ve million Lego pieces spilled off
Lands End, England. At the moment 2000
17-inch computer monitors that spilled
in the Pacic last year are washing up on
shore. In 1996 I established the Beachcombers Alert newsletter and I now receive
reports about all manner of washed-up
debris from beachcombers from all over
the world.
Many of these beachcombers search for
the fabled message in the bottle but few
nd them. I have never found one but a
Dutch beachcomber, Wim Kruiswijk, ranks
as the all-time best. While searching for 19
years (1980-1998) along the coast bordering the southern North Sea, Kruiswijk
hauled home 435 bottled notes. Looking
for patterns, Kruiswijk divided them into
thirteen types:
# of bottles
Reason:
157
109
56
36
27
12
10
9
9
4
3
2
1
17
18
Main
Stealth towers
Kristen Dodge
If you have ever noticed an unusually stifflooking tree with an abnormally thick trunk,
frugally spaced branches, and an unchanging appearance through all seasons, you
have unwittingly identied a stealth telecommunication tower. Whether disguised as
a tree, agpole, or church steeple, a stealth
tower is the solution offered by tower
companies to local jurisdictions that refuse
the construction of tall metal structures
in the town square, a high-school eld,
or a local church. Each particular location
requires a customized stealth tower to best
suit the sthetic demands of that environment. Tower companies do not build palm
trees in New Hampshire.
In order to be functional, a stealth tower has
certain non-negotiable structural requirements. A stealth tower must accommodate
up to three carriers to match the minimum
capability of traditional towers, be con-
Above
Stealth cactus and palm telecommunication towers.
Courtesy of Larson Camouage
21
Hidden talents:
The camouage paintings
of Abbott Handerson Thayer
Emily Gephart
Thayers rst scientic article received widespread and justied praise. Using the language of art and optics, he had, for perhaps
the rst time, explained precisely why many
animals seem to blend in with their surroundings. Thrilled by his success, Thayer
followed this essay with others, increasingly
supercilious in tone. In 1903, he extended
his powers of observation to elucidate
another principle of camouage, the disruptive (he used the term ruptive) effects of
patterned markings such as stripes or spots.
These markings disguise an animals contours by making its contiguous parts seem
unrelated to one another. This principle of
concealment proved to be temptingly and
dangerously elastic; virtually any kind of
coloring and patterning could be argued
to be ruptive under certain circumstances.
Despite his increasingly pompous attitude,
at this stage Thayer willingly acknowledged
that other scientists had reached similar
conclusions and he retained an open mind
about alternative forms of animal coloration.
He commenced lecture-demonstrations,
both in America and abroad, using illuminated shadowboxes containing sculptures,
stuffed animals, and decoys to orchestrate
elaborate performances of the principle of
counter-shading. His enthusiasm frequently
overwhelmed his audience: He vigorously
encouraged observers at a 1910 lecture at
the Smithsonian Institution to approximate
the viewpoint of a predator by lying facedown on their stomachs, a request which
the audience of ornithologists warily
refused.3
A popular society artist and renowned
gure painter in the 1880s and 1890s,
Thayer had been a leader of the American
Renaissance. He believed that his position
as an accomplished artist and an observer
of natural history made him uniquely qualified to understand and identify the principles
of animal coloration. He wrote in 1903,
Nature has evolved actual art on the bodies
of animals, and only an artist can read it.
Perhaps this degree of hubris was what led
him to subsequently take his ideas to utterly
absurd limits. In 1909, Thayer and his
son Gerald published the book Concealing
Coloration in the Animal Kingdom with
illustrations provided by Thayer in collaboration with Gerald, his second wife Emma,
and students Rockwell Kent and Richard
Meryman. Black-and-white photographs
were exhibited alongside paintings (repro-
22
25
26
27
A Change of Regime
Rancires thinking of the political was
formulated during the long French slide into
recession and racism, when the status of
salaried labor was falling into tatters along
with welfare-state guarantees, when immigrants were being outlawed in the name
of union jobs and the unemployed were
being proclaimed the impossible political
subject. Yet the threat of the exible, transnational, networked regimethe so-called
economic horrorsparked original
forms of protest and debate. A breach
was re-opened, marked in political economy
by the work of Andr Gorz, Misre du
prsent, richesses du possible (Poverty of
the Present, Wealth of the Possible), which
turned the questions of exible work and
unemployment back on an entire system,
to explore the reasons for maintaining a
politics of scarcity in a society of automated
production.
That breach seems to have closed today.
Disagreement had already shown how
cer-tain forms of political consensus act
to freeze social identities, eliminating the
disruptive claims of equality. There is the
welfare-state conception of society as an
interplay of partners (unions, businesses,
public services); the neo-liberal idea that
society does not exist, only desiring, enterprising individuals; the multicultural vision
of separate, Balkanized communities, each
bound by their own beliefs. All exclude the
political conict formerly brought by the
subject called proletariatthe most recent
name of the antique demos or the revolutionary peuple. After integrating much of the
National Fronts racism, the French socialist
party has now found an original mix of the
rst two forms of consensus: They intensify
the neo-liberal program of exible transnational labor relations, in hopes of returning
to the salaried employment on which the
postwar social contract of the nationstate
was based! As though the challenges raised
by the mouvement des sans never even
existed.
But what is happening now is that similar
movements are expanding, proliferating,
in an attempt to meet their adversaries
on another stage: the stage set by the transnational corporations. This proliferation
involves an identication with the cause
of an impossibly distant otherMayan
peasant, Brazilian autoworker, Nigerian
tribesman, Indian farmer But to explore
28
29
31
32
Hispaniola
David Hawkes
33
between classes; it also mediates the relationships between Northern and Southern
hemispheres, between men and women,
between life and death.
The history and cultures of Hispaniola provide a microcosmic lens through which such
global and cosmic polarities can be reduced
to legible size. If the postmodern West relates to the third world as Marxs bourgeoisie relates to his proletariat, then Haiti
plays much the same role in relation
to the Dominican Republic. Throughout their
history, the Spanish-speaking, mulatto DR
has consciously and openly constructed its
Kreyol-speaking black neighbor as the Other
in relation to which its own identity is formed.
A typical example, by no means the rst but
arguably the most inuential, of this thinking
is Jose Rodos Ariel (1900). The books crude
implications can be inferred from its title.
Rodo takes inspiration from Shakespeares
The Tempest, which is the central myth
through which the West has imagined
its encounter with the third world. In this
version, however, the global culture-clash is
re-invented as taking place within the island
of Hispaniola, with the Dominicans playing
the part of the intellectual, spiritual Ariel, and
the Haitians cast in the role of the physical,
bestial Caliban. This, at least, was the
reading preferred by Joaquin Balaguer,
the blind tyrant who ruled the Dominican
Republic for over thirty years until 1996.
Balaguers most famous book is The Island
in Reverse, in which he suggests that
Dominicans are, by denition, everything
that Haitians are not.
In 1996, the ninety-year-old Balaguer
announced that Haiti and the Dominican
Republic ought to live like Siamese twins.
Presumably intended as conciliatory,
the statement perfectly captured the
predominant Dominican view of Haiti as
a hideous, unnatural Other, grafted onto
an otherwise healthy body by some cruel
quirk of Nature. For over a hundred years,
the Dominican Republic has turned its back
on Haiti, turning it into the geopolitical
equivalent of the Elephant in the Drawing
Room. The fact of Haitis existence obviously
determines every aspect of life and culture
in the Dominican Republic, which responds
to this overwhelming impact by refusing
to acknowledge it, except through periodic
campaigns to expel the thousands of
Haitians who fuel Santo Domingos
34
35
Airport disease
Matthew Rose
Above
Nasseri in photo booth at Charles de Gaulle airport, 2001.
36
39
40
43
44
45
is now once again not only used for Free Mason meetings,
but is available for rent for weddings, parties, Bar Mitzvahs,
and other special occasions.
2 Robert Stacy-Judd was by no means the only advocate of
the Mayan Revival. Other proponents include Frank Lloyd
Wright, Alfred C. Bossom, George Oakley Totten, Francisco
Cornejo, Manuel Ambilis, Richard Requa, and many others.
3 Stacy-Judds colorful life and architectural career are
summarized in David Gebhard, Robert Stacy-Judd (Santa
Barbara: Capra Books, 1993).
4 Ester Allen, The Aztec Lilliputians of Iximaya, Mandora,
no. 3 (1993), p. 151.
5 Marjorie Ingle, Mayan Revival Style (Salt Lake City:
Peregrine Smith Books, 1984), p. 4.
6 More on this early history is available in the unpublished
dissertation (UCSB, 1996) by Tina Marie Llorante, The
Worlds Fairs of 1889 and 1893: Antecedents to Maya
Revival Style Architecture.
7 Holly Barnet-Sanchez, The Necessity of Pre-Columbian
Art: U.S. Museums and the Role of Foreign Policy in
the Appropriation and Transformation of Mexican Heritage,
1933-1944, unpublished dissertation (UCLA, 1993).
8 Ibid., p. 28.
9 Stacy-Judd writes in his unpublished autobiography: . .
. when the hotel project was announced, the word Maya
was unknown to the layman . . . as the word Aztec was
fairly well known, I baptized the hotel with that name,
although the decorative motifs are Maya. (p. 351).
Stacy-Judds autobiography is held in the archives of
the University of California Santa Barbaras Architectural
Drawing Collection.
10 Helen Delpar, The Enormous Vogue of Things Mexican:
Cultural Relations Between the United States and Mexico,
1920-1935 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
1992); James Oles, South of the Border (Washington, DC:
Smithsonian, 1993).
11 Sylvanus Morley, The Foremost Intellectual
Achievement of Ancient America, National Geographic
vol. 41, (January 1922), pp. 109-131, and Chichen Itza:
An Ancient American Mecca, National Geographic, vol.
47, (January 1925), pp. 63-95. In addition, the writings of
Alma Reed, Gregory Mason, and the much publicized aerial
photography of Charles Lindbergh helped popularize the
Ancient Maya in the 1920s.
12 Edward Lloyd Hampton, Creating a New World
Architecture, Southern California Business (April 1928)
pp. 16-17, 38, 45, 48.
13 For a reading of cross-dressing, minstrelsy, and what I
am referring to here as cross-cultural transvestitism, see
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the
American Working Class (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993).
14 David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, revised ed.
(London: Verso, 1999), p. 104. See also Philip J. Deloria,
Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
15 Bruce Prices home for Pierre Lorillard (Tuxedo, NY,
1885), Otto Neher and Chauncey Skillingss Cordova Hotel
(Los Angeles, 1912), the rm of Allison and Alisons tunnel
Warhols dream
Saul Anton
12 February 1972
I had slept badly. I decided to go out for
breakfast, but when I got down to the street,
there was no one there, and I thought, Andy,
you must be still dreaming. It was like New
York at eight in the morning on New Years
Day. Completely deserted. Everything shut.
Its my favorite time to be out, actually.
I decided to go to my favorite diner, the
Star Palace, on 37th and Madison. And
there, sitting alone at the window was,
believe it or not, Robert Smithson, who Ive
met a few times. He comes by sometimes,
but I think hes pretty shy, so Ive never really
spoken to him all that much before. That
Spiral thing he did out west is great, though,
everyone says. Ive seen the pictures and I
agree. For that alone, they should put him on
the cover of Time or some magazine like that.
They all think hes a genius. But I still cant
get through the stuff he writes in Artforum.
I get a headache almost right away.
Anyway, I walk in and hes sitting there
smoking and drinking Lipton and he asks
\me what I think we should do, like hes been
waiting for me all along. How about going
up the Empire State? he says, and I thought
that was pretty terric.
47
48
A: Huh?
B: A prime is a number that relates only
to itself and to one. It is a singular thing.
The Egyptians were fascinated by it.
The pyramids are, it turns out, kind of like
prime numbers. Theyre prime objects, units
of measurement.
A: If I had to make the Empire State Building
over, maybe Id choose the Twin Towers
instead. What bothers me is the idea that
every building has to be different. Why cant
they just nd the best kind of building and
once they do, make it all over the place.
The projects are kind of nice that way, except
that the buildings arent very nice. Brownstones are nice like that, but everyone knows
theyre just projects from a different time.
B: Theyre all parts of this giant hive. Lewitt
likes the grid, but to me, thats all about
abstractions, pure conceptual geometries.
New York, though, isnt about that. Its about
the hive. Except up here. From up here,
youd never think that there was any life
down there at all.
A: I somehow knew youd say something
like that.
B: And if you go up the Twin Towers, youre
thinking, okay, Im nally going to get a
birds eye view of this place, looking down
on it, and you look over and theres another
guy thinking hes god too.
48
A: Edie?
A: Id say.
50
50
The eye produces serial images, automatically, and without thought. The mouth
produces serial words, automatically, and
without thought. Eye and mouth are both
52
Guggenheimlichkeit
Carl Skelton
53
Examples
Design-ication/de-signication?
What we are calling Design these days is
a very small piece of discursive territory.
Its precisely for this reason that it is foregrounded: The prerogatives of client are
similar to those of patron prior to the First
World War. What ground was given up by
collectors and collecting agencies has been
reclaimed indirectly, simply by a shift of
emphasis from Picasso to Gehry, who can
call himself a tailor without calling his tness
into question.
54
57
obvious revisions, such as a de-specialization of the prison staff, with recruits being
used to run administrative tasks. God bless
the recruits. They do their job, but in their
reluctant, fuck-am-I-doing-here manner,
often openly sympathizing with the prisoners, and, to quote the jailed reporter Baqi,
ostensibly treating the prison staff as
inmates. The intelligence agents are, for
their part, also undergoing changes, and
are sporting a new sort of lan.
59
60
61
Thats right.
62
63
You now have a generation of cadets entering who were children when the coverage
of events like the sieges of Srebenica and
Sarajevo were being broadcast on national
news. They were at a formative age when
these humanitarian missions became
perceived as pressing. Are they more open
to them than older ofcers?
Sure.
And this generation of cadets is now entering from a civilian world that has become
willing to make those sorts of intrusions.
Insistent on making those kinds of intrusions
might be a better characterization.
Thats fair. Is it changing the cadets
perceptions of the proper relationship
between civilian and military society?
I think so, yes. Achieving the same level of
commitment to principle with these shifting
attitudes is a matter we sort through on a
regular basis here. How do we best provide
the army and the country with ofcers with
the education, the background, and the
perspectives that best suit them to do what
the nation will require them to do?
And if that doesnt involve ghting
conventional threats to the nations security,
then so be it?
Well, the Chinese are coming, but they
havent arrived yet [laughs].p
64
I tried!
Jonathan Ames
81
Cover versions:
The Communist Manifesto
Geoff Cox
85
Animals
90
youve come across this group of Minnesota-based artists called the Justice for
Animals Arts Guild, who have started lobbying various state arts organizations and
funding agencies to try to limit the ways in
which artists can incorporate living animals
in their work.
92
94
I
Draw a circle, and ray out from it the abject,
the melancholic, the wicked, the childlike.
Now in the zones between add the erotic,
the ironic, the narcotic, and the kitsch. Intersperse the Romantic/Victorian, the Disney/
consumerist, and the biologically deterministic. At the center of this many-spoked wheel
lies a connective empty space. Label it
CUTE.
II
What is cute? The technical denition
encompasses revealing distinctions that
tend to be elided in normal conversation,
where cute is cute and everyone knows
what this means. Cute by the book derives
etymologically from acute, and its
establishing usage dates to circa 1731.
From this root comes cutes rst meaning,
as clever or underhandedly shrewd, and
its second, as impudent or smart-alecky
Dont get cute. The standard connotation
of dainty or delicate prettiness then leads to
what might be termed mannerist cutethe
cutsey, which (like the folksy) is dened by
its excessive or self-conscious appeal to the
unembarrassed core quality.1
III
Such interconnections echo a number of
distinctions present in the larger motif.
Fundamentally, cute serves to displace, or
neutralize, or reconceptualize in a positive/
non-threatening direction; this is possible
only to a certain degree, at which point
the pendulum swings back the other way.
Because it is a device of masking and
semblance, cute is inherently circular (see
Thesis No. I). Note how the dictionary
denition enacts this closed progression,
which has to do at every stage with
things not being wholly what they seem.
Cleverness shields or distances; it plays
potentially hurtful games. Impertinence
simplies this game, softening the con
artists plot into a joke. Prettiness and
daintiness further soften a barbed joke
into an appeal or irtation; self-conscious
or excessive appeal becomes suspect.
Suspicious appeal shades toward a con.
IV
Cute marks a crucial absence. It guarantees,
by denition, the nonappearance of malice,
premeditation, irony, self-consciousness,
accusation, or mercenary agenda. However,
in its manufactured forms cute remains a
major locus forin some ways is synony-
95
XI
Morphologicallythat is, stheticallycute
relies on big eyes, round heads, fat bellies.
The limbs of the cute are stubby or
nonexistent, its mouth abstracted or disproportionately tiny, its nose button, its ears
enormous, or alternatively, invisible. Cute
tumbles, toddles, waddles, rolls; it is visibly
dependent, apparently engineered by natural
selection to stimulate a nurturing response.
If this is true in evolutionary terms, it follows
that the surplus cuteness manufactured by
culture might denote the cultures attempt
to trick itself into kindness. One respondent
dened it thus: Cute makes you do things
you wouldnt do otherwise. (See Thesis V.)
XII
The evil (or drunken) clown; the devilpossessed doll; Star Treks Trouble with
Tribbles: like porn-cute, wicked-cute
depends upon camp. When cute goes bad,
it deepens rather than transforms. Poisoned
cute retains its outward appearance while
proliferating cancerously toward a toxic/
comic exaggeration of itself. Its colors tend
to darken from pure pastel; its contours
sharpen or skew to the grotesque. Cute
melodies lilt or rollick and repeatwhen
sped to mania or slowed to dirge, their
whimsy boomerangs upon and guts itself.
(See Thesis X.)
XIII
The linguistic analogue of cute is formed by
a prolonged nonsense exhalation ltered
through the mouth aligned as if to smile;
when inected improperly, these sounds
become not porn-cute but directly pornographic: awww, oooohh, mmmm.
Since this lexicon is ostensibly derived from
baby talk, perhaps it makes sense that it
also gestures to the origin of babies. When
such sounds coalesce into words, they often
function as aliases for cute and rely on repetition and diminution, as if unconsciously
articulating the concepts dual nature: booboo, snookums. The infamous sufxes
-ie or -y and, to a lesser extent in English,
-ettereverse toward the abstract, pulling
normal words back into their malleable
infancy as preverbal sound. Of course, this
also has the predictably paradoxical effect of
making unremarkable words foolish, of
cutesifying them. (See Thesis No. VII.)
XIV
Cute in German: liebe or sss. Cute in
Spanish: lindo. Cute in French: mignon.
Bee Modern:
An interview with Juan Antonio Ramirez
Eric Bunge
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97
1.
2.
8.
14.
3.
10.
9.
15.
16.
21.
27.
4.
23.
22.
28.
29.
5.
30.
11.
12.
17.
13.
18.
24.
19.
25.
31.
7.
6.
20.
26.
32.
33.
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101
Mapping behavior
Tomas Matza
102
opposite
Nest dug by woodland ants
Photo Charles F. Badland
103
Opposite
Angela Wyman, Rabbit Rising, 1999
105
TOO HUMAN
ANIMAL ENOUGH
Animals on trial
Jeffrey Kastner
108
110
with animals biologically and environmentally. It has not, however, done much
to assuage the deep, atavistic sense that
for all its familiar ease, there is something
slightly odd about our contact with other
creatures, a lingering ambivalence into
which these kinds of historical memories
still neatly plug.
5 For all their wonders, Evans asserts that his tables are
Beastly agendas:
An interview with Kathleen Kete
Sina Naja
112
113
More than that, its a matter of understanding habitat and the needs of various species,
and of breeding dogs and succoring wounded animals. Its not a claim that has a lot of
resonance anymore, but its one that helped
shape the history of animal protection in
England.
Did the Game Law extend any further
hunting privileges to the rural workers?
No. Rural workers were still prohibited from
hunting. One could be sent to Australia
or hung for killing deer. But the laws that
reserved hunting to the landed gentry were
not very successful, in part, because of an
increasing market for game. That demand
eventually led to a permit system. In the 19th
century hunting was commercialized and
opened to wealthy London professionals.
Thats presumably because game became
part of standard cuisine in the 19th century.
Yes, game speaks to status and we are what
we eat.
But is the same bourgeoisie that demands
game on its table also involved in the animal
protection groups of the 19th century?
Animal protection societies were voluntary
organizations of middle- and upper-class
people concerned about lower-class violence towards animals. Hunting is not
the issue because to a large degree, class is.
It is mainly over the issue of vivisection that
elite cruelty towards animals is dened, and
there the enemy is science and rationality.
Marx notes the class interests of animal
protection societies in a passing reference in
the Communist Manifesto when he groups
them with other reforming groups, like temperance societies. These groups wanted to
solve the social problem by transforming the
mores of the workers.
Were there other contemporary critiques of
these protection societies?
As vivisection became a concern, animal
protection societies were criticized for not
taking an aggressive enough stand against
the practice. Thus, anti-vivisection societies
were formed in the last third of the century
to specically address this issue.
Where was vivisection practiced?
114
115
116
117
118
of urban reforms. Advocating a peculiar mixture of morality, social welfare, and environmental control, public hygienists studied
everything related to the health of humans
and the cleanliness of urban environments.
As a result, Pariss ve public abattoirs, too,
came under increased supervision during
the 1830s and 1840s. Alongside prostitution, hospitals, and sewers, abattoirs
became a central battleground in the
struggle to improve the physical and moral
hygiene of Paris. Starting with the conduct
of butchers and the physical appearance of
livestock, hygienists investigated anything
and everything related to the abattoir. Some
even went as far as to conduct self-feeding
experiments with rotten meat to determine
its effects on human health.
Meat became a critical aspect in the discourse about and demands for better living
conditions. The growing recognition of
protein as a life sustaining nutrient enhanced
the signicance of meat consumption, not
least because of its potential to extend the
general life expectancy of populations,
especially that of the lower classes. The
tremendous population growth of the 1850s,
which brought more than 600,000 new,
mostly poor, inhabitants to the city, heightened the need for reforms, because it further
intensied the already rampant problems
with Pariss urban space and its haphazard
infrastructures of provision. With regard to
meat production, the biggest problem was
the continued geographical separation of
the livestock market and the abattoirs.
Since they were located in different parts of
the city, livestock herds continued to be an
all-too-visible sight in the streets of Paris.
By 1850, close to a million animals traversed
the city annually, adding considerably to
trafc congestion and street pollution. And
there was another incentive for reforms
the invention of rail transport. The emergence of railroads drastically altered existing
infrastructures. Among other things, it
enabled the expansion of agriculture, but
also necessitated the greater concentration
of markets, especially in the city.
It is hard to imagine that slaughterhouses
could be the objects of pride, but for Baron
Georges-Eugne Haussmann, probably
the most famous and arguably the most
controversial Prefect of Paris, they were one
of the most considerable works accomplished by [his] administration.6 This is all
the more surprising since it was under
Slaughterhouse in Germany.
Photo Oliver Bernt
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124
125
126
127
And
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FRONT VIEW OF A SET OF SIX LAMINATED MASS CARDS BY CARRIE MOYER. THE CARDS INCLLUDE INSPIRATIONAL REVOLUTIONARY TEXTS ON THE REVERSE. AVAILABLE AT THE GALLERY UPON REQUEST.
RINA BANERJEE
PROJECT ROOM: NINA KATCHADOURIAN
SEPTEMBER
6TH -
OCTOBER
13TH, 2001
DEBS & CO
525
WEST
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