Performing Animal, Becoming Human: Jonas, Forti, Holman, Monson
By Danni Shen, Curatorial Research Associate, 2021 CCS Bard Mentorship Program
“From the Archives” is a series that spotlights The Kitchen’s history. As a complement to our Archive Website, these posts offer focused reflections on the artists, exhibitions, events, and institutional practices that have defined and shaped The Kitchen since its founding in 1971.
IN THE MIDST OF ACCELERATING ecological ruination and global warming anxieties, the turn to the nonhuman has been of ever growing concern in artistic practice and institutional presentation. It was with this initial thought that I began searching through The Kitchen’s archives. Given the anthropocentrism of performance and theater—and those forms mediated by video—such methodologies seem apt to reimagining what it means to be human. As Jen Parker-Starbuck, performance scholar and author of Theatre and the Nonhuman, notes, “as artistic practices reposition human and nonhuman relations, moving the nonhuman more centrally onstage might make us more attuned and responsive to our reliance upon nonhuman others.” [1] Yet given the vastness of such concepts as the “ecological” or “nonhuman,” the use of these terms can risk re-enforcing or homogenizing the human–nonhuman divide that has only enabled continued environmental exploitation. What do we even mean by “nonhuman”? It was through the discovery of one archive folder for a 2016 work by Joan Jonas that I was able to broach these broader ideas in the context of The Kitchen. In what follows, I home in on specific examples from The Kitchen’s history that involve the performance of animals and animality.
It was with a kind of delight that I came across Jonas’s citation of John Berger’s 1977 essay “Why Look at Animals?” in the program for her 2016 performance at The Kitchen They Come to Us Without a Word II. Having a relationship with The Kitchen dating back to the 1970s, Jonas developed this second iteration of the performance with the institution in conjunction with her exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. The pioneer of video and performance art references Berger’s essay as a central influence to her recent work. It seemed serendipitous that when I found this program, I happened to have been reading The History of Animals: A Philosophy by Oxana Timofeeva, which had also led me to this exact text the day before. Berger’s essay opens poignantly about the importance of animals, in a passage that is worth copying here:
The 19th century, in western Europe and North America saw the beginning of a process, today being completed in 20th century corporate capitalism, by which every tradition which has previously mediated between man and nature was broken. Before this rupture, animals constituted the first circle of what surrounded man. Perhaps that already suggests too great a distance. They were with man at the center of his world. [2]
Indeed, animals, chimeras, shapeshifters, and spirits are not new to cultural discourse, and have long been central to ritual and religious performances. Humans throughout our species’ existence have looked to non-human animals for ways to live and as cosmic mediators. Berger traces the animal as the first metaphor rendered in prehistoric caves, to the ways in which animals have all but disappeared from everyday life via the alienating logic of capitalism. They have been reduced to icons, toys, mascots, animations, food, chattel, circus performers, and pets, and placed in zoos. According to Jonas, They Come to Us Without a Word II is also a work that engages with disappearance in a rapidly changing world through sound, light, and shifting images. Animals, as well as children and landscapes, come and go together as shadows and ghosts in a dissolving world.
Of the same generation as Jonas is Simone Forti, who is of foundational importance in thinking about animality through performance work. The American Italian dancer and choreographer’s seminal contributions to both Postmodern dance and the Fluxus movement have been an influence to many. In the ’70s she developed movement vocabulary based on observations of locomotion and dance behavior by animals in captivity within various zoos. For example, she took cues from the repetitive pacing of big cats, polar bears, and elephants to adapt patterns of movement such as pacing and swinging her head back and forth. In 1975, Forti screened two videotapes in The Kitchen’s Video Viewing Room that demonstrated such studies. Identified on The Kitchen’s program as Grizzleys and later known as Three Grizzlies (1974), the video was shot at the Central Park Zoo and traced the actions of grizzly bears inside of their enclosures as a kind of dance movement. In Solo #1 (1974), Forti performs a movement study guided by the human body interacting with natural forces of gravity and momentum. The piece begins on two legs and evolves through repetitive motions such as crouching poses, soft rolling falls, and crab-like crawling to sliding along the floor on her stomach. This work seems to also be a predecessor to another entitled Door Studies (1982), which Forti presented in an evening program at The Kitchen that included solo sections and group forms, and included live music as well as sculpture.
Rather than using animals as inspirations for some sort of “return to nature,” however, Forti used performance to process a sense of shared despair as well as admiration for their powerful presence. Returning to Berger, “until the 19th century, anthropomorphism was integral to the relation between man and animal and was an expression of their proximity.” When the human-animal divide is so integral to a certain sense of being in the world, anthropomorphism continues to create a wary sense of “other-ness.” By tapping into the already theatrical nature of the zoo, where animals are rendered marginal, and the human isolates itself as a species of spectators across bars and glass, Forti utilizes a kind of reverse anthropomorphism, or zoomorphism, where animal traits are attributed to humans. The artist further attempts to rebridge that distance between human and animal in a way through which movement becomes a kind of melancholy, release, mantra, control, awareness, and interspecies empathy all at once.
Another artist who addressed animality in their performance work at The Kitchen is Stephen Holman. The multidisciplinary artist’s Self-Obliteration of Human Form (1990) enacted a kind of carnival or circus at the Kitchen. The event was replete with performers dressed as characters ranging from cows, chickens, rabbits, bugs, squid, dogs, pigeons in a giant nest, and crucified veal calves to biblical figures and scientists. Each acted out a series of ecosystems and food-chains. The performance’s press release (excerpt below) summarizes the work as “a kind of zoo, rather than a show… A manic melodrama and surreal exposé of the human condition and the complex web of hypocrisies and disguises we use to conceal that fact from ourselves.”
I conclude on another influential artist’s work found in The Kitchen’s history: Jennifer Monson’s Live Dancing Archive presented in 2013 with the organization iLAND (interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature, and Dance), founded by Monson. This was the New York-based choreographer and dancer’s first evening-length solo performance, and it included a video installation and collaborative online archive. In the work, the artist meditates on ecological interdependencies, while exploring her own queerness and animality through the socially and culturally mediated body. It was after entertaining the thought of quitting dance to become a park ranger in 2000 that Monson began researching animal navigation. The artist ultimately decided to continue her dance practice on the road. While camping along the way, Monson and accompanying colleagues expanded their actions. They danced in public spaces for passersby, gave improvisational exercise workshops on embodying animal perception and flocking, and held panel discussions with zoologists and environmental scientists. iLAND was thus born in 2004 from years of animal inspiration—tracking gray whales migrating from Vancouver to Mexico, ospreys from Maine to Venezuela, and the flight of ducks and geese from Texas to Canada.
As evidenced by these select archival records from the works of Joan Jonas, Simone Forti, Stephen Holman, and Jennifer Monson, leveraging the anthropocentrism of one cultural sphere (i.e. performance) to move critically through another (i.e. zoo, carnival, or circus) can help rethink the alienating animal and human distinction and what it means to be “human” in a precarious world. To reject animality, a stand-in for abject irrationality, in relation to humanity is to replicate the same logic that has replaced the once held position of animals with the current biopolitical infatuation around the nonhuman in the form of robots, androids, cyborgs, and AI. It is still the rational and empathetic “us” versus the irrational and unfeeling “them” that is ripe for exploitation. The question of empathy is an important one in performance: when the human becomes the animal and vice versa, acting out one’s animality helps us understand the ways in which we are intertwined with, rather than against. As Timofeeva writes in The History of Animals (2018), “it is precisely today, when humanity seems on the verge of leaving its animality behind, that the question of the animal returns with a vengeance.” [3] From the work discussed here, it seems the question of the animal has had its moments of transformation as well as great potentiality in The Kitchen’s record. Hopefully animality continues to return, be complicated, and diversified through experimental, generative ways in performances of humanity.
Images: 1) Program for Joan Jonas, They Come to Us Without a Word II at The Kitchen, April 6–8, 2016. Detail. To see the full program, click here. 2) Left: Joan Jonas, They Come to Us Without a Word II, 2016. Performance view, The Kitchen. © Moira Ricci. Right: Joan Jonas, They Come to Us Without a Word II, 2016. Performance view, The Kitchen. © 2016 Paula Court. 3) February 1975 calendar of programming. The Kitchen. Detail. To see the full calendar, click here. 4) Right: Video still from recording of Simone Forti, Solo #1, 1974. Videography by Andy Mann. Video recording from the collection of The Kitchen Archive, ca. 1971–1999. The Getty Research Institute. Right: Still from Simone Forti, Three Grizzlies, 1974. Courtesy of the artist and The Box, LA. Still by Castelli-Sonnabend Tapes and Films. Video by Elaine Hartnett. 5) Press release for Stephen Holman, Self-Obliteration of Human Form at The Kitchen, December 6–9, 1990. Detail. To see the full program, click here. 6) Poster for Jennifer Monson, Living Dance Archive at The Kitchen, February14–23, 2013.
Footnotes:
[1] Jen Parker-Starbuck, "Editorial Comment: Theatre and the Nonhuman," Theatre Journal, Volume 71, Number 3, September 2019.
[2] John Berger, Why Look at Animals? (London: Penguin, 2009). [3] Oxana Timofeeva, The History of Animals: A Philosophy (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).