Some timely visits to retrospectives of John Baldessari (Tate Modern) and Ed Ruscha (Hayward) both West coast Americans of a similar era, both hovering on the boundaries of conceptual art and minimalism, with reference to Dada. The wit in the work is infectious.
Ed Ruscha ‘words as landscape’.
On TV last night ‘Horizon: The secret life of dogs’ and their underrated intelligence by us humans (not unusual). Also Natural World on New Guinea’s incredible birds of paradise.
Which reminded me of Michel de Montaigne (1500s) quoted in Jacques Derrida’s ‘The Animal that therefore I am’ (1997):
‘How does he [the human being] know, by the force of his intelligence, the secret internal stirrings of animals? By what comparison between them and us does he infer the stupidity that he attributes to them?’
Montaigne ‘attributes much to the animal, beginning with a type of language…and [he] recognises in the animal … a capacity to respond’ (Derrida):
‘it is not credible that Nature has denied us this resource that she has given to many other animals; for what is it but speech, this faculty we see in them of complaining, rejoicing, calling to each other for help, inviting each other to love, as they do by the use of their voice? How could they not speak to one another? They certainly speak to us, and we to them. In how many ways do we not speak to our dogs? And they answer us. We talk to them in another language, with other names, than to birds, hogs, oxen, horses; and we change the idiom according to the species’ (Michel de Montaigne ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’)
