A short post, (actually a quote) – from John Berger’s Why Look At Animals?
Ive been trying to write a post on this part of Berger’s book for a while – but felt that I wasn’t making myself too clear – so thought I’d post a quote from the book – hoping that this will start to explain some of my current thinking ….
“The décor, accepting these elements as tokens, sometimes reproduces them to create pure illusion – as in the case of painted prairies or painted rock pools at the back of the boxes for small animals. Sometimes it merely adds further tokens to suggest something of the animal’s original landscape – the dead branches of a tree for monkeys, artificial rocks for bears, pebbles and shallow water for crocodiles. These added tokens serve two distinct purposes: for the spectator they are like theatre props: for the animal they constitute the bare minimum of an environment in which they can physically exist.
The animals, isolated from each other and without interaction between species, have become utterly dependent upon their keepers.”
(More description of this and work to come)
Berger. J (2009) Why Look at Animals? Penguin: London
(pp.34-35)
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POST UPDATE [17/05/2013]
The parts of this quote highlighted in bold are what I feel are the important parts which relate to my work (drawings). The last bold sentence “The animals, isolated from each other and without interaction between species” is very important to my work (past and present).
I want to recreate a zoo enclosure scenario (where animals aren’t allowed to mix – predator and prey animals are kept seperate – for good reasons the predator will eat the prey animal) and where the animal becomes dependable on their keepers for food etc. These factors among others create an artificial setting for the animal to live within and so makes nearly everything they do artificial as well.
(On a personal note – don’t get me wrong I love zoos – who doesn’t – a chance to get up close to living predators who would probably try and kill you if they got the chance to (as well as the conservation part that zoos do) but doing this project seems to have made me think twice about them, which is a good thing because I feel like I can appreciate zoos possibly more than I did before.
Picture Reference
PD Smith (2009) Why Look at Animals? By John Berger [Online] Available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep/19/why-look-animals-john-berger Accessed: 19/05/2013
