Animals, Nonhuman and Otherwise

Graduate / Professional

In “Why Look at Animals?” (1977), a canonical essay in the literature of animal studies, John Berger writes on the historic dynamic between humans and nonhuman animals as a question of seeing and being seen, subject and object, vision and power. Charting this relationship from the distant past to the industrial present, Berger focuses on the modern spectacle of nonhuman animals as an index of the progressive marginalization of animal life; the public zoo, for example, constitutes “the living monument of their own disappearance.” Visitors to the zoo, Berger notes “ . . . proceed from cage to cage, not unlike visitors in an art gallery who stop in front of one painting, and then move on to the next or the one after next.” In rendering the modern zoo continuous with the modern art gallery, Berger prompts us to consider the role of the animal in modern and contemporary art with respect to the priority accorded the human subject. This seminar attends to the wide-ranging interests of this dynamic within the history of art and visual culture, addressing, among other issues, the status of “Man” versus nonhuman animals and the hierarchies of personhood, race, class, gender, and power that underwrite their representation. We consider topics ranging from the relationship between the natural sciences and the visual arts; companion animals, domestication, and domesticity; animals, technology, and bio-media; animal rights and interspecies collaboration; race and colonialism; animals in times of war. In addition to literature from animal studies and the history of art, readings are drawn from philosophy, critical theory, Black studies, gender studies, and science and technology studies. In part following the model of a bestiary, the syllabus introduces many nonhuman animals as case studies: dogs, sharks, termites and ants, nonhuman primates, horses, birds, mollusks, tigers, elephants, etc. A transhistorical roster of artists includes Goya, John Singleton Copley, George Stubbs, Edwin Landseer, Samuel Daniell, Winslow Homer, Kerry James Marshall, Anicka Yi, Kara Walker, Sue Coe, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Tomás Saraceno, Mark Dion, Juliana Huxtable, Jeffrey Gibson, Sammy Baloji, Lin May huSaeed, Jes Fan, and Agnieszka Kurant. Campus visits to the Yale Center for British Art, the Peabody Museum and the Beinecke. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students in the History of Art and graduate students in the humanities (with permission of the instructor). No auditing. M 1:30pm-3:25pm