Intersections of Art & Animals

There are so many ways animals are integrated into art & design that it’s impossible to do all of them, but I wish I didn’t have to choose. I went to the Victoria & Albert Museum, where even though I was there for two hours I probably only saw 15% of everything they have, probably doesn’t include every single way animals are involved in art & design.

So I think I should restrict myself to stay in ceramics (&printing &sewing), using the other workshops available to me only when very necessary. This way I think I can explore more ways of interpreting art & animals, create things quicker since I’m already good at it, and be therefore maybe be able to narrow down what I want to do while I’m doing it. Plus, all the art I like & found for this post are sculptural & could be ceramic anyway.

There’s art where animals are the subject, which I and most artists have done, and don’t always have something interesting to say about the animals themselves or how they’re involved in our lives. These are my favorite pieces I saw from the V&A (images taken from their site):

This is something I wish I had rather than an art piece I have a lot to say & think about. It’s a tiny (2 inch tall) chinchilla carved from chalcedony made by Carl Faberge, likely for some aristocrat.

I think this is the most common way animals are used in art because it’s the closing thing to having the real thing—to have the “aww” feeling of looking at and possessing an adorable critter like a chinchilla without paying hundreds of dollars and sacrificing hours of times actually caring for it.

These two were my favorites—two ceramic sculptures by Dutch artist Carolein Smit. From V&A’s summary: “Seated on a cauliflower, and flanked with a knife and fork, we are reminded of the duality in our love of animals.” I guess that’s supposed to mean that even though we love to see animals as the subject of things and can appreciate them as they are, we also slaughter & eat them. I can appreciate that message, but looking at it initially I just though it was a bummed out rabbit, unable to finish eating his cauliflower…

Especially considering the dog sculpture doesn’t have a similar kind of messaging—Smit’s work is about expressing emotion through animal forms, and the dog is simply representing grief. Why do we have to relate the emotions an animal is having to how humans react to it? I can just as much assume that the dog sculpture is about grief as assume the rabbit is about physical pain and agony, both emotions animals can have. She doesn’t really explain this particular piece on her own site. I wonder who wrote up the summary on the V&A’s site.

Anyway, visually, they’re just great, and just looking at them opens up more techniques to use in ceramics for me. Since these were my favorite objects overall, and in the past I love to made forms of just animals as they are, I hope I can find a way to put them in my own work during my course without being on the “chinchilla” side of this kind of art.

More common than this kind of animal art is surface designs depicting animals, which I also found at the V&A:

Snuff Bottle with Frog Design, 1800-1900, Qing Dynasty

It’s made out of ivory, which is made of animals (usually elephant), and decorated with a much smaller animal (frog), then used for humans.

I won’t be using animal material in my work, but there’s also a whole other category of art of things made from animals, especially with ivory & furs.

There are so many cute, fun designs from John Clappison, and this was my favorite cup from the collection the V&A had.

But obviously, though there’s a place for this kind of art, it’s shallow decoration. This is the kind of art I’d like to do the least, as I think it does the least for animals, and I’m not too interested in it anyways.

And then there’s ceramic design where the form is inspired by or a replica of an animal, an approach basically as old as pottery itself, and transcends artsy design, inspiring scientific designs like birds/planes.

A rabbit tureen design from Chelsea, 1755, though I swear I’ve seen dozens of these across several thrift stores in Louisiana.

This one makes more sense to me—a goose-shaped incense burner, 11th century China. Someone liked it so much they were buried with it. Unlike the rabbit tureen, I might be able to imagine a real goose holding a stick in its mouth (is that how it’s used?) but the rabbit being the shape it is is kind of arbitrary. Or even worse, it might have rabbit stew in it…

If I made functional work like this (which I have) I want to make sure that the animal’s shape as well as its behavior is considered, and I want to make sure I’m not commodifying it too much.

Though I found plenty of art about animals, I didn’t find a lot of art for animals, except this (taken from WIRES Facebook):

In the design exhibit they showcased some of WIRES’s volunteer donated kangaroo pouches—knitted exterior and wool lining.

While they’re used for a great purpose, they’re very simple & nothing groundbreaking for design. That’s intentional, obviously, they need to produce many of them cheaply for orphaned kangaroos, but my point is I wish there were more objects for animals’ use, though I haven’t seen all of it.

That’s why I’ve said out loud this particular category is what I want to do; there’s not much good stuff for animals. As a pet owner I noticed that much design for them is garbage, especially toys, mass produced or even handmade. At the same time, there’s not much they really need because they don’t live like us. They don’t mind if their bed is an ugly combination of colors, and their favorite toy could be a Kong as much as it could be a cute teddy bear. It might be weird to critique most dog toys or water bowls for being not cute enough because, well, they work just fine.

But I think there’s still something to explore there—I think there’s aspects of having a pet that we don’t think about aesthetically that could be made prettier, or aspects that design could make easier. The issue here is I’ll have to incorporate more materials into my work, and therefore it’ll be harder to explore the other categories I’ve wrote about here.

I think for now I’ll go about this project-by-project rather than just think about it.