urban animals

We are face-to-face,
in the company of significant others,
companion species to one another.

Donna J. Haraway

Animals in Art - Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt

Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden,
where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.

Milan Kundera



© Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt, Naked Dog, Belgium, 1993

Animals in Art - Martin Usborne

the difference in mind between man and the higher animals,
great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind

Darwin


Buzz, from the series The Silence of Dogs in Cars

skin - hair - fur - feathers II

Natural objects, for example, must be experienced
before any theorizing about them can occur

Edmund Husserl



Vija Celmins, House #1

Animals in Art - Early Photographs

I stumbled across this mysterious daguerreotype of a bird from 1851.
It is one of the first photographic images taken of an animal...

Animals in Art - Yamamoto Masao

I photograph to capture existing phenomena.
Thinking about this day by day, the mountain ceases to be a mountain,
the cloud is no cloud, things left behind are not left behind. . .
maybe I begin to see what only I can see.

Yamamoto Masao



#1315, 2005

Animals in Art - Levi Fisher Ames

Nothing is more beautiful than to know all.

Athanasius Kircher

 

Wood carver Levi Fisher Ames (1840-1923) was originally a carpenter when he began working on his menagerie of small wooden animal figures, some of which were based on real animals, some were purely imaginary. Ames created a very personal cabinet of curiosities: several hundred fabulous creatures housed in glassfronted shadowboxes, completed with hand written labels.

Animals in Art - Jane Edden - Ornithomorph

Jupiter announced that he intended to appoint a king over the birds and named a day on which they were to appear before his throne, when he would select the most beautiful of them all to be their ruler...

Jane Edden - Bird feathers and resin in perspex case
32 Glenny & Henderson HSF.2 Gadfly 2012

Animals in Art - Adam Fuss

The aesthetic of me not being there

Adam Fuss,  Untitled, From the series 'My Ghost', 2000

Favorite Monsters - The Cat with Hands

This is why poetic images are imaginings in a distinctive sense:
not mere fancies and illusions but imaginings that are visible
inclusions of the alien in the sight of the familiar.

Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought




watch the video below

Black & White - Dogs

When the Man waked up he said,
'What is Wild Dog doing here?'
And the Woman said,
'His name is not Wild Dog any more,
but the First Friend,
because he will be our friend
for always and always and always.'

Rudyard Kipling



Elliott Erwitt,  New York City, 2000

Animals in Art - Chris Marker's Petite Bestiaire

Chris Marker lives in Paris and very rarely grants interviews. 

When asked for a picture of himself, he usually offers
a photograph of a cat instead.

watch the video below

Animals in Art - Doug Aitken

watch the video below

Black & White - Horses

The New York that I had come back to was not my old New York. I used to wander around the streets disconsolately, until one night during a blizzard, I happened to see a man watering a couple of steaming horse-car horses, and I thought, “Well, there at any rate is the human touch.” That made me feel much better.

Alfred Stieglitz



Alfred Stieglitz, “The Terminal, New York” (1892)

Animals in Art - Nadine Rüfenacht

from the series "Le Curée de Lilith"

Britta Jaschinski - Zoo

We need animals. Animals don't need us, but we need them.
We constantly look for any kind of connection we can possibly get to them.

Britta Jaschinski

Michael Schnabel - Cages

A Cage went in search for a bird.

Franz Kafka, Collected Aphorisms


Photographic series of empty zoo cages (2000-2002)
by german photographer Michael Schnabel

Animals in Art - Roger Ballen

Many people say my work is quite disturbing. 

I am so pleased to hear that. What a great thing!

Animal Abstraction, 2002

Artist's statement:

I have been shooting black and white film for nearly fifty years now. I believe I am part of the last generation that will grow up with this media. Black and White is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive. Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.

My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey.

If an artist is one who spends his life trying to define his being, I guess I would have to call myself an artist.

Roger Ballen

Animals in Art - Roni Horn - Bird

bird presents the culmination of Roni Horn’s long-running photographic series of taxidermied Icelandic wildfowl. Photographed at close range against white backgrounds (as though obeying the conventional format of studio portraiture) the birds are viewed from behind, their unique physiognomies and markings resulting in inscrutable shapes and patterns on the photographs’ surfaces. Despite the singular form of the title, the birds in this series are presented in pairs, images that are hung side by side one another highlighting the differences and similarities between the two. The gesture of doubling — as an aesthetic and conceptual strategy — has been a recurrent motif for Horn since 1980, a tool that invites careful scrutiny from the viewer, altering the dynamic of the work.

source

Animals in Art - Tim Flach

There is no exquisite beauty, without some strangeness in the proportion...

Edgar Allan Poe