Panel 1: Performance
Panel 2: Afterlives
Panel 3: Circulations

Panel 1

Performance 

Alexander Clayton, University of Michigan, Wisdom Grunts at Charing Cross:” Performing Animal Intelligence in London, 1750-1850

This paper examines how performances of animal intelligence—rooted in illusion and satire—came to redefine understandings of the animal mind, the natural order, and human-animal relations in late-eighteenth century London. It shows how a menagerie of learned pigs, scientific elephants, and military monkeys both sustained and challenged taxonomies of reason at the end of the enlightenment. By spelling words, dressing fashionably, and solving puzzles, animals toyed with the exclusivity of human subjective experience. Far more than Cartesian machines, they became the flag-bearers of the “demi-rational.” Animals were remade as politicians, musicians, and academics, blurring the boundary between nonhuman cunning and human creativity. From Samuel Johnson and Roberts Burns to Erasmus Darwin and William Martyn, writers and men of science examined the acts as proxies for the power and limits of human reason. In doing so, performances not only blurred the line between human and nonhuman, but helped move it altogether.

Caricature cartoon of pig arranging letters on ground while spectators watch in amazement

Thomas Rowlandson, The Wonderful Pig (1785), engraving on paper, Royal Collection, RCIN 810128.

Rebecca R. Olsen, University of Delaware, Flesh, Fiber, and Feminine Materiality in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford

When Betty Barker’s cow is nearly fatally burned by a fall into a lime-pit in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), a former military officer offers a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that she clothe her cow in a flannel suit, as was used to treat human bodies which had been burned. Betty Barker takes this suggestion seriously, creates the garment, and the animal’s health is restored. Though today typically made from cotton, nineteenth century flannel was most often constructed from a softly woven sheep’s wool. In creating her cow’s suit, Betty Barker produces a multispecies object: sheep’s wool used to clothe a cow that mimics a human-centered medical practice. In this paper, I consider how Cranford’s women-dominated town presents alternative material practices which value animal bodies.

Daniel J. Bowman, University of Sheffield, For the Humane Treatment of Automobiles: Loving Machines in Early U.S. Road Narratives

In the first automotive periodical ever published in the English language—The Horseless Age—the editor E. P. Ingersoll claimed that the automobile was a ‘humane’ technology, which would ensure the liberation of horses from human service.  Whilst the automobile offered equines some relief from their heavier burdens, this form of humanitarianism sought to remove horses entirely from human society—to usher in a horseless age.  In this paper, I evaluate the extent to which early automotive culture truly encouraged the humane treatment of nonhuman animals in the US, considering factors such as roadkill and habitat destruction notably absent from automobile advertisements.  By analysing some of the earliest texts of a now-classic US genre—the road narrative—I will reveal some surprising features of our relationship with this revolutionary technology.  Human tendency to zoomorphise these machines leads to the formation of emotional bonds, and even calls for more ‘humane treatment of automobiles.’  In a world where humans have increasingly fewer meaningful relationships with other animals, what does it mean to care about cars—to love horsepower more than horses?

Panel 2

Afterlives

Corey Ratch, Columbia University, The Recursive Rendering of Interwar Abattoir Photography

Theorist Nicole Shukin points to the double meaning of “rendering” as both the making of artistic forms and the melting down of animal bodies. Film-based photography is only possible through the production of gelatin, a substance obtained through engineering the lives and deaths of specific domesticated animals. The use of animal by-products to make art and artifacts is a practice virtually inseparable from the development of human culture. In cave painting, animal representations were made using materials from various species in a range of prehistoric art supplies. In the modern period, a similar dynamic plays out in abattoir photography, where dismembered animals are depicted on gelatin-coated film stock. While the work of interwar photographers like Eli Lotar and Dora Kallmus takes us inside the abattoir, the images are in part a material result of the processes they themselves show. This talk explores how this kind of recursive rendering brings subject matter and material substrate into disquieting proximity, collapsing distinctions between spectacle and reality.

Alex Zivkovic, Columbia University, Two Lost Parrots: Taxidermy Art and Embodied Engagement

Focusing on two Surrealist assemblages from the 1930s—Joan Miró’s Object (1936) and Joseph Cornell’s Untitled (Fortune-Telling Parrot for Carmen Miranda) (1939)—this paper explores how to recover and center taxidermy in our responses to these projects. By being attuned to the materiality and lived experiences of two parrots often “lost” in scholarship, we add a physiological (which I argue is consequently also ethical) aspect to the critiques of war and voyeurism already present in the works. This paper seeks to explore what is lost when we ignore materiality and what can be gained by embracing affects of desire, mourning, or hunger in the “viewing” experience. Rather than settle on one approach, this paper moves through various theories of embodiment to probe the possible audience relationships that different disciplinary methodologies may offer—questions that have become all the more important now at various degrees of digital mediation and remove.

Watercolor of a green parakeet and blue parakeet sitting on a tree branch

Illustration of two parrots by Anselmus Boëtius de Boodt (1550-1632).

Ramey Mize, University of Pennsylvania, From Buffalo Hide to Paper: The Contested Ground of Pté Oyáte and Plains Painting

By the late 1600s, vast buffalo herds had emerged as the foundational source of physical, spiritual, and cultural sustenance for the Indigenous people of the North American Great Plains. Warrior artists rendered incidents of human history across buffalo hide with buffalo bone brushes, the animal’s skin serving both as a medium and metonym of Native homelands. By 1883, however, buffalo were brought to the brink of extinction by the violent incursions of U.S. settler colonialism. Native artists increasingly made use of alternative media, replacing hide with muslin and paper for the material basis of their ongoing artistic practice. Through a comparison of imagery on hide, muslin, and paper, I will investigate the ways in which landscape and colonial rupture were instantiated at the material level. By taking into account the ecological, historical, and symbolic valences of Plains painting and its shifting supports, this paper proposes a different understanding of contested “ground.” 

Three men on horses hunting three buffalo along with another man and two more horses all painted on a buffalo hide

Painted Buffalo Robe, Nuxbaaga (Hidatsa), Northern Plains, ca. 1875, Tanned buffalo hide, pigment, porcupine quills, Plains Indian Museum, Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Cody, WY, NA.702.30

Panel 3

Circulations

Sarah Mead Leonard, Independent Scholar, Imperial Iridescence: Beetle Wings in Victorian Dress

Between about 1850 and 1880, some fashionable British gowns and shawls glimmered with a particular iridescence: green, purple, and blue, shining out among intricate embroidery. The embellishment that created this effect was not sequins nor stones, but rather elytra – the wing cases of jewel beetles from the family Buprestidae. These beetles are native to Southeast Asia, and the embroidery using them was created not in Britain, but in India. By tracing the material history of beetle-wing embroidery, this paper will reveal not only the Victorian taste for animalian iridescence, but also a complex network of nature, trade, imperial power, and cultural exchange.

Victorian white cotton dress with stitched green iridescent beetle wings into patterns

Dress, 1868-69. Cotton, gilded metal thread and jewel beetle elytra. Victoria and Albert Museum, T.1698:1 to 5-2017.

 

Marina Wells, Boston University, The Gender of Bones

This paper examines whalebone canes and corset busks to illuminate the unique role of these animal products in producing gender identity on nineteenth-century whaleships. Whalebone complexly connotes the context of all-male butchery in the American whaling industry, and has gone previously unexamined as a gendered product with a past life of its own. Antebellum whalemen also deliberately inscribed their gender onto whalebone when they used it as a canvas, carving scenes such as violent whale hunts onto women’s busks. As a result, works of scrimshaw paradoxically perpetuated and challenged mainstream gender norms and animal relations in New England, and brought whales into their human bodily realm.

Drawing of nautilus pompilius with spiral shell cutaway to reveal body inside the shell

Richard Owen (drawing) and John Christian Zeitter (mezzotint and engraving), Nautilus pompilius in the prone position, in Richard Owen, Memoir on the Pearly Nautilus (London: Richard Taylor, 1832), plate I.

Laurel Waycott, University of California, San Francisco, Lustrous Shells and Rotting Bodies: The Material Duality of the Chambered Nautilus

The spiral of the nautilus shell is a familiar image at the nexus of art and science, connoting growth and wonder, while making the natural world seem ordered and logical. For centuries, Westerners collected the beautiful shells, while knowing almost nothing about the animals who produced them, because shells were mobile in ways that the elusive animal—and knowledge about it—was not. I explore this material duality through the story of the first preserved nautilus specimen to arrive in Europe. Violently collected near Vanuatu in 1829, bottled in alcohol, and transported to London, the animal was dissected by naturalist Richard Owen, who translated the messy, decomposing organism into a triumph of scientific knowledge. Through this, I demonstrate how knowledge about the organism, and the meanings attached to it, were shaped by the animals’ materiality: squishy, ephemeral bodies in lustrous, enduring shells.

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