Taking up the entirety of Centre Vox’s exhibition spaces is Greek artist Janis Rafa’s Landscape Depressions. It is part of Vox’s Chronopolitics programming, the aim of which is “to provide a forum for artists advocating ethical stances on the future, and to prompt critical reflection on the social and political issues around the notion of time.” A slightly different version of the exhibition under the title Feed me. Cheat me. Eat me ran at the Eye Filmmuseum.
At the entrance is the introductory text and the video, A Sign of Prosperity to the Dreamer, in which dead birds fly through the sky again thanks to an explosion. The remainder of the exhibition spans four distinct spaces.
The first space shows The Space Between Your Tongue and Teeth. It involves three screens, each of which tends to be dominated by light in a specific colour. On each screen is a different view of horses being trained for racing. They have metallic bits stuck in their mouths, they run on treadmills, they stand in neon glow, and they run the track as men fight in the mud. Nude men wash them down. A lewd neon sign buzzes. It all reads like cast-offs from a Nicolas Winding Refn series.
The second space is in the far smaller, narrow room to the side, where an animated video plays with voiceover co-authored by Ioanna Gerakidi. I Betrayed Your Mouth Endlessly focuses on the inside of a horse’s mouth, the skeletal animation shifts around to different angles, the tongue lapping and unfurling. Sometimes the teeth face flat, almost a human mouth with an alternative, “monstrous” mouth to the side, the tendril-like tongue flailing around.
The third room is the largest gallery in the space. It also contains three video works, Requiem to a Fatal Incident (Requiem #2), Waiting for the Time to Pass, and Lacerate. The first two fall around five minutes and the other is much longer. They all play at the same time and the audio overlaps. One involves a highway at night with a heap of dead animals fallen from a truck. Another is a two-sided video of a dog panting behind the misting glass of a car. The last is a lengthy piece where a woman departs from a decaying building, a murdered man left behind as dogs take over the building, sniffing at the naked corpse and putting their noses in his blood. The video is filled with references to Dutch paintings and concentrates on heaps of dead birds and a flood that slowly expands through the building.
The last is the small viewing room, set out with rows of seats for Landscape Depressions, a video work roughly the length of a sitcom episode. Also littered with references to Dutch painting (most of her funding comes from Dutch sources), it is narrated, telling a vaguely magic realist sort of story about a world where all the people suddenly fell fast asleep. The animals are left to roam, although some are trapped in barns or the back of trucks. Other livestock wander into homes, drift into water, and fill the empty streets.
In a “critique” which was actually an interview by Le Devoir, the artist explained the works do not simply view animals through the lens of ecological crisis. Instead, the aesthetics she employs are a means to create an image of animals that is “empathetic” and restores “thickness” to the world. These are two of the primary tropes of cultural anthropology. In assuming this strategy, she aims to “subvert” or “defamiliarize” (two of the primary tropes of “Modernism”) common perceptions of animal and human life. However, the way she goes on to gloss it, the “animal” mostly comes down to a means for self-reflection. Rafa asserts that
My work aims to reflect on the tamed, dominated or even free-roaming animal, in order to grasp who we are, the animal serving as a mirror for our behavior. In addition to addressing the question of animal ethics or even the aesthetics inspired by animals, my work serves to apprehend who we are. In fact, it’s a reflection on the hierarchy we’ve built up with animals, whether it’s because we love them, need them, use them or want to eat them.
One of the interesting things about the exhibition is how readily this already dubious rationale is then even more dubiously framed by curatorial interventions. According to the accompanying text:
Rafa directs her lens and our gaze at the ambivalent connections of intimate familiarity, domination and control between humans and animals. Through her images, the artist pays homage to the non-human body–dead or alive–that bears the mark of that affection as well as that violence. In so doing she posits an alternative perspective in which sensory experience associated with the animal realm prevails over the language and visuality of anthropocentrism.
Is this the case? Isn’t “sensory experience associated with the animal realm” precisely what anthropocentrism is being defined by here? (There isn’t enough of a set-up within the works themselves to make such a distinction meaningful.) Is there anything about the “visuality” in these works that is not already extremely familiar? If anything, you could question the reasonableness of imagining that there has ever been any “anthropocentric” visuality to begin with (let alone that language and visuality have any easy or especially convincing correlative relationship). Making matters worse, the accompanying essay by Goldsmith’s drone Lynn Turner is a near-perfect example of the total incapacity (or unwillingness) to move beyond a completely sentimentalizing anthropocentric fantasy.
Similar thematic claims are taken up in the texts that litter the exhibition space and which tend to gloss the works in terms that have little-to-no evidentiary basis in any of the works themselves and amount to the projection of weak metaphors. (Perhaps it indicates something that almost all the texts are in the dark and illegible. I only read them with the light on my phone). For instance, we are told that one video is reminiscent of a “space capsule” and another is about victimization and revenge while another video shifts from subjective to objective perspective. Meanwhile, Landscape Depressions “can be read as a metaphor for our passive attitude toward climate change or as nature’s revenge on humanity.”
However, it is unclear that it makes sense to talk about “affection,” “domination” or “violence” at all outside of anthropocentric fantasy unless it is to objectify them as the tropes of such a fantasy. The videos, to varying degrees, undermine the appeal to such notions as anything other than this. The authorized narrative of domestic violence in Lacerate is mostly undercut by the irony and indifference of the animals to such a fantasy and the lack of any implied structure of causation. Nothing in Landscape Depressions plausibly leads to imagining it has anything to do with “revenge” or climate change. Again, it seems more like a fable about indifference that points to the irrelevance of human presence in the world. A Sign of Prosperity to the Dreamer boils down to a nicely executed and ironic gag about life’s supposed difference from death and the aesthetic qualities of violence.
Whatever the “theme” might be, it is style that overwhelms all the work. There are around four loose styles she uses within the exhibition. The first work is clearly channelling the aesthetics associated with giallo (and its many current streaming imitators), in terms of colour, use of sounds, textures, framing, tempo, etc.. The other pieces run through a series of other recognizable stylistic tics and references. While all of this is enjoyable, its relationship with the thematic content is to abstract it toward the familiar. She is so fully channelling an entirely familiar set of “euro art film” clichés of the “bodily” or “extreme” that the basic aesthetic of the works has the same quality as the numerous references to art history. Is that what “visuality” and “anthropocentrism” are here, just questions of style? In the case of referencing specific artworks, there may be some very vague art-historical point (the Dutch Golden Age/early capitalism/colonialism), albeit one that is no less commonplace. The use of overtly generic depictions of texture, pacing, lighting, etc. is no less platitudinous.
Most of the exhibition’s confused framing seems to be about a romantic desire to rescue “anthropocentrism,” discharging any accusation of hypocrisy through vagueries like “ambivalence” and “empathy” while simultaneously, and quite accurately, narrating all of this as “perversion” (overtly in the case of the voiceover text for I Betrayed Your Mouth Endlessly, which addresses the “beauty of the perverse”).
What comes from this is a set of familiar aesthetic fantasies (the artist as ape and art as the “domesticated”) ventriloquized through an already tamed avatar in a thematization of the failure to break through the redundancy of the fantasies put on display. They become exercises (not like those of a dog or horse) in the mastery they seem to mock but clearly take great pleasure in. This is not to criticize the works as hypocritical. They are consciously perverse and achieve this with impressive severity and concision. The “animal” is just a prop exploited to create fantasies about violence. The “self-reflection” involved seems to be entirely a matter of self-conscious stylistic choices that foreground the skill and intentionality of the artist as what “prevails” over content.
You could argue that it is impossible to be anthropocentric, that there has never been any “humanity” and that the narrative of human vs animal is mostly nonsense. All the works on display suggest this. To the extent that the works reflect on “who we are,” as she puts it, they suggest that humans are just animals that other animals do not recognize as unique. A discussion of anthropocentrism then is the discussion of a delusion, one which includes the notion of a bifurcation between “nature” and “culture.”