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Books in Progress
- The Natural Anarchist: Animal Rights and Visual Culture in Pre-World War I France and Britain. 2011.
Abstract:
I am starting a long-term book project on the subject of the interrelation between anarchist theory and philosophy, animal rights, and visual culture at the turn of the twentieth century, comparing Britain and France. Sparked by my previous study of anarchist theory and the development of modernism in this seminal period, this project will focus on conceptions of the ‘human/animal divide’, their role in anarchist social theories, and their relation to a range of visual imagery, from painting and sculpture exhibited in the official salons, to prints and cartoons in the popular press, to the development of modernism and the new media of photography and film. My project will intersect the fields of visual studies, political theory and ethics, and the new field of animal studies, conceived as a subset of environmental history.
Anarchism as a movement rejected the authority of the state and all traditional hierarchies, looking to the future for a just and balanced social order. Anarchists critiqued the economic injustices and labor conditions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century society, industrial degradation of the natural environment, and gender inequality. They mounted support for the first environmental, feminist and sexual liberationist movements at the turn of the century, and they remain an important part of the anti-globalization and ecology movements in the present. It may not be surprising that the relation of animals to these ideas is important in our own period, but that such ideas originated in the nineteenth century and played an important role in the development of modernism and visual culture is more so.
Relations between humans and animals have received focused attention in the last two decades, building on more traditional scholarly literature and partly responding to a culture-wide growth of concern about biodiversity and climate change. Because the impact of the human race on our planet is rooted in changing attitudes to nature over a long period, environmental historians, political economists and scholars in numerous other fields have become increasingly interested in these attitudes, studying the human/animal divide from a great variety of perspectives. Within art history and visual studies, this question has begun to receive much needed attention. Fin-de-siècle and avant-guerre France has received little attention so far within the interdisciplinary field of animal studies in recent years, though rich primary material exists regarding its animal rights movements; Victorian Britain has received quite a lot of attention, though its related visual culture remains understudied and often misunderstood. Too frequently, in otherwise excellent studies, images in a variety of media are treated as “documentary” proof, for example, of the altered appearance of domestic animals through genetic manipulation and the reshaping of the animal body in line with complicated human desires. But the images in question need themselves to be analyzed as expressive of these same desires and as manipulating inherited visual conventions in a variety of styles; they should not be taken as “realistic,” much less documentary.
The conception of this book grew out of my previous book, The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism Avant-Guerre Paris (forthcoming University of Chicago Press). The final chapter studied the anarchist aesthetics of the modernist Czech artist František Kupka in light of his close friendship with the major French anarchist theorist Elisée Reclus. Reclus's chief project, L’homme et la terre (Man and the Earth) (1905-08), for which Kupka did the illustrations, was a six-volume comparative history of human cultures and their changing relationships to the earth. An internationally respected scientist, Reclus had an openly political aim in his study, which was to look at the development of institutions and the allocation of natural resources in every corner of the globe throughout history, arguing for more equal distribution of wealth as a cure for social ills and for the evolution of society toward a happier future. The implicit anarchism of his geography is explicit in a large body of writing that made Reclus equally famous as an anarchist theorist throughout Europe. In a steady stream of pamphlets, he spelled out his central notion of evolution; engaging with contemporary arguments interpreting Darwin, Reclus’s concept encompassed not merely the physical, but also spiritual and social realms. In considering this body of theory, I noticed the important role he attributed to animals in the birth of human culture, and I realized that it was a potent foundation of Reclus’s early environmentalism; this evolutionist view of society constitutes a form of primitivism deeply germane to early twentieth-century art and visual culture. I want to study how this may be encoded and/or reflected in depictions of animals and early humans as an expansion of my longtime interest in the history of modernist primitivism. Additionally, Reclus himself proselytized for vegetarianism and antivivisectionism, participating in an active animal rights movement in France that went well beyond the parameters of the anarchist movement; for Reclus, animal rights was continuous with his anticolonialism. The animal rights movement in Britain is better known, and I will study them comparatively to discover whether they cooperated or merely overlapped, as well as to consider differences in attitudes to colonialism, hence primitivism, in these two imperial cultures.
This book will be a consideration of new issues raised by my twenty years of research into anarchism and modernism in the visual arts in early twentieth-century France. My first book, Re-Ordering the Universe: Picasso and Anarchism, 1897-1914 (Princeton 1989), considered Pablo Picasso’s immersion in Spanish anarchism in the artist’s early work and its impact on the development of his modernism through the Cubist movement and up to the First World War. My next book projects—Cubism and Culture (co-authored with Mark Antliff, Thames & Hudson 2001) and A Cubism Reader: Documents and Criticism, 1906-1914 (co-authored with Mark Antliff, University of Chicago, 2008)—further developed my research into art and anarchism; I meanwhile began study of the concept of the ‘primitive’ in light of colonialism and have also published substantively on that subject. In a number of articles I have addressed a variety of artists’ involvement with the concept and practice of an anarchist and primitivist art, which form part of my forthcoming The Liberation of Painting. I am widely read in anarchist theory, though I do need to go back and reconsider the role(s) that animals have been asked to play in this literature. I have found several categories of related imagery: paintings of fallen cart horses; paintings and sculptures of ‘early man’, usually family groups often depicted with domesticated animals; political cartoons comparing the plight of the prostitute with overworked horses, and numerous modernist treatments of the traditional animalier category, etc. I know that there will be much more when I am able to research the project.
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