Mice And Man - Carsten Holler and Rosemarie Trockel - Brief Article

ArtForum, Feb, 2001 by Daniel Birnbaum

THE ART OF CARSTEN HOLLER AND ROSEMARIE TROCKEL

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

--George Orwell, Animal Farm

High hedges surround the building, hiding it from view like a public toilet that the denizens of this little German city, Kassel, aren't particularly proud of. From the outside it's not very hospitable, its strangely minimal architecture making it look like a bunker. The door is ajar, as if to facilitate quick access when the need is pressing. But once you enter the building, an altogether unexpected atmosphere prevails. You have entered a place of calm reflection, meditation, even wonder. Groups of people, young and old, sit and lie on gray carpets arranged on a concrete incline. Everybody is looking in the same direction, as if silently scrutinizing a large painting in a museum. But what these people are marveling at is alive: a group of pink pigs with big black spots. Carsten Holler and Rosemarie Trockel's Ein Haus fur Schweine und Menschen (A house for pigs and people), presented in 1997 at Documenta X, was a pigpen complete with a sow feeding her enormous litter. The pig family, relaxing behind a large s heet of glass, was sometimes so still that it didn't seem quite real. At times you had the feeling you were looking at a large photograph. Then, suddenly, one of the piglets would start moving, and the fiction of a still life disintegrated.

What is an animal? In a series of collaborations that began in 1996, Holler and Trockel have staged encounters between man and beast that make this question pressing. And in a second step that seems to follow on the heels of the first, one is led to inquire, And what precisely are we who ask this question? Holler and Trockel have realized ten projects together, the final one being their contribution to EXPO 2000 Hannover, Augapfel: Ein Haus fur Tauben, Menschen und Ratten (Eyeball: A house for pigeons, people and rats), 1996/2000. Hens, pigs, mosquitoes, bees, silverfish, rats, and pigeons have all appeared in this series of works, which Holler referred to in a recent lecture as "monuments of incomprehensibility." Both artists have produced works with zoological ingredients before (Holler is also a devoted ornithologist), but never has the hermeneutic problem been so evident as in this series of collaborations. "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him," Wittgenstein wrote in the Philosophical Inves tigations, and Holler and Trockel appear to agree: We're surrounded by animals, some of them we know well, some we even love, but they remain strangers to us. They're inscrutable.

As an introduction to the book A House for Pigs and People (2000), Holler and Trockel pose a long series of questions--moral, epistemological, and political--concerning the relation between humans and animals: "Do races living on a vegetarian diet behave differently than meat-eaters when it comes to territorial expansion? Is there a link between Hitler's vegetarian eating habits and what he did? Why is it that worldwide many more men kill than women? How would it be if we ourselves had to kill the animals we eat and could no longer delegate the unpleasant side of it? How would it be, as proposed by Porphyrius, to eat but only without killing and thus to live on fruit and withered cabbage leaves?"

The Documenta piece, perhaps the best-known work in the artists' collaborative series, emphasized the importance of the eye. Because of the glass, all the other senses are bracketed. The pigs cannot be touched, smelled, or heard. They're reduced to visual phenomena. As it turns out, the glass separating the humans from the pigs was transparent only from one side: Seen from the pigs' perspective, the glass was a mirror. The humans who, after visiting the house, wanted to get a pig's-eye view of the setup--that is, watch the humans watching--soon realized that the people weren't visible to the swine: The family of pigs was free to walk in and out of the house, which opened onto a muddy outdoor area, and one could thus get a glimpse of the pigs from around back if one walked around the hedges, but the human audience on the ramp would always remain out of view, behind the mirror.

There is something about a pane of glass that fictionalizes whatever is on the other side. Thus the pigpen became a kind of theater with animals onstage. One could even take the glass for a large screen; this cinematic quality was emphasized in a smaller version of the piece presented as part of the 1999 show "Maisons/Hauser" at ARC Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, where the artists displayed the whole series of animal projects, some in the form of models. The miniature version of the Documenta work was titled Ein Haus fur Schweine und Kinder (A house for pigs and children), a replica so small that only little kids could enter. For an adult to find out what was going on in the house, he or she would have to ask the children, who would report that they'd seen a film (which, in this version, was indeed the case). A film about pigs.