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

ArtForum, Feb, 2001 by Daniel Birnbaum

"The brutality of a society, whose dominant trait can be clearly described as maximization of economic profit, is reflected in the fate of those without rights and of animals," Holler and Trockel contend. So is this a political work about injustice and oppression, even an allegory of class struggle? When Kafka's "A Report to an Academy," the story about an ape that is transformed into a human being, was to be published in Martin Buber's journal Der Jude in 1917, Buber wanted to call it a parable, but Kafka preferred the more neutral description "animal story." Most readers, perhaps swayed by the site of publication, take the story to be about the plight of the assimilated Jew. But for Kafka it was clearly important to keep the possibilities of interpretation open. Similarly, the questions asked by Holler and Trockel in relation to their house for pigs and humans don't confine the work to one specific reading but instead open up labyrinths of associations. In a recent essay about these animal projects, French critic Nicolas Bourriaud observes that they are not only about our relation to other living creatures, but just as much about our relation to ourselves. There are things in us that are other than us: "To come to terms with the pig, the mosquito, or the rat also means to make peace with the piggish, mosquito-like, and rat-like parts of ourselves, with a whole community of processes that inhabit and determine us." The encounter with the otherness of the animal thus reminds us of the foreigner inside ourselves. The "becoming animal" in the short stories of Kafka has been interpreted by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as a liberatory strategy, a radical way out of the oedipal structure of European bourgeois subjectivity. Asked about such fantastic transformations, Holler remarks, "Nevertheless, also after reading Kafka, I am no further along in knowing how to view the animal. Or how it might be to be an animal."

Holler and Trockel's first collaborative animal project was Muckenbus (Mosquito bus), 1996, in which humans were to encounter mosquitoes inside a Volkswagen van to test whether sheer willpower alone could influence the insects' tendency to bite. Why is it that some people get bitten a lot, while others are completely spared? Does it have anything to do with the mind-set of the person in question? In the end, because of the risk of disease spreading from one visitor to the other, the project had to remain largely hypothetical. When the bus was finally exhibited, no mosquitoes could be seen, heard, or otherwise perceived (for the simple reason that there weren't any). But in later projects, the visual qualities have been much more emphatic, as in A House for Pigs and People, where the pigs and piglets appeared as part of some hyperreal tableau vivant. Actually, the whole setup could be seen as a piece of optical machinery emphasizing the eye of the spectator and the completely objectified animals that are not even allowed the opportunity to meet the gaze of the observer. Addina, 1997, a closely related work that was originally presented in Palermo and takes its name from the Sicilian word for chicken, reversed the visual arrangement: Here it was the animal who played the role of spectator. Behind the polyester walls of a huge egg-shaped room, real eggs were being produced by forty-eight hens that could climb ramps up to a narrow wooden platform; from there, they were afforded a vantage on the oval room through egg-shaped windows that acted as mirrors when seen from the other side. This privileged perspective offered a view of the human visitors eating their eggs. The humans, on the other hand, saw nothing of the hens, hidden as they were behind the two-way mirror. Instead, other senses were activated: The visitors could hardly avoid the sound and odor of the chickens behind the walls.