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

ArtForum, Feb, 2001 by Daniel Birnbaum

In his 1997 catalogue essay "A House Divided," Richard Shusterman gives a political interpretation of Holler and Trockel's Documenta work: "There are also many human pigs in our social world: races and ethnicities that fail to gain our recognition because they are seen through the one-way glass of socio-cultural privilege. Very often such despised ethnicities are denigrated as swine, though Hegel, in denying the African's humanity, compared him not to a pig but a dog." All of this is no doubt true, but there are also millions of real pigs that live short and miserable lives in industrial confinement only to be sent to the slaughterhouse and made into cheap meals for the masses. One needn't see the work as an allegory to see its political dimension. "Can domesticated animals protest against us in any other way than by diseases (swine fever, mad-cow disease, cardiac infarct)?" inquire the artists. These days, when militant vegans in Europe bum down burger joints and sausage factories, when apocalyptic minds de clare that mad-cow disease is divine revenge, and less dogmatic souls like myself actively avoid certain meats, Holler and Trockel's houses for humans and animals cannot be seen merely as amusing visual arrangements of various zoological specimens or as works about the incomprehensibility of animal behavior and nothing else. They're also about power. Indeed, the philosophical underpinnings of humanism itself seem to be at stake. Do we humans need constantly to reassure ourselves of our supremacy over other species through the exclusion of that which is not us but looks, smells, and acts a bit like us--i.e., the animal?

In an interview conducted in 1989 by Jean-Luc Nancy for Confrontations ("Eating Well"), a speculative and outspoken Jacques Derrida delineated a theory of the Western subject as an essentially meat-eating creature. Western humanity has defined itself through a violent exclusion, and incorporation, of the animal: "The subject does not want just to master and possess nature actively. In our cultures, he accepts sacrifice and eats flesh." The subject of power is essentially male and carnivorous, says Derrida, and he inquires, "I would ask you: In our countries, who would stand any chance of becoming a chef d'Etat (a head of State) ... by publicly, and therefore exemplarily, declaring him- or herself to be a vegetarian? The chef must be an eater of flesh."

Holler and Trockel's houses for animals and humans do not try to blur the border between man and other species, nor do they actively renegotiate the traditional notion of humanism. But their untiring exposure of the very line of demarcation forces the viewer to ask the same questions over and over: What is an animal? What is Man? These works never suppose that humans could inhabit a house where other creatures were living on the same terms. It's always an issue of a power structure already visible in the architecture and of who is the subject watching and who the object. In Eyeball: A House for Pigeons, People and Rats the optical associations are stressed even more. In fact, every thing takes place in a giant eye. Built on a hill in the EXPO park in Hannover, this pavilion takes the shape of an eyeball, the iris and pupil directed skyward. One sees the strange-looking building from far away. A wooden canopy covers a circular steel sphere ten meters in diameter, producing the visual effect of a utopian architectural construction reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome or Galeron's Glob Celeste built for the Universal Exposition in Paris a century ago. The artists' original plan was to keep living animals in the gigantic eye. The iris was supposed to open at certain hours, letting the pigeons fly out at the top. What the artists ended up presenting in Hannover was a me chanical model, albeit an impressive one. Visitors could enter the construction from four directions on ramps. Inside the sphere, a never-ending automatic ballet was performed by metal rats and pigeons, pneumatically controlled. The viewers, standing on a circular balcony inside the eye, could see rats shooting out of tubes at the bottom of the construction. The birds in the upper regions of the sphere would suddenly start to move. Some would even flutter their wings and "fly."