From Critical Art to an Art of Reconciliation: Cohabitation with Non-Human Animals

If art has been instrumental in the formation and sedimentation of the naturalist conception of the world, it also has the power to break it apart by participating in the invention of viable relationships with living beings. But what paths may we take to replace the naturalist relationship with healthier, more enriching, and more intense connections with non-humans? By what means and under what conditions can art best produce an enduring transformation in our rapport with other living creatures and the rest of the world? It is from this perspective that I will examine the work of contemporary American artist Fritz Haeg.

These considerations are informed by ideas developed by Jacques Rancière in The Emancipated Spectator (2009). In this work, Rancière focuses on art’s enduring transformative effects, through a comparative analysis of different forms of socially engaged art and of the effects they produce. The conventional model of engaged art, Rancière says, is dedicated to creating critical devices that strive for a dual effect: “an awareness of the hidden reality and a feeling of guilt about denied reality.” ¹ 1 - Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London, New York: Verso, 2009), 27. As the author points out, however, the guilt born from awareness does not readily translate into a change in representations or a spectator’s decision to act. We are all to some extent aware of the irremediable destruction of primary forests, of polluted oceans, of the disappearance of countless species, and yet this does not change our relationship with nature.

This proposal echoes the concept of “reconciliation ecology” proposed by the ecologist Michael Rosenzweig,² 2 - Michael Rosenzweig, Win-Win Ecology: How the Earth’s Species Can Survive in the Midst of Human Enterprise, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). where reconciliation constitutes the third “R,” or the third axis, in an effective conservation plan, which also includes strategies for reservation (creating natural reserves) and restoration (restoring ecosystems). For Rosenzweig, the protection of living beings can no longer rely solely on the establishment of sanctuaries: the territory has been almost entirely anthropized and pristine spaces are becoming scarce. The habitats of many species are becoming obsolete: they belong to a “wilderness” that no longer exists and that will not return. “The problem is then to create cohabitations on highly anthropized terrain while making sufficient room for other species, thus initiating a coevolution of biodiversity and sustainable human usage.” ³ 3 -  Baptiste Morizot, Les Diplomates. Cohabiter avec les loups sur une autre carte du vivant (Marseille: Wildproject, 2016), 296 (our translation). It is a question of making room for non-human animals in cultivated fields, planted forests, city parks, schoolyards, military bases, timberlands, and our own gardens.

But it is not just a matter of sharing our habitat with other species. Like it or not, we already cohabit with a number of species — for city dwellers, this includes such “synanthropic” species as rats, corvidae, herring gulls, cockroaches, and more. It is a question of “deliberately sharing,” that is, actively transforming our human living habits: “But access to our land isn’t enough. To practice reconciliation ecology successfully, we must learn what species need in order to get along with us, and we must do that job for thousands of separate species. Then, we must diversify the habitats of our surroundings instead of creating, as we do now, the very limited number of habitat architectures that we have come to like. Every front lawn need not look like a golf course.” ⁴ 4 -  Win-Win Ecology, 7.

The reconciliation ecology project thus consists of “reconciling human use of the planet with other species’ usage by allowing wild, autonomous, and resilient populations to flourish on the very same space we inhabit.” ⁵ 5 - Morizot, Les Diplomates, 295 (our translation). Such a conservation policy has philosophical and civilizational ramifications. Nonetheless, art is not an instrument of conservation. While reconciliation with living creatures may be a deeply felt issue for some contemporary artists, it is adopted from a different perspective than that of conservation ecology. It is rather a matter of transforming our attitudes, such as to instil a profound desire for this reconciliation. Indeed, the environmental crisis also reveals a crisis in our sensibilities. Our tastes and our most sensitive availability to the world have been partly mutilated by the reification of nature that accompanied naturalism. Deemed inconsequential by modernity, impoverished by a contemporary life that keeps us willingly apart from a daily rapport with nature, our sensitivity to living beings appears to have been blunted. It is in this sense that art allows one to fashion new connections with the living, by arousing a predisposition for reconciliation. Such is the challenge that Haeg set for himself in his long-term project, Animal Estates.

As part of the Whitney Biennial in 2008, Animal Estates proposed a careful cohabitation of human with non-human animals as a fulcrum for the reinvention of a new sensibility and relationship with living beings. In New York, Haeg built habitats for wild animals: beavers, bats, bees, squirrels, and more. Developed in collaboration with ethnologists and zoologists, these habitats were placed so as to favour the species’ return to an urban setting and were equipped with visual, sound, and olfactory stimuli meant to accommodate the given species. A plaque next to each habitat informs passersby about which particular species lives (or will soon live) on the premises. The artist thus engages the sustainable sharing of an overwhelmingly human urban space with other living creatures. Some might say that these installations make visible a cohabitation that is already taking place and of which humans are either ignorant or pay little attention to. “Animals other than me live here,” a New Yorker might say, while passing the barn owl nest on Gansevoort Street. But there’s another part to Animal Estates: the construction of habitats for animals who will never be able to inhabit them. Haeg built habitats for animals who roamed Manhattan four hundred years ago: the opossum, the eagle, the lynx, etc. Above the Whitney Museum entrance, for instance, he placed a huge eagle nest, which remains irremediably empty, day in and day out.

By its dual nature — the construction of livable habitats together with habitats destined never to be inhabited — Animal Estates constitutes a powerful relational device in one’s rapport with other living beings. An elegiac installation like the eagle’s nest heightens the semantic and affective significance of these inhabited spaces. Standing before the lynx’s empty den, the city-dweller experiences a loss, an absence of relationship with the animal, and possibly even the loneliness of feeling deprived of a presence the possibility of which he or she hadn’t the slightest clue moments earlier. It is one thing to know that the lynx does not live in New York and quite another to be face to face with a den made for it but that it cannot inhabit. Creating new relationships with the living also involves making the disappearance felt. In response to their experience with the empty habitats, citizens may well be moved to act, affectively and cognitively, with respect to habitats that can actually be inhabited, whether by salamander or falcon. The possibility of effective cohabitation with the animals seems, under these conditions, like an opportunity, a tangible enrichment of our environment and of our relationship with animal life, in as much as it is associated with a powerful affective experience of loss and absence. If we can no longer share our lives with one group, we can at least make room for the other. With its two-pronged approach, Animal Estates manages to instil in us a sense of the value of an attentive cohabitation with animals, with other living beings, and to create a new form of community with humans and non humans. We live together here. 

Translated from the French by Ron Ross