Last weekend saw the celebration of Halloween on campus. Participating students wore their costumes, some handmade and others purchased from retail stores such as Spirit Halloween. Many costumes were of animals that appear in popular movies and television franchises. These included Pascal the chameleon from Rapunzel, Patrick from SpongeBob, and multiple Garfields.
We can inquire further about the act of dressing oneself in a costume, and try to discern from it certain features that are present in our understanding of animals broadly. While the aforementioned characters — Pascal, Patrick, and Garfield — are animals, they are only so according to the fictional universe they belong to, which is incompatible with our world. Our world is one where chameleons, starfish, and cats cannot communicate intelligibly with us humans to the extent that these characters do. Therefore, dressing oneself in a Garfield costume cannot be equated with dressing oneself in a cat costume; the costume is an animal insofar as Garfield is a character that possesses the qualities of cat-ness, as Garfield himself is not a cat either according to our taxonomical rules. The idea of cat-ness we find in a Garfield costume is twice abstracted from the actual animal, cat.
Abstractions on their own are not problematic. This is the case for Halloween costumes, where abstractions on animals usually occur incidentally when the costume-wearer decides on a character that happens to be based on an animal. The unwritten rule of Halloween dictates that one must dress up in a costume that is recognizable, and it happens to be that many recognizable characters are based on animals.
However, abstractions do become problematic when they become our primary mode of engagement with the subjects that they attempt to imitate. These phenomena are conditioned by a background that physically prevents interaction between dominant and marginal groups; as was the case during racial segregation in the United States, the distorted portrayals of Blackness, and the anti-Asian sentiment during World War II, made possible by the marginal Asian population in the contiguous United States. A similar problem occurs in our portrayal of animals, coupled with a physical division that exists between us and most animals. I say “most” because there are pets with whom we interact daily, whom we already know more intimately than any abstraction can tell us. A common example is the novel and movie Jaws, whose distorted portrayal of a great white shark is problematic because most of us have not interacted with a great white shark directly, and thus we can neither confirm nor deny how they are depicted in the movie. Even when engaging directly with a subject is impossible, we can get to know the subject better by consulting diverse empirical sources. These sources can take the form of scientific research, recounts of genuine experience, and even art.
The Colby Museum of Art is currently exhibiting “Why Look at Horses?”
Henry Merges, the Anne Lunder Leland Curatorial Fellow, describes the exhibition with the following quip: “In our rush toward the future, what gets left behind?”
He expanded, “The horse serves as an early case study for understanding the technological displacements we are witnessing today. […] The horse now persists primarily as an image […] to look at horses then, is to look at ourselves.”
The exhibition includes a digital video projection by Anri Sala which films a horse flinching each time a car passes on a nearby highway. Eadweard Muybridge’s collotype, “Elberon,” deconstructs a horse and a rider’s motion into frames. Elijah Gowin’s “Horse” photographs a disposed toy horse in silver print. Otto Dix’s “Pferdekadaver” is an etching of a mutilated horse cadaver, an inspiration from Dix’s years as a machine gunner during World War I.
With the exception of photograph prints, these works can be called abstractions insofar as they emphasize one aspect of the horse over all others. However, because humankind has engaged with horses for more than 4,000 years, and because the artists themselves interacted with horses prior to creating the art, the abstractions do not distort the idea of the horse. A firm grasp on the actual horse has already been established.
~ Benjamin Ha `27
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