Quodlibetica

Savage Edge: Human/Animal in Roxanne Jackson’s Recent Work

Written By: Patricia Briggs Constellation 05 11.23.09

Roxanne Jackson savors images of the “the kill,” the dead, and the undead in her exhibition “We Believe in Some thing,” recently on view in the  galleries of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program (MAEP) at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.  Disturbing body dismemberments and monstrous hybrids signal the violence that polices the cultural categories “human” and “animal,” a violence formed at the edge of the shifting, contingent ontological constructions that philosopher Giorgio Agamben has argued shape Western culture’s racial consciousness. Viewed as a whole, Jackson’s MAEP installation problematizes a group of related cultural fantasies–animality, primitivism, and criminality–and explores these through the lens of the predator/ prey relationship. (1.-2.)

Jackson’s installation Lyuba Twins subtly works with the dynamic of the predator’s instinct to kill and the prey’s feeling of dread. Here, the notion of viewer and viewed becomes analogous to predator and prey; these positions are mobile and shifting.  Jackson uses the darkened gallery both as a stage and as a scene.  In order to witness the scene illuminated on the far end of the gallery, the viewer must  become an actor on this stage–must enter the gallery and traverse the dimly lit space.  Once enveloped in darkness, the viewer’s familiar purchase on the world disappears and is replaced by feelings of defenselessness, weakness, exposure. In this way, the viewer becomes the (vulnerable) “viewed.”  In this darkness, this wilderness, the viewer experiences for a moment a shift from the vertical axis, where head and reason make “human” master, to the horizontal, where violence, ecstasy, and “animal” instinct rule; where every predator is also prey. Bataille is well known for this image of man becoming animal.(3.)

Arriving at the brightly illuminated scene, the viewer finds masterfully crafted ceramic sculptures depicting a pair of newborn animals. In Lyuba Twins Jackson is purposefully unspecific about species. Are these calves or baby sheep?  No matter, so alienated are most of us from the animal world that we lack the information needed to make this simple identification. Nevertheless, positioned above these fragile, in the artist’s words “still borns,” seemingly still wet and warm from the womb, the viewer is master again, predator picking around potential prey.

The connections  between verticality and mastery and between the viewer and human articulated by Lyuba Twins are drawn elsewhere in “We Believe in Some thing,” where Jackson continually picks at the surface of our facile assumptions and reveals the violence located at the ambiguous borderlines that constantly attempt to define and separate human/nonhuman, man/animal, civilized/barbarian. In the process of digging into this discursive and ideological territory, Jackson hits again and again at the figurative rock of racial difference with references to safari,  the “primitive,”  Hip Hop culture, vampire and criminal.

Jackson nods to the ritual of the hunt and to the practice of stuffing dead animals so they appear to be alive in White Diamond (2009), a wall-mounted ceramic buffalo head coated in white flock thread, and Pachyderm (2009), a life size elephant head fashioned of foam, plaster, and gray primer. So accustomed are we to the violence  implicit in the cultural logic of man as master,  we hardly bat an eye at these representations of  decapitated animal heads. Indeed, hunting for sport, the colonial safari, and the display of taxidermy trophies of “the kill” are all practices based in the belief, the truth claim, of a hierarchical relationship of man to animal. Yet Agamben has argued that the instability, the impossibility, of this ontological separation motors a set of cultural practices which constantly attempt to reinforce it. The results are violent, lethal practices like the hunt, the routine slaughter of animals for industry and profit, and the systematic dehumanization of  racial or ethnic groups (for Agamben, the Jew and concentration camps of WWII are a prime example of this lethal cultural logic) (4.). In works like White Diamond and Pachyderm the same human/animal paradigm which justifies a notion of man as master comes into dialogue with the concomitant logic of civilized/primitive which justifies colonial and imperial expansion and naturalizes racial inequality.

Accordingly, the splashes of gold Jackson includes in these works are references to Hip Hop grillz, the elaborate silver, platinum, and diamond caps worn over the teeth by rappers which signal “gangster” wealth, outsider status, and alternative models of success via signs of conspicuous consumption. The shiny gold horns of the buffalo in White Diamond and the golden bricks that ‘prop up’ the elephant head in Pachyderm speak directly, then, to the bodies of African-American rappers and contemporary youth culture. With this gold, Jackson pulls colonial history and naturalized  assumptions about hierarchical order of being(s) into conversation with contemporary ways of distinguishing the line between “white” and “black,” “law-abiding citizen” and “gangster,” which are produced in and disseminated daily though the entertainment industry. (5.)

The synthetic wigs in Untitled (2009) are another instance of Jackson’s dialogue with the contemporary costumes of Hip Hop culture. In this piece, brunette wigs hang over (are worn by) a pair of truly disturbing sculpted ceramic heads with grotesque animal snouts. The dark cascading hair, so closely connected in the viewer’s mind with the dynamic movement of young Black females dancing, is coupled here with faces of savagery. In this piece bloody eviscerated flesh speaks of the brutality of animal and human sacrifice, suggesting the so-called primitive that inhabits our historical and psychological imaginary.

Jackson’s Untitled video (2009) picks up this exploration of the primitive within and couples it with the related image of the “undead” which likewise haunts the modern psyche. Mythic types like the vampire, the werewolf, and the zombie, which populate horror films and music videos, manifest the fear and the threat of violence and violation that accompany the mixing of human and nonhuman, man and animal, revealing how closely tied these anxieties are to narratives that place man as prey or victim of an animalized human or nonhuman predator.  Jackson’s Untitled video weaves clips of dancing zombies from Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the classic horror film The Company of Wolves with brutal footage from nature documentaries showing animal predators killing their prey. Rather than erecting a screen or using a video monitor, Jackson projects the moving image on a rectangle of white fake fur placed on the floor of the gallery. In this video Jackson collapses discourses that are ideologically related, showing the ways that the nonhuman is mapped onto the human, the dead is mapped onto the living, in ways that never cease to fascinate and frighten us.

Agamben argues that the definition of difference which justifies racism or ethnic violence is one of the most lethal functions of the assumption of a fundamental ontological difference between man and animal, human and nonhuman. The same lack of regard for life characteristic of colonizing empire (and the violence, even genocide that  accompanies it) also justifies racial hierarchies that feed into and off of the disproportionate incarceration statistics for African American men. The racial dynamic at work in our shared cultural assumptions regarding race and criminality are activated in Hoody (2009), a gruesome decapitated head flocked in red fibers so as to visually scream, Danger! Emergency! This macabre object appears as if fresh from a crime. Still wearing the hood of a sweatshirt, it rests on a pedestal like evidence in a trial, or perhaps the leavings from a nightmarish street execution. In the open mouth a gold grill is worn over the enlarged incisors of this animal(ized) man, vampire, werewolf, criminal, predator. As is the case with so many works in this exhibition, Hoody positions the viewer as a participant or witness. The scene or stage suggested here is the urban street, subway car, parking  garage, or suburban alley where the potential for violence always feels palpable and the criminal predator is always potentially present. In Hoody, then, a network of signifies — animal, criminal, vampire, gangster, black man — register the threat of death or dismemberment that is a function of racial fear.

Because it uses realism, theatricality, and narrative, Jackson’s work shares much with the popular cultural discourses that so fascinate her. Yet her appropriations do not fetishize or glamorize death as the entertainment industry does. Rather, Jackson hones in on it, treating death as a critical detail, presenting it as a palpable singular scene. Excising the scene from the momentum of narrative (in cinema and the mechanisms of the unconscious) Jackson positions the viewer within its terrible radius.

Footnotes

(1.) Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

(2.) The unpublished reviews of “We Believe in Some thing” written by my students at Minneapolis College of Art and Design have shaped my understanding of issue of predator/ prey in Jackson’s work. My thanks especially to Emily Atchison, Benjamin Heyer, and Allegra Lockstadt for their insights on this exhibition.

(3.) Georges Bataille, “Mouth,” (1930) reprinted in Allen Stoekl ed., Visions of Excess Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 59-60.

(4.) Agamben, The Open (2002) and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.  Daniel Heller-Roazen (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press 1998).

(5.) See Bakari Kitwana for a discussion of Hip Hop culture as a language of the outsider. Bakari Kirwana, Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the new reality of race in America (New York: Basic Civitas Books: 2005)

Image List:

1.) Roxanne Jackson, Lyuba Twins (2009).

2.)Roxanne Jackson, Lyuba Twins (Rorschach) 2009.

3.) Roxanne Jackson, White Diamond (2009).

4.) Roxanne Jackson, Pachyderm (2009).

5.) Roxanne Jackson, Untitled (2009).

6.) Roxanne Jackson, Untitled (We Believe) (2009).

7.) Roxanne Jackson, Becoming (2009).

8.) Roxanne Jackson, Hoody (2009).

9.) Roxanne Jackson, Untitled (Video) (2009).

Patricia Briggs’s writing appears in journals including Artforum and History of Photography. She is Associate Professor at Minneapolis College of Art and Design.