Essay by: Lynn Ruscheinsky, PhD

Seeing is a great deal more than believing these days. Visualizing technologies allow us to see more than ever before—we can map a planetary hemisphere elsewhere in the solar system or magnetically image the workings of our own brain. Vision is considered the master sense of the postmodern era yet, the primacy of vision is not new; the privileging of sight in Western thought dates back to the ocularcentricism of the Greeks that insisted vision was the reflection of basic reality. Recently a new vision has inserted itself into the Western imaginary—Virtual Reality, “a reality which is apparently true but not truly True, a reality which is apparently real but not really Real”(Batchen 1998: 273). Consequently, postmodernism has seemed the demise of vision as the legitimation of knowledge. Images, it is claimed, are now set completely adrift from their referents, whose putative reality has ceased to provide a standard of truth or illusion (Jay, 1993: 544). Jean Baudrillard tells us, “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself” (1983: 218). The “hyperreal” world of simulations means we have become seduced by images that refer to nothing but themselves.

How then do we understand the real event if reality is everywhere infiltrated by images, virtuality and fiction?

In the culture of simulation, there is nothing “natural” about the way we look at animals. John Berger writing in 1980 insisted that the proliferation of animal representations was compensatory to their historic loss (10-11). During the twentieth century, the automobile displaced draught animals, the natural environments of field animals, wild or domesticated were destroyed by urban sprawl, and hunting, poaching and the commercial exploitation of many species has rendered them extinct or almost so (ibid.). As animals and their habitats became ever more exotic and remote our relationship with them shifted from cohabitation to isolation, and from service to spectacle.

Parallel to the disappearance of work animals from the urban environment was the burgeoning of the domestic pet (12-13). Animals were separated from their natural way of life and brought into relationship with human need, and human desire. Under the alienated conditions of late capitalism, our sentimental attachment and dependence on animals for companionship has increasingly diminished the power to act independently for both species. Even our ethical desire to protect and preserve the ecosystems of wild animals by simulating their natural habitats in public zoos and refuges has made these animals as dependent as pets on their keepers for food and social interactions, including the supply of mates for reproduction (Cox and Ward 2003: 2).

Our relationship to the wider world of nature under late techno-capitalism is further complicated by the creation of test-tube animals, genetically engineered animals, artificial life-forms and the merging of biological and computational forms. These are animals and organisms whose reproduction and evolution—whose futurity is dependent upon their utility and value to their human creators. This is the stuff of science fiction. The chimera of animals and non-animals, machines and organisms birthed within the wombs of techno-science not only make firm distinctions between animals, machines and humans increasingly difficult but also has contributed to our steadily depleted sense of reality (Haraway 2004: 174-175). Reality is assured, insured, not by the original in nature but by its copy—the replicant, the artificial, the image—as all of reality in late techno-capitalist culture lusts to become a copy of the real for its own survival.

Shannon Belkin’s portrait of Kirkuk is a copy not of reality, but of a photograph, which is already a copy of the horse. The painting bears only an external and deceptive resemblance to a recognized model; its semblance is only a surface effect, an illusion developed through an aesthetic of realism that transforms the depth of contact with nature into a virtual surface of contact, a second nature. We are asked to make an imaginative leap from nature to the very surface of the canvas where its copy and the viewer come into contact. Belkin brings together the visceral body of the horse and the technology of photography and paint, projecting them over each other in order to consolidate an effect, an enticement to touch, to smell, to hear – an enticement to the real that is thwarted.

In the space between the viewer and the image, a gradual oscillation develops between the two effects. In the first instance we feel ourselves absorbed by the image we are so intently looking at; we surrender to the phantasmagoric spectacle of Kirkuk frozen in a moment of supreme life. No living organism could accomplish this act. This is a spiritual vision made possible only through re-presentation (see Haraway 2004: 175). The specular commerce between viewer and horse at the interface of canvas is transcendent. Here Kirkuk has surpassed mortal life, he holds his pose forever, with muscles tensed, nose aquiver, veins in the face, slender ankles and folds in the supple skin all prominent. We are drawn into the scene and held there in communion for the eye of Kirkuk has captured our gaze (ibid.). His gaze holds and we are transfixed by the illusion mistaking it for reality.

In the second instance, Belkin plunges us into a movement away from psychological depth and absence of consciousness associated with aesthetic experience toward the surface and presence of our own phenomenal reality. Perhaps it is the expressive qualities of Belkin’s realism that also make it impossible to disassociate oneself so categorically from one’s own visceral body. We are brought to our senses at the surface of the canvas, we attend to the brushwork and subtle changes of colour, to the textures and forms, we are brought to an appreciation of the act of image making in and of itself. Our rational assessment makes the disjuncture between the copy and the real all the more evident.

In Belkin’s new works of toy animals, she takes this oscillation a step further. Viewers are positioned in a way that forces them to abandon their negation of nature altogether. Once again, Belkin has used beauty as a device for drawing viewers in. Yet she has made the slightly distanced space of purely aesthetic entertainment an uncomfortable one. She brings into full view the artificiality of our experiences. We are no longer even in front of a copy of a copy, but rather stare with fascination at the transformation of reality into images. These are disturbing paintings for they offer a fiction as reality. Yet we are drawn in fascinated by their familiarity, by their semblance of life.

Belkin’s canvases call up the virtual world of childhood play, of Saturday morning cartoons, Rin Tin Tin and Lassie. They remind us of the world of Disney. But that world, however nostalgic it may be, has reduced animals into human puppets that encapsulate all the trivial-mindedness of current social practices designed for family viewing and excessive consumption (Berger 1980: 13). Children are the key players here of course. Stuffed toys, plastic farm animals, cartoons, picture books, images of every sort are produced for children. For children seem to not only like animals, but also to be like animals in their wide-eyed innocence and dependence on adult caregivers. Children learn to be responsible adults through reflexive play with pets, toys or the more recent realistic animal toy robots and virtual pets and hence are required to feed them, train them, take them to bed, and so on, as part of a process of socialization (Cox and Ward 2003: 2).

Belkin’s paintings of toy animals parody and challenge the usual representational forms of childhood experience and question the ways in which we have come to regard reality. Former firm distinctions between animals, images, machines and humans are now unreliable—life can now be generated in the lab or even more abstractly by sophisticated computer programming. If watching animals once allowed humans to imagine being at one with nature, how does the human respond to the knowledge that nature itself is an illusion, a virtual reality (ibid: 4)?

The nature of memory and experience is being recast by the social manipulation of images. The inference is that even in the imaginary, virtual reality as a model represents the possibility of a distinctive and definitive difference that produces the real or, more precisely, a more-than-real, its own memory, on the basis of experience (see Massumi, 1987: 92). Hence, the reality of the model is a question that needs to be dealt with. The model is already a translation of the real through our conscious perception of matter; our senses translate the thing-in-itself enabling us to perceive it as distinct. There is a further contraction of the real when our perception is affected and complicated by our memory enabling recognition. This process of perception-contraction is instantaneously made virtual as moments of our consciousness. (Bergson, 2004: 25). According to Plato we see through our eyes and not with them. It is our consciousness that creates the entire network of resemblances and representation. Thus, both copy and model are the products of the same subjective process.

What we are left with is a distinction not between the model and copy, or the real and the imaginary, but between two modes of simulation. The first mode, the model, is the real dog. The second, the copy such as Belkin’s painting of a Sheep Dog, is normative, regularizing and reproductive, it relies on surface resemblances to visible objects in the world that cannot be recuperated into purely rational understanding but rather, according to Henri Bergson’s concept of perception-contraction, ruptures the smooth surface of the canvas to penetrate deep into the viewers unconscious. Taking this a bit further, Jean-Françious Lyotard insists that the figural is to be understood as an internal principle of disruption, which pits the materiality of signifiers against what they try to signify—the latent intelligibility or intuitive understanding lurking beneath the content of the image (in Jay: 568).

The copy, like its model is thus subject to innovation. The simulations as exemplified by Belkin’s stylized images of toy animals is less a copy twice removed than a phenomenon of a different kind altogether that opens a new space for the simulacrum’s own mad proliferation.

Consequently, representation must not be posited as an absolute: we cannot guess its origin or its goal. There is nothing in an aggregate of sensible qualities that will foretell the new qualities into which they will change (Massumi 1987: 95). “Newness enters the world,” according to Salman Rushdie, “through hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, ideas, politics, movies, songs [from]…a bit of this and a bit of that” (1990: 52). Art multiplies potentials, it offers a possibility of movement in all directions. In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call this process a double becoming because there is always at least two terms in the fabulous process of art making that transforms them both (1987). According to Deleuze and Guattari artists dip into chaos, into the world’s quantum level, into its pool of virtuality to create an as yet unseen amalgamation of potentials (Massumi 1987: 95).

Belkin’s new works unmask the artificiality of experience causing us to pause and take note of our own undoing. At the same time they create a new simulation, a territory from which there is no turning back. The only choice is to keep on becoming, in an endless relay from one term to the next, to combine as many potentials as possible, to affect and be affected until there is a breakthrough or the creative process is spent. There is no generalized indetermination. Everything has its own potential defining how far it can go but there are points of undecidability that offer a thin but fabulous hope that we can change the course of our own destruction.

Bibliography

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Baudrillard, Jean, Simulations, translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.

Berger, John, “Why Look at Animals?” in About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980, pp. 1-26.

Bergson, Henri, Matter and Memory, translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. Original publication The Macmillan Co. New York, 1912. Republication, Mineola, New York: Dover, 2004.

Cox, Geoff and Adrian Ward, “Why Look at Artificial Animals?” Consciousness Reframed 2003. http://www.generative.net/papers/animals.pdf

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated and forward by Brian Massumi. London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

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Massumi, Brian, Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari. Copyright no.1, 1987, pp. 90-97.

Rushdie, Salman, “In Good Faith: A Pen against the Sword,” Newsweek, 12 Feb. 1990.