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| Long before the invention of writing and the wheel, horses began to shape the way humans lived. While societies are conventionally understood as populated by humans-in-themselves and nature is understood as composed of the things-in-themselves, Shannon Belkin’s recent horse paintings continue to explore the concept of companion species. As such,humans and horses fates are intertwined in ways that the old distinction between domesticator and domesticated cannot adequately address. For Belkin, the notion that the human being ends at the skin and that the animal exists as tools to be lorded over and be utilized to whatever end the human intends is arbitrary and false. She insists the story of people and companion species involves much more than the exploitation of the horse’s labour. Horses and humans live and have evolved jointly. Our species are bonded in what Donna Haraway calls “significant otherness.” Shannon Belkin’s intimate and evocative horse portraits ask us to acknowledge the deep emotional connection we experience through such face-to-face inter-species friendship and love. Shannon Belkin’s recent horse paintings continue to explore the concept of companion species. For Belkin, the story of people and their relationship to other animal species involves more than the domestication and exploitation of ‘inferior’ creatures and even more than the moral responsibility humans must accept for the welfare of all the earth’s inhabitants. The sensitivity with which Belkin has rendered her animal subjects addresses the very long lasting symbiosis that has existed between species. Indeed, the consideration and compassion with which she treats her subjects let us see that human and animal fates are intertwined in ways that traditional distinctions between nature/culture, instinct/ reason cannot adequately address. They allow us to see that interactions of humans with many kinds of critters, especially with those called domestic, involve much more than a working relationship. Donna Haraway (2008) has argued that the deep bonds between species constitute a “significant otherness.” Shannon Belkin’s intimate and evocative animal portraits take up Haraway’s assertion by asking us to acknowledge the deep emotional connection we experience through such face-to-face inter-species friendship and love. Going to the dogs In recent years, traditional human-animal distinctions, which conceive a radical discontinuity between animals and human beings, have been radically challenged from a variety of perspectives. Detractors focus on the entanglements and mixtures that make up our complex world of habitation. In other words human society is not defined in opposition to animal nature, but by its seamless relationship with it. The basic story of co-evolution is simple: ever more complex life forms are the continual result of ever more intricate and multidirectional acts of association of and with other life forms (Haraway, 2008: 31).The concept of interspecies entanglement is not new. The writings of Jakob von Uexküll (1926) today considered one of the greatest zoologists of the twentieth century and among the founders of ecology argued that species cannot be understood as entirely separable from the perceptible world in which they find themselves, for species and their environments—collectives or hybrids of humans and nonhumans—are involved in a kind of co-evolution. Where classical science saw a single world hierarchically ordered from the most elementary forms up to the higher organisms, Uexküll proposed an infinite variety of perceptual worlds “linked together as if in a gigantic musical score” ( quoted in Agamben, 40). Too often, Uexküll insists, we imagine the relation a certain animal has to the things in its environment take place in the same time and space as our own world (ibid.). Uexküll shows that such a unitary world does not exist. The dog, the horse and the hare that we observe do not move in the same world as that which we observe, nor do they share with each other, the same time and same space (ibid.) According to Uexküll, species live in their own environmental-world that is constituted by elements that he calls “carriers of significance”; that is, a world that varies according to the point of view from which it is sensed. There exists a world for the dog, for the hare, for the human. In this sense, animals live in their world with humans in as much as humans live with animals. For Donna Haraway, co-evolution, or human entanglement with companion species entails lived relations of significant otherness. Cats, dogs, horses and other companion animals are beings of another species in deep encounter with humans. They are not furry children, and they are not givers of this fantasy called unconditional love “…they are beings with real needs and agendas and ways of being-in-the-world that are in interaction with us” (Haraway, 2008). We are a crowd of intra- and interrelations in process where the actors are the products of those relations, not pre-established, finished, closed-off things that enter into relationship but dynamic co-evolving entanglements that produce the beings that we are (ibid.) Now it’s possible to tell the evolution of the dog in terms of dog-initiated use of human-provided resources, co-extensive with a history of the human species (Haraway, 2000 ). The human-dog relationship amounts to a very long lasting symbiosis that some believe dates back 150,000 years to the origin of Homo sapien sapiens (see Colin Groves, 1999). It is suggested that wolves made use of the caloric benefits of edible waste in dumps near human sites of habitation (Groves, 11). In consequence, the ‘dog-wannabe’ wolves inadvertently selected themselves for shorter and shorter tolerance distances to human encampments which allowed for ever more cross-species socialization (Haraway, 2003: 28-29). These kinds of stories are widely told these days about evolution of so-called domesticated dogs. In keeping with Uexküll’s concept that species live in their own environmental-world, humans didn’t invent dogs, dogs invented themselves and adopted humans as part of their survival strategy (Haraway 2004: 331). Humans provided the dog with food, security and companionship. Dogs in relationship to humans acted as alarm systems, trackers and hunting aids, children’s and livestock guardians and playmates, comfort against the cold and much more (Groves, 11). In works like “Cookie” Belkin has skillfully created a balance and tension between the everyday experience we have of our companion animals and the deeper understanding that comes from a cross-species relation and respect that constitutes both of the partners and insists on making claims on each. In looking at Cookie reclining in an artificially pink landscape—that serves to make her appear all the more ‘real’—we are looking at a being who seems to recognize us. In mutuality, we, dog and human, sense that inside this other alien body there is someone like ourselves, which freely offers companionship and love. Such is the powerful effect of Belkin’s painting that insists on a kind of taking-life-up-with-each-other in a relation of deep bonding that gives back the sense of the possibility of fulfillment. Bird-brains and other Darwinian stories In the empirical sciences, a renewed interest in Darwinism has had the effect of undermining the human-animal opposition by positing a continuum based on degrees of difference in a dynamic process of evolutionary change. Charles Darwin devotes much of The Descent of Man (1871) addressing to what extent man must be considered part of the world of animals and thus subject to the same forces at play in the evolution of species: individual variation, the heritability of the characteristics of individual variation, and natural selection. Darwin claims man has been mistakenly distinguished from animals and from the natural world according to different philosophical and scientific positions, most notably those of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Darwin accepts that distinctions exist between human beings and animal beings but rather than a fundamental difference in kind, we will find, he argues, only differences in degree and are thus plausible effects of the operations of natural selection. Throughout his mature works, Darwin remains uncompromising in his stance that the chief characteristics of human beings—including the so-called higher-order traits such as rationality, language, and morality—are there in animals simply awaiting adequate stimulus and development (Grosz, 2004: 59).This point is of most importance becausefor many contemporary theorists, what distinguishes man from animal is the capacity for language, which makes possible abstract reasoning, cultural communication and the facilitation of learning, but according to Darwin this is not a natural biological or psychological structure inherent in man alone but rather a historical production that can be assigned neither to man nor to animal (Agamben, 36). Animals can certainly be considered to communicate, to express and to emote using sounds and other forms of bodily expression. The various systems of communication applied by animals, like our own, are not instinctive but learned (Grosz, 2004: 59). For example, according to Darwin, there can be no doubt that bird’s songs are commonly learned rather than innate (1871: 52). Birds will often mimic melodic sounds they hear. Sometimes they merely repeat the refrain note for note but, remarkably at other times, birds will take elements of the refrain and insert them into their customary birdcall. Thus, the sonorous movement of tones that make up a bird’s call must be considered the result of spontaneous improvisation rather than a fixed repertoire of signals. The addition of new learned refrains or the modification of existing elements suggested to Darwin that over time an individual bird’s call “might have been improved into a melodious love-song” (ibid: 66). What is implied through Darwin’s example of birdsong is two-fold. Firstly, the elements that bring about change in a bird’s call are introduced through haphazard occurrences in the bird’s environment to which they are acutely attuned, and that the interjection of those elements, often in a multiplicity of ways, into their existing vocabulary develop over time. Secondly, and most importantly, that because of the creative nature of birdsong that serves to distinguish the individual in the eyes, or perhaps more accurately ears, of potential mates it cannot be reduced to the pragmatic world of survival that, according to some, distinguish humans and animals. Each innovation brings something new into the world that has no purpose but “to the opening up of life to taste, to sexuality, to erotic appeal, [and] to excessiveness” (Grosz, 2008: 41). Is this not what we call art? That birds are capable of artistic expression seriously confronts the notion that only humans are capable of such and renders the prospect of distinguishing human beings from animals rather difficult for the empirical sciences. A similar displacement of the animal-human dichotomy has occurred in the humanities and social sciences, where what is professed to constitute the human—articulate speech, knowledge of death, consciousness, and so on—has also been shown to exist in a similar form among nonhuman animals (Calarco, 3) From the horse’s mouth The anthropocentric privileging of speech over other forms of communication has blinded us to the subtle and nuanced ways that animals express thoughts, ideas and feelings through codes. Although animal codes are often argued not to be strictly linguistic, according to Giorgio Agamben (1993) the difference between animal beings and human beings with respect to language is that animals are identical with, and fully immersed in, the language they speak in the same way as they are in their surrounding environment (Calarco, 84).Horses, like all animals primarily use bodily gesture rather than vocalization to communicate their feelings and knowledge about their world. One way for the human to learn the subjective presence of the horse is to pay close attention to the language encoded in gesture (Brandt, 2003). The human must also be keenly aware of his or her own bodily gestures with the knowledge that horses understand their subjective presence through the medium of the body (ibid.). Shannon Belkin’s extensive knowledge of horses and incomparable skill as a realist painter provides her with the almost instinctive ability to capture in paint the subtle meanings attributed to the flick of an ear or quiver of a flank. In doing so, Belkin allows all of us entry into the language of horses. Shareef Dancer stands his ground, wary, eyes and ears alert to movement and sound, every muscle in his powerful body tensed for flight or confrontation. Manduro with eyes half closed and neck relaxed seems far more approachable. Through the bodily gestures of the horse captured in oil on canvas, Belkin allows us to understand if the horse is scared, angry, willing, happy, approachable and so on. We too are made keenly aware of our own bodily gestures in this mutual language between horse body and human body that foster a deeper emotional connection and support the growth of a meaningful relationship between horse being and human being (ibid.). The idea that the ‘being’ of natural entities is constituted primarily in terms of a struggle for existence is, of course, a tenet of Darwin’s theory of natural selection (cf. Calarco, 60). However Darwin differs radically from his contemporaries that claimed an animal’s existence is solely a struggle for life without ethics or morality (ibid.). Against the prevailing dogma of the day he provides multiple examples of altruism and sociability in a wide variety of animal species, arguing “that animals exhibit mutual affection, provide services for one another, care for kin and siblings, alert one another to danger, and even protect and provide for their injured or invalid fellows” (ibid.). For Darwin, such “social instincts” held in common with human beings are genuinely ethical inasmuch as they proceed from strong emotional bonds among and between individual animals (ibid.). Ethics, if we are to follow the analysis of Emmanuel Levinas are focused on the way in which a ‘face to face’ encounter with an Other’s destitution and vulnerability lead us to act generously in order to ameliorate the others suffering even when it imperils our own existence (1969: 194-212). I must make clear here that Levinas insists that nonhuman entities are ‘faceless’ as they do not according to his criteria possess the ability for objective intentionality and are thus unable to call me into question in any significant way. Levinas’ claim that animals are not capable of initiating and/or eliciting an ethical response in face-to-face encounter with humans or other species is being seriously confronted by the work of Matthew Calarco, Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe and many other contemporary theorists. Following Darwin in his contention that animals have the capacity to instigate an ethical encounter means that animals could have a ‘face,’ which is to say, an expressivity and vulnerability that calls my thought and egoism into question and that demands an ethical response in the direction of generosity and responsibility (ibid: 64-69). It is only by shutting animals “away in a class” and “depriving them of expression” that we could have ever thought otherwise (Calarco, 64). The role of ethics and morality is an important feature in Belkin’s work that is closely connected not only with her rational and realistic style but also with her ability to capture the individual character of her animal subjects. It bears, too, on the structural soundness of her composition, since the peculiar function of ethics consists in establishing subtle face-to-face correspondences between one and the Other. Belkin’s Ruby quizzically and guilelessly offers us her ‘ face’ and her trust in a response that is rooted in honoring the working, playing, living relationships that bind us together in significant otherness. In this work, the background reminds us that Ruby is a free subject, a subject that has her own world, her own will, a subject that chooses an interconnection with us based on an ethical relationship of friendship and love. Belkin’s horse paintings also challenge us to acknowledge the deep emotional attachment that is possible when species meet. Whether it is the willfulness conveyed through the rolling eye of the horse in Refuse to Bend or Tahhan’s artless innocence, it is Belkin’s deep commitment to a respectful and charitable relation with animals that enables her work to evoke an emotional response in us that is spontaneous and direct. In conclusion Shannon Belkin’s recent works aim at putting into meaningful form the relative ordinariness of our everyday relations with companion animals in such a way as to make us acknowledge our deep and extensive relationship with animals that truly makes them our significant others. She allows us see that how we think, perceive and act in the world comes about through entangled webs of complex inter-species assemblages. It is this particular feature in Belkin’s work that makes it so engaging. Bibliography 2002, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press. Brandt, Keri Calarco, Matthew Darwin, Charles 1981, Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Repr. of 1871 edition, London: J. Murray). Grosz, Elizabeth 2008, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. Groves, Colin Haraway, Donna 2003, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. 2004, The Haraway Reader. New York and London: Routledge. 2008, When Species Meet: An Interview with Donna Haraway Levinas, Emmanuel, 2004 “The Paradox of Morality,” portions reprinted in Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought, ed. Matthew Calarco and Peter Atterton. New York: Continuum. Uexküll, Jakob von Wolf, Cary, |
 Derby Horse, 2009, oil on canvas  Rabbits in Green, 2009, oil on canvas  Cat in Blue, 2009, oil on canvas  Cookie, 2009, oil on canvas  Cookie Reclining, 2009, oil on canvas  Shareef Dancer, 2009, oil on canvas  Manduro, 2009, oil on canvas  Ruby in Landscape, 2009, oil on canvas  Refuse to Bend, 2009, oil on canvas  Tahhan, 2009, oil on canvas |
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