Notes on works for documenta 14, Athens & Kassel, 2017

ABSTRACT

This text details two inter-related Envoy works, Criollo and The Athens-Kassel Ride: The Transit of Hermes, commissioned for documenta 14, Athens and Kassel, 2017. Both works respond to Tschiffely’s Ride (1933), an account of a 10,000 mile journey from Buenos Aires to New York (1925–1928) by Swiss-Argentine horseman, Aimé Félix Tschiffely, riding two Argentine criollos, Mancha and Gato. The film Criollo features an Argentine criollo horse standing at the Artists’ Gate entrance to Central Park at the end of sixth Avenue / Avenue of Americas, New York. Criollo, a variant of ‘creole’, holds associations of ‘creolisation’, ‘cultural mixing’ (Hall) and ‘entanglement’ (Glissant) in the context of globalisation and migration. Criollo also prompts consideration of the animal in the development of capitalism (Berger, Raulff) and a reading, in turn, of the concepts of ‘bare life’, ‘bios’ and ‘zoe’ (Agamben). These contexts also frame The Athens-Kassel Ride: The Transit of Hermes, a 3000km equestrian journey performed over 100 days by four Long Riders traversing Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria and Germany, accompanied by a Greek arravani horse ‘Hermes’ named after the god of border crossings who – as angel messenger – is a key figure in the thought of Michel Serres.

KEYWORDS:

• Documenta 14
• envoy
• animal
• biopolitics
• Hermes
• Michel Serres

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ross Birrell is Professor of Contemporary Art Practice and Critical Theory at the Glasgow School of Art. His works interweave philosophy, politics, and place and embrace a range of media including moving image, sculpture, installation, music, events and publications. Both his solo work and collaborative projects with David Harding have been exhibited in documenta 14, Edinburgh Art Festival, CCA, Glasgow International, Kunsthalle Basel, Talbot Rice Gallery, Westminster Hall, MAXXI, Rothko Chapel, Keats-Shelley House, Portikus, Museo Tamayo, Americas Society, Swiss Institute in Rome, COBRA Museum of Modern Art, DCA, Apex Art, Kunsthalle Nuremberg, BAWAG Foundation, Fries Museum, BüroFriedrich, Inverleith House, Gwangju Biennale. He is represented by Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam.

Notes

1 Derrida, caught naked and exposed before the ‘insistent gaze’ of his cat, relates his struggle to overcome feelings of embarrassment and shame, as nakedness is a condition which normatively distinguishes animals from men to the extent that animals are deemed to be ‘naked without knowing it’ (Derrida 2008, 4).

2 For a discussion of Heidegger’s reading of the animal and captivation, see Agamben 2004, 49–56.

3 For key discussions of the Eighth Elegy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies in relation to the animal and ‘the open’ see Heidegger (1992), Agamben (2004) and Santner (2006).

4 As Ron Broglio writes: ‘The surface can be a site of productive engagement with the world of animals.’ (Broglio 2011, xvii)

5 To borrow terms from Bruno Latour, a film crew represents ‘a collective of humans and non-humans’, where the process of film-making necessitates ‘the folding of humans and non-humans into each other’. (See Latour 1999, 174–215) The terms of my suggested comparison revolve around the pun contained in ‘to shoot’, its being associated both with the purpose of the actants of gun (the subject of Latour’s analysis) and camera alike.

6 This final sequence of the film maps an almost imperceptible ‘becoming-animal’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 232ff) of the camera, which precipitates a vital shift in the subject position of the gaze: from a human-animal encounter to ‘an animal relationship with the animal’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1989, 14:22– 4:25).

7 For a discussion of this event see the editorial of Art & Research 4 (1) by Birrell and Broglio (2011). See also the documenta 14 daybook in which participating artists were invited to identify a date in history with an accompanying image which was important to them. I selected 3 January 1889 and an image of Nietzsche from a decade later, taken by Hans Olde, which capture the philosopher in the grip of stroke-induced paralysis. The short entry concludes: ‘Visible in his final silence is a defiant animal resonance, wild staring eyes fixated in self-dissolving, intoxicating rapture.’ Latimer and Szymczyk (2017), np [Entry for 20 August].

8 Tradition Day is held on 10 November to mark the anniversary of the birth of Argentine writer, José Hernández (1834–1886), author of the epic poem, The Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872). Martín Fierro is a classic of Argentine gauchesco poetry and Jorge Luis Borges regarded it as ‘the most lasting work we Argentines have written’, and echoes the opinion of the Argentine poet, Leopold Lugones (1874–1938), that ‘this poem should be for us what the Homeric poems were for the Greeks’ (Borges 1999, 420). An English version of Martín Fierro was published by the Glasgow-born translator, Walter Owen (1884–1953).

9 Argentina is regarded as the world’s leading exporters of horses for the meat industry with a substantial share of its market being the EU: ‘In spite of its love for horses, Argentina is the world’s leading exporter of horse meat having shipped 23.880 tons in 2010, valued 75 million US dollars according to the country’s Animal health and Agro-food quality service, SENASA.’ http://en.mercopress.com/2011/05/04/argentina-leads-in-horse-meat-exports-23.880-tons-in-2010 [Date accessed: 27 November 2017]

10 Filipa Ramos describes Berger’s essay as an articulation of ‘longing for a lost animal presence in our contemporary world’ (Ramos 2016, 18).

11 Tschiffely’s contrasting of ‘rough’ and ‘smooth’ places on his equestrian journey also chimes with Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ space. See Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 474–500.

12 For an interesting discussion of friendship within and between species, see James Serpell, ‘Humans, Animals, and the Limits of Friendship’ (Porter and Tomaselli 1989, 111–129) and Serpell 2008.

13 Later, in a further displacement of anthropocentrism which perhaps echoes E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, Tschiffely will pen a version of the 10,000 mile epic journey retold from the perspective of the horses (Tschiffely 1943).

14 Derrida dismisses the distinction between zoe and bios drawn by Agamben on the grounds that Agamben misinterprets zoe as ‘bare’: ‘ … zoe designates a life that is qualified, and not “bare”.’ (Derrida 2009, 327), and arguing that there is no absolute division between biopolitics and zoopolitics to be found in Aristotle, explaining:

 … man is that living being who is taken by politics: he is a political living being, and essentially so. In other words, he is zoo-political, that’s his essential definition, that’s what is proper to him, idiom; what is proper to man is politics; what is proper to this living being that man is, is politics, and therefore man is immediately zoo-political, in his very life, and the distinction between bio-politics and zoo-politics doesn’t work at all here. (Derrida 2009, 348–9).

15 Agamben also associates the body of the slave with the animal body, an ‘unresloved remnant’ in a philosophy ‘irreducibly drawn and divided between animality and humanity’ (Agamben 2004, 15).

16 The decision to film Criollo in cinemascope evokes the historical correspondence between horse, film and cinema, from Muybridge Horse in Motion (c. 1886) to the Western, a genre whose origins André Bazin regards as ‘almost identical with those of the cinema itself’. Bazin accounts for the longevity of the genre (into the 1960s at least) in that it ‘must have a secret that somehow identifies it with the essence of cinema’. (Bazin 1971, 140–141) Far from featuring a galloping horse, as depicted in Muybridge’s research and in countless Westerns (as Sigfried Kracauer notes, a galloping horse is synonymous with the genre and a ‘genuine Western’ is unimaginable ‘without a pursuit or a race on horseback’ [Kracauer 1960, 42]), Criollo nevertheless plays upon this intertwining of the figure of the horse with the history of cinema.

17 A further detail with regard to equestrian statues is that the statue of José de San Martin in New York is a copy of the memorial statue to the Argentine leader located in Plaza San Martin, Buenos Aires. An earlier copy of this statue also resides in Triangle Park, Constitution Avenue, Washington, D.C. On the criollo’s passage north from Argentina January-March 2017, the riderless horse was documented at the base of each of these statues in turn, documented in a series of photographs and a second film (in postproduction at the time of writing). For the installation of Criollo in Neue Neue Galerie, documenta 14 in Kassel, 10 June-17 Sept 2017, the film was presented on a large monitor situated between two framed photographs of the horse at the base of the statues to José de San Martin in Buenos Aries and Washington, D.C.

18 The very presence of the Argentine criollo in New York after several thousand miles of travel resulting from years of planning, applications, setbacks, catastrophes and miracles, represents not so much a feat of artistic endeavor – a ‘triumph of the will’ à la Leni Riefenstahl, so to speak – as ‘the triumph of zoe’ (Braidotti 2006).

19 The Long Riders produced and maintained their own website for The Athens-Kassel Ride, which documents their daily rides and activities, including the long delays at border crossings: http://www.theathenskasselride.eu/

20 I employ the term ‘posse’ in relation to Hardt and Negri’s reading of posse as ‘that which produces the chromosomes of its future organization’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, 407–411, 410).

21 As Michel Serres somewhat mournfully asks: ‘Who now thinks about the world?’ (Serres 2014, 5).

22 The weekend before the launch of The Athens-Kassel Ride in Athens, the mountain village of Prastos hosted an inaugural ‘Arravani Festival’ (1 April), organized by local Veterinarian, Konstantinos Kourmpellis. The festival promoted the arravani breed with over 50 horses and riders from across the region, and also included participants from arravani equestrian societies in Germany. The festival also celebrated the departure of the Greek horse ‘Hermes’ (specially sourced for the Ride) as he embarked upon his journey from the Arkadian mountains to Kassel.

23 The Proceedings of the British Equine Veterinary Association (BEVA) relate:

The horse evolved in an environment where it was a prey species; therefore its overriding aim is to avoid being eaten and, in order to do this, its survival techniques are based on detection of any possible predators and its subsequent escape from them, for which the horse needs acute senses, quick reactions and the ability to run fast. (Harris et al. 1999, np);

See also Jethro Tull Jr, ‘Of Work Animals: Bovines and Equines’, Horse-Hoeing Husbandry [1750], Fifth Edition by Aaron Brachfield and Mary Choate (Colarado: Coastalfields Press, 2010): ‘As prey animals, both equines and bovines naturally flee when approached.’ (Tull 2010, 545); Budiansky (1997): ‘ … Pliocene horses (beginning 5 million years ago) … as grassland animals, these grazing horses were more exposed to predators and had to be able to flee.’ (Budiansky 1997, 21).

24 As the BEVA Proceedings inform us: ‘The horse is … strongly motivated to keep moving, not necessarily at high speeds, but certainly over some distance … ’ (Harris et al. 1999, np).

25 In a different context, this correspondence is found in the combined form of the ‘animal refugee’ in Armstrong (2008). See Chapter 5. ‘Animal Refugees in the Ruins of Modernity’.

26 See Birrell (2014).

27 Michel Serres’s study of parasites and parastical relations (Serres 2007) prompts wider critical reflection upon the relation of individual artworks to their host contexts and also on the context of documenta 14 being ‘hosted’ in Athens, as well as a reading of the economic relations between Germany and Greece more generally.

28 In a footnote on his translation of ‘The Homeric Hymn to Hermes’, Lewis Hyde relates that Hermes was ‘“cunning,” “versatile,” “much travelled,” “polytropic”: poútropon (literally turning many ways)’. (Hyde 2008, 317)

29 My use of the term ‘transposed’ is informed by previous works which transposed music, film and site in installations such as Duet (2013) and Sonata (2014), exhibited in Winter Line, Kunsthalle Basel (2014) and Where Language Ends, Talbot Rice Gallery (2015), exhibitions made in collaboration with David Harding; it is also informed and advanced by a reading of Rosi Braidotti:

The term “transpositions” has a double source of inspiration: from music and from genetics. It indicates an intertextual, cross-boundary or transversal transfer, in the sense of a leap from one code, field or axis into another, not merely in the quantitative mode of plural multiplications, but rather in the qualitative sense of complex multiplicities. It is not just a matter of weaving together different strands, variations on a theme (textual or musical), but rather of playing the positivity of difference as a specific theme of its own. As a term in music, transposition indicates variations and shifts of scale in a discontinuous but harmonious pattern. It is thus created as an in-between space of zigzagging and of crossing: nonlinear, but not chaotic; nomadic, yet accountable and committed; creative but also cognitively valid; discursive and also materially embedded – it is coherent without falling into instrumental rationality. (Braidotti 2006, 5)

30 Hyde refers to Hermes as an ‘awakening angel’ (Hyde 2008, 209). In an echo of Hermes’s mercurial identity, ‘The dimension of the Angel’, Massimo Cacciari asserts, ‘is ou-topic. Its place is the Land-of-no-where, the mundus imaginalis … ’ (Cacciari 1994, 1).

31 Berger’s comments on animal ‘intercession’ further invite a parallel between the animal and the angel. However, Cacciari, drawing upon Luther, warns: ‘One should not confuse the role of intermediary, of metaxy, with that of intercession.’ (Cacciari 1994, 95, n2). Nevertheless, outside Lutheran doctrine, the concept of angelic intercession remains a widespread Christian concept. My purpose in pursuing a correspondence between the animal and the angel, here, however, is less to outline theological than theoretical perspectives upon animals.