The Animal Question via Art and Law

Abstract

Since at least the late 1960s, artistic creation has increasingly called upon its audiences to consider the acceptability of certain actions in ways that law cannot. Based on four examples carrying especial weight in international artistic circles due to their reliance on animal actors—Kim Jones’s Rat Piece (1976), Yukinori Yanagi’s World Flag Ant Farm (1993), Xu Bing’s A Case Study of Transference (1993-1994) and Huang Yong Ping’s Theater of the World (1993)—this article reflects upon the notion of sovereignty as an unstable contest between competing views of acceptability, permissibility and enforceability. Inflected by counter- or non-anthropocentric views, I consider how artworks serve as augmented para-legal cases accountable to both legal and art historical interpretation. Predicated on the belief that we consider artworks as sources of critical action rather than as products of human expression or examples of property, I explore how live animal participants initiate active reflection upon the misalignment between existing laws and proposed standards of human behavior towards animals. What common justices are imaginable for humans and animals? A corollary aim is to explore how such questions are inflected less by universal-versus-local dichotomies and more by the contingency of bodies moving across legal jurisdictions that both reinforce and undermine the structuring forces of globalization.

Keywords:

• animal rights
• contemporary art
• art and law
• posthumanism
• animals in art
• sovereignty
• globalization
• property

Acknowledgments

I thank the Aesthetics Discussion Group of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan for their attention and helpful suggestions, particularly Sarah Buss, Danny Herwitz and Angela Sun. Further thanks is due to the editorial board of Law and Literature for their astute observations.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Notable, for instance, is how Steve Baker’s Artist Animal—one of the most comprehensive discussions of live animals in contemporary art—opens his book with a description of Anthony Julius’s disapprobation of artists whose works place the animal over the human. Steve Baker, Artist Animal, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1. Julius is a well-known British attorney known for, among things, his condemnation of anti-Semitism, including the demonization of animal slaughter done in accordance with Jewish religious law (shechita) and the consequent weaponization of animal welfare by pro-Nazi and neo-Nazi activists in Great Britain. Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 341–4.

2 Some well-cited recent discussions of the latter turn towards human/non-human relations include calls for art history to account more proactively about materials including Michael Yonan, “Towards a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies,” West 86^th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 18, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 2011): 232–48; the popularity of “thing” theory and network theory imported from sociology and philosophy in the name of a “material turn,” as summarized by Jennifer Roberts, “Things: Material Turn, Transnational Turn,” American Art 31, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 64–8; and the popularity of posthumanist thinking such as “Object Oriented Ontology” that rejects “the primacy of relations over things” but also diverges from the natural and social sciences that “attempt a literal paraphrase of what objects are by detecting and summarizing their qualities” and instead joins forces with art and its “love of objects” that “cannot be paraphrased.” Graham Harman, “Art Without Relations,” Art Review, 4 September 2014. https://artreview.com/september-2014-graham-harman-relations/, accessed 11 June 2010.

3 Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 8–9.

4 Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Towards a Constructive Christian Social Ethic, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 225–6.

5 The human status of pets is most likely to be recognized within the domain of family law. Pets, particularly dogs, increasingly feature as subjects of domestic violence protection orders as well as custody battles whose ferocity can rival those involving children. See Barbara J. Gislason, Pet Law and Custody: Establishing a Worthy and Equitable Jurisprudence for the Evolving Family, (Chicago: American Bar Association, Section of Family of Law, 2017).

6 For a discussion of these defenses as a matter of competing philosophies see Ted Nannicelli, “Animals, Ethics, and the Art World,” October 164 (Spring 2018): 113–32.

7 Anthony Cross, “The Animal is Present: The Ethics of Animal Use in Contemporary Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 76, no. 4 (Fall 2018): 524.

8 Lori B. Andrews, “Art as a Public Policy Medium,” Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, ed. Eduardo Kac (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 142.

9 Hendrik Hartog, “Pigs and Positivism,” Wisconsin Law Review 4 (1985): 935.

10 Joan Kee, Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 46–7.

11 Martin Harries, “Regarding the Pain of Rats: Kim Jones’s Rat Piece,” TDR: The Drama Review 51, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 165.

12 For an engaging summary of key examples of animal-centric legal practice see Joyce Tischler, “The History of Animal Law, Part I (1972-1987),” Stanford Journal of Animal Law and Policy 1 (2008): 1–49.

13 Al Hanson, “London: Destruction in Art Symposium,” Arts Magazine 66, no. 1 (March 1967): 52–3. A highly visible event that would become a benchmark in the history of performance, the London-based symposium “Destruction in Art” included a work involving the slaughter of chickens.

14 Through his lawyer, Jones asserted that his performance was “conduct” that “falls within the protection of the First Amendment. Demurrer to Complaint Pursuant to Penal Code 1004 (4)(5), NO. 31540476, 29 April 1976, 1. Republished in Kim Jones, Rat Piece: February 17, 1976 (U.S.: Kim Jones, 1991).

15 J., undated letter to T., republished in ibid., 48.

16 Following RSPCA complaints regarding the incineration of butterflies, the play’s director, Peter Brook, concocted a strategy in which the RSPCA was told a “secret”: that the butterflies used on stage were made of paper. Should the RSPCA disclose this information or make further complaints, the director would proceed to use live butterflies. According to Hall, “the blackmail worked.” Peter Hall, Making an Exhibition of Myself: The Autobiography of Peter Hall (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993), 198.

17 Since the 1980s there has been a decided uptick in descriptor substitutions; what was once known as “food” is now described as “victims,” where “killing” is now “murder” and even comparisons between animal cruelty to human slavery and the Holocaust. See, for instance, Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern, 2002).

18 J., undated letter to T., Rat Piece: February 17, 1976, 49.

19 “Even rats have the right to live,” University Times, 19 Feb 1976, republished in Rat Piece: February 17, 1976.

20 Brown quoted in “Nude ‘artist’ beings controversy to Union,” University Times 19 Feb 1976, republished in ibid.

21 Martin Rickler, “Psych. Dept. Reacts to Rat Killing,” University Times 23 Feb 1976, republished in ibid.

22 Andrews, 139.

23 Jones’s lawyer thought the artist could have been acquitted if they had gone to trial. Carl Capozzola, letter to Kim Jones, 26 May 1976. Published in Rat Piece: February 17, 1976.

24 Charlotte Willard, “Violence in Art,” Art in America 57, no. 1 (January 1969): 36–43.

25 Jacques Derrida and David Wills, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 375.

26 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 39.

27 Rebecca J. Huss, “Valuing Man’s and Woman’s Best Friend: The Moral and Legal Status of Companion Animals,” Marquette Law Review 86, no.47 (2002): 68–9.

28 Gary Francione, Animals, Property, and the Law, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 26.

29 Demurrer to Complaint Pursuant to Penal Code 1004 (4)(5), NO. 31540476, 29 April 1976, 4. Republished in Rat Piece: February 17, 1976.

30 Robert Hughes, undated letter to David Riles, republished in ibid.

31 Examples include the Swiss legislation amending its constitution in 1992 to redefine animals as “beings” rather than things and the incorporation of animal protection without regard to species into the German constitution in 1994. Jessica Eisen, “Liberating Animal Law: Breaking Free form Human-Use Typologies,” Animal Law Review 17, no. 59 (2010): 64–6.

32 Quoted in Patricia Clough, “Dingo comes to the rescue of ants imprisoned for art,” Independent, 19 June 1993. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/dingo-comes-to-the-rescue-of-ants-imprisoned-for-art-1492665.html, accessed 7 February 2020

33 One of the most influential newspapers in Italy implied that the swiftness of legal response was not because the use of ants qualified as a animal welfare violation but because Yanagi had used “foreign” ants whose possible escape from the work might disrupt the reproduction of local ant species. Antonello Francica, “Liberate 5 Mila Formiche ‘Esposte’ alla Biennale,” la Repubblica, 18 June 1993

34 “Animal Rights Backer Finds Nothing Artistic about Display of 200 Ants,” Chicago Tribune, 20 June 1993.

35 France, for instance, recognized the sentience of animals from 1976, but only that of domestic, tamed, and captive animals. Jean-Marc Neumann has described the turn to animal sentience through a close reading of the Universal Declaration of Animal Rights of 1978 which “unambiguously classifies humans as one animal species among others.” Neumann, “The Universal Declaration of Animal Rights or the Creation of a New Equilibrium between Species,” Animal Law Review 19, no. 1 (2012): 98.

36 Valerio Pocar, “Animal Rights: A Socio-Legal Perspective,” Journal of Law and Society 19, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 225.

37 Ibid., 226. The interpretation to which Pocar refers was made in 1990.

38 Mitsuhiko A. Takahashi, “Cats v. Birds in Japan: How to Reconcile Wildlife Conservation and Animal Protection,” Georgetown International Environmental Law Review 17, no. 135 (2004): 142.

39 See especially Article 27, Law for the Humane Treatment and Management of Animals, Law No. 105, October 1, 1973, revised May 30, 2014. https://www.env.go.jp/nature/dobutsu/aigo/1_law/files/aigo_kanri_1973_105_en.pdf, accessed 17 September 2020

40 Carter Dillard, “Empathy with Animals: A Litmus Test for Legal Personhood?,” Animal Law Review 19, no. 1 (2012): 13.

41 Janet Kraynak, “Rikrit Tiravanija’s Liability,” Documents 13 (Fall 1998): 35.

42 Accompanying the proliferation of works requiring viewers to not only invest time but also put their physical or personal well-being at possible risk (such as entering a room infused with a chemical compound that causes tearing as in the work of Tania Bruguera for Tate Modern in 2018) is the conspicuous use of liability waiver agreements.

43 Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3–19, also 35–56.

44 This is a self-perpetuating operation. As Claire Bishop discusses, “the tendency is always to compare artists’ projects with other artists on the basis of ethical one-upmanship – the degree to which artists supply a good or bad model of collaboration – and to criticise them for any hint of potential exploitation that fails to ‘fully’ represent their subjects (as if such a thing were possible).” Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012), 19.

45 Tischler, 6. But as leading animal rights lawyer and scholar Steven Wise points out, “next friend” arguments fail because most judges are disinclined to admit the personhood of nonhuman animals. Angela Fernandez, “Legal History and Rights for Nonhuman Animals: An Interview with Steven M. Wise,” Dalhousie Law Journal 41 (Spring 2018): 213.

46 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), vii.

47 Italics are those of the court. Naruto v. Slater, 888 F.3d 418 (9^th Cir. 2018).

48 Julia Tanner, “Contractarianism and Secondary Direct Moral Standing for Marginal Humans and Animals,” Res Publica 19, no. 2 (May 2013): 150.

49 David S. Favre, “Judicial Recognition of the Interests of Animals – A New Tort,” Michigan State Law Review (Summer 2005): 333–67.

50 Tilikum et al v. Sea World Parks & Entertainment, Inc. et al, No. 3:2011cv02476 - Document 32 (S.D. Cal. 2012), 5.

51 Naruto v. Slater, 888 F.3d 418 (9^th Cir. 2018) (9^th Cir. 2018)

52 Cornelia Vismann, “Cultural Techniques and Society,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, no. 6 (November 2013): 86

53 Ibid., 86.

54 Francione, 7.

55 Will Kymlicka proposes the idea of social membership as replacing current legal models focusing on animals as resources from which to extract human utility. He argues that classifying animals as members of a recognized social category like the family or a company (as co-workers) would help pave the way for animals to be recognized as legal persons. “Social Membership: Animal Law beyond the Property/Personhood Impasse,” Dalhousie Law Journal 40, no. 1 (2017): 123–55.

56 Xu would also use silkworms in later works.

57 Xu Bing, quoted in Linda Weintraub, In the Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Art (New York: D.A.P., 2003), 270.

58 At this time, exhibitions in non-government spaces enabled experimental artists like Xu to assert their right to create non-establishment art which state institutions typically discouraged by the early termination of exhibitions including such work. Wu Hung, “A ‘Domestic Turn’: Chinese Experimental Art in the 1990s,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 1, no. 3 (Fall/November 2002): 6.

59 http://www.xubing.com/en/work/details/395?classID=11&type=class, accessed 8 February 2020.

60 Ibid.

61 Pooja Rangan, Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 4–5.

62 Of the work’s debut, Britta Erickson notes how audience members tried to distract themselves with nervous conversation and seemed “uncertain otherwise where to look.” Britta Erickson, The Art of Xu Bing: Words Without Meaning, Meaning Without Words, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 62.

63 Derrida, 377.

64 Haraway, 19–20.

65 Derrida, 374.

66 Stephen Eisenmann, The Cry of Nature, Art and the Making of Animal Rights, (London: Reaction Books, 2013), 255.

67 Ann Wilson Lloyd, “Binding Together Cultures with Cords of Wit,” New York Times, 18 June 2000, 2.35.

68 Another version of the work staged in 2000 showcased porcine refusal as the pig protagonists “declined to co-operate, preferring to munch on the shoes of spectators.” Aidan Dunne, Irish Times, 22 December 2000, 12.

69 Ann Wilson Lloyd, “Lost and Found,” Xu Bing: Language Lost, (Boston: Massachusetts College of Art, 1995), 21.

70 Bennett, 96.

71 Suga Kishio, “Jōtai o koete aru,” Bijutsu techō 324 (February 1970): 24–33.

72 Angela P. Harris, “Should People of Color Support Animal Rights?,” Journal of Animal Law 5, no. 1 (2009): 28. Also see Justin Marceau, Beyond Cages: Animal Law and Criminal Punishment, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 151–92. A wealth of recent scholarship has addressed the contentious production of racial categories through animal metaphors, as well as the history of legal cases that directly pit animal rights devised largely within a liberal humanist framework against cultural difference as funneled through legal definitions of religious and expression freedoms. See, for instance, Otto Santa Ana, “‘Like an animal I was treated’: Anti-Immigrant Metaphor in US Public Discourse,” Discourse 10, no. 2 (1999): 191–224; Glen Elder, Jennifer Wolch, and Jody Emel, “Le Pratique Sauvage: Race, Place, and the Human-Animal Divide,” Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands, ed. Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel (London: Verso, 1998), 72–90; Angela P. Harris, “Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 44–49. Adjacent to these histories is the dehumanization of Asians on account of how some groups have traditionally consumed animals Anglo-American law has declared are most proximate to humans, namely cats and dogs.

73 Claire Jean Kim, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015), 72–100.

74 Terry Grimley, “Watch Your Language in the Art Gallery: Terry Grimley at the Babel Exhibition at the Ikon Gallery,” Birmingham Post, 30 September 1999, 13.

75 San Francisco Chinatown vendors claimed that the sale and killing of certain animals for food was entrenched in Chinese culture and therefore should be protected as an extension of Chinese personhood, a claim that Carlos Bea, then a trial judge on the San Francisco County Superior Court, dismissed in 1998 as “not only irrelevant but bothersome” adding that “the laws that apply here are Californian, not Chinese.” Kim, 92. Now on the Ninth Circuit, Bea wrote the opinion rejecting PETA’s attempts to establish a judicial precedent extending copyright to animals in the notorious monkey “selfie” case. Naruto v. Slater, No. 16-15469 (9^th Cir. 2018).

76 Holland Cotter described the work as a “satirical, Orwellian take on the loony ways of cultural interchange, global and personal,” “Calligraphy, Cavorting Pigs, and Other Body-Mind Happenings,” New York Times, 25 January 2002, E45.

77 Xu Bing, “Trans-boundary experiences: a conversation between Xu Bing and Nick Kaldis,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 6, no. 2 (June 2007): 79.

78 Ibid., 79.

79 While I am not wholesale opposed to live animals in artworks, I argue for institutions and funding bodies to hold artists contemplating such works to a stricter standard of conduct. For instance, artists seeking to exhibit their work should be made to sign contracts legally obligating them to care for the animals during the course of the work, and more importantly, after the work’s display or after its conclusion in the case of a performance. Under no circumstances should animals be sold, released directly into the wild without appropriate supervision or abandoned at a kill shelter.

80 Xu Bing quoted in Simon Leung and Janet Kaplan, “Pseudo-Languages: A Conversation with Wenda Gu, Xu Bing and Jonathan Hay,” Art Journal 58, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 93. Another category of viewer worth mentioning is the Chinese state, which in the immediate years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests was particularly vigilant for signs of possible dissent, including experimental art. Xu experienced no government interference during his show, but observed that subsequent exhibitions at the Han Mo Art Gallery drew police attention, while he himself returned to New York the day after the show’s opening. Xu Bing, “Trans-boundary experiences: a conversation between Xu Bing and Nick Kaldis,” 78–9.

81 Wesley V. Jamison and William M. Lunch, “Rights of Animals, Perceptions of Science, and Political Activism: Profile of American Animal Rights Activists,” Science, Technology & Human Values 17, no. 4 (October 1992): 438–58. Interestingly, most of the interviewed activists demonstrated marked skepticism towards science in part because scientists were “men in white coats” not only responsible for harming animals but because they belonged to a class of patriarchal authority figures, including politicians and businessmen. Ibid., 453.

82 Wall text accompanying the display of Theater of the World describes thus: “the work functions as a metaphor for the conflicts among different peoples and cultures.”

83 The majority of exhibits proceeded without controversy, including at the Guggenheim Museum’s SoHo branch in 1998, at the Jack Tilton Gallery in New York in 2000, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts in 2006.

84 Jérôme Sans, “Huang Yong Ping: Art as a War of Imagining,” China Talks: Interviews with 32 Contemporary Artists (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2009), 25.

85 Alexa Olesen, “A Dadaist Whose Art Can Bite, New York Times, 8 June 2000.

86 Doryun Chong, “A Chinese Homecoming,” Walker Reader, 16 April 2008. https://walkerart.org/magazine/chinese-homecoming, accessed 4 August 2020. All U.S. states have some form of prohibition against animal fighting. In Minnesota, where the Walker Art Center is located, animal fighting statutes are limited to fighting among dogs, roosters, pets and other companion animals. Minn. Stat § 343.31. However, six states (Delaware, Florida, Michigan, Oregon, Utah and Virginia) have banned all forms of animal fighting.

87 Cited in Sans, 25. Quoted in Ian Mulgrew, “Art exhibit a commentary on prisoners being watched,” The Vancouver Sun, 9 April 2007.

88 While many audience members applauded The Nightwatch, others called it “irresponsible” for allowing an animal to make physical contact with some of the works on display. Lance Esplund, “Of Celestial Beings, Sly Foxes and Weehawken,” Wall Street Journal, 4 February 2011.

89 Quoted in Francesco Bonami, Truce: Echoes of Art in an Age of Endless Conclusions (Santa Fe: Site Santa Fe, 1997), 20.

90 Perhaps the most vivid instance of this is a change.org petition circulated by a single individual which demanded that all works involving animals be removed from the Guggenheim exhibition. The petition garnered more than 820,000 signatures as well as significant media attention. https://www.change.org/p/promote-cruelty-free-exhibits-at-the-guggenheim, accessed 11 September 2020

91 Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992).

92 Cass Sunstein, “Standing for Animals (with Notes on Animal Rights),” UCLA Law Review 47 (2000): 1349. As Sunstein adds in his reading of Animal Legal Defense Fund, Inc. v. Glickman, the court was divided as to whether the act of intentionally viewing animals in a zoo was enough for individuals to claim an interest in the prevention of what they perceived as improper treatment. Of the Guggenheim show, Huang noted that most protestors never saw the works in person, but merely succumbed to a particular media structure that “has engendered a new servility that makes people parrot each other.” Scarlet Cheng, “After Guggenheim removes animal-related pieces from 'Art and China,' what's left? More questions,” Los Angeles Times, 27 October 2017. Indeed, even those not categorically opposed to the use of live animals in artworks seem to have relied only on the most cursory descriptions of the work. See, for example, Giovanni Aioi’s unsubstantiated assertion that A Case Study of Transference casts the viewer as a “sadistic voyeur.” “Should Museums Display Artworks that Feature Live Animals?,” Apollo (June 2018): 29.

93 Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365, 1926.

94 The contempt with which humans hold the aural presence of frogs—even to the point where frogs are frequently killed or harmed for daring to croak—is perhaps most vividly described by William Hogan the anti-Catholic activist, who, when starting his legal practice described “a most hideous chorus – just as Papists have done for more than twenty years.” William Hogan, A Synopsis of Popery, as It Was and as It Is (Hartford: S. Andrus, 1851), 227.

95 Moving beyond the do-no-harm idea underpinning the idea of permissibility, at least one artist implies that the acceptability of live animals in art could depend on whether the work benefits the animals in some way. In 2010, Elizabeth Demaray created Corpor Esurit, or we all deserve a break today, which supplied ants with fast food. The ants lived at least a week more than was expected of their species, a finding repeatedly mentioned in descriptions of the work. Sheila Prakash, “Desert Dwellers on a Fast Food Diet,” New York Times, 23 August 2010.

96 An unnamed veterinarian alleged that the insects and reptiles used in the exhibit may be completely incompatible, and should not be confined together. Brian Hutchinson, “Reptiles safe from the angry crowd,” National Post, 13 April 2007.

97 Uncredited Tate Modern statement quoted in multiple news sources. “9,000 Butterflies Die for Damien Hirst’s Art,” BBC, 15 October 2012. https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/19948359 accessed 2 April 2020.

98 Four creatures died in the Vancouver iteration; when Theater of the World was shown in Oxford and Stuttgart, only twenty percent of the animals died and most were cockroaches supplied as food. On Huang’s work, see Robin Laurence, “Huang Yong Ping,” Border Crossings 26, no. 3 (August 2007): 132.

99 Ibid., 132.

100 Sunstein, 1366.

101 A case in point is Canyon (1959), Robert Rauschenberg’s three-dimensional assembly, or in his words, a “combine” of objects which includes a bald eagle whose sale and export is barred in the U.S. per the 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Because of the criminal liability that would incur should a sale or trade be attempted, appraisers valued the work at zero. Patricia Cohen, “Art’s Sale Value? Zero. The Tax Bill? $29 Million,” New York Times, 22 July 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/arts/design/a-catch-22-of-art-and-taxes-starring-a-stuffed-eagle.html?pagewanted=all, accessed 18 October 2020

102 Kee, 17–20.

103 For discussions of the exhibition and its closing, see Jon Bird, “Minding the Body: Robert Morris’s 1971 Tate Gallery Retrospective,” in Michael Newman and Jon Bird, eds., Rewriting Conceptual Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 88–106.

104 Guggenheim Museum, “Statement Regarding Works in ‘Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World,” https://www.guggenheim.org/press-release/works-in-art-and-china-after-1989-theater-of-the-world, accessed 14 July 2019.

105 A case in point is PETA representative Ingrid Newkirk who argued that withdrawing the offending works “may help [China] and its artists recognize that animals are not props and that they deserve respect.” Robin Pogrebin and Sopan Deb, “Guggenheim Museum Is Criticized for Pulling Animal Artworks,” New York Times, 17 September 26.

106 Huang Yong Ping, cited in A Fruitful Incoherence: Dialogues with Artists on Internationalism (London: inIVA, 1998), 112.

107 Ibid., 112.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joan Kee

Joan Kee is Professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan and the Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at Williams College. A public interest attorney based in Detroit, she has written extensively on the intersection of contemporary art and law, including an edited forum on the subject for the Brooklyn Rail, and articles in Artforum, Law and Humanities, American Art, and Law, Culture and the Humanities. Kee’s most recent book is Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America (University of California Press, 2019).