2. Animacy: Partner, Person, Subject

The time has come for art history to expand its understanding of agency by regarding nonhuman animals, plants, and other phenomena, including the material constituents of art, as being alive, animate living partners, persons, and fellow subjects rather than as mere objects, matter, or even uncanny things—a kind interpretive property. As indicated in the previous chapter, the reification and exploitation of nonhuman entities as commodities is expanding rapidly around the world, especially in centers of industrial power where human beings consume earth, meat, and fossil fuels on a colossal scale. Likewise, the pernicious habit of regarding some human beings—notably people of color, women, and the poor—as objects has hardly disappeared and in many ways has accelerated recently as a result of intensifying White supremacism, misogyny, and neoliberal capitalism. In response, the present chapter argues for the abandonment of objectifying thought, language, and representation as such. Let there be no more talk or images of “objects,” “things,” or lifeless “matter.”1 On objectification, see David Joselit, Art’s Properties (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2023); John M. Rector, The Objectification Spectrum: Understanding and Transcending Our Diminishment and Dehumanization of Others (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type Books, 2016); and Ann J. Cahill, Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2010).

Instead, let us try to reimagine all entities and phenomena—even a chair, the trees that constitute it, the oxygen they generate, the nutritive soil in which they grow, and other vital agents, including fellow humans and nonhumans—with greater dignity and respect as coexisting inhabitants and collaborators on Earth. This will sound fatally sentimental to some readers, but such a vision of agency is now a matter of survival for many life-forms facing extinction as well as particular Homo sapiens who experience dehumanizing violence, disproportionate burdens, and socioeconomic inequities. The stakes here are at once ethical and ecological insofar as the exploitation of vulnerable beings and earthly substance contributes to desensitization, war, genocide, planetary disruption, and associated problems of environmental injustice. Approaching art historical interpretation with a more capacious, empathetic understanding of the living, vital agency of others should therefore be an urgent priority.

Indigenous communities have long espoused such a view, as Robin Wall Kimmerer explains in her remarkable book Braiding Sweetgrass:

In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out.2 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Minneapolis, Minn.: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 9. For more on the Western concept of the Great Chain of Being, see chapter 7.

In a chapter on “Learning the Grammar of Animacy,” Kimmerer acknowledges the power of mainstream Western science and epistemology to provide “careful observation” and “an intimate vocabulary that names each little part” of a plant or other specimen of study. As a botanist, she knows that vocabulary well and uses it regularly. Yet, she says, “science can be a language of distance which reduces a being to its working parts; it is a language of objects. The language scientists speak, however precise, is based on a profound error in grammar, an omission, a grave loss in translation from the native languages of these shores.” Lost in translation, says Kimmerer, is the “grammar of animacy”—the knowledge, and linguistic acknowledgment, that we live in “a world where everything is alive.”3 Kimmerer, 48, 49, 55.

What I find so interesting—and ultimately valuable—about Kimmerer’s book is her ambiguity about whether Indigenous people actually have a special, intrinsic claim to understanding and articulating animacy. On the one hand, in referring to “the native languages of these shores” (that is, the Americas), Kimmerer says, “In Potawatomi 101, rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places,” suggesting that Indigenous people regard animacy as a fundamental principle of their cultural education, if not an inborn, essential trait of their identity. On the other hand, Kimmerer acknowledges that non-Indigenous communities are also capable of appreciating and describing animacy, albeit in relatively limited ways. “In English,” she says, “we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it,” for “that would be a profound act of disrespect,” but “English doesn’t give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or she.” Kimmerer’s own use of first-person plural pronouns “we” and “our” is revealing, for this discloses her awareness of being implicated in the linguistic structures of English, too, as she participates in more than one cultural tradition. When she later uses another first-person plural, observing, “The animacy of the world is something we already know,” the reader cannot discern which community or tradition she has in mind. Does she mean the Potawatomi “we,” the English “we,” or the universal “we”? Her inclusive perspective then becomes explicit when she says, “The language of animacy teeters on extinction—not just for Native peoples, but for everyone. Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion—until we teach them not to.”4 Kimmerer, 55, 56, 57.

I interpret Kimmerer to be acknowledging that all human beings have the potential to embrace the world’s animacy, or vital agency, and thereby learn to act ethically, justly, and sustainably. I heartily agree. The problem, as she says, is that “we teach them not to” view the world as a living entity deserving of respect. The significance of these important insights is not that Indigenous people are inherently, or essentially, respectful of the world’s animacy and that non-Indigenous people are by nature destructive of that animacy. Rather, the upshot is that the grammar of animacy—or its antithesis—is learned. As a result of different cultural trajectories over centuries, this grammar thrived among Indigenous people while powerful forces of opposition and objectification—call them what you will: greed, hate, misogyny, racism, capitalism, colonialism—largely succeeded in suppressing animacy in the European tradition.

Largely, but not completely. In the book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, (2010), Jane Bennett revisits a selection of dissident authors within the European tradition going back to antiquity—Lucretius (ca. 99–55 BCE), Benedict de Spinoza (1632–1677), Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Henri Bergson (1859–1941), and others—and finds in their writings substantial attention to earthly matter and “inanimate” things as having vital agency and force, contrary to dominant views. Bennett also critically contends that the lingering European classical “image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption.” Moreover, she argues, “The figure of an intrinsically inanimate matter may be one of the impediments to the emergence of more ecological and more materially sustainable modes of production and consumption.” Eschewing both the antihumanism of deep ecology and the anthropocentrism of Marxist historical materialism (including thing theory), Bennett emphasizes “the agentic contributions of nonhuman forces” in order “to dissipate the onto-theological binaries of life/matter, human/animal, will/determination, and organic/inorganic” and thereby “induce in human bodies an aesthetic-affective openness to material vitality.”5 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), viii–xi, xvi. On thing theory, see Bill Brown, ed., Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Bennett and other so-called new materialists have been justifiably criticized for ignoring ancient Indigenous traditions like those described by Kimmerer—traditions that have recognized and articulated the vitality of nonhuman entities for millennia. Indeed, a certain hubris akin to that in Columbus-like “discovery” narratives informed new materialism’s self-described sense of being “new.” Vilifying Bennett and new materialism strikes me as misplaced, however, in light of Kimmerer’s acknowledgment that “the language of animacy teeters on extinction—not just for Native peoples, but for everyone.” With Kimmerer’s key point about how “we teach” each other to ignore animacy and learn to objectify the world, I prefer to call out some of the leading objectifiers instead. Accordingly, the present chapter concentrates on the tradition of art historical objectification as one that merits ecocritical attention because of its lingering power and authority.6 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). For a critique of new materialism, see, e.g., Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (2016): 4–22.

The philosophical roots of objectifying thought in art history run deep and still demand scrutiny. This is not the place for a comprehensive unpacking of such thought in general, but suffice it to say that classical Western philosophy, religion, and science—from which the discipline of art history emerged—long ago established ingrained habits of viewing nonhuman phenomena mechanistically as inert, passive matter, a resource of objective stuff to be used, studied, and owned by human agents. Other cultural traditions have manifested their own objectifying tendencies, but the global hegemony of Western culture today testifies to its dominating tendency, although decolonial critiques have begun to change the equation somewhat. The foundations of this hegemonic tradition were established in antiquity by influential Greek philosophers such as Plato (ca. 428–348/347 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE), reinforced by Christian beliefs about human dominion articulated in the Bible, and then naturalized in the early modern scientific and philosophical writings of Francis Bacon (1561–1626), René Descartes (1596–1650), John Locke (1632–1704), and Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), among many others. Marginalizing alternative perspectives, these persuasive Europeans normalized the idea of human exceptionalism and a qualitative, hierarchical boundary separating human subjects from nonhuman objects. In particular, the human agency of Europeans—especially leaders and wealthy educated men—stood out as uniquely conscious, rational, intelligent, and divinely ordained to govern others.7 A classic critique of Western classicism’s objectifying tradition, focusing on science, appears in Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1980). See also Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science, March 10, 1967, 1203–7. On non-Western objectification, resource extraction, and environmental exploitation, see, e.g., Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 17–18, 49, 61, 119–24, 132, 217–18, 264, 380–81; and Shellen Xiao Wu, Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860–1920 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015).

Since the second half of the twentieth century, scholarship in art history has begun to break from classical conventions formulated during this historical process of subjugation by increasingly exploring the creative efforts of repressed and exploited people to resist objectification. To a lesser extent, art historians have also initiated ecocritical inquiry and a broader rethinking of agency, with help from scholars in various fields, including Kimmerer, Bennett, and others. This chapter builds on such scholarship by shining a light on one particularly powerful, lingering discourse of objectification within art history that emanates from Western classicism in order to hasten its unraveling. Perhaps appropriately, this unraveling coincides with the Anthropocene, Earth’s new geological epoch of human-dominated planetary transformation, and the emergence of ecocritical art history. After examining a few key traditional texts from the tradition in question, I put them in conversation with alternative perspectives, both old and new, as well as selected historical works of art that vividly demonstrate the importance of nonhuman agency as something that has always been present in one form or another, whether recognized by art historians or not. It will become clear that this objectifying vein of Western classical art history, though still powerful today, has failed to comprehend agency in the broader, more inclusive sense that artists themselves have often understood and that the world now demands.

ALL ELSE IS SUBJECT TO MAN: THE KANTIAN TRADITION

Let us begin with the influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who offered the following categorical declaration about human beings and their relation to other entities in his Lectures on Ethics (1784–85): “Man has, in his own person, a thing inviolable; it is something holy, that has been entrusted to us. All else is subject to man. . . . That which a man can dispose over, must be a thing. Animals are here regarded as things; but man is no thing.”8 Immanuel Kant, “Of Suicide,” as recorded by Georg Ludwig Collins (1784–85, 27:373), in Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind, trans. Peter Heath (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 147. Western philosophy’s commitment to human exceptionalism has rarely found a clearer expression of faith. Indeed, for Kant, such a commitment entailed “something holy,” a matter of spiritual belief. By saying that “all else is subject to man,” he declared everything nonhuman to be an object or “thing” lacking the “inviolable” agency of “Man” and therefore both qualitatively different and presumptively inferior.9 For a thorough exploration of Kant’s thinking about nonhuman beings, see John L. Callanan and Lucy Allais, ed., Kant and Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Kant reiterated this categorical anthropocentrism in his Critique of Judgment (1790), a foundational text for Western aesthetics in the modern era. The treatise insistently contrasts the “instinctive” and “nonrational” behavior of nonhuman animals and “lifeless” matter to “rational,” “purposive” humans as proof of the distinct, sovereign status of “Man.” In an interesting sign of ontological ambiguity, Kant acknowledges that “Man” is also an animal, even a physically “frail” one compared with some animals. Nonetheless, Kant never wavers from emphasizing the exceptionalism of “Man” as “lord of nature” and “noumenon” (that is, non-object) for his rational “intelligence,” “supersensible ability,” and the “immortality” of his “soul.” The Christian religious underpinnings of Kant’s thought saturate his language at nearly every turn, even though he carefully avoids declaring knowledge of God.10 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), 10 (§1.172), 52 (§5.210), 319 (§83.431), 323 (§84.435), 368 (§91.474).

Elsewhere, in describing “humanity” as a quality encompassing “the universal feeling of sympathy” and “the ability to engage universally in very intimate communication,” Kant says, “When these two qualities are combined, they constitute the sociability that befits [our] humanity and distinguishes it from the limitation characteristic of animals.” Regarding his broader idea about nature as a “teleological system,” Kant believed that “there is only one kind of being with a causality that is teleological, i.e., directed to purposes. . . . That being is man. . . . Man is the only natural being in whom we can nonetheless cognize, as part of his own constitution, a supersensible ability (freedom), and even cognize the law and the object of this causality, the object that this being can set before itself as its highest purpose (the highest good in the world).” Indeed, Kant regarded man as “the ultimate purpose of nature here on earth, the purpose by reference to which all other natural things constitute a system of purposes.”11 Kant, 10 (§1.172), 52 (§5.210), 231 (§60.355), 317 (§83.430), 323 (§84.435).

Kant’s hierarchical sense of human exceptionalism is especially clear in his discussion of art and aesthetics, as when he makes distinctions among various “kinds of liking,” including “agreeableness” versus “the beautiful.” Whereas “agreeableness holds for nonrational animals” and relates to mere gratification, “beauty [is] only for human beings,” because “only the liking involved in taste for the beautiful is disinterested and free.” Disinterestedness is a key term for Kant, who regards it as a fundamental condition of freedom that ensures the universality and autonomy of true aesthetic experience, uncorrupted by subjective desires, politics, or other earthly entanglements. Kant’s notion of disinterestedness constitutes one of many assertions of his belief in the exceptional capacity of human beings to transcend objecthood and materiality through aesthetics. For Kant, aesthetics offer a refuge from implication.12 Kant, 52 (§5.210).

Kant viewed “art in general” as a distinctly human product at once “purposive” and “free” by definition:

Art is distinguished from nature as doing (facere) is from acting or operating in general (agere); and the product or result of art is distinguished from that of nature, the first being a work (opus), the second an effect (effectus). By right we should not call anything art except a production through freedom, i.e., through a power of choice that bases its acts on reason. For though we like to call the product that bees make (the regularly constructed honeycombs) a work of art, we do so only by virtue of an analogy with art; for as soon as we recall that their labor is not based on any rational deliberation on their part, we say at once that the product is a product of their nature (namely, of instinct), and it is only to their creator that we ascribe it as art.13 Kant, 170 (§43.303).

Kant does not consider the possibility that “doing” art might be in some way instinctive for human beings and therefore evidence of their coexistence with bees on a spectrum of creativity in nature, producing different kinds of “work” appropriate to different species. Instead, for Kant, human “doing” differs categorically from the instinctive “acting or operating” (having agency, agere) of nature because it is “a production through freedom, i.e., through a power of choice that bases its acts on reason.” Humans, in Kant’s view, have something greater than mere natural agency, but his argument rests on a faith in “freedom” as an attainable absolute, an ideal condition with no impediments, entanglements, or implication. Kant thus imagines the human being as a kind of god on Earth, acting in a state of pure freedom. In that respect, Kant’s vision of humanity recalls the ancient phrase Deus ex machina, literally meaning “god outside the machine,” referring to an unexpected narrative plot device that satisfyingly resolves a seemingly intractable problem. The ancient Greek playwrights Aeschylus, Euripides, and Aristophanes used this device frequently in their plays, even employing mechanical contraptions and often producing an emotional response in audiences, who experienced a sense of astonishment and wonder at the sight. In a famous example during Euripides’s Medea, the sun god, Helios, sends a chariot to Earth to rescue his granddaughter, Medea, from her husband, Jason, whisking her away to safety in Athens. Kant did not explicitly invoke the Deus ex machina, but his vision of disinterested human freedom producing transcendent art resembles a miraculous illusion drawn from the history of theater.14 On the Deus ex machina, see Jordan M. Dorney, “Sage against the Machine: The Politics of the Deus ex Machina” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2018); Julie Hudson, “The Environment in Performance: Stage Invasion or Deus ex Machina?,” in The Environment on Stage: Scenery or Shapeshifter? (New York: Routledge, 2020), 85–105; Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis, “Deus ex Machina,” in The Classical Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 263; and Bernard M. W. Knox, “The Medea of Euripides,” in Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy, ed. Erich Segal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 272–93. For insightful discussion of Kant’s ambivalence about theatricality as an ethical necessity, see Howard Pickett, Rethinking Sincerity and Authenticity: The Ethics of Theatricality in Kant, Kierkegaard, and Levinas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 3, 6, 8–10, 11–96.

Kant proceeds to make various other distinctions about “aesthetic” or “Fine Art” as a product of “freedom,” “genius,” “reflection,” “purposiveness,” and “originality,” and therefore different from science, the “mercenary art” of craft, “mechanical art,” and above all “nature.” He also insists that “art always has a determinate intention to produce something,” but that something cannot be “mere sensation,” nor should the product of art “seem intentional.” As indicated by his example of bee honeycombs, Kant acknowledges a creative dimension in nature—one that humans often find visually appealing—but any comparison of it with human art is only an analogy, since the latter occupies an entirely different and superior category for him. Kant thus consistently uses nonhuman animals as a natural foil to the exceptional purposiveness and creativity of “Man” as a transcendent being.15 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 172–76 (§44–46.305–308).

Kant’s influence on subsequent Western thinking about aesthetics and humanism has been substantial. For example, in 1940, the eminent German émigré art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) cited Kant in the introduction of a field-defining essay titled “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline.” Panofsky recounts a well-known biographical anecdote about Kant, shortly before his death, receiving a visit from his doctor. Refusing to sit until his guest sat first, Kant reportedly told the physician, “The sense of humanity has not yet left me.” Panofsky then explains the etymology and evolution of “humanity” as a term originating in Latin antiquity to describe “the quality which distinguishes man, not only from animals, but also . . . from the barbarian or vulgarian who lacks pietas and paideia [upbringing].” By the time Kant invoked “humanity” during his last days in 1804, notes Panofsky, the word had also acquired a competing inflection from Christianity, referring to the inferiority of human beings compared to the true divinity of God. Thus, “humanity” could also be a sign of frailty and imperfection. “It is from this ambivalent conception of humanitas,” says Panofsky, “that humanism was born” in the Renaissance as “an attitude which can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitations (fallibility and frailty); from this two postulates result—responsibility and tolerance.” As a Jewish scholar who faced anti-Semitism, Panofsky understood such issues personally, especially writing during the depths of World War II amid the genocidal intolerance of fascism. Like Kant, though, Panofsky upheld the firm boundary between “Man” and “nature” by asserting:

From the humanistic point of view, however, it became reasonable, and even inevitable, to distinguish, within the realm of creation, between the sphere of nature and the sphere of culture, and to define the former with reference to the latter, i.e., nature as the whole world accessible to the senses, except for the records left by man. Man is indeed the only animal to leave records behind him, for he is the only animal whose products “recall to mind” an idea distinct from their material existence. Other animals use signs and contrive structures, but they use signs without “perceiving the relations of signification,” and they contrive structures without perceiving the relation of construction.16 Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” originally published in The Meaning of the Humanities, ed. Theodor Meyer Greene (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1940), 89–118; reprinted in Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology, ed. Eric Fernie (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 184–95; quotes on 184, 186.

Anyone whose dog has marked a fire hydrant or whose cat has left a dead animal on the doorstep in tribute may question Panofsky’s assumptions (as do a growing number of scientists today), but the key issue here is the lingering influence of Kantian humanism in the realm of art history and aesthetics. Like Kant, Panofsky takes great pains to preserve a sense of human exceptionalism and categorical difference from other forms of being. To reinforce his argument, Panofsky quotes an article on “Sign and Symbol” by Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) in the Journal of the Warburg Institute (1937), distinguishing humans from all other animals that “use signs without ‘perceiving the relation of signification.’” Drawing on Kant and 1930s understandings of semiotics and animal cognition, Panofsky asserts the distinctive way “Man” leaves “records” and creates products that “‘recall to mind’ an idea distinct from their material existence.” In his article, Maritain refers to such an idea as a “spiritual sign.” The important point here is not that Panofsky distinguishes between human beings and other animals. Human beings are different in some ways from other animals, just as any species has unique traits. What matters is the categorical way in which Panofsky makes that distinction by invoking and extending Kant’s belief in an unbridgeable spiritual boundary between human beings, who produce transcendent “culture,” and all other animals lumped together as an undifferentiated group of lesser beings under the sign of “nature” as “material existence.” Instead of searching for continuities across species, Panofsky, like Kant, insistently—even anxiously—asserts and upholds a binary opposition between “Man” and everything else, defined in terms of spirit and faith.17 Jacques Maritain and Mary Morris, “Sign and Symbol,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 1, no. 1 (1937): 2: “Animals make use of signs without perceiving the relation of signification. To perceive the relation of signification is to have an idea—a spiritual sign.” On nonhuman scent marking as a form of communication constituting a “record,” see Jane L. Hurst, “Scent Marking and Social Communication,” in Animal Communication Networks, ed. P. K. McGregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 224. For an alternative perspective upholding the human exceptionalism of “records,” see Paul Beynon-Davies, Significance: Exploring the Nature of Information, Systems and Technology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 74–75.

A stark, Kantian contrast between the supposedly spiritual status of human art and the materiality of objects remained an urgent philosophical issue during much of the twentieth century, notably in the writings of another prominent German philosopher in this European anthropocentric tradition, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), who, unlike Panofsky, embraced Nazi fascism. Heidegger’s voluminous and challenging writings are difficult to summarize, but a few salient points are worth making here. In “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1950), Heidegger disputed traditional understandings of human art as transparent representation or decipherable symbol by privileging its exceptional power to embody and create, rather than merely reflect, a world. His vivid example was an ancient Greek temple, which “structures and simultaneously gathers around itself . . . the world of this historical people.” Consistent with Kant’s complex notion of “humanity,” Heidegger recognized that an external world actually does exist outside human consciousness, as he explained in an influential essay on “The Thing” (1977). In that text, Heidegger conceded that a nonhuman thing resists human understanding by always withdrawing from perception, citing Kant’s idea of a thing or “object-in-itself,” existing “without reference to the human act of representing it.” The thing’s resistant withdrawal is evident, says Heidegger, when a tool such as a hammer breaks, becoming abstracted from human use and making its thingness palpable. For Heidegger, art constitutes another dense thing irreducible to instrumental uses and interpretations. As his examples reveal, though, Heidegger viewed the work of art as only having significance for human beings in human terms, not as something whose relevance or implications hinged in any way on a relation to other species or things themselves. His philosophy retained an important element of Kantian hierarchy, human exceptionalism, and transcendence. As he says in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1929–30), “The stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, man is world-forming.”18 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 42–43, 174, 180; Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 185. Elliot R. Wolfson, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Philip Oltermann, “Heidegger’s ‘Black Notebooks’ Reveal Antisemitism at the Core of His Philosophy,” Guardian, March 12, 2014; Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

A Kantian philosophical distinction between art’s transcendent quality and the worldless materiality of objects informs one of the most widely known critical polemics of the later twentieth century. In an essay from 1967 titled “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried attacked the minimalism of such contemporary artists as Tony Smith (1912–1980), Robert Morris (1931–2018), and Donald Judd (1928–1994) by condemning their three-dimensional works as “literalist” for failing to transcend the status of being mere objects. Fried does not invoke Kant directly, but Kantian ideas pervade the essay. The minimalists deliberately broke from sculptural tradition by using industrial materials to produce large pieces they described as “Specific Objects” and “Primary Structures,” designed with plain geometric shapes, often repeating them. In an effort to avoid conventional approaches to composition, the minimalists eschewed complicated arrangements of parts and idiosyncratic formal relationships in favor of unitary shapes to produce a legible whole, as seen in one of Donald Judd’s untitled works of 1966, consisting of four identical cubes made of stainless steel and Plexiglas (fig. 1). Fried quotes various statements by the minimalists, including one from Judd’s article “Specific Objects” (1965), which says, “Anything that is not absolutely plain begins to have parts in some way. The thing is to be able to work and do different things and yet not break up the wholeness that a piece has.” In another passage, Fried quotes Morris’s “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2” (1966), discussing how minimalism fostered a “nonpersonal or public mode” of “physical participation” that included the “bodies” of viewers in a “situation.”19 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (1967): 12–23, 12 (quoting Judd), 15 (quoting Morris). For a comprehensive study on minimalism, see James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

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Fig. 1. Donald Judd, untitled, 1966. Stainless steel and amber plexiglass, four units, each 34 × 34 × 34 in. (86.4 × 86.4 × 86.4 cm). Judd Foundation. Photo Alex Marks © Judd Foundation. Donald Judd Art © 2023 Judd Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In Fried’s view, such ideas and works are anathema for several reasons that result in the failure of the “literalist” project to transcend “objecthood” and thereby qualify as art. Their fundamental shortcoming, he says, is that “the literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theater; and theatre is now the negation of art.” As Fried explains:

Literalist sensibility is theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work. Morris makes this explicit. Whereas in previous art [quoting Morris] “what is to be had from the work is located strictly within [it],” the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation—one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder. . . . The larger the object the more we are forced to keep our distance from it. . . . It is, one might say, precisely this distancing that makes the beholder a subject and the piece in question . . . an object.20 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 15.

Using leitmotifs of literalist objecthood and theatricality on the one hand versus the transcendent quality of modernist art on the other, Fried’s essay unfolds through a series of oppositional distinctions that further underscore the stark contrast in question. For example, whereas modernist artists such as David Smith (1906–1965) use compositional focus and pedestals to organize their works and set them apart from the surrounding world, as in Smith’s Cubi XIX of 1964 (fig. 2), in Minimalism “there is nothing . . . that, as it were, declares its irrelevance to the situation, and therefore to the experience in question.” As a result, “the presence of literalist art . . . is basically a theatrical effect or quality—a kind of stage presence . . . a function, not just of the obtrusiveness and, often, even aggressiveness of literalist work, but of the special complicity that that work extorts from the beholder.” For Fried, minimalism differs from the bounded, contemplative works of modernism by engaging in a forceful act of extortion—a veritable crime against art.21 Fried, 16.

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Fig. 2. David Smith, Cubi XIX, 1964. Stainless steel, 112 13/16 × 58 5/16 × 40 in. (286.4 × 148 × 101.6 cm). Tate Modern, London. © 2023 The Estate of David Smith / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Furthermore, Fried opposes the “indeterminate, open-ended—and unexacting—relation as subject” in which the “impassive object” of minimalism places “the beholder,” who becomes “distanced, or crowded, by the silent presence” as if by “another person” in a way that he finds “disquieting.” Indeed, Fried compares this effect of minimalism to that of “entities or beings encountered in everyday experience,” namely “other persons.” Moreover, the design and arrangement of minimalist works, producing “a kind of order that ‘is simply order . . . one thing after another,’ is rooted, not, as Judd seems to believe, in new philosophical and scientific principles, whatever he takes these to be, but in nature.” Again, consistent with the ideas of Kant highlighted earlier, such statements by Fried express a profound discomfort with art that insufficiently segregates itself from its surroundings and thereby fails to uphold a stark boundary between “Man” and “nature.” There seems to be something profoundly anti-environmental (if not anti-environmentalist) about Fried’s argument in its resistance to “open-ended” art that steps outside the enveloping frame of Kantian aesthetics to engage the beholder’s bodily awareness of those surroundings and of “nature” at large.22 Fried, 16, 19.

Reading between the lines, I infer in Fried’s essay a deep and timely anxiety about implication, marked by loss of control over “nature,” “the situation,” and the interpretation of art. It is worth noting that Fried wrote “Art and Objecthood” only a few years after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring (1962), a landmark book of environmental consciousness-raising about the destructive unintended consequences of industrial pesticides and other chemicals adapted from military stockpiles for domestic purposes in the aftermath of World War II. Carson concluded her book with a statement that effectively called into question the entire Kantian/Western philosophical tradition of human exceptionalism and hierarchy upon which Fried’s argument rested:

The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.23 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 297.

Fried was not an applied entomologist responsible for arming industry with “the most modern and terrible weapons . . . against the earth,” but he did envision his art-critical argument in terms of warfare against what he called “enveloping, infectious theatricality.” According to Fried, the ultimate goal of modernism—indeed of all art—was to “defeat” theatricality and objecthood in order to preserve and extend the “exalting” tradition of “high art.” Fried insistently constructs the “conflict” between modernist and “literalist” work as a “war”—a word that he uses repeatedly:

The imperative that modernist painting defeat or suspend its objecthood is at bottom the imperative that it defeat or suspend theater. And this means that there is a war going on between theater and modernist painting, between the theatrical and the pictorial—a war that, despite the literalists’ explicit rejection of modernist painting and sculpture, is not basically a matter of program and ideology but of experience, conviction, sensibility. . . . Theater and theatricality are at war today, not simply with modernist painting (or modernist painting and sculpture), but with art as such. . . . The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theater.24 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 20, 21.

Fried also briefly mentions that “cinema escapes theater” and “provides a welcome and absorbing refuge to sensibilities at war with theater and theatricality,” but “the fact that what is provided is a refuge from theater and not a triumph over it, absorption not conviction—means that the cinema, even at its most experimental, is not a modernist art.”25 Fried, 21.

In a striking rhetorical gesture reminiscent of Kant’s invocations of “spirit” and “faith,” Fried frames his argument in explicitly moral and religious terms, suggesting a kind of aesthetic crusade against objecthood. The essay’s epigraph quotes the eighteenth-century American Protestant theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) to affirm the power of art to emulate the transcendent creativity of God: “It is certain with me that the world exists anew every moment; that the existence of things every moment ceases and is every moment renewed. . . . We every moment see the same proof of a God as we should have seen if we had seen Him create the world at first.” In keeping with this sense of continuous renewal, Fried celebrates what he sees as the positive qualities of modernism’s perceptual “instantaneousness,” “presentness,” and “perpetual creation of itself” as “wholly manifest.” Against these miraculous traits of temporal transcendence, he starkly contrasts “the literalist preoccupation with time” and “the duration of the experience.” Such durational temporality, says Fried, is “paradigmatically theatrical,” for it “confronts the beholder, and thereby isolates him, with the endlessness not just of objecthood but of time.” Thus, for Fried, “it is by virtue of their presentness and instantaneousness that modernist painting and sculpture defeat theater.” Yet, he ends by lamenting “the utter pervasiveness—the virtual universality—of the sensibility or mode of being that I have characterized as corrupted or perverted by theater. We are all literalists most of our lives. Presentness is grace.”26 Fried, 12, 22, 23.

Before concluding discussion of Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” I wish to underscore his belligerent rhetoric of “war,” “conflict,” “conviction,” “survival,” “infectious theatricality,” and the imperative to “defeat” it, for this feels redolent of the fraught historical moment in which he wrote the essay. In 1966 and 1967, the world witnessed a disturbing escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam and with it a growing antiwar movement that publicly challenged American militarism. By 1967, with nearly five hundred thousand U.S. soldiers deployed to Vietnam, American forces were engaged in a massive, multiyear bombing campaign called Operation Rolling Thunder against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). Meanwhile, the war’s growing unpopularity at home spawned large-scale protests, including one at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on April 15, 1967, attended by a hundred thousand people or more. In the face of mounting domestic opposition, President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) and his military advisers attempted to hide evidence that the conflict was going badly for the United States while publicly projecting optimism and a patriotic commitment to defeat the enemy.27 Douglas Robinson, “100,000 Rally at U.N. against Vietnam War,” New York Times, April 16, 1967. On escalation, Operation Rolling Thunder, and official deception, see H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); Brian Van De Mark, Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Mark Clodfelter, The Limits of Airpower: The American Bombing of Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 1989).

One mantra in this official smokescreen was the word “conviction,” in the sense of unwavering belief in the American cause. For example, at a news conference on June 18, 1966, President Johnson made a statement acknowledging controversy about the war but also expressing resolve: “While we do have differences and divisions, I want our men in the field and our people at home to know that our course is resolute; that our conviction is firm; and that we shall not be diverted from doing what is necessary in the nation’s interest and the cause of freedom.”28 John D. Pomfret, “Johnson Warns Enemy,” New York Times, June 19, 1966. Similarly, during a Memorial Day address in May 1967, the president had this to say: “And I ask you, my fellow Americans, to join me in prayer that the voice of reason and humanity will be heeded, that this tragic struggle can soon be brought to an end. Every President must act in the deep conviction that the cause for which young men suffer and die transcends their sacrifices. We have had to accept the war in Vietnam to redeem our pledge to those who have accepted in good faith our commitment to protect their right of free choice. Only in this way can we preserve our own right to act in freedom.”29 “Johnson Decries Vietnam ‘Impasse’: Memorial Day Proclamation Urges Enemy to Negotiate—Officials Pessimistic,” New York Times, May 23, 1967.

In the context of the present chapter, Johnson’s wartime vocabulary—“reason,” “humanity,” “conviction,” “transcends,” “faith,” “freedom”—uncannily reverberates with the Kantian aesthetic tradition then culminating with Fried’s “Art and Objecthood.” Peace activists sometimes cited their “faith” and “conviction” as well in opposing American military involvement, but Fried wrote admiringly of modernist art—and of the modernist critic—as displaying “conviction” in a war against minimalism:

Roughly, the success or failure of a given painting has come to depend on its ability to hold or stamp itself out or compel conviction as shape. . . . It is, I think, hardly necessary to add that the availability of modernist art is not of this kind, and that the rightness or relevance of one’s conviction about specific modernist works, a conviction that begins and ends in one’s experience of the work itself, is always open to question. . . . And this means that there is a war going on between theater and modernist painting, between the theatrical and the pictorial—a war which, despite the literalists’ explicit rejection of modernist painting and sculpture, is not basically a matter of program and ideology but of experience, conviction, sensibility.30 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 12, 19, 20. Additional references to “conviction” appear on 21, 22, and 23n4.

Fried’s ardent framing of the “conflict” between modernism and “literalist” art as a “war” requiring “conviction” aligns him, at least rhetorically, with U.S. militarism at that moment. He thus engaged in an art-critical theater of warfare, so to speak.31 See “A Rabbi Assails Vietnam Policy,” New York Times, May 20, 1966, quoting the Rev. Dr. Israel Margolies telling worshippers that President Johnson’s “anxiety” to reach public consensus about the war in Vietnam had “tended to obscure the more sacred obligation of every American to be true to his own faith and conviction.”

The irony of Fried’s posture was obvious to at least one prominent artistic contemporary from within the enemy “literalist” camp, Robert Smithson (1938–1973). Responding to Fried’s essay in a letter to the editor published in Artforum a few months after “Art and Objecthood,” Smithson observed the following:

Michael Fried has in his article “Art and Objecthood” (Artforum, June 1967) declared a “war” on what he quixotically calls “theatricality.” In a manner worthy of the most fanatical puritan, he provides the art world with a long-overdue spectacle—a kind of ready-made parody of the war between Renaissance classicism (modernity) versus Manneristic anti-classicism (theater). . . . Fried has declared his sacred duty to modernism and will now make combat with what Jorge Luis Borges calls “the numerous Hydra (the swamp monster which amounts to a prefiguration or emblem of geometric progressions) . . . ,” in other words “Judd’s Specific Objects, and Morris’s gestalts or unitary forms, Smith’s cube . . . .” This atemporal world threatens Fried’s present state of temporal grace—his “presentness.” . . . Every refutation is a mirror of the thing it refutes—ad infinitum. Every war is a battle with reflections. What Michael Fried attacks is what he is. He is a naturalist who attacks natural time. Could it be there is a double Michael Fried—the atemporal Fried and the temporal Fried? Consider a subdivided progression of “Frieds” on millions of stages.32 Robert Smithson, letter to the editor, Artforum 6, no. 2 (1967): 4.

Smithson clearly registers the aggressive, moral intensity and polemical contradictions that mark “Art and Objecthood.” There is indeed something rather theatrical about Fried’s diatribe against theater—a diatribe that he has since expounded repetitively in numerous books investigating a deeper history of theatricality and antitheatricality, objecthood and its transcendent modernist opposite. Fried’s ever-expanding corpus suggests self-doubt in its constant reiteration, while rivaling the scope and scale of Kant’s own writings. In any case, Fried’s argument ultimately revolves around one fundamental claim articulated in his essay of 1967: “A work of art—more accurately, a work of modernist painting or sculpture—[is] in some essential respect not an object.” Though qualified with reference to “modernist painting or sculpture,” Fried suggested that art in general was incommensurable with objecthood. Unlike the democratizing arguments of Kimmerer and Bennett, who question the idea of objecthood by highlighting the pervasive animacy of nature, Fried reasserts the Kantian hierarchical tradition by affirming objecthood (and nature) as categorically different from, and inferior to, the spiritual transcendence of human art.33 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 15.

BEYOND ART AND OBJECTHOOD: EXPOSING THE ARBITRARINESS OF DIVIDES

Since Fried wrote “Art and Objecthood,” art history has become more receptive to the vital agency of works of art, thanks to Kimmerer, Bennett, and numerous other scholars mostly outside the discipline, notably in anthropology and literary studies. For example, in his book Art and Agency (1998), the anthropologist Arthur Gell (1945–1997) observes, “Art objects are the equivalent of persons, or more precisely, social agents. . . . Art objects are characteristically ‘difficult.’ They are difficult to make, difficult to ‘think,’ difficult to transact. They fascinate, compel, and entrap as well as delight the spectator.” In other words, art does not just sit there passively. Similarly, for the literature scholar Bill Brown, works of art and other material “things” belie traditional assumptions about their inert passivity by displaying uncanny liveliness. “You could imagine things,” says Brown, “as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects—their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems.” Brown’s notion of the “excessive,” “metaphysical presence” of objects sounds vaguely similar to Kantian transcendence, with the important difference that he ascribes such qualities to the objects themselves rather than to their human makers. In various ways, such scholarship has expanded the scope of agency to include the active power of items other than human beings alone.34 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7, 23; Bill Brown, Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 5. Examples of recent art historical research informed by Gell, Brown, and related scholarship include Lorraine Daston, Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004); Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Jennifer L. Roberts, “Things: Material Turn, Transnational Turn,” American Art 32, no. 2 (2017): 64–69; and Mark D. Mitchell, Audubon to Warhol: The Art of American Still Life (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015).

Although this innovative discourse about agentic things and objects has influenced much research and writing in the humanities in recent years, art historians who embrace such thinking remain focused primarily on human artifacts and their human implications regardless of their environmental contexts. It is still unusual for scholars in art history to examine the vital agency of living nonhuman beings and inorganic matter, even when these are used as art materials (as, for example, in ivory, vellum, gelatin, and cochineal). Therefore, art history continues to be dominated by anthropocentrism—Kantian or otherwise—regarding considerations of agency. The few art historians who attend closely to nonhuman animal agency, such as Steve Baker, Stephen Eisenman, J. Keri Cronin, and a few others, also tend to emphasize modern and contemporary work, especially activist work, but not the deeper history of art. Even ecocritical scholarship in art history tends to overlook nonhuman animals and the vitality of matter when examining familiar topics such as landscape painting or the pressing political issues of environmental injustice.35 Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion, 2000); Steve Baker, Artist/Animal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Stephen F. Eisenman, The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights (London: Reaktion, 2014); J. Keri Cronin, Art for Animals: Visual Culture and Animal Advocacy, 1870–1914 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018). See also Ron Broglio, Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Carol Freeman, Elizabeth Leane, and Yvette Watt, eds., Considering Animals: Contemporary Studies in Human-Animal Relations (New York: Routledge, 2011); Louise Lippincott and Andreas Blühm, Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750–1900 (New York: Merrell, 2005); Nato Thompson, ed., Becoming Animal: Contemporary Art in the Animal Kingdom (North Adams, Mass.: MassMOCA in association with MIT Press, 2005); and Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior, Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History (New York: Routledge, 1997). Regarding the dearth of historical scholarship on the agency of art materials, an important exception is Laura Turner Igoe, “Creative Matter: Tracing the Environmental Context of Materials in American Art,” in Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock, Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2018), 140–69.

Not so in other fields of the “humanities.” For instance, Cary Wolfe, a key theorist in posthumanism and animal studies, introduces his interdisciplinary anthology Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (2003) by saying, “Those nonhuman beings called animals pose philosophical and ethical questions that go to the root not just of what we think but of who we are. Their presence asks: what happens when the Other can no longer safely be assumed to be human?” Wolfe detects a “crisis of humanism” in recent critical theory coinciding with “a radical revaluation of the status of nonhuman animals that has taken place in society at large.” He cites the “veritable explosion of work in areas such as cognitive ethology and field ecology,” which “has called into question our ability to use the old saws of anthropocentrism (language, tool use, the inheritance of cultural behaviors, and so on) to separate ourselves once and for all from animals.” The resulting erosion of “tidy divisions between human and nonhuman,” he observes, “has led to a broad reopening of the question of the ethical status of animals in relation to the human.”36 Cary Wolfe, ed., Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xi–xii.

Charles Darwin famously inaugurated that “erosion” within modern Western thought during the nineteenth century, but art historians, art critics, and cultural studies scholars are still absorbing the decentering implications of his work and of much older Indigenous traditions of the sort articulated by Kimmerer. In On the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin recognized the “mutual relations of the innumerable inhabitants of the world,” viewing them not as belonging to “immutable” or “independently created” species but rather as “plastic” forms subject to infinite “variation” through “natural selection” and “bound together by a web of complex relations.” In The Descent of Man (1871), he observed, “Man bears in his bodily structure clear traces of his descent from some lower form,” yet “there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.” Furthermore, Darwin said, “The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery. . . . The fact that the lower animals are excited by the same emotions as ourselves is so well established, that it will not be necessary to weary the reader by many details. . . . Most of the more complex emotions are common to the higher animals and ourselves.” Numerous other writers have contested the objectification of nonhuman animals over the centuries: Plutarch (46–after 119 CE), Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948), Jacques Derrida, Jane Goodall, and Peter Singer, among others.37 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859; New York: Penguin, 1985), 68–69, 124–25; Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871; New York: Appleton, 1896), 65. Plutarch, Plutarch’s Three Treatises on Animals, ed. Stephen T. Newmyer (New York: Routledge, 2020); Michel de Montaigne, “An Apology for Raymond Sebond” (ca. 1568), and Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), excerpted in The Animals Reader, ed. Kalof and Fitzgerald, 8–9, 57–58; Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: Murray, 1872); Leo Tolstoy, The First Step: An Essay on the Morals of Diet, trans. Aylmer Maude (Manchester, U.K.: Albert Broadbent, 1900), 11–62; Mahatma Gandhi, “The Fiery Ordeal” (1929), and other texts on the ahimsa principle of nonviolence, quoted in R. Rajmohan, “Gandhi on Violence,” Peace Research 28, no. 2 (1996): 27–38; Marc Bekoff and Jane Goodall, The Emotional Lives of Animals (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2007); Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet and trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: Avon Books, 1975).

An avalanche of recent scientific research and philosophical inquiry has confirmed the sentience, consciousness, cognitive abilities, and even cultural behavior of other animals as well as the agentic force of plants and matter. For example, the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness by a group of leading cognitive neuroscientists announced in 2012 that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” That does not mean that humans and nonhumans are the same, but it demands rethinking of traditional anthropocentric beliefs about human exceptionalism, including Kantian notions of categorical difference. Recent scientific analyses of trees and other forms of plant life have revealed hitherto unrecognized complexity in their movement and behavior, such that researchers now routinely refer to forest “communication” and human “cohabitation” with certain species of mushrooms, among many other observations. Indeed, research on plant and nonhuman animal communication is flourishing today.38 Philip Low, “The Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness,” ed. Jaak Panksepp, Diana Reiss, David Edelman, Bruno Van Swinderen, Philip Low, and Christof Koch, proclaimed July 7, 2012, at the Francis Memorial Crick Conference on Consciousness in Human and Non-Human Animals, at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, “signed by the conference participants that very evening, in the presence of Stephen Hawking, in the Balfour Room at the Hotel du Vin in Cambridge, UK,” https://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf. See also Marc Bekoff, “Animals Are Conscious and Should Be Treated as Such,” New Scientist, September 19, 2012; Simon Worrall, “Yes, Animals Think and Feel; Here’s How We Know,” National Geographic, July 15, 2015; Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (London: Picador, 2016); and Jodey Castricano, ed., Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008). On plant life and fungi, see Ferris Jabr, “The Social Life of Forests,” New York Times, December 2, 2020; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015); Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (Vancouver, B.C.: Greystone Books, 2015); Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Jack W. Bradbury and Sarah L. Vehrencamp, Principles of Animal Communication, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Richard Karban, Plant Sensing and Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Born from the same philosophical stew that spawned Bennett’s new materialism, discourse on “object-oriented ontology” also challenges the classical humanist view of subject-object relations but with a different emphasis that makes its potential usefulness for ecocritical art history less clear. Founded by American philosopher Graham Harman around 2000, object-oriented ontology challenges Kantian idealist philosophies that describe being—existence, reality, the world of objects—as solely the province of human understanding. Object-oriented ontology builds upon Heidegger’s insights about the resistant withdrawal of things from human perception in order to dismantle persistent Western anthropocentrism. Harman argues that an “object” is “that which has a unified and autonomous life apart from its relations, accidents, qualities, and moments.” In other words, objects exist for themselves, regardless of their usefulness or relation to humans. Accordingly, object-oriented ontology puts objects, not humans, at the center of being, with nothing enjoying special status or existential privileges. Everything exists equally; as Harman says, “All relations are on the same footing.” Using a lucid, engaging style of writing, Harman observes in Towards Speculative Realism (2010):

The arena of the world is packed with diverse objects, their forces unleashed and mostly unloved. Red billiard ball smacks green billiard ball. Snowflakes glitter in the light that cruelly annihilates them, while damaged submarines rust along the ocean floor. As flour emerges from mills and blocks of limestone are compressed by earthquakes, gigantic mushrooms spread in the Michigan forest. While human philosophers bludgeon each other over the very possibility of “access” to the world, sharks bludgeon tuna fish and icebergs smash into coastlines.39 Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (London: Zero Books, 2010), 94, 199, 201.

Harman’s bracing prose, reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) or Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), helps explain why he has attracted a number of followers. His philosophical critique of anthropocentrism broadly resonates with ecocritical art history. Indeed, Timothy Morton, whose defense of artistic form as an embodiment of ecology we encountered in the Introduction, has aligned himself with Harman’s arguments. Yet the implications of object-oriented ontology become complicated in the work of another Harman follower, Ian Bogost, a digital media theorist and game designer.40 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

In Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (2012), Bogost embraces and extends Harman’s arguments by underscoring not only the inaccessibility of all objects and beings to each other but also the fundamental indifference of being as such. Sharing Harman’s desire to undo anthropocentrism, Bogost radically flattens the ontological status of all things. Emphasizing object autonomy in the extreme, he elides politics and ethics, preferring to see things as randomly coexisting and essentially alien from one another, with no meaningful interaction, mutual understanding, shared responsibility, or historical relations except through “caricatures” of metaphor. Dismissing the ethical concerns of environmentalists and vegans, Bogost touts a vision of ontology that “makes no distinction between the types of things that exist but treats them all equally,” from the “secret universe” of a computer to “the disappearing worlds of the African elephant or the Acropora coral.” Bogost never really ponders the endangered being of elephants or coral, however, because he lavishes so much attention on the ontology of computers, video games, Foveon camera sensors, Shimano bicycle gear hubs, burritos, and other objects of (human) consumption. His cynical vision has no room for ecological thought, understanding, or action. No wonder Bogost praises Stephen Shore’s photographic series from the 1970s addressing banalities of American road travel for capturing a sense of undifferentiated alienation (fig. 3), saying that such imagery “simply catalogs, like the monk’s bestiary, exemplifying the ways that human intervention can never entirely contain the mysterious alien worlds of objects.” Bogost prefers cataloging to historical understanding or ethical judgment, which he condemns as always already fraught with anthropocentrism.41 Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 9, 47–50, 66, 72–77.

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Description: Trail's End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah, August 10, 1973 by Shore, Stephen

Fig. 3. Stephen Shore, Trail's End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah, August 10, 1973, 1973. Chromogenic color print, 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm). © Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

In the Anthropocene, an epoch marked by the Sixth Mass Extinction (an extinction rate not seen since dinosaurs disappeared, sixty-five million years ago), it seems to me that art history ought to give greater ethical consideration to nonhuman lives, especially since so much recent art has involved them in various ways. Exploring such art in his book The Postmodern Animal (2000), Baker puts it this way: “The animal is a reminder of the limits of human understanding and influence, but also the value of working at those limits.” To better grasp the implications of what Baker says, let us consider Joseph Beuys’s I Like America and America Likes Me (fig. 4), a work that refused ontological indifference in its interrogation of national and species boundaries. During this performance in 1974, the German artist spent several days at New York’s René Block Gallery, sharing a fenced space with a live coyote named Little John. Wielding a shepherd’s crook and felt blanket, Beuys (1921–1986) reanimated Eurocentric myths about American “wilderness” and his own personal history. As a Luftwaffe pilot whose fighter plane was shot down over the Crimea during World War II, Beuys claimed to have been rescued by Tatar nomads (with dogs) who nursed him back to health by wrapping his injured body in felt and animal fat. Regardless of his self-mythologizing, Beuys’s performance posed questions about human-nonhuman interaction and shared animal being, testing the limits of otherness, autonomy, isolation, and indifference. Eventually, as coyote and man became acquainted, Beuys dropped his protective blanket, approached the (other) animal, and presented his gloves in a symbolic interspecies hand-off.42 Baker, Postmodern Condition, 16; Mark Rosenthal, Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments (Houston, Tex.: Menil Collection, 2005), 33.

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Description: I Like America and America Likes Me by Beuys, Joseph

Commenting later on this encounter, Beuys said that “the roles were exchanged immediately” because the coyote became “an important cooperator in the production of freedom,” helping the artist approach what “the human being cannot understand.” Beuys also observed the following:

The brown gloves represent my hands, and the freedom of movement that human beings possess with their hands. They have the freedom to do the widest range of things, to utilize any number of tools and instruments. They can wield a hammer or cut with a knife. They can write or mould forms. Hands are universal, and this is the significance of the human hand. . . . They are not restricted to one specific use like the talons of an eagle or the mole’s diggers. So the throwing of the gloves to Little John meant giving him my hands to play with.43 Quoted in Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys: Coyote (Munich: Schirmer-Mosel, 1980), 28–30.

Following Bogost, who says, “Things [are] at the center of being” and “Nothing has special status,” we might interpret everything in that performance from 1974—Beuys, coyote, gloves—as existing “equally” apart. Such an interpretation would see no meaningful distinction between the ontology of the glove and that of Little John, Beuys, an endangered African elephant, or the “secret universe” of a computer. Aside from seeming ethically problematic, this approach feels like an interpretive dead-end that also inadvertently revives Kant’s idealistic disavowal of politics through disinterestedness. It also ignores important interaction and access—however imperfect—between the animals in question.

Astutely analyzing I Like America and America Likes Me, Baker contends, “It is the manner in which Beuys established his humanness that is especially revealing,” for “the artist gives something to the animal, and what he chooses to give is his hands. They carry associations of creativity . . . and they enable the animal to play. . . . They are just sufficient to gesture toward the other-than-animal: the human.” Citing Heidegger’s anthropocentric thesis about how “the animal is poor in world” whereas “man is world-forming,” Baker acknowledges the condescension of Beuys’s “gift” to Little John. Yet, in that gesture, Baker nevertheless sees the artist “slowly giving up preconceptions and learning something of what the animal has to offer him.” The “awkwardness” of this scenario, says Baker, demonstrates “Beuys’s role as a performer rather than a philosopher. Philosophy has all too often tried to settle matters (on the question of animals as much as on any other), whereas art has more often seen the scope for unsettling things.”44 Steve Baker, “Sloughing the Human,” in Wolfe, Zoontologies, 149–53.

Still other recent scholars have inflected this ongoing revisionist discourse on agency with a view to even broader political ecologies. For example, in the book Animacies (2012), Mel Y. Chen builds upon the work of Bennett and existing scholarship on sexuality, race, critical animal studies, affect, queer theory, and disability theory “to examine how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, or deathly animates cultural lives.” Focusing on twenty-first-century cultural perceptions of toxicity, queerness, and dehumanization, Chen explores “the blurry division between the living and the dead, or that which is beyond the human or animal.” In the book Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (2018), Bénédicte Boisseron critically examines animal activist analogies between human and nonhuman “slavery,” noting “the potential effect of reinscribing a discriminative approach that one had sought to reject in the first place.” Yet, says Boisseron, “there is no denying that there are important parallels to be drawn between the rationale behind opposing animal oppression and that behind condemning discrimination against minorities,” since “exposing the arbitrariness of divides—whether based on race, gender, or species—is the root of any resistance against discrimination and oppression.” Boisseron’s insightful comment about “exposing the arbitrariness of divides” succinctly captures the post-Kantian critique that I have been tracing and suggests a positive role for both art and art history, namely by revealing the meaningful implication of various agents in the creative process and in helping to build a more inclusive, sustainable world.45 Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), cover; Bénédicte Boisseron, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), xi–xii, xiii. See also Claire Jean Kim, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

HISTORICAL ART AND NONHUMAN AGENCY

I conclude this chapter with some ecocritical observations about selected historical works of art that in many ways anticipated—and thereby mooted—much of the above discussion by revealing palpable traces and signs of vital nonhuman agency, in effect blurring Kantian boundaries between art and object. The works in question also raise important questions about the limitations of still-powerful Kantian categories when viewed in light of cultural, geographical, and species diversity. As the ideas of Kant, Panofsky, Heidegger, and Fried have clearly demonstrated, this trajectory of thinkers sought to define not only a particular European tradition but rather “art” in general as the transcendent, more-than-material product of human beings alone. In other words, the Kantian tradition asserted its own universality. To the extent that we encounter evidence of art—European or otherwise—complicating and contradicting Kantian assumptions of universality, those assumptions and the tradition to which they belong falter by disclosing their parochial limitations.

First, let us ponder a Chinese Qing dynasty Taihu rock, a vertically oriented piece of perforated limestone approximately four and a half feet tall and a foot and a half wide, mounted on a wooden base, now at the Princeton University Art Museum (fig. 5). As the name suggests, this rock came from Lake Taihu, one of China’s largest freshwater bodies, located in the Yangtze River delta near the city of Suzhou and the coastal metropolis of Shanghai. Obtained from the lake’s prized deposits of limestone, the rock has a three-dimensional form that bulges at the top, vaguely resembling a tree, a mountain, a plume of smoke, or even a standing figure. For centuries, Chinese literati—wealthy educated government officials and art collectors—considered such “scholar’s rocks,” or gongshi (供石), to be aesthetically appealing for their rarity and complex formal properties, which they admired in themselves and as ornaments for both interior studios and outdoor gardens. The practice of displaying such stones goes back to the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) and continues today. Whereas smaller, table-sized stones are preferred for interior spaces, larger upright examples like the one at Princeton usually decorated gardens, often in groups to evoke a chain of mountain peaks. Art historian Robert D. Mowry observes in the catalog of a large exhibition of gongshi organized by the Harvard Art Museums, “Like a landscape painting, the rock represented a microcosm of the universe on which the scholar could meditate within the confines of garden or studio. . . . More than anything else, however, it was the abstract, formal qualities of the rocks that appealed to the Chinese literati.” Mowry also notes that connoisseurs historically admired formal nuances of proportion, texture, profile, overlapping, hollows, perforations, and rhythmic patterns, which in turn called to mind associations with a variety of nonhuman entities as well as human figures.46 Robert D. Mowry, Worlds within Worlds: The Richard Rosenblum Collection of Chinese Scholars’ Rocks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museum, 1997), 21.

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Fig. 5. Chinese (Qing dynasty), Taihu Rock, 1644–1912. Limestone with honmu wood base, 53 × 18 1/2 × 18 in. (134.6 × 47 × 45.7 cm). Princeton University Art Museum

Confirming the aforementioned interrelationship between stone and representation are numerous paintings of gongshi, including one by Emperor Huizong (1082–1135) of the Song dynasty, depicting a Taihu rock with plants growing on it (fig. 6). An adjacent inscription by the artist-emperor identifies the rock’s garden location (south of the Huanbi Pond, west of the Fangzhou Bridge) and offers a poetic description:

This beauty twists and turns with the force of a dragon,

Clearly an auspicious blessing from heaven;

Clouds given form and sensuosity: mutual borrowing,

Water smoothed pure and glistening: ever more different.

It carries the mist of dusk like the flying mane of a prancing horse,

Ready to soar into the sky with the rain of night.

I feel timid for its beauty may be compromised by my inferior painting skills,

That are not able to completely merge emptiness and profundity.47 Auspicious Dragon Rock, Palace Museum, Beijing, https://en.dpm.org.cn/collections/collections/2013-01-24/1207.html.

Judging from the emperor’s image and text, Chinese literati found scholars’ rocks to be both aesthetically beautiful and lively in their formal associations. According to Mowry, “Chinese connoisseurs had recognized the special aesthetic and spiritual qualities of rocks at least by the Tang dynasty (618–907), a period that saw the composition of poems and essays on both gardens and individual rocks.”48 Mowry, Worlds within Worlds, 19.

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Description: Auspicious Dragon Taihu Rock by Huizong

Fig. 6. Zhao Ji (Huizong), Auspicious Dragon Taihu Rock, 960–1127. Painted handscroll, 21 3/16 × 50 5/16 in. (53.9 × 127.8 cm). Palace Museum, Beijing

What makes scholars’ rocks particularly relevant here is how they embody the implication of human and nonhuman agents in their production. Although many collectors and admirers today think of them as created entirely through natural (that is, nonhuman) geological processes, most scholars’ rocks bear traces of both human carving and water erosion. In other words, they are complex hybrids, neither strictly art nor object in the Kantian sense. Of the different types of scholars’ stones, Taihu rocks were historically known and valued for this hybridity, as the Princeton curators explain regarding the example depicted in figure 5, using apt agricultural vocabulary:

Among many varieties, Taihu rocks were farmed from Lake Tai in Jiangsu province. The perforated surfaces of the stones were formed by drilling the limestone and then immersing the rocks in the lake, where they were exposed to the erosive actions of water, waves, and sand, sometimes for hundreds of years. When the rocks were harvested, the perforations often appeared to be natural, and Taihu rocks have been likened to miniature cosmic mountains with heavenly grottoes and fantastic peaks.49 Taihu Rock, Princeton University Art Museum, https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/55543.

Mowry quotes the twelfth-century Chinese connoisseur Du Wan (or Tu Wan), who wrote that Taihu rocks are “improved by . . . chiseling and then aged by resubmersion, so that the stone may be scoured by wind and rain and its patterns restored to a living appearance.” Collectors obviously valued Taihu rocks for their vitality and evocative form, knowing their complex production process. According to Mowry, the sculptors responsible for drilling scholars’ rocks “remain anonymous, as do almost all Chinese artists outside the fields of painting, calligraphy, and poetry, which from Song times onward Chinese considered the ‘fine arts.’” This means that the rocks participated in a lesser craft tradition, even as they found a place in rarefied aesthetic displays that inspired fine paintings and poems such as those by Emperor Huizong, a fact that further suggests their hybrid status.50 Mowry, Worlds within Worlds, 21 (quoting Du Wan), 35n18.

What would Kant and his intellectual descendants say about such art created and appreciated as a synthesis of human and nonhuman agencies, wherein Western notions of intention, genius, and material transcendence do not strictly apply? Do Chinese scholars’ rocks exemplify art, objecthood, or both? At first glance, these questions might seem absurdly irrelevant to ask about a historical art form far outside the Western tradition. Yet remember that those writers—Kant, Panofsky, Heidegger, and Fried—ambitiously asserted the universal relevance of their aesthetic criteria for assessing all art as the product of human intention and genius in an absolute state of disinterested freedom. Scholars’ rocks do not appear to conform readily to the categories of Kantian aesthetics because of their hybrid human-nonhuman production, despite their evident artistic importance in Chinese culture. Probably the most accurate answer to the given questions would be that Kant and his ilk did not really consider anything created outside their own cultural tradition to be art at all. In that respect, scholars’ rocks reveal either the limitations of a Western philosophical tradition that purports to be universal or simply its parochial bias, and probably both.

Similar conclusions emerge from ecocritical consideration of a terra-cotta dibondo, or grave object, produced by an unidentified Kongo artist in sub-Saharan Africa circa 1800 (fig. 7), during Kant’s lifetime. Made with earth (fired clay) and placed on a burial site, the work functions very differently from a Western gravestone. Instead of simply marking the place of interment and carrying an identifying inscription, the dibondo—with circular openings at top and bottom—functions as a spiritual conduit providing ongoing access between earthly and subterranean realms. As such, it conceptually blurs the familiar Western distinction between living (above) and dead (below) by facilitating communication with ancestors as well as their passage back and forth. To symbolize this vital relationship, the artist decorated the exterior surface of the dibondo with surface textures in geometric patterns abstractly evoking snakes and other nonhuman species whose amphibious powers of movement between realms aptly parallel the spiritual passage of human ancestors in question. Here again we appreciate the limitations of the word “object” in describing such a work, which leverages multiple entities in tandem—human, earthen, nonhuman—in another hybrid vision of vital agency. Indeed, curators at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, where the dibondo currently resides, might wish to consider renaming it Grave Conduit (or Grave Channel). Clearly, the Kantian tradition outlined above fails to account for a work such as this, despite that tradition’s claims to universality.51 On the dibondo, see Karen E. Milbourne, Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in African Art (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in association with Monacelli Press, 2013), 97–99, https://www.si.edu/object/nmafa_89-13-7.

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Fig. 7. Kongo artist (Democratic Republic of Congo), Dibondo (grave object), ca. 1800. Ceramic, 17 11/16 × 11 1/4 × 11 1/4 in. (45 × 28.5 × 28.5 cm). National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Even works within the Western tradition reveal the brittle inadequacy of Kantian aesthetics, especially regarding nonhuman animacy and agency. To demonstrate this fact, I conclude with two paintings produced in Europe within a decade of Kant’s death, both still-life pictures of a sort: Francisco Goya’s Still Life with the Head of a Sheep of circa 1808–12 (fig. 8) and Théodore Géricault’s Severed Heads from the 1810s (fig. 9). The Spanish title of Goya’s picture, Bodegón con costillas, lomo y cabeza de cordero (Still life with ribs, loin and head of lamb), certainly seems to emphasize the slaughtered animal’s objectification as meat; so does an alternative title, Trozos de carnero (A butcher’s counter). The French designation similarly renders this nonhuman being as consumable flesh: Nature morte à la tête de mouton. Visually, however, the painting tells a different story. Flayed and dismembered, the lamb stares at us with an accusing eye, providing a stark reminder of the Lamb of God sacrificed for the sins of humankind. Dutiful Christian viewers might try to contain the visceral display within a familiar moral tradition of vanitas, but this would entail a disavowal of Goya’s openness to nonhuman agency and its lingering vitality in a way, even in death. After all, the lamb’s eye still glistens with reflected light, as does the moist, bloody flesh of the head and ribs, which only a short time before supported the living animal. Goya (1746–1828) thus implicates our gaze with slaughter while also suggesting our mutual mortality and animality. Situated on a plain table in a dark, empty space with no other visual information, the animal confronts us forcefully—a stark and holy challenge to Kant’s archly humanistic ethics. Moreover, for Goya this was not an isolated case of empathic openness to the nonhuman animal. Think of Decoy Hunting (1775, Prado, Madrid), with its perverse proliferation of caged and netted birds; or Animal Folly from his Disparates etchings (ca. 1815–19, various museums), showing humans idiotically displaying a book for an elephant to read; or, perhaps most stunning of all, The Drowning Dog (1820–23, Prado, Madrid), in which we see only the canine’s head, seemingly adrift on a swelling brown sea below a vacant yellow sky. Like many artists, Goya sometimes used animals as metaphors, but their frequent appearance in his work, often in very unusual and unsettling compositions, also indicates his recognition of their sentient vitality and kinship with human beings.52 Francisco Goya, Nature morte à la tête de mouton (1808–12), Louvre Museum, Paris, https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010066557. On Decoy Hunting, see Mark McDonald, Goya’s Graphic Imagination (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019), 202–3; Prado Museum, Madrid, https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/decoy-hunting/02bb7573-35d7-4d80-aa7a-92c5c06e2267. For information about Drowning Dog, see Janis Tomlinson, Goya (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020), 278; Prado Museum, Madrid, https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-drowning-dog/4ea6a3d1-00ee-49ee-b423-ab1c6969bca6.

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Description: Still Life with the Head of a Sheep by Goya, Francisco de

Fig. 8. Francisco de Goya, Still Life with the Head of a Sheep, ca. 1808–12. Oil on canvas, 18 × 24 in. (45 × 62 cm). Musée du Louvre, Paris

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Description: The Severed Heads by Géricault, Théodore

Fig. 9. Théodore Géricault, The Severed Heads, 1810s. Oil on canvas, 19 11/16 × 24 in. (50 × 61 cm). Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

In The Severed Heads, Géricault (1791–1824) took the implications of Goya’s Still Life to a logical next step by presenting the slaughter and dismemberment of human beings. Following the French Revolution in France, the Reign of Terror revealed how cheap human life could be by institutionalizing the guillotine as a modern machine of capital punishment: the antihumanistic flipside of René Descartes’s influential early modern objectification of nonhuman animals as thoughtless, “natural automata.” Like some of his contemporaries, Géricault pondered the exact moment and duration of life’s evacuation from the body. In doing so, he helped reveal the animality of the human being as another uncanny thing, composed of flesh at the threshold of life and death. Darwin, born in 1809, was only a toddler then, but Géricault here effectively inscribed his evolutionary writing on the wall by posing this ethical question: If we allow ourselves to slaughter and eat the Lamb of God, why not perceive dismembered human heads as so much meat?53 Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Géricault’s Severed Heads and Limbs: The Politics and Aesthetics of the Scaffold,” Art Bulletin 74, no. 4 (1992): 599–618. For Descartes’s “natural automata,” see René Descartes, Letter to [Henry] More, February 5, 1649, in The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings, ed. Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald (New York: Berg, 2007), 61.

Historical works of art like these, when considered in light of the nonhuman agencies they register, reveal shortcomings in the Kantian aesthetic tradition, with its unswerving commitment to categorical notions of human exceptionalism and transcendence of objecthood. In the interests of cultivating a more inclusive and sustainable art history, ecocritical interpretation attends closely and respectfully to the more-than-human entities and materials that have always been key agents in the creation of art.

Epigraph: “animacy, n.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/248721.

1 On objectification, see David Joselit, Art’s Properties (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2023); John M. Rector, The Objectification Spectrum: Understanding and Transcending Our Diminishment and Dehumanization of Others (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type Books, 2016); and Ann J. Cahill, Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2010). »

2 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (Minneapolis, Minn.: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 9. For more on the Western concept of the Great Chain of Being, see chapter 7. »

3 Kimmerer, 48, 49, 55. »

4 Kimmerer, 55, 56, 57. »

5 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), viii–xi, xvi. On thing theory, see Bill Brown, ed., Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). »

6 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010). For a critique of new materialism, see, e.g., Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, no. 1 (2016): 4–22. »

7 A classic critique of Western classicism’s objectifying tradition, focusing on science, appears in Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1980). See also Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science, March 10, 1967, 1203–7. On non-Western objectification, resource extraction, and environmental exploitation, see, e.g., Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 17–18, 49, 61, 119–24, 132, 217–18, 264, 380–81; and Shellen Xiao Wu, Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860–1920 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015). »

8 Immanuel Kant, “Of Suicide,” as recorded by Georg Ludwig Collins (1784–85, 27:373), in Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind, trans. Peter Heath (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 147. »

9 For a thorough exploration of Kant’s thinking about nonhuman beings, see John L. Callanan and Lucy Allais, ed., Kant and Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). »

10 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), 10 (§1.172), 52 (§5.210), 319 (§83.431), 323 (§84.435), 368 (§91.474). »

11 Kant, 10 (§1.172), 52 (§5.210), 231 (§60.355), 317 (§83.430), 323 (§84.435). »

12 Kant, 52 (§5.210). »

13 Kant, 170 (§43.303). »

14 On the Deus ex machina, see Jordan M. Dorney, “Sage against the Machine: The Politics of the Deus ex Machina” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2018); Julie Hudson, “The Environment in Performance: Stage Invasion or Deus ex Machina?,” in The Environment on Stage: Scenery or Shapeshifter? (New York: Routledge, 2020), 85–105; Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis, “Deus ex Machina,” in The Classical Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 263; and Bernard M. W. Knox, “The Medea of Euripides,” in Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy, ed. Erich Segal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 272–93. For insightful discussion of Kant’s ambivalence about theatricality as an ethical necessity, see Howard Pickett, Rethinking Sincerity and Authenticity: The Ethics of Theatricality in Kant, Kierkegaard, and Levinas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 3, 6, 8–10, 11–96. »

15 Kant, Critique of Judgment, 172–76 (§44–46.305–308). »

16 Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” originally published in The Meaning of the Humanities, ed. Theodor Meyer Greene (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1940), 89–118; reprinted in Art History and Its Methods: A Critical Anthology, ed. Eric Fernie (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 184–95; quotes on 184, 186. »

17 Jacques Maritain and Mary Morris, “Sign and Symbol,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 1, no. 1 (1937): 2: “Animals make use of signs without perceiving the relation of signification. To perceive the relation of signification is to have an idea—a spiritual sign.” On nonhuman scent marking as a form of communication constituting a “record,” see Jane L. Hurst, “Scent Marking and Social Communication,” in Animal Communication Networks, ed. P. K. McGregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 224. For an alternative perspective upholding the human exceptionalism of “records,” see Paul Beynon-Davies, Significance: Exploring the Nature of Information, Systems and Technology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 74–75. »

18 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 42–43, 174, 180; Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 185. Elliot R. Wolfson, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Philip Oltermann, “Heidegger’s ‘Black Notebooks’ Reveal Antisemitism at the Core of His Philosophy,” Guardian, March 12, 2014; Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). »

19 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (1967): 12–23, 12 (quoting Judd), 15 (quoting Morris). For a comprehensive study on minimalism, see James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). »

20 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 15. »

21 Fried, 16. »

22 Fried, 16, 19. »

23 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 297. »

24 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 20, 21. »

25 Fried, 21. »

26 Fried, 12, 22, 23. »

27 Douglas Robinson, “100,000 Rally at U.N. against Vietnam War,” New York Times, April 16, 1967. On escalation, Operation Rolling Thunder, and official deception, see H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); Brian Van De Mark, Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Mark Clodfelter, The Limits of Airpower: The American Bombing of Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 1989). »

28 John D. Pomfret, “Johnson Warns Enemy,” New York Times, June 19, 1966. »

29 “Johnson Decries Vietnam ‘Impasse’: Memorial Day Proclamation Urges Enemy to Negotiate—Officials Pessimistic,” New York Times, May 23, 1967. »

30 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 12, 19, 20. Additional references to “conviction” appear on 21, 22, and 23n4. »

31 See “A Rabbi Assails Vietnam Policy,” New York Times, May 20, 1966, quoting the Rev. Dr. Israel Margolies telling worshippers that President Johnson’s “anxiety” to reach public consensus about the war in Vietnam had “tended to obscure the more sacred obligation of every American to be true to his own faith and conviction.” »

32 Robert Smithson, letter to the editor, Artforum 6, no. 2 (1967): 4. »

33 Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 15. »

34 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7, 23; Bill Brown, Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 5. Examples of recent art historical research informed by Gell, Brown, and related scholarship include Lorraine Daston, Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004); Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); Jennifer L. Roberts, “Things: Material Turn, Transnational Turn,” American Art 32, no. 2 (2017): 64–69; and Mark D. Mitchell, Audubon to Warhol: The Art of American Still Life (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2015). »

35 Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion, 2000); Steve Baker, Artist/Animal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Stephen F. Eisenman, The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights (London: Reaktion, 2014); J. Keri Cronin, Art for Animals: Visual Culture and Animal Advocacy, 1870–1914 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018). See also Ron Broglio, Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Carol Freeman, Elizabeth Leane, and Yvette Watt, eds., Considering Animals: Contemporary Studies in Human-Animal Relations (New York: Routledge, 2011); Louise Lippincott and Andreas Blühm, Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750–1900 (New York: Merrell, 2005); Nato Thompson, ed., Becoming Animal: Contemporary Art in the Animal Kingdom (North Adams, Mass.: MassMOCA in association with MIT Press, 2005); and Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior, Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History (New York: Routledge, 1997). Regarding the dearth of historical scholarship on the agency of art materials, an important exception is Laura Turner Igoe, “Creative Matter: Tracing the Environmental Context of Materials in American Art,” in Karl Kusserow and Alan C. Braddock, Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Art Museum in association with Yale University Press, 2018), 140–69. »

36 Cary Wolfe, ed., Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xi–xii. »

37 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859; New York: Penguin, 1985), 68–69, 124–25; Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871; New York: Appleton, 1896), 65. Plutarch, Plutarch’s Three Treatises on Animals, ed. Stephen T. Newmyer (New York: Routledge, 2020); Michel de Montaigne, “An Apology for Raymond Sebond” (ca. 1568), and Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), excerpted in The Animals Reader, ed. Kalof and Fitzgerald, 8–9, 57–58; Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: Murray, 1872); Leo Tolstoy, The First Step: An Essay on the Morals of Diet, trans. Aylmer Maude (Manchester, U.K.: Albert Broadbent, 1900), 11–62; Mahatma Gandhi, “The Fiery Ordeal” (1929), and other texts on the ahimsa principle of nonviolence, quoted in R. Rajmohan, “Gandhi on Violence,” Peace Research 28, no. 2 (1996): 27–38; Marc Bekoff and Jane Goodall, The Emotional Lives of Animals (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2007); Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet and trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: Avon Books, 1975). »

38 Philip Low, “The Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness,” ed. Jaak Panksepp, Diana Reiss, David Edelman, Bruno Van Swinderen, Philip Low, and Christof Koch, proclaimed July 7, 2012, at the Francis Memorial Crick Conference on Consciousness in Human and Non-Human Animals, at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, “signed by the conference participants that very evening, in the presence of Stephen Hawking, in the Balfour Room at the Hotel du Vin in Cambridge, UK,” https://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf. See also Marc Bekoff, “Animals Are Conscious and Should Be Treated as Such,” New Scientist, September 19, 2012; Simon Worrall, “Yes, Animals Think and Feel; Here’s How We Know,” National Geographic, July 15, 2015; Carl Safina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (London: Picador, 2016); and Jodey Castricano, ed., Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008). On plant life and fungi, see Ferris Jabr, “The Social Life of Forests,” New York Times, December 2, 2020; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015); Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (Vancouver, B.C.: Greystone Books, 2015); Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Jack W. Bradbury and Sarah L. Vehrencamp, Principles of Animal Communication, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Richard Karban, Plant Sensing and Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). »

39 Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (London: Zero Books, 2010), 94, 199, 201. »

40 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). »

41 Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 9, 47–50, 66, 72–77. »

42 Baker, Postmodern Condition, 16; Mark Rosenthal, Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments (Houston, Tex.: Menil Collection, 2005), 33. »

43 Quoted in Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys: Coyote (Munich: Schirmer-Mosel, 1980), 28–30. »

44 Steve Baker, “Sloughing the Human,” in Wolfe, Zoontologies, 149–53. »

45 Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), cover; Bénédicte Boisseron, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), xi–xii, xiii. See also Claire Jean Kim, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). »

46 Robert D. Mowry, Worlds within Worlds: The Richard Rosenblum Collection of Chinese Scholars’ Rocks (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museum, 1997), 21. »

47 Auspicious Dragon Rock, Palace Museum, Beijing, https://en.dpm.org.cn/collections/collections/2013-01-24/1207.html. »

48 Mowry, Worlds within Worlds, 19. »

49 Taihu Rock, Princeton University Art Museum, https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/55543. »

50 Mowry, Worlds within Worlds, 21 (quoting Du Wan), 35n18. »

51 On the dibondo, see Karen E. Milbourne, Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in African Art (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in association with Monacelli Press, 2013), 97–99, https://www.si.edu/object/nmafa_89-13-7. »

52 Francisco Goya, Nature morte à la tête de mouton (1808–12), Louvre Museum, Paris, https://collections.louvre.fr/ark:/53355/cl010066557. On Decoy Hunting, see Mark McDonald, Goya’s Graphic Imagination (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2019), 202–3; Prado Museum, Madrid, https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/decoy-hunting/02bb7573-35d7-4d80-aa7a-92c5c06e2267. For information about Drowning Dog, see Janis Tomlinson, Goya (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020), 278; Prado Museum, Madrid, https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-drowning-dog/4ea6a3d1-00ee-49ee-b423-ab1c6969bca6. »

53 Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Géricault’s Severed Heads and Limbs: The Politics and Aesthetics of the Scaffold,” Art Bulletin 74, no. 4 (1992): 599–618. For Descartes’s “natural automata,” see René Descartes, Letter to [Henry] More, February 5, 1649, in The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings, ed. Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald (New York: Berg, 2007), 61. »

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