Looking at Animals Differently: Posthumanist Performativity as a Tool for Aesthetic Analysis

This paper considers how posthumanist perspectives are actively transforming the ways of thinking around animals in the arts. With the emergence of Performance Art during the 1960s, art history starts to explore living, non-human animals. Theatre and performance studies were already confronted with them in much earlier contexts, for example in stage fights in ancient Rome or operas in the baroque era. As theatre and performance studies deal with changing, dynamic artforms, they are corresponding with newer concepts, such as posthumanist performativity. Within the posthumanist thinking, the status of non-human entities like animals changes: Animals and their agency come into focus. They are not passive or matter shaped by humans anymore, but active and actionable entities within dynamic relations. Building up on the concept of ‚Posthumanism as a praxis‘ (Francesca Ferrando), Posthumanism serves as a interdisciplinary perspective and a tool to examine animals in the arts. It is an active decision to go beyond an anthropocentric perspective. I would to like ask what happens when we try to look at animals in art without assuming the human subject as our sole reference. This is examined by analyzing the installation Soma of Carsten Höller at Hamburger Bahnhof from 2010. In a fictional experimental setup the artist installs reindeers, birds, flies and mice so that the presence of animals transforms the setting into a performative artwork.