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Natur und Landschaft spielen eine wichtige Rolle im Werk von Joseph Beuys. Nach seiner anthropologisch verstandenen Landschaftsauffassung sollten Energieverhältnisse der Natur, aktiv auf den Menschen wirken. Die Autorin weist erstmals nach, dass Beuys u.a. klassische Landschaftsmotive und zeitgenössische Naturschutzvorstellungen in seinen neuen Kunstbegriff einbezog.

Joseph Beuys hat in seinen frühen Zeichnungen die Gattung der Landschaftsmalerei erweitert und neue Landschaftstypen geschaffen, um Strömungs- und Energieverhältnisse aufzuzeigen. Klassische Landschafts-Darstellungen wie bukolische Idyll-Motivik oder den Locus amoenus entwickelte der Künstler zu einem Landschafts-Inventar, das er in seinen Kanon des erweiterten Kunstbegriff aufnahm. Geistesgeschichtliche Naturvorstellungen der Alchemie und die Idee von einer sexualisierten Natur, in der die Erde als Uterus aufgefasst wird, sind dabei ebenso von Bedeutung wie innerweltliche Atmosphärenvorstellungen beim Menschen, die der Künstler als „Seelenmeteorologie“ bezeichnete.
Beuys verwendete klassische Landschafts-Topoi, anthropologisch verstandene Naturauffassungen, soziologische, psychoanalytische sowie meteorologische u.a. Themen, für seine Vorstellung von Natur als energetischem „Wirk-Raum“, der bis in gesellschaftliche Prozesse erfahrbar sein soll. Ihr aktuelles Potential ist heute noch spürbar und beispielsweise in der Partei der Grünen wirksam, die Beuys mit gegründet hatte. So hat die anthropologisch aufgefasste Landschafts- und Naturvorstellung von Joseph Beuys maßgeblich die Kunst und Gesellschaft nach 1945 geprägt.

Fudge, Erica Animal. Distributed for Reaktion Books. 192 p. 5.75 x 8.25 Series: (RB-FOCI) Reaktion Books - Focus on Contemporary Issues (FOCI)
From the pet that we live with and care for, to news items such as animal cloning, and the use of various creatures in film, television and advertising, animals are a constant presence in our lives.

Animal is a timely overview of the many ways in which we live with animals, and assesses many of the paradoxes of our relationships with them: for example, why is the pet that sits by the dinner table never for eating? Examining novels such as Charlotte’s Web, films such as Old Yeller and Babe, science and advertising, fashion and philosophy, Animal also evaluates the ways in which we think about animals and challenges a number of the assumptions we hold. Why is it, for example, that animals are such a constant presence in children’s literature? And what does it mean to wear fake fur? Is fake fur an ethical avoidance of animal suffering, or merely a sanitized version of the unacceptable use of animals as clothing?

Neither evangelical nor proselytizing, Animal invites the reader to think beyond the boundaries of a subject that has a direct effect on our day-to-day lives.

To modern sensibilities, nineteenth-century zoos often seem to be unnatural places where animals led miserable lives in cramped, wrought-iron cages. Today zoo animals, in at least the better zoos, wander in open spaces that resemble natural habitats and are enclosed, not by bars, but by moats, cliffs, and other landscape features. In Savages and Beasts, Nigel Rothfels traces the origins of the modern zoo to the efforts of the German animal entrepreneur Carl Hagenbeck. By the late nineteenth century, Hagenbeck had emerged as the world's undisputed leader in the capture and transport of exotic animals. His business included procuring and exhibiting indigenous peoples in highly profitable spectacles throughout Europe and training exotic animals—humanely, Hagenbeck advertised—for circuses around the world. When in 1907 the Hagenbeck Animal Park opened in a village near Hamburg, Germany, Hagenbeck brought together all his business interests in a revolutionary zoological park. He moved wild animals out of their cages and into "natural landscapes" alongside "primitive" peoples from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the islands of the Pacific. Hagenbeck had invented a new way of imagining captivity: the animals and people on exhibit appeared to be living in the wilds of their native lands. By looking at Hagenbeck's multiple enterprises, Savages and Beasts demonstrates how seemingly enlightened ideas about the role of zoos and the nature of animal captivity developed within the essentially tawdry business of placing exotic creatures on public display. Rothfels provides both fascinating reading and much-needed historical perspective on the nature of our relationship with the animal kingdom.

In eighteen original essays, this book illuminates the ways in which our human intellectual and cultural models have been influenced by the natural history of insects. Through critical readings contributors address such topics as performing insects in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, the cockroach in the contemporary American novel, the butterfly’s “voyage out” in Virginia Woolf, and images of insect eating in literature and popular culture. In surprising ways, contributors tease out the particularities of insects as cultural signifiers and propose ways of thinking about “insectivity,” suggesting fertile cross-pollinations between entomology and the arts, between insects and the humanities.

Contributors: May Berenbaum, Yves Cambefort, Marion W. Copeland, Nicky Coutts, Bertrand Gervais, Sarah Gordon, Cristopher Hollingsworth, Heather Johnson, Richard J. Leskosky, Tony McGowan, Erika Mae Olbricht, Marc Olivier, Roy Rosenstein, Rachel Sarsfield, Charlotte Sleigh, Andre Stipanovic.

Eric C. Brown is assistant professor of English at the University of Maine at Farmington. He has written previously about insects and eschatology in Edmund Spenser’s Muiopotmos.

The guinea pig leads a double life. On the one hand it is the much-loved family pet, which owes its docility and portly form to millennia of breeding for the table in its Andean homeland. On the other, its small size and relatively rapid breeding cycle made it an attractive subject for laboratory research from the 18th century onwards - so much so that guinea pigs have helped to win 23 Nobel prizes, though they never got the credit.

Though not often acknowledged openly, killing represents by far the most common form of human interaction with animals. Humans kill animals for food, for pleasure, to wear, and even as religious acts, yet despite the ubiquity of this killing, analyzing the practice has generally remained the exclusive purview of animal rights advocates.

Killing Animals offers a corrective to this narrow focus by bringing together the insights of scholars from diverse backgrounds in the humanities, including art history, anthropology, intellectual history, philosophy, literary studies, and geography. These essays, conceived as parts of a larger whole from their inception, together reveal the complexity of the killing phenomenon by exploring the extraordinary diversity in killing practices and the wide variety of meanings attached to them. They examine aspects of the role of animals in human societies, from the seventeenth century to the present day: their cultural manifestations, and how they have been represented. Topics include hunting and baiting; slaughter practices and the treatment of feral and stray animals; animal death in art, literature and philosophy; and even animals that themselves become killers of humans.

Authors: THE ANIMAL STUDIES GROUP consists of the following British scholars: Steve Baker (art history, University of Central Lancashire), Jonathan Burt (independent scholar), Diana Donald (art history, Manchester Metropolitan University), Erica Fudge (history, Middlesex University), Garry Marvin (anthropology, University of Surrey Roehampton), Robert McKay (literature, Sheffield University), Clare Palmer (art history, Lancaster University), and Chris Wilbert (geography, Anglia Polytechnic University).

In The Postmodern Animal, Steve Baker explores how animal imagery has been used in modern and contemporary art and performance, and in postmodern philosophy and literature, to suggest and shape ideas about identity and creativity.

Baker cogently analyses the work of such European and American artists as Olly and Suzi, Mark Dion, Paula Rego and Sue Coe, at the same time looking critically at the constructions, performances and installations of Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys and other significant late twentieth-century artists.

Baker's book draws parallels between the animal's place in postmodern art and poststructuralist theory, drawing on works as diverse as Jacques Derrida's recent analysis of the role of animals in philosophical thought and Julian Barnes's best-selling.

book Picturing the Beast

From Mickey Mouse to the use of "jackass" as an all-purpose insult, images of animals play a central role in politics, entertainment, and social interactions. In this penetrating look at how Western culture pictures the beast, Steve Baker examines how such images--sometimes affectionate, sometimes derogatory, always distorting--affect how real animals are perceived and treated.Baker provides an animated discussion of how animals enter into the iconography of power through wartime depictions of the enemy, political cartoons, and sports symbolism. He examines a phenomenon he calls the "disnification" of animals, meaning a reduction of the animal to the trivial and stupid, and shows how books featuring talking animals underscore human superiority. He also discusses how his findings might inform the strategies of animal rights advocates seeking to call public attention to animal suffering and abuse. Until animals are extricated from the baggage of imposed images, Baker maintains, neither they nor their predicaments can be clearly seen.For this edition, Baker provides a new introduction, specifically addressing an American audience, that touches on such topics as the Cow Parade and animatronic animals in recent films."Immensely accessible . . . Baker's study is witty, learned, sophisticated, and direct." -- Norman Bryson, editor of Visual Culture: Images of Interpretation

P. Atterton and M. Calarco - Animal Philosophy

Animal Philosophy is the first reader to look at the place and treatment of animals in Continental thought. A collection of essential primary and secondary readings on the animal question, it brings together contributions from the following key Continental thinkers: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Levinas, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Ferry, Cixous, Irigaray.

Each reading is followed by commentary and analysis from a leading contemporary thinker. The coverage of the subject is exceptionally broad, ranging across perspectives that include existentialism. poststructuralism, postmodernism, phenomenology and feminism.

In recent decades the humanities and social sciences have undergone an ‘animal turn’, an efflorescence of interdisciplinary scholarship which is fresh and challenging because its practitioners consider humans as animals amongst other animals, while refusing to do so from an exclusively or necessarily biological point of view. Knowing Animals, showcases original explorations of the ‘animal turn’ by new and eminent scholars in philosophy, literary criticism, art history and cultural studies. The essays collected here describe a lively bestiary of cultural organisms, whose flesh is (at least partly) conceptual and textual: paper tigers, beast fables, anthropomorphs, humanimals, l’animot. In so doing, they investigate the benefits of knowing animals differently: more closely, less definitively, more carefully, less certainly.
Contributors include: Laurence Simmons, Alphonso Lingis, Barbara Creed, Tanja Schwalm, Philip Armstrong, Annie Potts, Allan Smith, Ricardo De Vos, Catharina Landström, Brian Boyd, Helen Tiffin, Ian Wedde.

From the lazy, fiddling grasshopper to the sneaky Big Bad Wolf, children’s stories and fables enchant us with their portrayals of animals who act like people. But the comparisons run both ways, as metaphors, stories, and images—as well as scientific theories—throughout history remind us that humans often act like animals, and that the line separating them is not as clear as we’d like to pretend.

Here Martin Kemp explores a stunning range of images and ideas to demonstrate just how deeply these underappreciated links between humans and other fauna are embedded in our culture. Tracing those interconnections among art, science, and literature, Kemp leads us on a dazzling tour of Western thought, from Aristotelian physiognomy and its influence on phrenology to the Great Chain of Being and Darwinian evolution. We learn about the racist anthropology underlying a familiar Degas sculpture, see paintings of a remarkably simian Judas, and watch Mowgli, the man-child from Kipling’s The Jungle Book, exhibit the behaviors of the beasts who raised him. Like a kaleidoscope, Kemp uses these stories to refract, reconfigure, and echo the essential truth that the way we think about animals inevitably inflects how we think about people, and vice versa.

Loaded with vivid illustrations and drawing on sources from Hesiod to La Fontaine, Leonardo to P. T. Barnum, The Human Animal in Western Art and Science is a fascinating, eye-opening reminder of our deep affinities with our fellow members of the animal kingdom.

Kemp, Martin - The Human Animal in Western Art and Science. 320 p, 187 halftones.