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  • Primal Revenge and Other Anthropomorphic Projections for Literary History
  • Karyn Ball (bio)

Whether what survives is the human or the inhuman, the animal or the organic, it seems that life bears within itself the dream—or the nightmare—of survival.

—Giorgio Agamben1

I. From the Museum of Dead Animals (Peter Friedl at Documenta 12)

During the rain-drenched summer of 2007, I encountered a giraffe outside a zoo in Germany. You might be surprised unless I admit that I discovered this giraffe in Kassel at Documenta 12, curated by Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack and organized around the motifs of “bare life” and the “migration of form.” This “migrant” giraffe did not live, though I would not label it a simulacrum. The creature in question is the exclusive material of Peter Friedl’s installation entitled “The Zoo Story.”

Cocurator Buergel’s catalog introduces Friedl’s giraffe as “a fatality of armed conflict.” The animal died on August 19, 2002, in Qalquiliyah Zoo, “the only zoo in the West Bank.” “When the Israeli forces moved into this city of 45,000 inhabitants in the wake of the second Intifada,” Buergel explains, “outbreaks of shooting ensued.” The nine-year-old giraffe named “Brownie” probably panicked, “ran into an iron bar, bumped his head and collapsed to the ground. This spells death for giraffes,” as Buergel informs us, because “their strong hearts are designed to pump blood upwards.”2

This poetic hint of divine or Lamarckian teleology lodged in the giraffe’s heart quickly veers into a global genealogy. Before Brownie was bestowed with a cutely generic name and the mortal destiny that attended it, he lived in South Africa with his mate who remains nameless here. Buergel narrates: “[Brownie] arrived in Qalquiliyah via Israel in 1997—in the days when this Palestinian town was the agricultural centre of the West Bank and not yet cut off from the outside world by [End Page 533] an eight to ten-metre-high cement wall.”3 The irony of this situation is self-evidently tragic: Buergel, speaking on Friedl’s behalf, attests to Israel’s self-contradictory role in serving as a conduit for most economic activity in this region at the same time that it not only restricts, but also destroys the fruits of such activity among the Palestinians who depend on the state’s good will (or sense of security). Less self-evident is how to comprehend without dissembling this giraffe’s ghastly afterlife. Friedl discovered him in a museum adjacent to the Qalquiliyah Zoo, which also houses a lion, a zebra, and a baboon. Like Brownie, these animals were stuffed following their deaths in the same zoo by the local veterinarian, Sami Khader, who “is not a professional taxidermist.”4

It used to be the case that any endeavor to specify the object of literary history grappled with the tension between distinctive and generic aspects of its form. Yet in the era of the “antidisciplinary” text conceived as a cultural artifact, the questions I might pose to the Austrian artist, Friedl, are not directly oriented by the conventions that determine literary genres. It would be disingenuous to ask whether Khader’s amateur taxidermy assumes the status of “art” rather than “craft” once it appears in an exhibit or whether an object of this kind is more “document” than “art.” Binaries of this ilk occult the sociohistorical conditions that make it not merely feasible but also desirable to present an animal carcass as a politicized aesthetic concept. To shift the horizon of this occultation, one might ask how Friedl phrased his request for the loan of the giraffe from the operators of the museum of dead animals. Did he say, “Can I borrow your stuffed giraffe for an internationally renowned art exhibit that takes place on a spectacular scale every five years in Kassel, Germany?” One assumes that translators and lawyers were employed to negotiate the contract(s) drawn up among the respective parties in German, Arabic, and English. How did they calculate the compensation for this singular exchange and for the labor involved in crating and transporting a stuffed giraffe from the West Bank to the Federal Republic? What were...

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