Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History

Touching Animals: The Search for a Deeper Understanding of Animals

3 8 Since 2002, when it was first displayed at the Arsenale in Venice, Gregory Colbert’s multimedia exhibition Ashes and Snow has drawn more than 1 million visitors to venues in New York City, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Tokyo, and Mexico. The exhibition includes more than fifty untitled, large-format, sepia-tone photographs of animals and people; a sixty-minute 35mm film; two nine-minute film “haikus”; and an epistolary novel that details a journey through time and space toward enlightenment. Ashes and Snow reaches a global audience, as well, through its Web site, online bookstore, affiliated foundation, and more. Every aspect of the project is carefully designed and controlled to reflect the deliberately meditative atmosphere of the photographs , through which Colbert is “exploring the shared language and poetic sensibilities of all animals . . . [and] working towards rediscovering the common ground that once existed when people lived in harmony with animals. The images depict a world that is without beginning or end, here or there, past or present.”1 For many who encounter this atemporal world, the first reaction seems to be one of disbelief. Photographs of Colbert swimming with whales and manatees, in which he himself somehow appears to be an aquatic creature, and the many images of animals in apparent communion with humans seem more like ideas or fantasies than photographs of actual phenomena in the “real” world. The Ashes and Snow Web site addresses this feeling of disbelief in a brief description of Colbert’s creative process: “With profound patience Touching Animals The Search for a Deeper Understanding of Animals n ige l rot h fe l s Touching Animals 39 and an unswerving commitment to the expressive and artistic nature of animals , he has captured extraordinary interactions between humans and animals . . . . None of the images have been digitally collaged or superimposed. They record what the artist himself saw through the lens of his camera.”2 It must nevertheless be recognized that these are highly composed works that represent visions of a conceptual relationship with animals. Moreover, they are directed to an audience that acknowledges that the authentic experience of contact with the nonhuman has been lost to all save those few who work closely with animals in nature and are seen to have an almost spiritual connection with them. Colbert’s success stems largely from certain popular ideas about “nature” and “natural environments”—and about the animals that often stand in for those terms. The Ashes and Snow exhibition qualifies as much more than “just one of those New Age things.” At least part of what that more is can, I think, be found in the history of ideas about animals; and exploring that history will clarify more than just the aesthetic that informs Colbert’s art. Indeed, I believe that it will help us to see not only how ideas about animals and environments have changed since the nineteenth century but also why a persistent debate within the field now known as animal studies should be formulated in historical terms. The End of Seeing The expression to see the elephant appears to have been fairly common slang in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. It implied that one had experienced an extraordinary event, overcome a daunting obstacle, or witnessed something remarkable. A soldier returning from the Civil War had seen the elephant; the thousands who crossed the country on foot or by wagon, or who traveled by ship and overland through Panama, had seen the elephant; and farmers returning from a visit to one of the big cities had seen the elephant. The etymology of this idiom remains a bit vague, however; the first two instances noted in the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, are from 1835 and 1844, but they both suggest that the expression was already in wide use.3 The OED also notes a related seventeenth-century expression, to see the lions , which derived “from the practice of taking visitors to see the lions which used to be kept in the Tower of London.”4 The OED’s definition of see[ing] the lions connects the origin of the expression with the act of actually seeing animals, and my guess is that see[ing] the elephant probably came about in n ig e l r o t h f e l s 4 0 the same way. When elephants first came to the United States at the end...