The Animal Question via Art and Law

Abstract

Abstract Since at least the late 1960s, artistic creation has increasingly called upon its audiences to consider the acceptability of certain actions in ways that law cannot. Based on four examples carrying especial weight in international artistic circles due to their reliance on animal actors—Kim Jones’s Rat Piece (1976), Yukinori Yanagi’s World Flag Ant Farm (1993), Xu Bing’s A Case Study of Transference (1993-1994) and Huang Yong Ping’s Theater of the World (1993)—this article reflects upon the notion of sovereignty as an unstable contest between competing views of acceptability, permissibility and enforceability. Inflected by counter- or non-anthropocentric views, I consider how artworks serve as augmented para-legal cases accountable to both legal and art historical interpretation. Predicated on the belief that we consider artworks as sources of critical action rather than as products of human expression or examples of property, I explore how live animal participants initiate active reflection upon the misalignment between existing laws and proposed standards of human behavior towards animals. What common justices are imaginable for humans and animals? A corollary aim is to explore how such questions are inflected less by universal-versus-local dichotomies and more by the contingency of bodies moving across legal jurisdictions that both reinforce and undermine the structuring forces of globalization.