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12023-04-02T17:07:45-07:00Evelyn Burvant9983db2c9a777261e1300e636bee4e2835958cc8426756plain2023-04-11T04:17:41-07:00Evelyn Burvant9983db2c9a777261e1300e636bee4e2835958cc8"By transposing us beyond the confines of bound identities, art becomes necessarily inhuman in the sense of nonhuman in that it connects to the animal, the vegetable, earthy and planetary forces that surround us. Art is also, moreover, cosmic in its resonance and posthuman by structure, as it carries us to the limits of what our embodied selves can do or endure [...] To this effect art is linked to death as the experience of limits,"(Braidotti 107).
If we're talking about a system or concept that is always pushing boundaries, art deserves a mention. The above quote stipulates the connections art makes to our previous themes of death and reevaluated ways/states of becoming. In death, Dolly the sheep's body was taxidermied and showcased in a museum. For most artists who practice taxidermy, it is an emotional humbling experience. Divya Anantharaman is a well known practitioner who expresses “Being able to give something another life, elevating it into something beyond death—that gives me chills.” (Leckert 2018). While Dolly's body has been, in a sense, been given that additional life, it is not a life for her benefit more so it is for those not willing to let her or her body go. Again, she has had no say in what is done to her body post death. Now this does not mean that she cannot still be considered art, as the practice of taxidermy requires a very specific creative skillset. What I am trying to get here is simply how Dolly's body being made into an installation opens the door way to ask questions about death and rituals of mourning. Is it appropriate? Does her body allow for that posthuman connection Braidotti points to? Is this kind of memorialization even ethical since the subject has no choice in the matter?
The robot was programmed and created to serve a specific set of functions that it had no control over. It was made to make viewers think and consider the robot human dynamic, so was still made to fulfill a purpose. Like I mentioned during the Human Remake, the piece has a certain connection to it's location. It is site specific because if it were brought into a different place some level of meaning would be lost. It shows how relational the work is to everything else around it, and just how formative those relationships are. Taking this further, whether you are right behind the glass, or connecting through an app, the work is still able to have come effect on the viewer. I hope to replicate or at least connect with this idea in my own work which, though it is not situated in a museum and so will never garner the same level of prestige, ______.