One of my favorite episodes of Ecosystem Member is the chat with Lucia Pietroiusti, the head of ecologies at the Serpentine in London.
The thrust of the conversation is about consciousness and what makes an ecological artist? Can a non-human animal be considered an artist? (A question Lucia and her collaborators explore in a forthcoming book - The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish that you can pre-order on Bookshop.org.)
The example Lucia used is the pufferfish, which draws amazing circles in the sand.
Our best guess at this point is that the pufferfish’s circle is part of a mating ritual. And even if it is primarily done to attract a mate rather than for aesthetic expression and enjoyment, isn’t it probably true that a lot of art humans make - especially when we think about music, poetry and not just visual mediums - is done for the same reason? It’s not a coincidence that many people’s first engagement with poetry is a simple, but classic love poem:
Roses are red
Violets are blue,
Sugar is sweet
And so are you.
Its origins date back to the 1700s, with traces of it appearing in Edmund Spenser's epic The Faerie Queene in 1590.
Like many people around the world, I woke up this morning thanks to a smartphone alarm. And then after turning the alarm off (never hit snooze), I proceed to use that smartphone to dive into the updates to the Internet that I missed while I was sleeping. (Not well always mind you, thanks to the blue light and late night usage of the aforementioned Internet-connected smartphone.)
Opening up the BBC - my usual first port of call - I was excited to see a collection of photos from the latest edition of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition.
This year’s People’s Choice winner - pictured above - is of a badger seeing a graffiti stencil work in the style of the street artist Banksy of a badger with handguns raised in each front paw. I almost used the word ‘admiring’ instead of seeing, but we’ll get to why that might not be right in a minute. For all we know, seeing might also not be right. (Apparently in low intensity light like in the photo, badgers can see well enough.)
The composition of the photograph is stunning.
You can clearly see the graffiti work and you can imagine - but not confirm - the badger recognizing itself through the striking outline of the bold stripes on its head. You can look online to see plenty of photographs of badgers standing on their hind legs, so that might not have thrown the non-human animal off. The small handguns however, certainly would have. I know of no known usage of handguns by badgers.
Above the back of the badger is a sign reading “Keep access clear at all times”. There are a few layers here that I find interesting. From a human perspective, street art provides access, and access at all times. Compared to an often stuffy museum with a $20+ entrance fee for the top exhibitions that closes around 6pm, street art is firmly public art easily accessible by humans in the area whenever the want.
Another reading from a possible more-than-human perspective is less inclusive. The “Keep access clear at all times” sign, combined with the graffiti, nod to the encroachment of humans on what was once a wild space. Access for the badger has probably not always been kept clear as humans established their physical dominance in a space that was already occupied. (Not exactly a new thing for humans to do to other animals, especially other human animals.)
The photographer tells the BBC that he noticed the badgers emerging in the night to nick food scraps that had been left out for foxes.
"I spent the best part of two years photographing them, and this particular photo came about as an idea. I thought it'd be fun to put the graffiti there and see if I could get a badger walking underneath it."
The photographer Ian Wood also brings up a particularly English issue - badger culling. He tells the BBC it is a “national disgrace” and would trade his award for the permits issued for its practice to be revoked immediately.
To me, this image shows the power of artistic and creative practice to stir interest and particularly empathy in humans about the more-than-human world.
To my earlier point, to ascribe the adjective admiring to the badger would not be inappropriate. It would be me projecting what I feel about the image onto a non-human entity who may be having a totally different experience with it. Heck, different humans experience the same piece of art differently.
What work like this can do is stir our imaginations.
It can spur empathy and encourage us to think about how living things outside of our own mind and body experience the world not as the physically dominant species that is the modern human, but as just one piece of a puzzle. Or as Jeff Perry from Angel City Lumber said on the podcast, as “just one of the gang.”