4 Contact Zones and Living Flesh

Inside Out

Vision mediated by cultural codes enables the circulation between canvas and the animal bodies. Because the fundamental means of evaluating and categorizing animals for natural history and agriculture from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries is by their lines and surfaces—that is, by what can be seen—artists have a privileged position in translating the wilds to culture.2 With a primacy placed on line and form by breeders, the artist is able to employ his skills toward creating a visual argument for the value of an animal. In painting, the animal’s qualities become evident at one glance: one can simply look at animal portrait paintings to see the desired traits. Natural history inquiries were conducted not only through pelts and specimens, but also through illustrations that featured the primary characteristics of the animal. Of course, it was the various human classification systems for animals that decided what constituted the primary and secondary traits of an animal as, for example, in the Linnaean system. In agriculture, animals were bred according to traits determined to be valuable by both the breeder and market where the animal was to be consumed. Artists’ portraits of the beasts provided proof of these traits. You doubt that an ox can weigh 2,400 pounds? Why, simply look at the neck, the shoulders, the dewlap, the fine ribs, and so on (Figure 16). Lest the two-dimensional image not convince, the inscription of dimensions at the bottom of many paintings and prints will advance the point.

Yet more important than the visual representation itself is the spacing that takes place in the act of codifying the animal. The artists, scientists, and farmers judge the animals while maintaining distance between themselves and their objects of inquiry. Furthermore, the eye as window positions the viewing subject as a human with privileged interiority, in contrast to the outward surface of the viewed object—the beast’s corpulence. Through sight, we possess in our minds the animal that is seen from a distance.3 The animal surface is contrasted with and co-opted by the human, who uses his own reflexive interiority (that is, “thinking”) to divide the animal surface into categories and traits of interest. These traits are then projected schematically onto the body of the beast. In the example of cattle bred for slaughter, the animal becomes the meat chart, and so turns the animals inside out as so much flesh for (intellectual and physical) consumption. Because these animals are not considered to have an interiority, which is the unique quality of humans, and because they do not speak in our language, their inside is already made an outside, a mere surface to be exposed for human use.4 How might the surface be rethought in a way that does not simply maintain the distance between the knowing human (artist, natural history scholar, farmer, and consumer of animal flesh) and the object of study?

Outside Out

Again, let us suppose that it all takes place on the surface—that is, after all, what we are told about animals, isn’t it? They have no eternal soul and no substantial interiority; they are, as Heidegger says, “poor in world.”5 Because they supposedly have no interiority and thus no place for philosophical thought, animals don’t think like we do; in their life without depths, they don’t know they are going to a slaughterhouse—they don’t even know they are animals! Of course, why should they be required to know these things?6 Animal is our word, a human word for all that crawls, slithers, creeps, stalks, and walks the earth—other than ourselves, of course, or at least that part of ourselves that is not the least—namely, that which is culturally recoverable from our animal bodies.7 I would like to think through—no, with—the animal surface, the literalism of the surfaces and the material bodies both as they have been used historically to determine the animal’s being from the distance of culture and how surfaces collapse the heights (and transcendental impositions) of cultural appropriation of the animal. If, as the Nietzschean aphorism goes, truth is a metaphor of which we’ve forgotten it is a metaphor, then surfaces deflate both the cultural scaffolding of metaphor and of truth by returning thought to the site where bodies meet. In this collapse of cultural cache, material surfaces offer a means of thinking about humans and animals outside the hegemony of the privileged interiority of the human subject. The suggestion here is that surfaces offer no retreat to an Archimedean point within the human that is removed from exterior events and used to leverage (in thought) the rest of the world. Without such a distance or remove, there is nowhere else to go, no chance to remove ourselves in ways that rationalize our superiority “over” or “above” other animals. In brief, the long-standing philosophical assumption that animals live only on the surface, and the negative valuation that follows from this, can be turned as a positive site for production.

Heidegger’s work on the notion of world proves an important starting point where we can cut our teeth before moving elsewhere. His sense of a limited animal world—animals “poor in world” compared to human world building—encapsulates much of philosophy’s history with the animal question. Agamben situates Heidegger as “the last to believe (at least up to a certain point, and not without doubts and contradictions) that the anthropological machine, which each time decides upon and recomposes the conflict between man and animal, between the open and the not-open, could still produce history and destiny for a people.”8 Heidegger shepherds the animals through an “anthropological machine” of thought, or Dasein, that “decides upon and recomposes” animal being by selection and division, a cutting up not evident—offstage—in his laying out of his position. He has decided the results of his philosophical gambit in advance by the grounding in anthropocentrism.

Heidegger’s most discussed topography of the animal’s world appears in his 1929–30 seminar published as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: “the stone is worldless; the animal is poor in world; man is world-forming.”9 Animals certainly have environments (Umwelt), but they are not aware of their environments in the same way that humans are. Derrida summarizes Heidegger’s position by explaining: “As for the animal, it has access to entities, but, and this is what distinguishes it from man, it has no access to entities as such.”10 Heidegger’s lizard, for example, sits on a rock and enjoys the sun, but it does not know the rock as rock, nor sun as sun. Heidegger goes so far as to explain that “[w]hen we say that the lizard is lying on the rock, we ought to cross out the word ‘rock’ in order to indicate that whatever the lizard is lying on is certainly given in some way for the lizard, and yet is not known to the lizard as a rock.”11 The animal is caught up in its series of relations to other entities without an ability to remove itself from the “captivation” that such a series presents.

Heidegger draws his notion of an animal world from Jakob von Uexküll, a founding figure in ethnology and semiotics who was discussed in the previous chapter. In his work A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, Uexküll moves beyond mechanistic biology to develop a line of inquiry into the animal’s sense of its surroundings—something close to an animal phenomenology.12 For Uexküll, the animal’s environment is constituted by the “carriers of significance,” or “marks,” which captivate the animal. All other elements in the world drop off and have no place in the animal world, or what Uexküll calls Umwelt.13 Thus Heidegger’s lizard may know a warm surface though he does not register the rock as rock nor the sun as sun; instead, the animal functions within a world that has carriers or marks of significance. Caught within the series of relations that is their Umwelt, animals simply cannot get outside their surroundings to look around.14

By way of contrast, the human world has manic-depressive heights and depths—from Plato’s ascent out of the cave to Empedocles’s refusal to climb out and instead to dig in, and dig deeply.15 It is human uprightness—verticality—that sufficiently dis-places us from our surroundings so that we can see the rock at a distance—a rock as rock. Animals do not have this distance: “Their whole being is in the living flesh,” as J. M. Coetzee explains.16 As Derrida has explicated in Of Spirit, “world” is for Heidegger only possible for humans—those beings who have spirit. As much as they are poor in spirit, animals are left “poor in world.” The “uprightness” of humans is both physical and metaphysical, while the animal world is decidedly flat. Without heights and depths, the animals are left with marks on the surface; these marks are a “cross out” that (re)marks in our language the place of their relations.17 To consider animals and take seriously the role of surfaces to thought and language means to reevaluate the physical and metaphysical uprightness of humans.

Gilles Deleuze, in Logic of Sense, counters the verticality of Plato and Empedocles with the horizontal animality of Diogenes: the cynic philosopher “is no longer the being of the caves, nor Plato’s soul or bird, but rather the animal which is on the level of the surface.”18 Known as the dog of Athens, Diogenes lived on the surface. If he wrote anything, none of it survives. We have only anecdotes: he ate without discernment whatever he happened upon in the streets, masturbated in public, took to insulting his contemporaries, and lived in a tub. Plato could not coax “the dog” into a dialogue, a conversation meant to invite Diogenes within the Academy, where he would be refuted by the masters of language, Plato and Socrates. Fed up with words, always more words, Diogenes would offer his detractors food—something to stuff their mouths with and stop the babble of culture. Food could stop the philosophical abstraction and recall the animal body of the speaker. Fredrick Young, in his essay “Animality,” explains:

Plato had no idea how to deal with Diogenes. For Diogenes refused to argue on Platonic grounds, refused dialectics and the rational “voice” that goes with it by means of which “man” speaks. With Diogenes, there’s a different modality of argumentation, if we can even call it that, the performative and animality. The Diogenic is more than a literal abject attack on Plato. More significantly, Diogenes’ strategies are irreducible to any modality of dialectics or philosophy proper. Again, what we have is the problematics of the surface, of animality—a physiognomic performance that unleashes the performativity of animality into the Platonic landscape and architecture.19

The performative is thought for Diogenes; his actions with his body in space are his thinking. This is the literalism of surfaces without retreat to a Platonic architecture. In like manner, Coetzee, in The Lives of Animals, explains that “the living flesh” of the animal is its argument. When Coetzee’s protagonist Elizabeth Costello is asked if life means less to animals than to humans, she retorts that animals do not respond to us in words, but rather with gestures of the living flesh. Its argument from its flesh is the animal’s “whole being.”20 Like Coetzee’s animals, the world for Diogenes is not that of the culture that surrounds him and that seeks to incorporate his corpus, if he would ever get around to writing one. Instead, he offers corporality—bodies and surfaces that evade the manic depression, the heights and depths, of his contemporaries. It comes then as no surprise that Diogenes lived his life in exile from Sinope, his birthplace.

Diogenes’ performative thought indicates an-other world, something other than the distanced observation by which humans understand an environment through a privileged interiority and reflexive consciousness.21 Collapsing heights and depths to surface, there is no space for interiority and reflexivity. In this collapse, Diogenes sides with the animals. While for Heidegger animals are benumbed to the possibility of seeing objects in themselves, the animals do see and interact with the world around them; if not a Heideggerian clearing—reserved for humans—then is it possible that animals have some other sort of clearing and revealing available to them and not to humans? Even Heidegger, in addressing the poverty of the animal, must admit this. The living flesh of animals is not “something inferior or that it is at a lower level in comparison with human Dasein. On the contrary, life is a domain which possesses a wealth of being-open, of which the human world may know nothing at all.”22 If human knowledge is that of distances and interiorities (our heights and depths), it is possible that one way of knowing that has been closed off to us is that of surfaces—a space where animals have often been relegated in their “poverty.”23

The gambit in this chapter is that there is an animal clearing or “open”on the surface of things and the performance of surfaces. Stated in another way, I am experimenting with the possibility that the “poverty” of the animal and its lack of interiority or depth is a site of productivity and a different economy of meaning. While it remains stubbornly difficult to enter into the perception of animals, humans can come to know the world of the animal through their own contact with the corporality of beasts and humanity’s own animality. Amid human worlding, a raw physicality can pull us away from the privileged interiority of the subject and point the way to an-other relationship. Uexküll marks out the terrain of this relationship with his notion of animal Umwelt and its carriers of significance. Within this terrain are two facets that I have outlined in this chapter: an animal “open” of which, as Heidegger says, “the human world may know nothing at all,” and, despite the unknowable, positive interactions expressed by Donna Haraway (as mentioned in chapter 3) and explored by Bateson, Goodall, Bekoff, and Smuts. The unknowable has its economies, relations, and productions such that Haraway and Heidegger, in this case, can find a meeting point. The figure of this meeting point could be Diogenes, who refused to engage in a mastery of language found in the Academy—where language and thought distance us from the object of study, and from this distance allow us to evaluate beings. Despite his refusal to enter the Academy, Diogenes still “speaks” through positive interactions of silences and performance.

It is under the context of physicality, surfaces, and performance that the work of contemporary artists Olly and Suzi gains currency. Their paintings jostles the Umwelt of the animal and the world of the human through the particular set of parameters under which these paintings are executed. This British artist team works in the environment of animals under conditions that threaten and impede on the human as they execute drawings of the animals. From the arctic to African deserts, the two artists place themselves in extreme environments—sites that are at the limits of human dominion, and are more likely the center of the animal’s domain and world. In a shark cage, squatting within range of a polar bear, a few paws’ length from a lion, the artists work “hand over hand” with one artist’s hands over top the other’s while creating sparse, strong, moving lines in the shape of the animal before them.24 The artists feel “helpless” and “out of our depths” by working within the environment of the animal, rather than in the familiar terrain of an artist’s studio.25 Working in the animal’s terrain produces a sense of fear that becomes important to Olly and Suzi’s art: “Fear plays a vital role in our art-making process. We are constantly challenged by and confronted with environments and animals, especially predators (polar bears, white sharks, big cats), that trigger adrenaline, a primal response that alerts us to the potential of imminent danger.” They further explain: “The knowledge we gather [about the animal] arms us, but fear is still present; a warm glow, keeping us warm.”26 Fear is something that rises to the surface that keeps the artists in contact with that surface, preventing them from slipping into an interiority of selfhood that would provide a safe haven and at the same time a danger to their bodily well-being while in the realm of beastly animals.27

As Olly and Suzi work at the surface, their physical presence becomes one of the marks within the animal domain. They are one of the carriers of significance, captivating the animal from within its world. From the animal’s world the artists are a marked surface, while from the human’s world the animal body is a surface to be illustrated. One surface meets the other, between which paper is spread out. The blank space of the paper is fair game from within the worlds of both humans and animals. The artists draw from within the domain of the animal and “encourage the animals to interact” with the paper.28 A white shark bites off a corner, a leopard tears at the cloth, an anaconda slithers across the surface, leaving a mud-stained track (Plate 5 and Figure 17). The animal as surface and human as surface leave their marks on a mutual environment of paper that has become the outside, the outer margin or limit of each domain, where the outside finds a way out of a limited Umwelt and becomes evidence of a much larger world. The outside limit becomes the site of production and possibilities.29

Their work is a performance. The making of their art is part of the art itself and gets documented in photographs taken by Greg Williams, Olly’s brother, who accompanies the artists in their travels. The paintings are not something to be executed at a distance from the “object” of study, as in natural history animal portraits; instead, the artists are caught within the world of the animal, and the spacing of space or distance is collapsed. Furthermore, like Diogenes, their actions disavow the linguistic markers of the dialectic and the academy, with humans on one side and the animals (caged) at the other.30 Up close to the animal, another language develops through a repetition in drawing a muzzle, ears, a paw: “Once we’ve done many, many, many drawings of the same subject, we suddenly get our own language and focus on certain areas.”31 The posture and face of the wild dogs drawn in Tanzania, for example, develop over the course of encounters. Rather than focusing on detail—the art of natural history—Olly and Suzi develop caricatures that highlight and heighten features such as facial markings that are prominent within the moment of drawing (Figure 18). The language of these drawings take place within the immediacy of an encounter with its particular animal and human poses and forms; it is less the cutting up of the animal into parts, and more the development of noticing the animal’s comportment alongside the artists’ comportment in this space and the handling of materials in this zone of contact between species.

Contact

The larger world that humans and animals create in alliance with one another can be considered a “contact zone.” The term comes from Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes, where she uses it to describe the “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.”32 The grappling between humans and animals forms a topography much like the space described by Pratt. With Olly and Suzi, for example, such topography is an actual relation between bodies—a marker or carrier of significance of each other’s body from within their respective domains. The marks cross, and cross out, until there is a space negotiated and shared between human and animal through their re/marks. Such re/marks take on the character of a hybrid language similar to the origins of Pratt’s term:

I borrow the term “contact” here from its use in linguistics, where the term contact language refers to improvised languages that develop among speakers of different native languages who need to communicate with each other consistently, usually in context of trade. Such languages begin as pidgins, and are called creoles when they come to have native speakers of their own. Like the societies of the contact zones, such languages are commonly regarded as chaotic, barbarous, lacking in structure.33

It is exactly the asignifying scrawls across the paper spread out by Olly and Suzi that bear witness to and constitute the pidgins and forked tongues of the animal–artist alliance.34

It is not that Olly and Suzi have drawn animals; rather, they have formed alliances that become the agents of painting.35 Most importantly, the artists talk about respect for the animal—a respect that makes alliances possible. They glean from experts in the field the various information needed to survive within the Umwelt of the Other: How far to stand from a polar bear? How to not look afraid in front of a large cat? How to handle an anaconda is a knowledge leading to physical comportment, a manipulation of their own body surface in relation to the animal’s. Olly and Suzi’s physical bearing in the world of the animal, and how the animal reacts to their actions, serves as a syntax for the pidgin language between species.

It is certainly possible to read the work of Olly and Suzi as a naive, hopeless effort to engage animals in a project of which the animals have no interest. Is the paper really a contact zone, or is this a naive view of transspecies communication? Perhaps they are simply baiting the unwilling animal participants for a theatrics of value only (or mostly) to the humans concerned in the project. While the art and artists are vulnerable to such critique, their interests lie with other questions. The artists themselves consider their work with predator species as a way of bearing witness to endangered ecological chains that sustain the predators and that the fierce animals help constitute; as such, it is a project of ecological awareness. Increasingly, their work has highlighted the environmental landscape that bears the weight of these predators, and suffers under the weight of human incursion.

Perhaps the hazy romanticism of engaging animals resides in the notion that the art is an alliance. Baker counters this argument in part by considering the authenticity or earnestness of the project, a sincerity that produces something new rather than taking refuge in art as satire or irony.36 My own interest is in how this art shows a concern for human and animal phenomenologies. Humans and animals share the same earth but live in different worlds. What, then, are the possibilities of thinking at the edge of the human world, at the place where it bumps up against the animal’s world? What happens where the surface of skin and scales meet? Negotiating this meeting place, this contact zone, requires that the artists momentarily suspend or leave behind much of the world of culture and acquire new gestures and a different awareness of their bodies before the body of the Other. They do not place themselves in absolute danger as a sort of stunt; rather, they negotiate the space by using some technological elements of culture (wet suits, shark cages, special paints, and so on) and some cultural awareness of various animals’ behaviors, but also, as I’m emphasizing here, by relying on bodily movements and the physicality of the environment. Thus, for example, when encountering a polar bear, the artists have the technological equipment of transportation, warm clothing, paints that will not freeze too quickly, and a camera to document the event. However, they also must rely on knowing the proper proximity to the animal, how to crouch down, and how to maneuver in the snow.

Each of the sections in Olly and Suzi: Arctic Desert Ocean Jungle is filled with tales of how they navigated extreme environments. Details of bodily motion—buoyancy underwater, cautious wading in the marshy domain of an anaconda, rapid brushstrokes in the –40°C weather of the polar bear’s icy habitat—are more than adventurous tidbits meant to titillate admirers back home; motion and environment contribute to the individuality of the pidgin language, and the space in which this language is formed. Rather than an imposed form, pidgin language created between species arises from tentative gesturing, assertion of ground, meanings conveyed or missed; the lack of structure creates possibilities, but also threatens collapse of all meaning. Contact zones bring together physicality and linguistic exchange in order to create new tentative meanings and temporary societies.

Density and lightness, slowness and speed, thick and thin are states of being inhabited by the lines on paper, the flight and repose of the animals, and the corporality held by the human–animal alliance. The surfaces and bodies refuse signification, and in doing so they take us elsewhere, to the “poor in world” of the animal that is rich in its own textures: “signification may be undone, with both literal and metaphorical attempts to fix meaning giving way to ‘a distribution of states’; and that individual identity may be undone, with both human and animal subjects giving way to ‘a circuit of states.’”37 The paintings bear witness to the “distribution of states.” The hand-over-hand method of the artists, along with the interaction of the animal, diffuses the agency of the artwork and creates an event structure.

Economy of Relations

Crossing and marking: the artists’ bodies cross into the animal’s world and become carriers of significance in that world. The privileged interiority of the human subject unfolds, unravels, becoming more like paper spread out than a selfhood and more like an element than a person. Following Uexküll, Olly and Suzi can say that we are markers of significance in a world that is not our own as a whale shark glides along the length of Olly’s body, a great white shark bumps the diving cage, an alligator’s tail pushes against Suzi’s hand, a snake’s scales rub against their skin. The animals leave their marks. Double-crossing: being astute to the way animals work within their terrains, Olly and Suzi do not give in and give themselves up to the animal. They understand enough to maneuver in the animal world; they also know how to use a blank white surface. Let the shark bite the paper and the anaconda slither across it (Figure 19); the paper will record one of the many crossings in the “inky, impenetrable darkness.” The recording becomes the double cross, the betrayal and portrayal of an event that cannot be fully captured but that leaves traces of its passing. The paper bears witness to the event. In a gallery, it functions like a map indicating an experiential terrain that has been traversed. The painting on paper is both presence and absence, a production and a loss of the actual event. It points to the animal’s “wealth of being-open, of which the human world may know nothing at all.” The artists have extended themselves to the limits of the human world to bump up against this wealth. As viewers, we stand in the shadows of this Other and foreign openness, and we wonder at its surfaces.

Who is making the work of art? Who signs it, and in that signature invests the art with language and value? Contrary to Heidegger’s insistence, one does not need “hand” to write. For Heidegger, the hand (in the singular and in its singularity) functions like the distance of the artist’s gaze and the natural historian’s eye in animal portraiture: hand allows humans both to be in touch with things and to manipulate them from a transcendental distance. Derrida explicates Heidegger’s hand in “Geschlect II”:

The nerve of the argument seems to me reducible to the assured opposition of giving and taking: man’s hand gives and gives itself, gives and is given, like thought or like what gives itself to be thought and what we do not yet think, whereas the organ of the ape or of man as a simple animal, indeed as an animal rationale, can only take hold of, grasp, lay hands on the thing. The organ can only take hold of and manipulate the thing insofar as, in any case, it does not have to deal with the thing as such, does not let the thing be what it is in its essence. The organ has no access to the essence of the being as such.38

The shark biting into a canvas certainly seems to want to take hold of the thing, to grasp it. The animal organs, including the human animal’s organs, fail for Heidegger to “give” and allow themselves to be given over to thought. The nudging and bumping and gnawing of animals show a relationship between an animal and its environment. Heidegger wants to cut short this relationship and cut off any opportunity for the claw or paw to be hand—for Heidegger, relationship is not thinking. As Derrida figures Heidegger’s hand, the hand becomes shorthand for metaphysical thinking, an investment in the human’s ability to speak in our language. Heidegger’s hand writes itself as human only. Yet what is thought if it is not the relationships among things made visible? Or even the ability to ask this question about relating, the ability to think of the distance between objects? The animal, in marking a canvas, doubles the double crossing: its mark is both the relationship between teeth and canvas, fur and white surface, scale and paper, and is the visible sign of this relationship. It is both mark and re/mark at once. The canvas is made useful and purposeful within the Umwelt of the animal. As such, the animal uses the canvas as “hand” to write and think with and to think on, like a scratch pad.

After a decade of working together, in 2003, Olly and Suzi expanded their art to include some studio painting. While still painting in the wilds, their New Elements work allowed them to use paper and canvas as a palimpsest of ecological elements encountered in various excursions. As they explain these works:

The “elements” relate to the key similarities and incongruities we have experienced whilst working in a wide variety of remote habitats with indigenous peoples and endangered animals. They include the key elements of survival, hunting, shelter and the fragile coexistence of man and beast. As with our ongoing site-specific work, New Elements utilise both clarity and ambiguity to convey the storytelling of an experience.39

The best of these works create a temporal duration of an excursion and layer scenes that reveal an event as well as the veil of its passing and inaccessibility. The viewer cannot reason out all the iconography of this pidgin language, but as bits and pieces make narrative sense, the painting intrigues and resists; in short, the painting conveys the wonder of an animal and an environment (Plate 6). A number of these works include the death of animals or destruction of an environment. Guns, bullets, hooks, arrows, and knives all cut through these canvases as an imprint of human encroachment. Viewers see worlds collide and the struggle for domination over and against another Umwelt. When some of the New Elements bring a too-easy narrative closure for the viewer, the works become didactic. The balance of translatability and the untranslatable makes the best of these works an extension of Olly and Suzi’s experiments in Olly and Suzi: Arctic Desert Ocean Jungle.

Contact zones and pidgin language leverage a rift within the human between the cultural humanity of man and our animality. It is our cultural humanity that creates manic-depressive heights and depths that distance us from surroundings. Nevertheless, the animality of man beckons:

It is possible to oppose man to other living things, and at the same time to organize the complex—and not always edifying—economy of relations between men and animals, only because something like an animal life has been separated within man, only because his distance and proximity to the animal have been measured and recognized first of all in the closest and most intimate place.40

Olly and Suzi circulate within this “economy of relations between men and animals.” They are able to cross over to the “wealth of being open” in the “poor in world” of the animal, because of the “diabolical art” by which their animal bodies mingle with other elements in the animal Umwelt. As part of the event structure that is their art, the artists ply their animality: they think orca, great white, and anaconda in order both to be a part of the animals’ worlds and to double cross these worlds while bringing something back, a scratch pad of animal–human surfaces that circulates in a double economy as a marker of significance for animality and culture.

Throughout this chapter, surfaces are shown to have a power of production by leveraging their negative place in philosophy to think outside of typical philosophical architecture, which privileges human interiority over and against objects of inquiry. At the heart of this chapter is a claim by Coetzee’s character Elizabeth Costello, who explains that animals don’t think like us or speak like us, but rather “[t]heir whole being is in the living flesh.”41 I have employed Uexküll’s biosemiotics of Umwelt to further Costello’s claim about the flesh of animals, as well as the visceral and tactical qualities implicit in the notion of “living flesh.” If, as Coetzee claims (through Costello), there is something meaningful in the living flesh of the animal, and if Uexküll’s work bears this out, then what are the implications for the visual arts?

Turning to a notion of living flesh changes the animal from an object of cultural consumption into a meaningful agent with an Umwelt. One way of exploring this Umwelt is by taking philosophy at its word and thinking with the poverty and “mere” surface of the animal. Because the world of the animal as a world remains foreign to humans (or as Thomas Nagel says, we will never know “what it is like to be a bat” from the bat’s perspective), we can only know the animal through surfaces. We know it through contact with the surface of the animal and the surface of the animal’s world, or “bubble,” as Uexküll explains. Olly and Suzi work with the animal surface, its living flesh, as well as the surface of the animal bubble as it meets our own in contact zones. Their resulting marks on paper are instructively different from animal portraiture and the history of animal painting. These pieces of paper have circulated in a human–animal economy and bear witness to an animal world. This witnessing is not a knowing and consuming like cattle portraits that subsume the animal and its world and subsequently deprive animals of a space outside of human understanding. These works leave the mystery of the animal and its world intact while calling attention to its existence.