Copy of my reading at Five Times Two’s ‘MY LOVE OF EVERLASTING THINGS’ in West Hollywood.
Who remembers animals?
Beautiful creatures are fading from our memories – as our relationship with the natural world has become increasingly mediated through a form of algorithmic ecstasy the mystification we used to hold as children has been washed over. Our speciesism is a process of ontological abstraction through accelerating industrialization. Cats dressed as pilots, dogs in VSS collars, and exotic animals pornotroped in domesticated content farms.
You say you love animals… but do you really?
Animal reverence and creature encounters were the foundation of humans earliest art. Tracing back the cave paintings in Lascaux, France. Stumbled upon after world war II by a few boys cashing a dog across a field, an innocent act of play leading to the discovery of a deep caverns’ region. In the depths of its depths large scale drawings of upside-down horses, deer with antlers, and big bears, sprawl the walls.
These were more than depictions but aspirations.
Imbued with affect and meant to form a summoning ritual. To affirm the relationship between the animal and the human in their collective struggle for survival. 10,000 years ago, we had yet to develop the assertive practice of hunting a species to board line extinction in a ruse of resource extraction. Every death was a consensual exchange.
A bear bows their head. Accepting a quick death at the hand of a tribe that will carry the bears energic legacy. The coat keeps a generation warm, there is no surviving the winter without it. The skull is worn higher than the head of the person that kills them, not as a trophy, but as reverence, a signal to show every other creature that they had shown enough respect to not get killed.
The deer had yet to be rendered venison.
This cave dwelling population has something we do not.
Belief in nature.
Recognize that we have manufactured the consent of earths agreement to let us raze it. To capture its most beautiful pieces for us to sacrifice without a goal. A uniquely human experience to demarc for demarcation, everything as uncontested ground, ripe for development. To see the field outside of Lascaux as more than a place to play with the town dog, but the future site of an info-tainment museum complex.
A relationship that says the non-human is something we deserve to inscribe onto, not something that deserves an inscription. To be remembered. At least not now.
We have aged. Fitting that children were the only ones able to initially access Lascaux. A hole too small for an adult to go down and depictions too large for them to imagine. The anima has been hollowed out and replaced with virtualized taxidermy.
We all remember animals, but do we really?
In the caverns preceding the animal paintings, there are depiction of the human, but without their ‘humanity’. Details not recorded and faces left obscured these basic anatomical descriptions depict humanity as a part of nature. A naked ape with the head of a bear, but a mind of something greater. The face that is our distinction. Using intuition not to efficiently exploit thousands of populations, but to connect with. To open our mind hearts.
To be at play like the little people we all once were. When we were closer in size to our four pawed friends.
These human not so human signifiers integrated a form greater than ourselves, but not through the reduction of other creatures. This is not omission, this is commission. A strategy of fore fronting an ontology of industrialization that has chosen to exclude our friends.
Instead.
We uplift and include them.
The magic left the air, the carriage turned back into the pumpkin. The clock struck midnight when we put down our salamander explorers guide in favor of let’s play YouTube videos. When Lascaux was forced open for adults to explore it was exposed to modern air. The air generated mold, fading the color of the cave paintings until they would return to rock. In a rushed act of control, they sealed everything off, trapping the containments inside. A reaction damning the further destruction of this site, while commending these works of art to something worse than mere erasure. Continued replication.
Versions 1, 2, 3, and now 4. Constructed on the site of Lascaux or immediately adjacent to it. Where a meticulous reconstruction of these paintings took place. Detail by detail. They missed the only thing that matters. The reason why they were painted. The affect imbued. As Lascaux was closed again in 2020, the project was revived to be damned one last time. Cataloged and uploaded to a French government website in a parcel of YouTube videos for our viewing pleasure, to water our eyes for a moment before it is lacerated as we click away or push it to our third monitor
A video recording of a replica. What am I supposed to get from that?
How is that supposed to make me feel? Certainly not mystified. Certainly more human.
Sterile and disgusting.
Bound and bonded. Tethered and exploited. Our future has become the flesh site for the vampirism of virtualized projects.
Being here. Surrounded by creatures now and then. Engaged in an affective animal encounter. Seeing us effaced with iPhones and equalized into the blue hue of naturalization. Let us acknowledge -
The hundred billion vertebrae
The 10 billion birds
Every creature on this planet in a death pact with a species they have yet to truly encounter. A pact predicated on a one side sacrifice, as we continue to refuse an encounter with them. A fungibility of every creature that is not us because only we have faces. Only the human dies, the animal is left to perish. The humans of Lascaux are remembered for their performance and not who they were preforming for. It is through an encounter with the face of affection are we able to reterritorialize the dualist demarcation that structures our engagement.
Mae provides us tonight a new way of imaging the animal. To imagine a future with animals. Painting of species have yet to exist, showing a relationship we used to have with them, one that is still possible. The hypersitional moment of our engagement. This is animal love.
Our performance re-injects the animal it a space that has forgotten them.
Our performance writes in the place that animals died.
Thank you two Eliza Blakemore of Five Times Two Exhibition for hosting and Mae Noland for painting.
Ok but u gotta see “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”