engleski

The Zoostage as Another Ethical Misfiring: The spectacle of the animal victim in the name of art

Along the lines of Šuvaković’s definition of the animal as object + subject + symbol in neo-avant-garde and post-avant-garde art, this paper will focus on several utilizations of animals as living or dead symbols, and on a number of performance art killings of animals on the Croatian performance stage. I shall frame the examples of performance art animal killing on the performance zoostage within Hans-Thies Lehmann’s deliberations on the fact that postdramatic theater negates the anthropocentrism immanent to drama, in such a way that a sympathetic equality between animal and human bodies is established on its stage. Nonetheless, it seems to me that this is a matter of only superficial equality, since the animal, of course, has no possibility of choice whatsoever as to whether it wishes to be a stage performer or not, by which a gap opens up, a discrepancy between the ethics and the aesthetics of such performances with animal subjects. That this is indeed a matter of superficial equality between the human and non-human animal is testified to by Lehmann’s following sentence which, in my opinion, undermines his former claim on the ostensible negation of anthropocentrism in postdramatic theater. Namely, he states that the extent to which the reality of the human body is similar to the reality of the animal body is researched in postdramatic theater, and that human bodies in their deformation and monstrosity, autism and speech impediments draw near to the animal domain. The article will focus on performances that include animal carcasses as symbols (for example, Sven Stilinović’s Bloodthirsty Geometry: from 1993 to 2001, this artist performed six variations of the said performance), particularly those performances that exploit animals as butchered stage objects (like Bloodthirsty Geometry in Dubrovnik [staged at the Lazareti in 2000], which included a slaughter of a lamb during a solar eclipse).

zoostage; animals; performance art

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