engleski

Exploitation and Monumentalisation of the Performance of Animals as a Living, Dead or Murdered Idea

In this paper, I interpret the symbolisation of animalhood in individual Croatian visual art and performing works within the framework of Deleuze's and Guattari's triad concept of animalhood - Oedipal animals (individuated animals, family pets) that are defined by identity, animals with characteristics or attributes (State animals) that serve the State, myth, and science and "more demonic animals" (pack or affect animals) that form a multiplicity (a "becoming-animal", an animal with its anomalous traits) - that they initiated in the book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975) and made rhizome-likely more sophisticated in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (1980). I open up the issue of the ethical ambivalence of the animal sacrifice - NOT a fictive one in this case but an actual sacrifice on the theatrical boards, which mean life itself only to some - at the moment in which, when the animal disappears from the scene, the tragedy (the song of the male goat) is born. Since the genesis of the tragedy is linked with the cult of Dionysus to which it was customary to offer the epiphany-like/incarnational he-goat, the anthropocentric tragedy comes into being with the disappearance of the sacrificial stage animal. However, the animal tragedy is realised at the moment of the return of the animal to the stage as a stage object, a sacrifice (pharmakôs) within the framework of an Art that decides on a performing-actual sacrificial butchering, and which, for example, cannot be justified by biocentric ethics (from the shelter of an ethical niche). According to René Girard's definition, the victim/sacrifice itself is a unification of a sacred and a criminal act, that has "to date retained the sonorous name of - ambivalence". On the trail of Peter Singer's premise "Some non-human animals are persons" and some humans are not in the discussion on the wrongfulness of killing non-human animals, by which he emphasises how important it is to ask the question Are any of them persons?, and how no objective evaluation whatsoever can support the viewpoint that it is always worse to kill members of our species that are not persons than members of animal species who are persons - I interpret several performance killings of animals on the Croatian performance scene and staged in the theatre. These are as follows: the Pinklec company's performance of Shakespeare's Macbeth in the Međimurean style at the 1995 Eurokaz, which staged the "strikingly realistic" execution of a live carp ; Vlasta Delimar's performance Tražim ženu (I'm Looking for a Woman, 1996) in which she executed a hen, which the artist, among other, interprets as ready-made behaviour ; and, Josip Pino Ivančić's performance, Hister&middot ; i&middot ; ja tour mitt preselitev (the artist is, otherwise, a vegetarian), in which he carried out the political slaughter of a turkey on the plateau in front of the Pazin Memorial Hall on October 28, 2000.

animal sacrifice; Croatian performance art; Peter Singer

nije evidentirano