1st Edition

Art, Animals, and Experience Relationships to Canines and the Natural World

By Elizabeth Sutton Copyright 2017
    160 Pages 8 Color & 11 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    150 Pages 8 Color & 11 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    150 Pages 8 Color & 11 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Elizabeth Sutton, using a phenomenological approach, investigates how animals in art invite viewers to contemplate human relationships to the natural world. Using Rembrandt van Rijn’s etching of The Presentation in the Temple (c. 1640), Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), archaic rock paintings at Horseshoe Canyon, Canyonlands National Park, and examples from contemporary art, this book demonstrates how artists across time and cultures employed animals to draw attention to the sensory experience of the composition and reflect upon the shared sensory awareness of the world.

    Table of Contents

    Chapter 1. Relational Ethics and Aesthetics

    Being and Thinking With Art and Animals
    Between Presence and Absence 
    An Ethical Art History

    Chapter 2. Dogged Flesh: Rembrandt’s Presentation in the Temple, c. 1640

    Real and Represented Dogs
    Rembrandt’s Three R’s: Radical, Reflective, Revelatory
    The Rhetoric of Etching
    Fleshly Experience
    Past Made Present

    Chapter 3. Glances with Wolves: Encounters with Little John and Joseph Beuys

    Entangled Encounters
    Seeing and Being with Little John
    Presencing Other Worlds
    Imaginative Empathy
    Gathering Together in the Gap

    Chapter 4. Glimpses into the Unknown: Contemporary Taxidermy and Photography

    Spaces Between: Yellow and Taza
    Respecting Unknowns
    Dominance, Submission, and Freedom:
    Inert and Progression of Regression
    Death and the Object (Ars longa vita brevis EST)
    From Hierarchy to Horizontality

    Chapter 5. "We Are All Connected": Experiencing Art and Nature at Horseshoe Canyon

    Guided by Dogs and Children
    "We Are All Connected"
    Dwelling with Dogs and Earth
    Accessing Histories with Attentive Care
    Art and Earth as Places of Emergence

    Chapter 6. Caring for Art and Animals

    Biography

    Elizabeth Sutton is Associate Professor at the University of Northern Iowa.