Ecological awareness vs. animal abuse in British art and literature
Résumé
I started by studying how, as soon as the 18th century, poets advocated for transition and renewable means in order to deal with nature. The Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796) displays an encyclopaedic knowledge of flora and fauna in Scotland. Burns draws his readers' attention to the universe of the living. In his poems, he displays a very acute ecological awareness that sometimes takes on extremely virulent overtones of protest. Going beyond the anthropocentric horizon of many of his contemporaries, Burns insists on the need for an ecocentrism that foregrounds responsible consumption and production while allowing the human, plant and animal kingdoms to live together sustainably. In the second half of the eighteenth century in Great Britain known as the Sentimental Era, artists such as William Hogarth and William Blake endeavoured to denounce man’s cruelty toward animals. Both gave a voice, in their own graphic and/or poetic style, to non-human animals (dogs, cats, sheep, etc.), sometimes going so far as to praise those who are often considered the humblest of them all and who are often referred to as parasites (flies, fleas, mice). By restoring the individuality of non-human animals, these artists set out to restore “the animal point of view” (Baratay), while underlining human (ir)responsibility in animal suffering.In the same vein, British painting has been renowned for its animal paintings since the 18th century. However, most artists prefer that the painted non-human animals be drugged, beaten or dead, so that they would stand still. The painter George Stubbs developed his anatomical expertise in horses by dissecting a large number of them. Edwin Landseer, one of the favourite animal painters of Queen Victoria, indulged in animal hunts. The Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt beat and ate the animals he painted when he thought them edible (notoriously in The Scapegoat, 1854-1856). Towards the end of the 20th century, the visual artist Damien Hirst (b. 1965) achieved early scandal by exhibiting animals cut up and presented in formaldehyde vats. The controversies and interpretations to which these works gave rise enabled us to reflect on the “animal holocaust” (Derrida) that remains taboo in British art (and in many other Western artistic traditions). However, in response to the controversies that this body of work triggered, Hirst has now ceased to use real animals when dealing with an animal motif: his statues are now cast in cement or metal, showing a transition towards an (ecocritically enforced) awareness.