ABOUT THE C3 EVENT
Like Animals: An interdisciplinary discussion on similarity and difference in the more-than-human world
Panel discussion with Sari Carel, Alistar Hunt, NIna Amstutz and moderator Sandra Percival
Thurs Nov 14, 5:30-7:30pm

On the occasion of Sari Carel's exhibition The Coyote After-School Program at Melanie Flood Projects, please join us for an interdisciplinary panel on the more-than-human world within the context of art making. We will explore ways to move beyond anthropocentric models of thinking in the arts and humanities, and towards changes in our fundamental ideas and practices involving animals.

​Scientific research on animal cognition and emotion has called into question the idea of an impermeable distinction between humans and other beings. “That we should find such deep continuity among life-forms as a whole, and among human beings and animals in particular should come as no surprise if we start from an evolutionary perspective”. Says Matthew Calarco in Thinking Through Animals. We will talk about humans and animals in deeply relational terms to make way for new groupings and permit less hierarchical ways of thinking about similarity and difference.

The transformative potential of animal issues will be discussed through an art historical lens, as well as ethics and philosophy, while drawing on the intersectional nature of animal studies.

ABOUT SARI CAREL

Sari Carel is a multi-disciplinary artist and activist based in New York. She works at the intersection of art, science, history and community. Carel’s work has been exhibited and screened internationally in venues such as Artists Space, Dumbo Arts Festival, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York; LAX Art and Young Projects in Los Angeles; TA University Gallery in Tel Aviv, and Haifa Museum of Art in Israel and Locust Projects in Miami. She has been awarded numerous fellowships and residencies, including AIR at the Stundars Museum, Finland; AIR Vienna; the Socrates Sculpture Park Artist Fellowship and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Residency on Governors Island, New York; and the Bundanon Residency, in Australia. Recent exhibition include Out Of Thin Air, a public sound installation with community driven workshops at City Hall Park in Manhattan and The A.I.R Gallery Biennial in Brooklyn

Carel is active with 350Brooklyn in fighting the climate crisis through city and state initiatives. She also nurtures human-canine relationships through adoption support for Sean Casey Animal Rescue.
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ABOUT THE MFP EXHIBITION
The Coyote Afterschool Program: A Film project and series of actions
On view at Melanie Flood Projects, 420 SW Washington St. #301
Nov 15 - Dec 14

“We are human only in contact and conviviality with what is not human”
David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

This film installation examines Joseph Beuys’ seminal 1974 Action, I Like America and America Likes Me, in which Beuys spent three days in the Rene Block gallery with a wild coyote. A landmark in the annals of Fluxus, the action is revisited via a feminist prism and contemporary research on animal behavior and personhood, ethics, and ecology.

Images of the coyote action are among the most resilient and generative to come out of Beuys's performance work, but they are also some of the most problematic.
In the hindsight of 40 years, the coyote action comes across as paternalistic and anthropocentric as it perpetuates romantic notions of nature, the creative process, and the mystical figure of the male artist. When watching documentation of I Love America one sees a stressed animal forced to engage in interactions that pay little attention to it’s welfare, or how it receives the artist’s overtures and approaches.

This project is facilitated by my work and experience with animals as a behavioral consultant and force-free trainer alongside my studio practice. These two disciplines have become intertwined within my practice, as I routinely borrow concepts from my work in the studio to foster notions of collaborative work, experimentation, and creative thinking, as I teach people how to communicate with their dogs and modify their behavior while demystifying certain ideas about human-canine relationships. In turn, animal behavior has entered my studio practice through my broader interest in cultural representations of nature and interactions with animals, especially those called domestic, as well as examining “The Great Divide” between human and animal in Western culture.

Filmed at the feminist collective A.I.R Gallery, in place of Beuys’s self-mythologizing actions, I base my collaborative interactions with Iris the dog on Robert Bringhurst’s poem. Each word in the poem is translated into a visual cue (dogs look to us for information much more than listen for it) and invite Iris to offer in return certain actions.

In this visitation of Beuys’s Action the animal is a domesticated version of its wild canidae predecessor, one that can actually thrive in the context of novel interactions with humans. The artist is a hands-on practitioner, using research-based methods and the relationship between non-human and human animal is a reciprocal and collaborative one, with an emphasis on positive, interspecies communication.

Playful experimentation is a guiding force that is both at the heart of a creative practice but also essential to the way animals explore the world around them and thrive within it.

This project among other things aims to establish continuity among human beings and animals and views the animal world as containing its own richly complex and differentiated modes of existence in order to allow for a more expansive ethical view and explore new ways of conceiving human-animal relations.

A bit about the dogs that participating in the film:
Iris and Tony are both rescue dogs Sari has helped rehabilitate after their adoption. She has a particularly long and deep relationship with Iris, who arrived to her new Brooklyn home terrified of urban sounds and other stimuli. Through patient and consistent work using behavior modification, enrichment and force-free training methods, Iris blossomed into a confident and joyful dog. Years later Sari suggested on working on this film project with Iris and her guardian Victoria, and they have both been enthusiastic partners in this process of collaborative learning and playful enrichment.

The poem appearing in the film as a series of actions and a text:
Voice: the breath's tooth.
Thought: the brain's bone.
Birdsong: an extension
of the beak. Speech:
the antler of the mind