Looking at Animals Looking at Us
Man’s view onto animal and vice versa
The publication evoking the exhibition under the same title presents an illustrated guided tour through a zoo with works from 1915 until 2015 by 36 artists.
The title is intendedly ambiguous: for once the artistic positions obviously refer to the attitude how we as humans look at animals; on the other hand the title points to the reverse perspective from which animals look at us (or don’t).
Three essays — two of the first editions — reflect upon the exhibits and position them in an admittedly controversial art-historical context:
Josef Hegenbarth takes us along on his walk through the zoo, seen through a painter’s eyes (undated). He intensely depicts his encounters with animals on eye level, moments of mutual understanding, from which his perception moulds the ever changing creatures into images.
Whereas in “Why Look at Animals?” (1977) the zoo does not stand for paradise for John Berger, rather for a museum where only representations of past meanings of animals for mankind are exhibited: magical reference points, basis of existence and many more. Berger develops a detailed history (of culture) in which course man first estranges from the animal and in the end from himself.
In her text from 2015, CHRISTINA KATHARINA MAY examines two theories of Fritz Löffler which, up to the present day, have not been questioned in the scholar Hegenbarth research: that the animal topic served as a code for politics and, in the 1940's, as a retreat into the innocuous.
From the contents
From the contents:
A guided tour through a zoo in pictures through the glasses of
Thomas Baumhekel, Matthias Beckmann, Ursula Böhmer,
Mark Dion, Piotr Dluzniewski,
Ayşe Erkmen, Max Ernst, Elliott Erwitt,
Roman Frechen,
Ingeborg Gabriel, GIOM — Guillaume Bruère, Ulrich Görtz, HAP Grieshaber,
Trixi Groiss, Waldemar Grzimek,
Emanuel Hegenbarth, Josef Hegenbarth, Norbert Hinterberger, David Hockney,
Candida Höfer,
Leiko Ikemura,
Sven-Åke Johansson,
Karin Kneffel,
Gerhard Marcks, Ewald Mataré, Nanne Meyer, Mona Mönnig, Bettina Munk,
Rudolf Schlichter, Renée Sintenis, Alice Stepanek, Wolf Suschitzky, Karin Székessy,
Victor Vasarely, Cornelius Völker,
Stephen Wilks, Garry Winogrand und Michael Wutz.
Essays
Josef Hegenbarth
Zoospaziergang, durch die Augen eines Malers gesehen (o.J., EA., dt.)
John Berger
Warum sehen wir Tiere an? / Why Look at Animals? (1977, dt./engl.)
Christina Katharina May
Hegenbarth sieht Tiere an — Zeichnungen von Zootieren und anderen Chimären / Hegenbarth Looks at Animals — Drawings of Zoo Animals and Other Chimeras
(2015, EA. dt./engl.)
Edition
208 pages, formate: 25 × 27,3 cm
116 pictures, 106 full page in colour and 10 b/w