6 Books Bibliography
Faber Kolb, Arianne. Jan Brueghel the Elder: The Entry of Animals into Noah’s Ark. Getty Publications. Los Angeles, 2005.
Brueghel popularized the “paradise landscape,” a new subgenre of landscape painting in the early seventeenth century, which typically represents episodes from Genesis. In Brugehel’s works, numerous exotic and native European species coexist harmoniously in a lush landscape setting. And unlike his predecessors, who emphasized man’s sin, Brueghel invites the viewer to celebrate the beauty and variety of God’s creations. The biblical story of Noah’s Ark could be argued to emphasize the importance of animals’ existence. Instead of saving all of mankind, God saved Noah and his family and two of every single species of animals. The coexistence of/relationship between man and animals is more significant than some may want to believe it to be.
Gates of Heaven. Dir. Errrol Morris. IFC Films, 1978. DVD.
The signs on the pets’ grave markers are eloquent in their way. ``I knew love; I knew this dog.'' ``Dog is God spelled backwards.'' ``For saving my life.'' Morris explores a subject that makes you want to laugh and cry simultaneously. These animal lovers are expressing the deepest of human needs, for love and companionship. ``When I turn my back,'' says Floyd McClure, ``I don't know you, not truly. But I can turn my back on my little dog, and I know that he's not going to jump on me or bite me; but human beings can't be that way.'' Questions that come to mind after watching this film: Is he making fun of those people? Are people ridiculous for caring so much about animals? The film is a put-on, right? It can't really be true?
Grier, Katherine. Pets In America. University of North Carolina Press. Chapel Hill, 2006.
Grier describes the changing cultural sensibilities that have defined the experience of American pet owners from colonial times to the present. She focuses on human-animal relationships and articulates why pets matter. It is connected to changing ideas about human nature, emotional life, individual responsibility and our society’s obligations to all kinds of dependent others. For many of us, pet keeping is the only one-on-one relationship we have left to animals. Many American pet owners share the conviction that pet animals are distinct individuals and their uniqueness should be celebrated.
Hugo, Pieter. The Hyena & Other Men. Prestel Publishing. Munich, 2007.
“I realized that what I found fascinating was the hybridization of the urban and the wild, and the paradoxical relationship that the handlers have with their animals- sometimes doting and affectionate, sometimes brutal and cruel…. I look back at the notebooks I had kept while with them. The words ‘dominance’, ‘codependence’, and ‘submission’ kept appearing. The motifs that linger are the fraught relationships we have with ourselves, with animals and with nature.”
Leal, Brigitte and Simon, Joan. Alexander Calder: The Paris Years 1926-1933. Yale University Press. New Haven, 2008.
For as long as there have been circuses, artists have taken as subjects their performers and their dazzling, often suspenseful, acts. Georges Seurat, Edgar Degas, and Picasso, among others, depicted circuses in Europe; Edward Hopper, George Luks, and John Sloan, did so in the United States. Though Calder had previously painted and drawn the circus, his miniature Circus was something far different: he performed it. Serving as narrator and puppeteer in this early example of performance art, Calder presented his Circus act-by-act in a precise order. The ringmaster (the mainly wire-and-cloth Mr. Loyal) opened the show by welcoming the audience and blowing his whistle. Calder’s version of the contemporary circus’s Roman chariot race served as its finale. ”There is always a feeling of perpetual motion about animals and to draw them successfully this must be borne in mind.” Calder knew how to capture the essence of an animal. There is a primal motion and performance to his circus and animal works. He understood the differences between humans and animals.
Martel, Yann. Beatrice and Virgil: A Novel. Spiegel and Graue. New York, 2010.
“I often get asked the question why I use animals in my stories. Life of Pi was set in a zoo and featured a number of animals, and animals once again play a prominent role in my new novel, Beatrice and Virgil. Am I a great animal lover? Well, I suppose I am; nature is indeed beautiful. But the actual reason I like to use animals is because they help me tell my tale. People are cynical about people, but less so about wild animals. A rhinoceros dentist elicits less skepticism, in some ways, than a German dentist. I also use animals in my fiction because people rarely see animals as they truly are, biologically. Rather, they tend to project human traits onto them, seeing nobility in one species, cowardice in another, and so on. This is biological nonsense, of course; every species is and behaves as it needs to in order to survive. But this animal-as-canvas quality is useful for a storyteller. It means that an animal that people feel kindly towards becomes a character that readers feel kindly towards.” -Yann Martel on Animals and the Holocaust in Beatrice and Virgil.
Shay, Art. Animals. University of Illinois. Urbana, 2002.
Shooting animal pictures that transcend ordinary human or bestial behavior is often a test of one’s own character: Do I shoot the picture or get involved? In Freud’s view, famously enlisted by Scott F. Fitzgerald, one test of sanity is being able to hold two opposing ideas in mind yet continue to function. (Referring to image on pg. 108.) Shay avoids the “cutes” while still displaying humans imitating animals. Shay, “we imitate those we love and they imitate us.” Shay illuminates the shameless extent to which people will go for their animals and reveals the lives some chose to share with animals. (See pg. 9, 55, 25, 87)
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