The Animage and the Artist

The animal is the animot. The animal is always told, imagined and represented. Although some artefacts that – to a modern observer – might appear like artistic phenomena precede the emergence of Homo sapiens, the fact is that the accomplished humanity of the human essentially coincides with the appearance of visual representations of animal life (Tattersall 1998; Guthrie 2005). The human has become itself by painting the animal. Indeed, in art, ‘we recognize two key elements: (1) an extraction from direct instrumental communication; and (2) a duplicitous logic of representation: there is what it is or presents, and there is what it conveys only in some figurative form’ (Deacon 2006: 22). Without wholly adopting a Kantian standpoint we can say that art presupposes a somehow ‘disinterested’ gaze, that is to say that a visual representation of a buffalo (for example) has no explicit and clear biological purpose. The image, that is, is not directly linked to survival, unlike a fur pelt or an axe, products with a clear biological purpose. At the same time, as stressed by Terrence Deacon, the artistic gaze implies a doubling, between that which is shown and what this ‘means’. But this doubling, in turn, presupposes an even deeper and more radical separation between the representer and the represented, the subject and the object. The anonymous painter who, in a Pleistocene era cave, traced the contours of an animal's shape on the wall was also declaring him- or herself to be different from that animal. He or she was marking a difference by stating: I am not that buffalo. In this sense, a visual representation of an object – and art in general (both representational and non-representational) – attests to the cognitive distance separating the human from the rest of the natural world. I paint; therefore I am not an animal. According to Deacon, this cognitive peculiarity of human art forms is linked to art's role as a symbolic activity: indeed, ‘art seems to have a sort of cognitive complementarity to language’ (2006: 23).