Sculpting Animals
1
2021
Dorothée Dupuis
I’m pretty sure that Laurent Le Deunff has no intention of invoking anything so esoteric in the representations of animals that abound in his work at least not deliberately. On the other hand, he has certainly always been aware that the subject matter of his practice is somewhat away from the mainstream, perhaps due to the fact he was born in a semi-rural setting, where he was in regular contact with certain animals: on the farm, animals that were hunted or present around the river near which he grew up, pets, etc. However, these “sightings” of animals in a nonurban environment were not just isolated events as animals were also part of the global audiovisual landscape that young Laurent experienced in the 1980s and 1990s, in the form of millennial archetypes ground out by the Hollywood pop mill. Movies such as The Neverending Story with its dragon-dog and Jaws or Jurassic Park come to mind or TV programs in France such as Thalassa, Chasse et Pêche and 30 Millions d’Amis.2 Even for the urbanites amongst us, the big and small screens have maintained the continuous presence of animals in our lives, more often than not through the prism of an anthropocentric interpretation of their activities, lending them human attitudes and feelings intended to shape our relationships with them as they are portrayed as heroes or victims, powerful or vulnerable, as faithful to man or on the contrary as fleeing from any contact with civilization. Today, as in the past, animals serve as non-consenting protagonists in the construct of how an age old human dilemma is represented: that of the conflict between instinct and domestication, passion and reason or “nature” and “culture.” The animal rights movement3 and its corollary, veganism,4 which seek to put a stop to all animal exploitation, particularly the breeding of animals for slaughter and the consumption of meat, are currents of thought that, in the West, came into being in the middle of the nineteenth century, at the same time as the rise of two other emancipatory movements: the suffragettes and the abolitionists. At the risk of shocking certain people, I would draw a parallel between these three struggles for emancipation, as they concern three groups of living beings: women, the descendants of slaves of African origin and animals. Of course, the status of the latter continues to be debated within society, but we can say that since the 1970s, many currents of anti-speciesist have come to the fore, under the influence of doctrines such as ecofeminism for example. Philosophers such as Donna Haraway, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Rosi Braidotti and Starhawk immediately spring to mind. Their common aim being to defend current alternatives to anthropocentric, positivist thought and to attempt to decenter the vision of the world imposed for centuries by European men and to put forward more horizontal and egalitarian ways of life. Contesting the world vision of Western man and a system of values largely inspired by religion—let’s not be taken in on this point—by opposing it with the understanding and representation of other points of view—whether speculative or not—from other bodies and ecosystems, according to the principles of “strong objectivity,”5 amounts to one of the greatest challenges of our time. These methods constitute an effective tool to confront the conceptual and technological challenges posed by climate change—beyond the hypothetical end of the capitalist system, a struggle the international left finds difficult to conceptualize outside the post-cold war binary logic inherited from the previous century.
Thanks to the current pandemic, these questions are emerging beyond the domain of minority thought and accompanying the past two years’ population shifts towards semi-rural habitats, considered as vectors of a renewed relationship with the environment: Covid 19 has forced us to re-evaluate our connection with nature, as it destabilizes manufacturing chains and highlights the hypothetical failure of our current systems of food production based on extractivism and globalization.
If Laurent Le Deunff’s art was labelled as “archaic” when he graduated in 2001, today he finds himself in exactly the right place at the right time. At the beginning of this century, when everyone was galloping head-on towards the wall of climate change, into which we are currently slamming, Laurent was seemingly already in a period of degrowth, or at least living according to its principles without really knowing it. He has never felt the urge to accelerate, something that complicates his relationship with the art world that constantly demands increased velocity, more participation, more travel and more competition. He is not at all interested in competition. Working from his home in the suburbs of Bordeaux, where his garden has quite logically become an extension of his studio, he has long affirmed autonomy as a driving force of his practice: he wants to do things by himself, to learn new techniques as he faces new conceptual and representational challenges. This “autonomist” rationale that has long been a reaction against the standardized practices of artistic production inherited from Minimalism, which consist of “delegating” the fabrication of works, in order to establish the notion that “artistic genius” is more related to conceptual matters than to craftsmanship or style, has recently been brought into question by Laurent in his collaboration with the rocaille sculptor Philippe Le Feron.6 I’ll come back to the subject of the use of craftsmanship after answering another burning question: why sculpt animals? Laurent refuses to answer this question directly. In his recent publication, L’Incroyable,7 he even goes as far as claiming that animals are not his subject. If animals aren’t his suject, what role do they actually play? In light of the examples and anecdotes cited above, I would like to put forward the following hypothesis. Our relationship with animals—and more broadly with nature in general—has in modern time degenerated to the extent, where for the majority of humans it has become symbolic and is devoid of any reality. In fables, legends and ancestral beliefs, animals had a mythological function, as they do in astrology today—a discipline which Laurent is passionate about. It’s worth asking oneself what functions animal representations have in the context we are experiencing today, where we are increasingly asked to re-evaluate our relationship with nature or at least the relationship our species maintains with others. I would suggest that the choice made by Laurent to focus on the representation of animals and their habitat is based on an overriding intuition concerning the importance of animals in our epoch as a key symbol, at the crossroads of complex environmental, emotional and historic issues that raise the question of who has the right to life and under what conditions. The artist’s dialog with the animal kingdom thus responds to the dual questioning of our relationship with animals: on the one hand a fundamental question concerning the nature of our real relationship with them in this world and on the other, one relating to their symbolic and mythological power. The body of work such as that produced by Laurent, encourages the renewal of this symbolic connection, as it explores the notions of realism and symbolism embedded in age-old traditions of animal representation in art and craft. In this way, Laurent, in setting out to hybridize his practice through the integration of the technical and aesthetic skills of other artisans, is again responding to his own intuition concerning the present time and the intrinsic need to redefine our relationship to both spirituality and technique at the same time.
Laurent—a white, cisgender, heterosexual male—perfectly understands that it isn’t his place to define himself as a feminist, and I can’t imagine the term “anti-speciesist” has ever even crossed his mind. However, he is also a man who assumes the feminine qualities within himself, who admits that being a parent has changed his vision of the world, who assumes the duty of care inherent to parenthood and understands childhood as a period when our connection to the world is different—just as he intuitively understands the unique ethical and existential position of animals in today’s world. This intuition translates in his practice into the particular attention lent to storytelling, world-building, the invention of textures and origins, without ever laying personal claim to the forms as an author might (the infamous genius that we feminists seek to take out once and for all). For all of these reasons, I’d like to put forward Laurent Le Deunff as an ally and welcome him amongst us as such, into the humble yet powerful community of those who want things to change and who constantly agitate in this direction. In the current world of art, such figures are not so numerous
Animals, 2009, Little, Brown & Company, New York.
2. Translator’s note: French TV programs on the subjects of the sea, hunting and fishing and domestic pets.
3. For more information on this topic see: Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, 1975, Harper-Collins, New York.
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veganism
5. Concept developed in the 1980s by scientific theorists such as Sandra Harding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_objectivity
6. Rocaille sculpting is a technique invented at the end of the nineteenth century for producing decorative sculpture in cement. It generally employs a formal vocabulary from the natural worlds, in resonance with the Art Deco and Art Nouveau movements.
7. L’Incroyable, 2021, published by Clotilde Viannay.
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