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Once And Ever AliveA caged leopard. Mute dogs. Bloody, slaughtered cattle. A grounded bird. With an unflinching gaze and an aura of cool, objective detachment, Los Animistas uses video, photography, scientific illustration, text, and taxidermy to create pristine tableaux of animals subjected to the will and direction of humans. Their sculptures and works on paper combine scientific analysis, images of remains, accounts of abusive treatment, and more. As such, the creatures in Los Animistas’s artworks are seen at their most undignified, most degraded. The assumption underlying this work is that animals are perceived of as existing for human consumption, use, and pleasure. Yet, the formal qualities of the art's appearance belie the slower-burning emotional power of the work itself. The very name of the artwork’s collaborators – Los Animistas, or “the animist” – indicates that the group identifies not just with animals but, specifically, with the notion of animism: the belief that all natural objects and indeed the universe itself have souls. In its practice, Los Animistas considers the suffering of animals, the ethics of food production, and the nature of human and animal interaction. Los Animistas is a three-person collective founded in 2000, at the tail end of Cuba’s Special Period, an era of economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Based in Los Angeles and Havana, Los Animistas is comprised of a visual artist, a television producer, and a biologist who specializes in vertebrate zoology. Dr. Carlos Arredondo Atunez has taught biological sciences for over twenty years at the University of Havana; Alberto del Rey has received numerous accolades and honors for his work at Havana’s Ciudad Libertad in the field of television production; and Los Angeles resident and artist Tammy Singer is the first and, to date, only US citizen to have earned a degree at the Superior Art Institute in Havana. We humans have always had a complex relationship to the rest of the animal kingdom, one that embodies many contradictions. In addition to objects of trade, consumption, abuse, and psychological projection, animals have also served as a source of awe, speculation, wonder, and even arousal. We go to zoos, we pamper our pets, we save whales. Some of us worship animals. They have inspired us as far back as we can recall; Dedalus and Icarus attempted flight, and the efforts of those in Lascaux continue to dazzle us, thousands of years later, through graceful, economic renderings of prey. In the case of Los Animistas’s "Ave Migratoria," (2007) we see images of a man with makeshift wings made of giant banana leaves affixed to his arms, Quixotically attempting to lift off the ground; he is embargoed, grounded on earth (specifically, on Cuban soil – adding a political dimension to the piece). As in the artwork of Damien Hirst, death is a central theme for Los Animistas. One of Hirst’s early works as a YBA, A Thousand Years (1990), contains an actual life cycle and consists of a claustrophobic glass case containing maggots and flies feeding off a rotting cow's head. Los Animistas’s video Vertebra (2007) shows an image of a cow’s vertebral column being collected by an ambulance from the bedroom of a modest home; a pseudo-scientific artifact anthropomorphized, is treated as would be an ill or injured human, suggesting an examination of the rituals around health, illness, medicine, and death, in the age of expediency and corporate medical care. Los Animistas embeds images of absurd actions, death, and decay in an aesthetic that quotes not only the polish and refinement of carefully crafted, conceptual work, but also the traditions of museum display. Using scientific and academic tropes and techniques –including reconstruction, scientific illustration, and museological strategies – Los Animistas asserts critiques of cultural dominance, political authority, and social values. US-based artist Mark Dion uses similar strategies; his work explores the ways dominant ideologies and public cultural institutions influence and inform our understanding of history, authority, knowledge, and the natural world. Appropriating scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects (which are themselves, to a great degree, animals and animal artifacts), Dion, like Los Animistas, creates works that question the distinctions between presumably objective scientific methods and unabashedly subjective influences. The quality of interconnectedness suggested in the group’s work is reminiscent of the practice of Cuban-American artist Enrique Martinez Celaya, who likewise has a background that integrates science, technology, and art. Celaya’s diverse interests are brought to multimedia works in an effort to seek understanding about the cycles of nature, the rhythms of life, and the mysterious spaces that exist between tangible things. With its overtones of spirituality and compassion, seen through a filter of presumed scientific and cultural authority, Los Animistas locates the spirit, as well as the dignity, within once-alive forms. From that dignity emerges a quality of perseverance, of persistence, despite obstacles such as muteness, or being caged, or lack of flight. Los Animistas revels in contradictions. In light of the relationship of its members to Cuba and the political and economic constraints that have existed there, the group’s images take on qualities that are both tender and critical, in works that are steeped in allegory. The various elements in their multi-media installations invoke vulnerability and entrapment and, paradoxically, liberation. Irene Tsatsos Los Animistas Los Animistas is a cross-disciplinary team, comprised of a visual artist, a video artist, and a biologist/anthropologist. The team came together to unite artistic and biological investigative fields in considering ethical, aesthetic and ecological issues. In addition to their expertise in their individual fields, each member of the Los Animistas team has also acquired both art and science credentials in the United States and Cuba. Their collaboration represents a union of art and biology, along with a richly fertile mélange of cultural antecedents. Through their individual careers, the Los Animistas team members have all worked extensively with animals, accumulating both hands-on experience and academic knowledge. When they function as a group, it is the animal that the team employs as the primary image, 'object', and metaphor of their installations. Recent works include such taxidermy native Cuban wildlife as vultures, scorpions, fighting cocks, and crocodiles. Comprising presentation of taxidermy creatures alongside scientific studies, drawings, video footage, photographs, and both natural and artificial artifacts, Los Animistas' installations displace the animals from their natural habitat, bring them into an artistic environment that also inculcates scientific processes, and pose them before us, dead and stuffed. By both intentionally celebrating that bond and deliberately invoking its ties and responsibilities in the integrated contexts of artistic pursuit and scientific investigation, Los Animistas' work powerfully stimulates consideration of the relationship between nature and human culture, and most particularly of the investigative pathologies by which we have defined and examine the 'natural' as an entity separate from ourselves. They are an early harbinger of the full collaboration between Cuban and American thinkers expected in years to come.
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