Animals and Artists is now available!
By Elizabeth Eleanor Jacqueline Atkinson
Animals and Artists: An Exploration of Impossible Encounters discusses a selection of modern and contemporary artworks that challenge traditional representations of nonhuman animals, and that expose human viewers to animal otherness. It argues that the individuated and discrete human self in possession of consciousness, rationality, empathy, a voice and a face is open to challenge by nonhuman capacities such as distributed cognition, gender ambiguity, metamorphosis, mimicry and avian speech.
By combining art analysis with poststructuralist, post-humanist and animal studies theories as well as scientific research, Atkinson decentres the human and establishes a new position where differences are embraced. In our current moment of ecological crisis, Animals and Artists brings readers into solidarity with other animal species.
