The question of life has always been one of modernity’s main preoccupations, but it was the advent of the camera—with its ability to record moving creatures—that initiated a new phase in the human investigation of animal behavior. In the world of contemporary art, animals now occupy center stage. Artworks such as Joseph Beuys’s I Like America and America Likes Me (1974), a weeklong performance in New York during which the artist lived with a coyote, and Rosemarie Trockel and Carsten Höller’s Haus für Schweine und Menschen at documenta X (1997), demonstrate the idea that culture, self-consciousness, and language do not exclusively belong to man. Drawing on key texts by Sergei Eisenstein, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Donna Haraway, and analyzing works by Pierre Huyghe, Christoph Keller, and Helen Marten, this volume brings together theory and art, showing how both turned to animals to find new ways of problematizing “life.”
