Abstract
In Art for Animals: Visual Culture and Animal Advocacy, 1870-1914, J. Keri Cronin explores the previously unrecognized 19th century animal activism in the United States and in Great Britain that reimagined animal–human relationships. Previous anthropocentric artists rigidly imposed binary hierarchies that centered human animals but marginalized nonhuman animals. Cronin focuses on those 19th century artists who challenged anthropocentric aesthetics by centering the nonhuman animals in their paintings, photographs, slides, prints, and publications.
Focusing on the period between 1870 and 1914, Cronin’s monograph is at its strongest in relating the stories of artists like Edwin Landseer, Marianne Stokes, Edward Fairholme, William Henry Simons, Kurt Peiser, and A. H. E. Mattingly, who make the invisible sufferings of animals visible to the public. Cronin recounts that Mattingly took a series of photographs during a 1906 expedition to New South Wales, and these photographs became ‘a standard part of the iconography of bird protection in the early twentieth century’ (p. 87). Mattingly’s photographs of starving egrets were used by bird protectors in their fight against the plumage trade.
An additional strength of Art for Animals is its identification of the intersection between art and activism. Rather than isolating these artists in an ‘art for art’s sake’ vacuum, Cronin highlights their integration of artistic production with animal activism. She demonstrates how these artists aimed their art towards reforming injustices in their social, cultural, and political treatments of animals. As a result, Cronin’s discussion of the visual culture of the United States and Great Britain between 1870 and 1914 successfully ties posthumanist aesthetics to social justice praxis.
The significant omissions in Cronin’s monograph are insufficient theorization of posthumanist visual culture and biocentric aesthetics. In order to solve the problems of anthropocentrism, animal studies scholars must identify, name, and categorize the many forms of anthropocentrism. After this theoretical framework has been developed, scholars and activists can begin to address these problems. Absent from this text, however, is a developed biocentric aesthetic framework. For example, Cronin doesn’t fully develop visual theories and concepts for anthropomorphism, animal–human hybridity, animal alterity, and transhuman issues.
The scantiness of her biocentric aesthetic framework is what prompts Cronin herself to lapse into anthropocentric instrumentalizing of animals. In her discussion of the 1838 painting of a life-saving Newfound dog, Bob, entitled A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society, Cronin uncritically discusses the popularity of this painting. She fails to observe that its significance in the eyes of its painter, Sir Edwin Landseer, and its popularity with the British public, were the result of an instrumentalist view of a dog who would jeopardize its own life to save drowning humans. ‘The idea that dogs could be so selfless and brave was enough to make this picture a perfect fit for reformers trying to change the ways in which people thought about nonhuman animals’ (p. 37). Cronin’s uncritical account does not acknowledge that valuing the dog only by virtue of its sacrificial service toward humans neglects the subjectivity and the autonomous being of the nonhuman animal.
Yet the strengths of this excellent and original monograph far outweigh its omissions to my mind. As Cronin herself points out, her study of 19th century animal activist artwork is innovative and unique because she is centering artists who have been marginalized in prior art historical and animal activist scholarship. She writes, ‘Animal advocacy has often been dismissed as trivial and framed as a marginal concern in relation to other pressing social and political issues. Only in recent years have we begun to see serious scholarly attention on this subject’ (p. 25). Cronin’s attention to this vital period in the history of animal advocacy is important for expanding and deepening biocentric scholarship, and this growing body of biocentric scholarship will assist animal advocates in challenging the dominant anthropocentricism of Western culture.