Anthropos 56 (2): 391–411 | issn0587-5161 | e-issn 2630-4082
Looking into the Face of an Animal
As a Mirror: The Case Study
of Marina Abramović’s Gaze
into the Donkey’s Eyes/Face
Suzana Marjanić
Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb
suzana@ief.hr
© 2024 Suzana Marjanić
Abstract. In the context of Una Chaudhuri’s interpretation on ani-
mal faces, the article focuses on the performance Confession (2010),
in which Marina Abramović uses a donkey’s face as a mirror of her
own past/trauma. Specifically, this example provides us with an op-
portunity to explore Derrida’s (2002, 376) question: ‘How can an an-
imal look you in the face?’ As Derrida (p. 376) points out, according
to Martin Buber’s book I and Thou (1923), an animal’s eyes have the
power to speak a great language . . . ‘Sometimes I look into a cat’s eyes’
(Buber 1958, 96–97). Additionally, the article interprets three more
performances (by Croatian artists – Saša Živković, Šikuti Machine and
Hrvoje Cokarić) involving confrontations-mirroring with animals. The
meeting between a man and an animal is, therefore, always ‘the meet-
ing of two subjectivities, two wills, which by definition are mutually
exclusive’ (Grušovnik 2023, 13).
Key Words: face of an animal, performance art,Marina Abramović and
donkey
Pogled v obraz živali kot v ogledalo: študija primera
Gaze into the Donkey’s Eyes/Face Marine Abramović
Povzetek. V kontekstu interpretacije Une Chaudhuri o živalskih obra-
zih se članek osredotoča na performans Confession (2010), v katerem
Marina Abramović uporabi oslovski obraz kot ogledalo lastne pretek-
losti/travme. Natančneje, ta primer nam ponuja priložnost, da razi-
ščemo Derridajevo (2002, 376) vprašanje: »Kako ti lahko žival pogleda
v obraz?«. Kot poudarja Derrida (str. 376), imajo v skladu s knjigoMar-
tina Bubra Jaz in ti (1923) živalske oči sposobnost spregovoriti v veli-
častnem jeziku . . . »Včasih gledam v mačje oči« (Buber 1958, 96–97).
Poleg tega članek interpretira še tri performanse (hrvaških umetnikov
https://doi.org/10.26493/2630-4082.56.391-411
Suzana Marjanić
– Saše Živkovića, Šikuti Machine in Hrvoja Cokarića), ki vključujejo
soočenje/odražanje z živalmi. Srečanje med človekom in živaljo je to-
rej vedno »srečanje dveh subjektivitet, dveh volja, ki se po definiciji
izključujeta« (Grušovnik 2023, 13).
Ključne besede: obraz živali, performativna umetnost,MarinaAbramo-
vić in osel
An animal looks at us and we are naked before it (her/him).
Thinking, perhaps, begins there.
Jacques Derrida
Marcus Bullock (2002, 99) opens up his article ‘Watching Eyes, Seeing
Dreams, Knowing Lives’ with the question ‘What do we see when we
look at an animal?’ Following this question, this article documents sev-
eral performances (art) that explore the concept of using an animal’s face
as a mirror. There have been various performances and artistic explo-
rations where the faces of animals are used metaphorically as mirrors,
reflecting human emotions, perceptions, or societal issues. One notable
example is the work of French artist Pierre Huyghe. In his film and in-
stallation Untitled/Human Mask (2014), Huyghe created a sculpture of
a monkey wearing a realistic human mask. This installation challenges
viewers to consider the erasing of boundaries between human and an-
imal (non-human), raising questions about identity, consciousness, and
the human tendency to anthropomorphize animals,¹ and ‘evokes many
such themes: the monotony of work and the repetition of ritualistic be-
haviours, the possibility of a catastrophic future, and the power that living
creatures hold over us as ciphers of ourselves’ (Huyghe 2014).
It is no coincidence that Una Chaudhuri begins her essay ‘(De)Facing
the Animals: Zooësis and Performance’ (2007) with countering Derrida’s
philosophical question ‘How can an animal look you in the face?’ with
the question ‘Did your food have a face?’ posed on the activist posters
¹Anthropomorphism, which is often labelled as a blind spot in animal ethics, was excep-
tionally clarified by ethologist Frans de Waal when he stated that some other scientists
always objected to him, asking if the term ‘reconciliation,’ in the context of his study of
chimpanzees, was overly anthropomorphized. On the other hand, de Waal points out,
expressions related to aggression, violence and competition have never been problematic
in scientific anthropomorphism; therefore, as soon as it was about a friendly outcome of
the fight, it was demanded that one switch to a dehumanized language (cf. Grušovnik
2023, 67; cf. Mota-Royas et al. 2021; cf. Moussaieff Masson and McCarthy 2004, 15).
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Looking into the Face of an Animal As a Mirror
(the skinned head/face of a slaughtered animal) of People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals/peta (2001).
The image is not of a face at all: it is of the head of a carcass, skinned
and bloody. It is an image of amissing face, aptly representing the dis-
appeared animal of the modern meat industry, which invests hugely
in suppressing such images, and which systematically and literally
keeps its operations, its vast animal factories, hidden – and keeps
us, the consumers, in the dark. [Chaudhuri 2007, 13]
John Berger focuses primarily on the gaze of one animal, specifically
the gaze of a captive animal, as emphasized by Kari Weil in her article
‘Killing Them Softly: Animal Death, Linguistic Disability, and the Strug-
gle for Ethics’ (2006). The gaze that Berger argues we lost in the nine-
teenth century can equally be the gaze of the animal we kill, whether in
the context of slaughter for food or slaughter in the name of art (cf. Berger
2007). This gaze of the animal at the moment of its slaughter also appears
in the academic novels on animal rights – Lives of Animals and Elizabeth
Costello by J. M. Coetzee (cf. Marjanić 2022).
The Donkey’s Gaze and the Gaze in the Donkey’s Eyes/Face
As mentioned in the introduction, we will focus on the view of the an-
imal, specifically on the face of the animal included in the performance
arts, with the duo performance Confession (2010) by Marina Abramović
as our starting point. In this performance, the artist uses the donkey’s face
as a mirror, an escape from the faces of people and culture, as a form of
rest, and as an opportunity to confess her own trauma, as a mirror of her
own past/trauma. We can use this example to explore the question: ‘How
can an animal look you in the face?,’ raised by Jacques Derrida (2002,
377), which is one of his central concerns. Derrida pointed out that, ac-
cording toMartin Buber’s book I and Thou (1923) (English translation by
Ronald Gregor Smith in 1958), an animal’s eyes have the power to speak
a great language (Buber 1958, 96–97). Marina Abramović, in her perfor-
mance/video piece titled Confession (2010, 60 min), confronts a donkey
while kneeling before him. She explains:²
I took one donkey into the backyard of Nicholas’s [Nicholas Logs-
dail] house and made a video piece called ‘Confession.’ I confessed
²Https://www.facebook.com/300806525911/posts/i-took-one-donkey-into-the-backyard
-of-nicholass-house-and-made-a-video-piece-ca/10156176855450912/.
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Suzana Marjanić
to the donkey all the flaws and mistakes of my whole life, starting
from my childhood and extending to that day.
Only by the slight swaying of the donkey’s tail can one conclude that
the recording (video) is not frozen. Abramović states that she chose this
animal because of the donkey’s exceptional power of immobility, persis-
tence, and endurance. She does not mention the speciesist attribution of
that animal as supposedly stubborn.³ First, she tried, by her words, to
bewitch the animal, hypnotize him,⁴ and then silently narrated her life’s
misfortunes to him as a way of freeing her memory – a confession like a
strip of text scrolling across a screen. After the donkey left the interaction
an hour later, the artist said she felt a little better (Racanović 2019, 201).
Trisha McCagh points out that animals will mirror us for different rea-
sons. ‘They are our constant companions and “roommates” in our home’
(McCagh n.d.). In the context of the mirroring process, McCagh also
notes that ‘our animals’ mirror our conditions and issues and this is the
point where animal communication is the key to uncovering our animal’s
problems.
Theperformancewith the donkeywas conducted by the artist in prepa-
ration for her performance piece The Artist Is Present,which involved her
sitting for eight hours a day over a period of three months in 2010. She
trained formonths to build the physical stamina to perform the piece, and
in hermemoirWalk throughWalls (2019), Marina Abramović comments
on how the performance demonstrated the profound need for people to
connect. In The Artist Is Present, the artist perceptively faced individu-
als face-to-face to get as deep as possible into their psyche and encourage
them to think about the meaning of life. After a month of performance-
³The donkey is primarily symbolically associated with the ‘qualities of stubbornness, ig-
norance, foolishness. It is characterized by its unpleasant voice and long ears, as well as
its use for heavy labor. However, in its native habitat of Central Asia and North Africa,
the wild donkey does not exhibit the negative traits of its European-transplanted relative.
In Phrygia, he was worshipped (Midas I), and he figured as a highly esteemed animal
among the Romans. Today, he is featured in the emblem of the American Democratic
Party’ (Hansen-Kokoruš 2016, 43–52). The donkey/ass was first domesticated in ancient
Egypt around 3000 bc, well over a millennium before the horse (Sax 2001, 14; Bough
2012). Unfortunately, in anthropocentric history textbooks, the fact that a small Egyptian
white donkey was exploited in the construction of the pyramids is often omitted as well
as the fact that ‘the ancient Egyptians are using donkeys as their only beast of burden’
(Bough 2012, 184).
⁴ I do not use the pronoun ‘it’ for animals in accordance with the concept of rejecting
linguistic speciesism, as advocated by Joan Dunayer (2004).
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confrontation, she removed the small wooden table in front of her so
she could be as close as possible to the person with whom she had a
psycho-emotional duel, conversation, confrontation and/or mirroring.
At the same time, the artist also tried to contribute to the associative ef-
fect of the spectacle with her clothes; she had a blue dress in March, red
in April and white in May. Abramović states that blue signifies peace and
tranquillity, red stands for energy, and white, as the last colour, purifica-
tion (Marković 2011, 196).⁵
Just as the mirror serves as a reflection of the world (Bandić 1997, 190),
so too do the eyes of the donkey in this performance function as a passage
for the artist between two worlds, two realities – between trauma (the
past, the autobiographical story written on the screen) and the present
(the encounter with the eyes of the donkey). The eyes of the donkey al-
most serve as doors of perception (in Aldous Huxley’s sense) for con-
fronting one’s own past. This is, in fact, the bottomless gaze discussed by
Derrida (2002, 381), in reference to Lévinas:
In looking at the gaze of the other, Lévinas says, one must forget
the color of his eyes, in other words see the gaze, the face that gazes
before seeing the visible eyes of the other. But when he reminds us
that the ‘best way ofmeeting theOther is not even to notice the color
of his eyes,’ he is speaking of man, of one’s fellow as man, kindred,
brother; he thinks of the other man and this, for us, will later be
revealed as a matter for serious concern.
While Derrida poses the question physically naked before the gaze of
his cat, Marina Abramović autobiographically exposes all the flaws and
mistakes of her entire life before a donkey. However, the effect in meeting
the gaze of the animal seems to be the same, regardless of whether he/she
involves the body or the psyche. In communication with the gaze of the
animal, the Cartesian dichotomy between body and psyche, spirit, disap-
pears. Or, as Derrida (2002, 381) would say about his cat’s gaze upon his
naked body when he rose from the bathtub:
As with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other, the gaze
called animal offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the
inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say the bor-
der crossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to
⁵Cf. ‘Mirror Your Audience: Four Life Lessons From Performance Artist Marina Abramo-
vić’ (n.d.).
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Suzana Marjanić
himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives
himself.
In the aftermath of the cathartic experience of The Artist Is Present, the
artist performed the series Back to Simplicity in 2010, stemming from her
need to re-establish a simple and immediate connection with nature. As
the artist stated (‘Marina Abramovic: Luciana Brito Galeria’ n.d.):
[. . . ] after I had been looking at one thousand six hundred and sev-
enty five pairs of eyes, after that incredible human connection, I
needed to be connectedwith nature. [. . . ] Being under a tree, holding
a lamb for two days, in complete joy, that’s what Back to Simplicity is
all about.⁶
The aforementioned emphasis on the dichotomy between nature (a
lamb resting under a tree) and culture/sophistication (in the Museum of
Modern Art –moma) is evident, as the artist not only engaged in direct
eye contact with the audience but was also observed and gazed upon by
both the audience and monitored by the media. What the artist refers to
as a return to nature is, of course, not natural for the lamb shewas holding
in her arms.
In relation to Confession, I note Emmanuel Lévinas’s thinking about
the face of animals. Specifically, in Lévinas’s ethics, the Other appears as
a face, interlocutor and transcendence, or, in his words in Totality and
Infinity: ‘Because the face (of the Other) does not belong to my world,
despite appearing in my world, I cannot eradicate it. In a very profound
sense, then, the Other remains’ (Lévinas 1979, 189–199). But we should
add that Jan-Harm de Villiers (2020) noted that Lévinas’s writings on an-
imals are ‘problematic in denying (albeit inconsistently) that the animal
is capable of eliciting an ethical response or, put simply, that all animals
have a face.’ Lévinas pointed out the following in The Paradox of Moral-
ity: ‘One cannot entirely refuse the face of an animal. It is via the face that
one understands, for example, a dog’ (Lévinas 1988, 169 in Burgat 2015,
186). The face-to-face relation (French: rapport de face à face)⁷ is a con-
cept in Levinas’s thought on human sociality. Itmeans that, ethically, peo-
ple are responsible to one another in the face-to-face encounter. Specifi-
cally, Lévinas says that the human face ‘orders and ordains’ us. It calls
⁶Cf. ‘Marina Abramović: Holding the Lamb, 2010’ (n.d.), Breese (2010); ‘Marina Abramo-
vić’ (2022).
⁷Unlike Lévinas, Erving Goffman in his book Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face
Behavior (1967) did not study interspecies relations.
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the subject into ‘giving and serving’ the Other.⁸ Marcus Bullock (2002,
99), whom I mentioned at the beginning of this article, states that the
muteness that shrouds animals’ senses accompanies us in the realm of our
language.
In the case of Bobby, a dogwho greeted Jewish prisoners in a concentra-
tion camp as humans, Lévinas concluded in his essay ‘TheNameof aDog,
or Natural Rights’ that animals can be far more humane than humans (cf.
Crowe 2008, 315–316). He wrote that Bobby ‘was the last Kantian in Nazi
Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives’
(Lévinas 1990, 153). Svendsen (2019, 137) adds that this statement is ironic
because it is known that Adolf Eichmann declared himself a Kantian.
Svendsen critiques Lévinas’s claims that animals are supposedly incapable
of showing interest in or caring for others for their own sake, contrast-
ing this with Lévinas’s view that humans are defined by their openness to
others. However, Svendsen emphasizes that Lévinas and other interned,
detained persons, the Jews in the concentration camp who experienced
Bobby’s gaze, recognized him as a gaze, perceived it as one of friendship
and loyalty (p. 139). On another occasion, Lévinas emphasized that ‘one
cannot entirely refuse the face of the animal. [. . . ] Yet the priority here
is not found in the animal, but in the human face’ (Lévinas 1988, 169 in
Crowe 2008, 315).
MarinaAbramović’s profound interactionwith a donkey (through gaze
and eyes),⁹ as expressed in her personal narrative of childhood trauma,
exemplifies a shift towards psychological communication with animals.
By gazing into the donkey’s eyes, Abramović uses the animal’s visage as
a mirror of her own trauma, thereby emphasizing the potential for emo-
tional connection and understanding between humans and animals. Of
course, this can be seen as one-way communication, where the artist re-
leases her own trauma through the eyes, or gaze, of a donkey, as a radical
animal studies interpretation of the work might emphasize. This possi-
ble and realistic interpretation of the duo-performance Confession can
be connected to Steve Baker’s critique of Beuys’s weeklong gallery action
⁸Cf. Burgat (2015).
⁹ Similarly, photographer Tim Flach achieves sensory identification most strikingly and
obviously by highlighting the animal’s eyes (Kramer 2005, 145): ‘Flach applies meticulous
care to the problem of illuminating the eyes. [. . . ] Before shooting can commence, Flach
spends hours “bending the light” so that the eyes of the animal model are illuminated
with requisite precision (a procedure which usually tires the subject long before shooting
has even begun).’
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Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me, performed in 1974 at the
René Block Gallery in New York. The performance juxtaposes living ani-
mals with a rather clumsy and/or shamanic human symbolism (cf. Antliff
2014, 107–110; Baker 2000, 151). Although Beuys emphasized that it was a
shamanic encounter with an animal symbolizing the indigenous peoples
conquered by Western colonialism (which is why the coyote urinates on
the Wall Street Journal), Steve Baker (2003, 150–151) focuses on Beuys’s
symbolic use of the gloves that the artist repeatedly threw to the coyote,
Little John:
The spectacle presented to viewers through the chainlink fencing
separating them from themain space of the gallery, took the form of
the artist’s and the animals continuing interactionwith each other as
the week progressed [. . . ]. [A] confrontation of human and animal,
through which, Beuys suggested, ‘the roles were exchanged imme-
diately.’
Although initially structured by a cycle of ritualized actions, Beuys was
acting out the limits of his own control of the situation, with the coyote
figuring for him as ‘an important co-operator in the production of free-
dom’ (Baker 2003, 151). The animal enabled the artist to edge closer to
that which ‘the human being cannot understand’ (p. 151).
Unlike Abramović, who focuses on the gaze, Beuys focuses on the
hands, and in this symbolic interaction he threw his gloves to the coy-
ote, about which he said the following (Baker 2003, 151):
The brown gloves represent my hands, and the freedom of move-
ment that human beings possess with their hands. They have the
freedom to do the widest range of things, to utilise any number of
tools and instruments. They can wield a hammer or cut with a knife.
They can write or mould forms. Hands are universal, and this is the
significance of the human hand [. . . ]. They are not restricted to one
specific use like the talons of an eagle or the mole’s diggers. So the
throwing of the gloves to Little John meant giving him my hands to
play with.
Baker (2003, 151) links Beuys’s statement about gloves/hands to Hei-
degger’s (1947) Letter to Humanism:
His initial theses, framed as a means of assessing how it was possi-
ble to know or to have access to the experience of the world, ran as
follows:
1. The stone is wordless.
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Looking into the Face of an Animal As a Mirror
2. The animal is poor in world.
3. Man is world-forming.
After the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina bought Marina
Abramović’s video performance Confession for $80,000, reactions arose
concerning the poor economic situation in Serbia.¹⁰ Additionally, car-
toonist Corax (real name Predrag Korakšić), a renowned Serbian car-
toonist for the newspaper Danas, created a cartoon featuring a šajkača
(traditional Serbian men’s cap) atop a donkey’s head, inviting the artist to
examine Serbia’s historical trauma instead of Marina Abramović’s own.
‘The cartoon raises the question that is on everyone’s minds: Will the ex-
hibition Cleaner (the title of one of the artist’s exhibition in Belgrade in
2019) provide an opportunity for Serbia, as well as forMarina Abramović,
to move past the sins of the past and pave the way for a long-awaited
reconciliation?’ (Novi Magazin, 2019). Questions were also raised as to
whether the donkey was drugged, given that he stoodmotionless in front
of Marina Abramović and watched for an hour.¹¹
Finally, in relation to the mirroring effect seen in the faces of ani-
mals in Marina Abramović’s performances, it is worth noting that she
also utilized the human skeleton to achieve similarmirroring purposes.¹²
The video piece Cleaning the Mirror ii (1995) involves the act of steady,
deep, conscious breathing by the artist, which sets in motion the skeleton
placed on her naked body. This produces a living, supine sculpture with a
breathing skeletonwhich is revived through the artist and her naked body
(Racanović 2019, 167). The act affirms the reconciliation of the livingwith
their own mortality; the skeleton is a mirror, just as the donkey serves
as a mirror into/through the same kind of mortality in the performance
Confession.Nancy Spector, the curator of the GuggenheimMuseum, em-
phasizes that this work, alongwithCleaning the Mirror ii, evokes ‘Tibetan
death rites that prepare disciples to become one with their ownmortality’
¹⁰The unpaid nature of animal labour can be explored in performance works, as Nico-
las Ridout (2006) demonstrates. Thus, with the return of the animal to the stage, its
strangeness does not stem from the idea that he/she has no place there or nothing to
seek, but rather from the realization that there is suddenly nothing strange about it. We
sense that the animal does indeed have something to seek on the stage and that he/she
can be used much like any human performer.
¹¹Cf. Stojanov (2018).
¹²The artist does not treat the donkey’s eyes as a mirror in terms of objectification. Rather,
they represent subjectivization, allowing the artist to achieve a ‘view of confession’ that
she could not attain with human beings.
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Suzana Marjanić
Figure 1 Marina Abramović, Confession (2010). ‘For the majority of the film however,
the donkey remains posed – virtually frozen and with a deceptively
sympathetic look in his eye – opposite the artist’ (Amicus Asini 2016; photo
Marko Ercegović/msuv, by courtesy of Film, Video and Photography
Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, Novi Sad)
(Spector n.d.; cf. Pešić 2017, 121). The same scene of lying with the skele-
ton, filmed from a different angle, became the foundation for her video
performance Nude with Skeleton in 2005 (Pešić 2017, 121).¹³
Reading as Mirroring to Animals
In contrast to the silent mirror confrontation with an animal and the
psycho-emotional confession, I present two examples of confrontations
with animals in which artists read selected works to animals.¹⁴
¹³The dark, mysterious world of Tibetan monks is the basis for her three video perfor-
mances dealing with death that M. Abramović entitled Cleaning the Mirror (1995). She
conceived the performances after an invitation from art critic Chrissie Iles to exhibit at
the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford (Pešić, 2017, 121).
¹⁴The classicway to study self-awareness in animals, as encyclopedia notes highlight, iswith
the mirror test developed by Gordon Gallup, Jr. in 1970. To conduct the test, an animal’s
body is secretlymarked, for example by placing odorless red dye on the face, and then the
animal is given access to a mirror. Gallup refers to the mirror test as the real metaphor
of the ancient Greek aphorism ‘Gnothi seauton,’ the looking glass as self-awareness. As
stated by veterinarianMarty Becker, among animals, only higher primates, dolphins, or-
cas, elephants, and European magpies are currently known to recognize that what they
see in a mirror is a reflection of themselves. While pigs show no sign of recognizing their
own reflections, they can use other information seen in the mirror, such as identifying
the location of food placed behind them (Becker 2012). In his chapter titled ‘Through the
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Looking into the Face of an Animal As a Mirror
Figure 2 Saša Živković: Reading Zerzan (2022) to the Donkeys (photo by Kruno Jošt)
Reading Zerzan is a performance by Croatian artist Saša Živković per-
formed in 2022 in the village Rasoja (Lovinac, Lika, Croatia, the Lovinac
Performance Nights). Živković reads John Zerzan’s text The Case Against
Art (2009) to donkeys who listen to him, and at the end of the reading
they leave. Živković’s performances, which at first glance appear as a sim-
ple or ironic joke, have deeper philosophical foundations (‘mmk22 pred-
stavlja: lvpperformans “Čitanje Zerzana”’ 2022). In this performance, he
opted for John Zerzan’s anarcho-primitivism, which is not just a mere as-
sessment of values, and the performance refers to a ‘non-human’ audience
in the open space (in nature, the natural habitat for these donkeys – the
audience).
In the aforementioned essay, among other points, Zerzan expresses
criticism towards avant-gardes that have lost their original essence by
succumbing to sensationalism. He also voices criticism over the symbolic
value of art, arguing that it should return to reality (Zerzan n.d.):
Mirror, in the Puzzle,’ Svendsen (2019, 67–70) highlights various points, including the
fact that dogs and cats do not pass the mirror test. Svendsen explains that dogs primarily
rely on their sense of smell for orientation, as emphasized by Stanley Coren’s observation
on the mental abilities and intellectual potential of dogs: ‘I smell, therefore, I exist.’ Hear-
ing is the second most important sense for dogs, while sight ranks third. Considering
the problematic aspects of the mirror test, it becomes evident that it lacks significance in
terms of detecting self-awareness. Or as Lesley J. Rogers and Gisela Kaplan point out, the
mirror test tells us little, if anything at all, of themental aspect of the self. Another notable
drawback of the test ‘is the fact that it can be used only on captive animals, which may
not be representative of their species’ (Rogers and Kaplan 2004, 177).
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Suzana Marjanić
Figure 3 Šikuti Machine: Darko Pekica, Vogrda (2011), or Reading the poem
‘Miracles’ by Walt Whitman to the Cows (photo by Andi Bačić)
Reacting against the increasing mechanization of life, avant-garde
movements have not, however, resisted the spectacular nature of art
any more than orthodox tendencies have. In fact, one could argue
that Aestheticism, or ‘art for art’s sake,’ is more radical than an at-
tempt to engage alienation with its own devices. The late 19th cen-
tury art pour l’art development was a self-reflective rejection of the
world, as opposed to the avant-garde effort to somehow organize life
around art.
The artist points out that as far as contact is concerned, the animals
were calm and sometimes timid when he read the text a little more ex-
pressively; it is interesting¹⁵ that as he was throwing pages, one of the she-
donkeys ate a few pages. Patience was closely related to feeding, as they
were given hay.
The next example of a performance involving reading to animals is
the video performance Vogrda by Šikuti Machine (2011), named after a
meadowwhereDarko Pekica (the author of the video performance) reads
Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Miracles’ while tending to his cows. The connec-
tion to anarcho-primitivism, as outlined by John Zerzan, can also be seen
in the activities of the Šikuti Machine collective from Savičenta. Their
¹⁵Here I emphasize that I personally found it interesting as a visual sight.
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Looking into the Face of an Animal As a Mirror
Figure 4 Hrvoje Cokarić and Vanja Pagar: Export, 14th Days of Performance Art
in Varaždin 2015
work affirms village life by demystifying artistic processes and promot-
ing rural culture¹⁶ toward a place of greater cultural recognition.
The very name of the Šikuti Machine group symbolically refers to the
link between rural, or, as the collective itself says, peasant life in Šikuti
near Savičenta (in Istria) and modern technology.
While Živković chose to read Zerzan’s critique of avant-gardes that
have lost their original essence by succumbing to sensationalism, Darko
Pekica chose Whitman (n.d.) who addresses (our) existence in the ‘mar-
vellouslymarvellous’ poem ‘Miracles’ (published in the 1855 edition of his
book of poetry, Leaves of Grass), starting from everyday observations, the
physical and material world, enumerating a series of poetic images, pos-
sible scenes, situations and experiences to their bridging, transcendence
and merging with the spiritual, from a walk through the streets of Man-
hattan, a bee in an apiary, other insects in the air, thewonders of the sunset
¹⁶Under the term ‘rural,’ ŠikutiMachines also refer to nature in a simplified sense, as part of
the binary opposition between village and city. However, we can also use the compound
term ‘natureculture,’ first introduced by Bruno Latour in We Have Never Been Modern
(1993; originally published in French in 1991), to denote the ontological inseparability
of nature and society. As Jane Bennett (2010, 108) puts it, we live in an era ‘when the
interactions between human, viral, animal, and technological bodies are becoming more
and more intense.’
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Suzana Marjanić
or the thin arc of the new moon, all the way to the movement of the sea.
Finally, in this reflection on life and everything visible – here, there, next
to us, and even what we sometimes fail to notice – he concludes the poem
with the question ‘What strangemiracles can there be?’ At the same time,
the poem about miracles seems to ask the question ‘Is there such a thing
as a miracle?’ Specifically, while some would look for miraculous heal-
ing or resurrection from the dead or some other such dramatic miracle
as evidence, Walt Whitman reveals, through the strange phenomenon of
life in simple, free-form verses, that he believes in miracles – not because
he has experienced biblical or other extraordinary miracles, but because
he has experienced the same things most people encounter daily, though
many fail to recognize them as miracles.¹⁷
The main goal of the multimedia project Towar/d¹⁸ Europe, con-
ceived as a community art initiative by the Split multimedia artist Hrvoje
Cokarić, is to integrate true artists with the coastal-Dinaric donkeys, who
are threatened with extinction in its natural habitat in Croatia. In his
monograph Toward Europe, he also highlights their view/eyes (Magdić
and Cokarić 2016, 40):
You can’t put a donkey into a cage. He won’t sing. He can’t be a slave.
Although he is a democratic child, he too is proud, he is dignified
and he is able to put himself in order. You think that he thinks you’re
better than him? You beat him and he doesn’t even turn his head.
And if he turns his head and looks at you, you can see in his eyes that
he thinks very little of you.A donkey is full of dignity, he doesn’t give
youmuch importance andmaybe he evendespises you, or feels sorry
for you . . . Not all donkeys are on the same height, but not all people
are the same, you can find all kinds of them. Usually people don’t
understand him, so they beat him. And that is all that they know.
The performance Export, as part of the project Towar/d Europe, fea-
¹⁷Here I would like to mention the performance Requiem for Boškarin (2005, Svetvinčenat,
Istria) by multimedia artist Darwin Butković, dedicated to the Boškarin who was slaugh-
tered the next day. (The term B/boškarin refers to a breed of cattle native to the Istrian
peninsula, which spans parts of Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy. The Boškarin is also a sym-
bol of Istrian heritage and is celebrated for its cultural significance in the area.) Along the
lines of the activity of St. Francis, who preached to the birds, the artist thus decided to
play Requiem for Boškarin (cf. Marjanić 2014, 1662).
¹⁸ ‘Toward,’ not ‘towards’ in this specific case because of the play on words. The Croatian
word tovar refers specifically to a donkey used for carrying loads or cargo. In English, it
can be translated as a ‘pack donkey ’or simply a ‘donkey used for carrying goods.’
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Looking into the Face of an Animal As a Mirror
tured two donkeys fromVaraždin – Jura and Ferdo – alongside the artists
Hrvoje Cokarić and Vanja Pagar. In this project, the donkey-artists and
their human artist colleagues, asHrvoje Cokarić (2016, 24) points out, be-
come the ultimate suprematists, ‘those who will resist the world that we
ourselves have created and which wants to destroy us.’ Just as Traveleri’s
donkey from 1922 became Croatia’s first Dadaist donkey (cf. Marjanić
2014), and for some a Zenithist or futurist, maybe even a constructivist,
what is important is that he is an avant-garde figure.¹⁹ The leader of the
Uzgon association, multimedia artist Hrvoje Cokarić connects with the
Dalmatian donkeys, who are disappearing, drawing a parallel to the don-
key Benjamin fromOrwell’s allegorical novellaAnimal Farm (1945). Ben-
jamin represents kynicism, a philosophical teaching focused on virtue,
a return to nature, and the rejection of social conventions – principles
championed by figures like Antisthenes and Diogenes. Cokarić adds that
kynicism is synonymous with anarchism, and he identifies his Dalmatian
donkey as both an anarchist with artistic determination and a suprema-
tist.
In Conclusion as Reflection
All of the animals used by the artists in these case studies aremammals or
those with faces that humans would likely recognize, such as donkeys and
cows. These artists are not focused on animal rights, nor is their aim to
disrupt “normalized” human-animal interactions. Only Hrvoje Cokarić’s
self-sacrifice serves a dual purpose: both for the preservation of donkeys,
who are unfortunately disappearing in Dalmatia (Croatia), and for the
artistic project called Toward Europe. However, they do not anthropo-
morphize these specific animals; rather, they use animals in their natural
state:²⁰ Marina Abramović stated that she ‘took a donkey into the back-
yard ofNicholas’s (Logsdail) house,’ while Saša Živković performedRead-
ing Zerzan to the donkeys in their natural habitat. Additionally, Darko
¹⁹Hrvoje Cokarić and Vanja Pagar also came up with a gilded ‘donkey dung’ as a souvenir
that tourists can take home from Croatia. The multimedia project Towar/d Project ex-
plores the protection of the coastal Dinaric donkey and includes an ironic cryptocurrency
based on donkey dung. The ‘cryptocurrency donkey,’ gilded donkey dung, becomes an
exceptional Croatian souvenir, with the project aiming to lay the foundation for a future
park for indigenous Dalmatian animals with educational and cultural content.
²⁰By the term ‘natural state,’ I mean that the animals remained in their living space; they
were not placed on a theatre stage or in a gallery. Of course, the term ‘natural state’ does
not imply their potential freedom in this context.
405
Suzana Marjanić
Pekica, from the artistic collective Šikuti Machine, uses cows as a scenog-
raphy for Whitman’s poem ‘Miracles’ about nature and its wonders. It is
not known howMarina Abramović managed to calm the donkey for one
hour; she wrote that after about an hour, the donkey decided to leave, ‘and
that was it. I felt a little better’ (Abramović 2019, 283). She recorded the
performance on the island of Lamu in the Indian Ocean, where she had
come at the invitation of Nicholas Logsdail. She described how she was
fascinated by the donkeys on the island: ‘They are the most static animals
I have ever seen – they would stand for hours in the strongest sun, almost
motionless’ (Abramović 2019, 283). Saša Živković toldme that he kept the
donkeys calm with hay, and Darko Pekica had no need to calm down the
cows because they were in their territory, on the meadow Vogrda, where
they graze on the grass.
Like Derrida, these artists also use animals to explore ontological
questions. Zerzan’s anarcho-primitivism is reflected in Živković’s per-
formance with donkeys while Whitman’s poem, celebrating the wonders
of nature, resonates in Šikuti Machine’s performance. Both can only be
fully appreciated by animals untouched by civilization. Or, as the Šikuti
Machine states (Marjanić 2014, 1162):
At the moment when the objective and social reality disappear in
imposed ‘reconstructions,’ re-branding and re-design, led bymarket
economy and cruel interest when a strip of land represents a prop-
erty and the social interest in ecology getsmarginalized, Vogrda take
us back into nature and encourages us to believe that there is a spot
under the sun where the pastoral idyll is true.
Jacques Derrida, in his article ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am,’ ad-
dressed his readers on the subject of standing naked in the presence of his
cat, ‘or this cat, this specific cat with which he shared aspects of his life,
and this cat with him’ (Reich, 2022).
I often ask myself, just to see, who I am – and who I am (follow-
ing) at the moment when, caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of
an animal, for example, the eyes of a cat, I have trouble, yes, a bad
time overcoming my embarrassment. Whence this malaise? [Der-
rida 2002, 372]
However, there are similarities between Derrida’s view of the cat and
Abramović’s view of the donkey’s face, both ofwhich involve searching for
pathos in the eyes of animals. ‘WhatDerrida experiences, and is searching
for an expression of, is pathos – the pathos in the artificial human-animal
relationship.He finds pathos in the suffering of animals’ (Reich, 2022). Or
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Looking into the Face of an Animal As a Mirror
as Derrida states in his article ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to
Follow)’ (2002, 372–380), the animal can be looked at, but he also warns
that philosophymay forget that the animal can look at us and that he/she
can have his/her own point of view towards us.
It has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the abso-
lute other, and nothing will have ever done more to make me think
through this absolute alterity of the neighbor than these moments
when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat. [Derrida 2002,
380]²¹
As I pointed out, the duo-performance Confession byMarina Abramo-
vić can be contextually linked with Beuys’s action involving a coyote, par-
ticularly regarding the zoo-ethic use of the animal. Additionally, in terms
of the symbolic meaning of the two performances (Saša Živković, Darko
Pekica) involving reading to donkeys/cattle, we can also draw a symbolic
connection to Joseph Beuys’s action How to Explain Pictures to a Dead
Hare (1965). By contrasting the hare (intuition) with the human (rational-
ity), Beuys covered his head with honey and gold leaf, then spent three
hours walking through an exhibition of his work, explaining the art to a
dead hare (Berghaus 2005, 161). Beuys points out that ‘even a dead animal
preserves more powers of intuition than some human beings with their
stubborn rationality.’ Human thinking was capable of achieving so much,
but it could also ‘be intellectualised to a deadly degree, and remain dead,
and express its deadliness in the political and pedagogical fields’ (Antliff
2014, 62).²²
²¹Žarko Paić solves the aforementionedmeeting of the cat’s gaze and the naked philosopher
with the inverted question: why is Derrida’s cat (not) ashamed of the reciprocal shame of
the philosopher as a non-cat? Derrida states that he is not looking at the ‘naked’ cat, but
that the little cat is looking at him, the ‘naked’ Derrida, not the man-philosopher. He de-
scribes how the cat’s gaze disrupts his sense of identity and challenges his perception of
being the master of language and reason. Derrida emphasizes the cat’s gaze as something
that sees himwithout any cultural or linguistic mediation, exposing the vulnerability and
animal (non-human) aspects of his existence. ‘In this gaze, theOther, i.e. man, sees some-
thing sublime and monstrous in general, because the gaze comes from an animal. Shame
is Derrida’s response to the event of meeting “his” cat while he is bathing naked in the
bathtub. It is not just any kind of shame, not even the apocalyptic one of Josef K. at the
end ofKafka’s novelThe Process: “Shamewill outlive him!” It is the pure vitality of individ-
ual contingency, the irreducibly “human-all too-human”. It is only through this encounter
that man perceives himself as ‘naked’ in the presence of the Other Being (species/genus
of animal). Who is truly “naked” and who is actually “looking” at whom – is Derrida as
a man looking at a cat/an animal or vice versa?’ (Paić, 2022, 613).
²²The performance based on interpreting his ownwork was staged at the opening of the ex-
407
Suzana Marjanić
Aldo Leopold, in the essay ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’ (first published
in 1949), wrote about how, in his youth, he witnessed a dying wolf and
how that experience changed his attitude towards nature (Leopold 1987,
130):
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in
her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was
something new to me in those eyes – something known only to her
and to themountain. [. . . ] But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed
that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
The green fire in the gaze of a dying wolf taught Leopold a lesson for
life (Sanders Pollock and Rainwater 2005, 7).
In any case, this donkey’s gaze (cf. Yong 2017; Saporito, n.d.), this zoo-
centric essay²³ will only be read by those with a sense of Solastalgia,²⁴ as
Glenn Albrecht would say.
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