Amanda Ba
狗女人放狗屁/Dog Woman Releasing Dog Fart / The Bitch is Non-sense, 2021
Oil on canvas
100 x 100 cm
Copyright The Artist
This painting is part of a larger series of four paintings, each of which depicts an Asian woman and an American Bully situated in the same psychologically charged room, with...
This painting is part of a larger series of four paintings, each of which depicts an Asian woman and an American Bully situated in the same psychologically charged room, with a different viewing angle in each painting, as if the audience's POV was aligned with a camera panning around the room. Each painting also portrays a different interaction between woman and bully. The series draws from the book Animacies by Mel Chen, and from The Companionship Species Manifesto by Donna Haraway.
Animacy in linguistics is the quality of sentience/liveliness/human-ness that a noun has, which then has grammatical and syntactic consequences. Mel Chen tugs the concept of animacy away from linguistics to argue that animacy is just as applicable in queer and race relations, seeing as dehumanizing insults hinge on the salient invocation of the nonhuman animal." The Chinese title of this painting "狗女人放狗屁" translates literally to "dog woman releasing dog fart," but it is actually a combination of two common insults, the first half meaning "bitch" and the latter half meaning "bullshit." To tack on "dog" in front of an animate "woman" transforms it into an insult, just as tacking on "dog" in front of an inanimate "fart" also transforms it into an insult. In these cases, a notion of a dog is de-humanizing and degrading, revealing a very human-centric metric of worthiness and value. In the painting, the woman and the dog take on the same stance, but our desire to project our human understanding of gesture prescribes sexuality unto the former and playfulness unto the latter. In The Companionship Species Manifesto, Haraway makes a case for reevaluating our relationship with all our worldly co-habitants, dogs being a significant example of the intimacy and historical co-evolution that humans are capable of. However, the value of dogs' lives do not and should not depend on their intimacy with us, (i.e. if they are loved/accepted by us or if they make us feel loved). Marginalized communities have long been put down by being compared to animals (dogs, monkeys, general pre-homo sapien "savages"), and thinking of ourselves as truly no better than dogs is the first step in working towards a non-anthropocentric post-human future.
Animacy in linguistics is the quality of sentience/liveliness/human-ness that a noun has, which then has grammatical and syntactic consequences. Mel Chen tugs the concept of animacy away from linguistics to argue that animacy is just as applicable in queer and race relations, seeing as dehumanizing insults hinge on the salient invocation of the nonhuman animal." The Chinese title of this painting "狗女人放狗屁" translates literally to "dog woman releasing dog fart," but it is actually a combination of two common insults, the first half meaning "bitch" and the latter half meaning "bullshit." To tack on "dog" in front of an animate "woman" transforms it into an insult, just as tacking on "dog" in front of an inanimate "fart" also transforms it into an insult. In these cases, a notion of a dog is de-humanizing and degrading, revealing a very human-centric metric of worthiness and value. In the painting, the woman and the dog take on the same stance, but our desire to project our human understanding of gesture prescribes sexuality unto the former and playfulness unto the latter. In The Companionship Species Manifesto, Haraway makes a case for reevaluating our relationship with all our worldly co-habitants, dogs being a significant example of the intimacy and historical co-evolution that humans are capable of. However, the value of dogs' lives do not and should not depend on their intimacy with us, (i.e. if they are loved/accepted by us or if they make us feel loved). Marginalized communities have long been put down by being compared to animals (dogs, monkeys, general pre-homo sapien "savages"), and thinking of ourselves as truly no better than dogs is the first step in working towards a non-anthropocentric post-human future.