{"id":755,"date":"2012-05-03T23:24:57","date_gmt":"2012-05-04T03:24:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=755"},"modified":"2012-05-04T12:54:47","modified_gmt":"2012-05-04T16:54:47","slug":"knowing-how-your-dinner-sees-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2012\/05\/knowing-how-your-dinner-sees-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Knowing How Your Dinner Sees The World"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Carrie Ahern in her Borrowed Prey. Photo: Jule Lemberger<\/p><\/div>\n

When writing about art with a message, critics tend to soft-pedal and back-pedal. Perhaps their hearts are with the messenger, yet they have reservations about the forms in which the ideas are delivered. Perhaps, for some, the message doesn\u2019t come through strongly enough.\u00a0 There\u2019s little doubt as to what Carrie Ahern wants to put across in in her provocative and deeply felt Borrowed Prey: <\/em>If we eat animals, we should be willing to face what they endure between untroubled life in a pasture and becoming chops on a plate. She herself has experienced hunting game and learned how to kill chickens.<\/p>\n

Ahern, an accomplished performer-choreographer, is showing her\u00a0work (the first half of a projected diptych) at Dickson\u2019s Farmstand Meats<\/em> in the Chelsea Market, 75 Ninth Avenue, through May 13 (carrieahern.com). In the middle of the piece, she climbs on something in the narrow space behind the counter and writes two sentences on a big piece of butcher paper taped to the wall. One says, \u201cEmpathy is not generally seen as a useful tool.\u201d For butchers in relation to the meat they sell, that\u2019s probably true. But Ahern clearly feels a great deal of empathy for animals destined to be food, as does the brilliant autistic thinker Dr. Temple Grandin, who has redesigned numerous slaughterhouses to make them more humane (and whose words Aherne speaks during Borrowed Prey<\/em>).<\/p>\n

Grandin\u2019s condition has made her sensitive to what cattle feel. She doesn\u2019t like to be touched unless she initiates it. Physical pressure (like being wrapped in something) calms her. Loud sounds disturb her. Ahern, being a mover, wants to show us\u2014as best she can\u2014what animals respond to.<\/p>\n

With the exception of the few people accommodated on VIP chairs, the spectators in Dickson\u2019s market (20 is the limit) stand for the performance, moving around the close quarters when necessary or desirable. Ahern\u2019s outfit (by Naoko Nagata) startlingly combines the butcher with the stock and challenges description: soft, non-descript black pants; a mottled brownish top; a shaggy, long-sleeved brown bolero jacket that looks as if it\u2019s been cut from a cow\u2019s pelt. On her head is a gray, faux-lambskin hood with a faint suggestion of ears. To this, add a blood-stained white apron.<\/p>\n

Ahern climbs onto a large table that divides the narrow front part of the store from its larger workspace at the back. The table is topped by butcher block and can be wheeled to other positions. She moves both like a dancer warming up and a passive carcass. Lying on the table, she lets one leg hang limply over the edge, arches her back, then collapses. At one point, it\u2019s as if someone is hauling her up by the buttocks. She spasms, folds herself into a bundle, and \u2014half-hidden on the metal shelf under the table\u2014trembles.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Ahern wrapping a volunteer. Photo: Julie Lemberger<\/p><\/div>\n

Throughout the hour-long piece, she finds ways to demonstrate how narrow a cow\u2019s range of depth vision is, how it places its hooves, how four-legged animals groom themselves, scrabble for footing, sink down. After she has removed her hood, welcomed us, and brought up Grandin\u2019s need to feel pressure, she begins to crawl among the spectators, rubbing against people\u2019s legs, touching one watcher, standing up to lick another\u2019s face (possibly someone she knows). She talks about the benign method of slaughtering chickens, while getting a volunteer (consulted quietly in advance) to lie on the table and be wrapped tightly in a length of unbleached muslin. Then\u2014with the help of two nearby spectators\u2014she lowers the young woman to the floor and drags her to the front of the shop. Swaddled like that, the woman resembles the paper-wrapped leg of lamb that Ahern gives away at the end of the performance, as well as the hand-stitched, hide and hair sculptures by lighting designer Jay Ryan and the choreographer that hang from the ceiling. (Ahern makes sure that \u201cAmy\u201d is all right and back among friends before continuing the work).<\/p>\n

Borrowed Prey<\/em> is most powerful when it is most direct in terms of the complex bonding of consumer and consumed. Two sections affected me less, or, fell short of what they seemed to intend. One occurs just after Ahern has performed her initial sequence on the table. Anne Hege\u2019s very effective music begins with a high voice calling, and Ahern begins to dance. Her little turned-out steps could pass for bourr\u00e9es, even though her body eventually starts to jiggle and sag. Finally, she collapses under the shop\u2019s painting of cows in a sunset field. I couldn\u2019t figure this out. Is she afraid we\u2019ll forget she\u2019s a dancer? Is she trying to forge a connection between ballet\u2019s vision of the creaturely world and the gritty reality?<\/p>\n

After Ahern has fetched a dressed lamb from the shop\u2019s refrigerator and carried it through the shop so everyone can see it up close, she washes her hands and head at the sink and contemplates the six-inch knife she\u2019s about to use (here the music switches to \u201cKnife Dance\u201d by New Prosthetics). The lamb is already missing one leg. She wants to convey, I believe, that even a dead animal must be treated with respect, and that butchery can be conceived as a ritual. But somehow, this sequence seems a little heavy-handed, especially when she places the knife blade against her own ankle and holds it there for a few seconds. We get the point. In the same way, it seems almost corny for her to hold a leg of lamb against her own leg, comparing them (maybe it\u2019s the timing that\u2019s at fault). She also licks the knife quite a lot\u2014as if to show that the killing tool itself doesn\u2019t inspire fear in animals.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The dancer as butcher. Photo: Julie Lemberger<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s more engrossing\u2014and somehow more moving\u2014to see her use the knife on the lamb\u2019s body. She moves with care and a dancerly ease, shifting angles as she slices the animal\u2019s remaining leg off, wraps it in paper and tapes it. She carefully frees the small kidneys and lays the hanging tongue beside something else retrieved from the cavity. These too she wraps and bestows on favored spectators.<\/p>\n

Just before she tackles the lamb, she polls the spectators about the other statement she wrote earlier: \u201cThe greatest of ethological sins is anthropomorphism.\u201d\u00a0 Is she guilty or innocent of this? She stands there wide-eyed, waiting. After a long silence, the woman standing behind me says quietly \u201cguilty.\u201d No one else speaks.<\/p>\n

The matter is more complicated. Ahern isn\u2019t attributing to her prey the nuanced human feelings that pet owners commonly ascribe to their animals (she missed me, he likes my husband better). She knows that what keeps her awake at night wouldn\u2019t trouble a sheep, and vice versa. As Grandin found, given the right conditions, cattle don\u2019t experience terror as they approach slaughter. Yet in very sensitively and skillfully absorbing and physicalizing the animal\u2019s responses, isn\u2019t Ahern making the animal seem humanized simply because a human is portraying it?\u00a0 (She must know that there\u2019s no easy answer to that.)<\/p>\n

Her final image brings the ambiguity into sharp focus. She doesn\u2019t rise and bow as we clap and get up to leave. She\u2019s sitting on a stool at the rear of the workspace, holding the dead, carved-up lamb in her lap and looking down at it. Madonna and Child. The Lamb of God. Life as death. If you look behind the obvious sentimentality of the picture, it can keep you awake and thinking hard for some time.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When writing about art with a message, critics tend to soft-pedal and back-pedal. Perhaps their hearts are with the messenger, yet they have reservations about the forms in which the ideas are delivered. Perhaps, for some, the message doesn\u2019t come through strongly enough.\u00a0 There\u2019s little doubt as to what Carrie Ahern wants to put across […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":761,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[303,302],"class_list":{"0":"post-755","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-postmodern-new-york","8":"tag-borrowed-prey","9":"tag-carrie-ahern","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=755"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}