Biography

Dr. Steve Baker (Emeritus Professor)

Emeritus Professor of Art History

Education and Social Science

+44 (0)1772 893044

sbaker1@uclan.ac.uk

Steve Baker is Emeritus Professor of Art History at UCLan, and is the author of The Postmodern Animal and of Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation. Aspects of his research have been translated into French, German, Dutch and Polish, and further translations into French and German are in progress.

Steve Baker is Emeritus Professor of Art History at UCLan, and is the author of The Postmodern Animal and of Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation.  Chapters from those books have recently been reprinted in Routledge’s five-volume collection Animals and Society: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, in Berg’s The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings, and in ZOO~, the catalogue of the inaugural exhibition at La Centrale électrique: European Centre for Contemporary Art, in Brussels.  In 2009 his publications will also include contributions to the edited collections Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, and Nature (New York: SUNY Press) and Animal Encounters (Leiden and Boston: Brill).

Baker is a member of the editorial boards of Society and Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies, and of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.  He is a founding member of the Animal Studies Group, whose co-authored 2006 book Killing Animals was acknowledged in Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet as ‘an important new book’.  His research on attitudes to animals in 20th and 21st-century art, philosophy and popular culture draws on his interviews and correspondence with contemporary artists in several countries, and his chapter in Killing Animals has been described by animal historian Harriet Ritvo as handling with ‘deft awareness’ the ‘politically charged and often intentionally offensive artwork’ that it analyzed.  His forthcoming book, Art Before Ethics: Animal Life in Artists’ Hands, proposes that the integrity of contemporary artists’ engagement with questions of animal life is not fashioned out of and is not best understood through the language of a regulatory or proscriptive ethics.

In recent years he has presented his research in keynotes and invited papers for conferences and lecture series including The Lives of Animals (LSE, 2006), Animal Humanities (University of Texas at Austin, 2006), Visualizing Animals (Penn State University, 2007), Animals and Society II: Considering Animals (Hobart, Tasmania, 2007), Antipodean Animal (King’s College London, 2008), Notre Animal intérieur et les Théories de la Créativité (Aberystwyth University, 2008), the Animal Futures meeting of the British Animal Studies Network (2008), and The Animal Gaze (London Metropolitan University, 2008).  In 2009 he has been invited to contribute to the forum Animals in Art (linked to the Arts Catalyst exhibition Interspecies at Cornerhouse, Manchester, February); to the conference Creative Practice / Creative Research: Materiality, Process, Performativity (York, April), where he will chair the ‘Unruly objects’ panel; to a symposium in honour of Stephen Bann (Bristol, June); and, with the support of a British Academy Overseas Conference Grant, to Minding Animals: International Academic and Community Conference on Animals and Society (Newcastle, NSW, Australia, July).

His continuing interest in collaborative research is evident both in practice-based and academic projects.  In 2005 he worked with artist Edwina Ashton on an installation for the group exhibition Animal Nature, shown at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and their co-authored account of this project appeared in a special issue of the journal TDR on ‘Animals and performance’ in 2007.  He is currently collaborating with another artist, Kate Downhill, on a site-specific installation about spaces of human-animal interaction, as well as with social anthropologist Garry Marvin, of Roehampton University, on the development of a project on contemporary practices and uses of taxidermy.  The term ‘botched taxidermy’, which he coined in The Postmodern Animal, has itself been taken as the theme for a recent special issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.

Baker is currently supervising postgraduate students at The London Consortium and at UCLan.  He has served as external examiner for postgraduate theses at Dartington College of Arts and at the University of Western Australia, and recently as mentor for an MSc major research project in the School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University in Massachusetts.  At UCLan, Baker is affiliated to the School of Education and Social Science, and is also an associate of both the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Electronic and Digital Art Unit.  Having recently completed the PINNA ‘Manager as Coach’ training programme, he continues to use his interest in facilitation and coaching to support the University’s research agenda.

Selected Publications

2008  ‘Something’s gone wrong again’, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, no. 7, special issue: ‘Botched taxidermy’.  ISSN 1756 9575.

2007  ‘What is the postmodern animal?’ (reprinted from The Postmodern Animal), in The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings, ed. L. Kalof and A. Fitzgerald (Oxford and New York: Berg), pp. 278-88.  ISBN 978-1845204693 / 978-1845204709.

2007  ‘The salon of becoming-animal’ (with Edwina Ashton), TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies, 51, no. 1: special issue: ‘Animals and performance’, ed. U. Chaudhuri, pp. 169-75.  ISSN 1054 2043.

2006  ‘“You kill things to look at them”: Animal death in contemporary art’, in The Animal Studies Group’s co-authored Killing Animals (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), pp. 69-98.  ISBN 0 252 03050 8 / 0 252 07290 1.

2006  ‘The artist’s undoing’ (reprinted in French, Dutch and English from The Postmodern Animal), in the exhibition catalogue ZOO~ (Brussels: La Centrale électrique: European Centre for Contemporary Art, 2006), pp. 139-50.  ISBN 90 77033 07 6.

2006  ‘What can dead bodies do?’, essay in the artists Bryndis Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson’s monograph nanoq: flat out and bluesome: A Cultural Life of Polar Bears (London: Black Dog Publishing), pp. 148-55.  ISBN 1 904772 39 0.

2006  ‘We have always been transgenic’ (with Carol Cigliotti), AI and Society: The Journal of Human-Centred Systems, 20, no. 1, special issue: ‘Genetic technologies and animals’, ed. C. Gigliotti, pp. 35-48.  ISSN 0951 5666.

2005  ‘Becoming-animal, becoming visible’, in the exhibition catalogue Animal Nature (Pittsburgh: Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University), ed. J. Strayer, pp. 16-31.  ISBN 0 9772053 0 4.

2004  ‘Mammals’, in Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture, ed. S. Harrison, S. Pile and N. Thrift (London: Reaktion Books).  ISBN 1 86189 181 4.

2004  ‘Impostors’, essay in the artist Catherine Chalmers’ monograph, American Cockroach (New York: Aperture), pp. 37-41.  ISBN 1 931788 39 1.

2003  ‘Philosophy in the wild?’, in The Eighth Day: The Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac, ed. S. Britton and D. Collins (Tempe: Institute for Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University), pp. 27-38. ISBN 0 9724291 0 7.  A version of this essay also appears in New Formations, 49 (2003), special issue: ‘Complex figures’, ed. P. Tew and W. Wheeler, pp. 91-98.  ISSN 0950 2378 / ISBN 0 85315 974 2.

2003  ‘Sloughing the human’, in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. C. Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 147-64.  ISBN 0 8166 4105 6 / 0 8166 4106 4.

2002  ‘What does becoming-animal look like?’, in Representing Animals, ed. N. Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), in the series ‘Theories of Contemporary Culture’, pp. 67-98.  ISBN 0253 34154 X / 0 253 21551 X.

2002  ‘Tigre, tigre’, in the exhibition catalogue Lyne Lapointe: La Tache Aveugle, ed. G. Godmer (Montréal: Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal), pp. 12-21, 71-78.  ISBN 2 551 21506 4.

For further information
please contact Steve Baker at
sbaker1@uclan.ac.uk

Book reviews

Killing Animals

Though not often acknowledged openly, killing represents by far the most common form of human interaction with animals. Humans kill animals for food, for pleasure, for clothing, and even for religious reasons, yet despite the ubiquity of this killing, analyzing the practice has generally remained the exclusive purview of animal rights advocates. Killing Animals offers a corrective to this narrow focus by bringing together the insights of scholars from diverse backgrounds in the humanities, including art history, anthropology, intellectual history, philosophy, literary studies, and geography. These essays, conceived as part of a larger whole from their inception, together reveal the complexity of the killing phenomenon by exploring the extraordinary diversity in killing practices and the wide variety of meanings attached to them. They examine aspects of the role of animals in human societies, from the seventeenth century to the present day: their cultural manifestations, and how they have been represented. Topics include hunting and baiting; slaughter practices and the treatment of feral and stray animals; animal death in art, literature, and philosophy; and even animals that themselves become killers of humans.

The Postmodern Animal

In The Postmodern Animal, Steve Baker explores how animal imagery has been used in recent and contemporary art and performance, and in postmodern philosophy and literature, to shape ideas about identity and creativity. Baker cogently analyses the work of such British and American artists as Olly and Suzi, Mark Dion, Damien Hirst and Sue Coe, at the same time looking critically at the constructions, performances and installations of Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys and other major artists of the twentieth century. Baker's book draws parallels between the animal's place in postmodern art and in poststructuralist theory, drawing on works as diverse as Jacques Derrida's recent analysis of the role of animals in philosophical thought and Julian Barnes's best-selling Flaubert's Parrot.

'This is a wonderful book … Steve Baker provides the most cogent explanation so far of how the questioning of human identity ineluctably raises issues about animals … He has given us a great gift, an understanding of a process unfolding during our own time.' - Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat.

Picturing the Beast

From Mickey Mouse to the teddy bear, from the Republican elephant to the use of  'jackass' as an all-purpose insult, images of animals play a central role in politics, entertainment, and social interactions. In this penetrating look at how Western culture pictures the beast, Steve Baker examines how such images-sometimes affectionate, sometimes derogatory, always distorting-affect how real animals are perceived and treated.

Baker provides an animated discussion of how animals enter into the iconography of power through wartime depictions of the enemy, political cartoons, and sports symbolism. He also discusses how his findings might inform the strategies of animal rights advocates seeking to call public attention to animal suffering and abuse. Until animals are extricated from the baggage of imposed images, Baker maintains, neither they nor their predicaments can be clearly seen.

For this edition, Baker provides a new introduction, specifically addressing an American audience, that touches on such topics as the Cow parade, animal imagery in the presidential race, and animatronic animals in recent films.