Figuring the Animal Autobiography: Animals and Landscapes in Daniel Naudé's Exhibition “African Scenery & Animals”

Abstract

SummaryDaniel Naudé's exhibition of photographic artworks, “African Scenery & Animals”, is discussed in this article, to consider the ways in which images of animal beings are mostly received as figurative vehicles for anthropocentric narratives. Naudé's particularised portraits of AfriCanis dogs and other domestic creatures are considered in relation to figurative anthropocentric analysis of the artworks that the artist's gallery and other reviewers have undertaken. I argue that Naudé's oeuvre is more in line with J.M. Coetzee's fictional character Elizabeth Costello's notion of imaginative empathy, proposing the capacity of human beings to imagine what it might be like to be an(other) (Coetzee 2004: 79), and that Naudé's portraits of animal beings provoke imaginative empathetic (Coetzee 2004: 79) transposition in the viewer. I recount my imaginative empathetic encounters (Coetzee 2004: 79) with particular artworks from the “African Scenery & Animals” series, and consider the imperial legacy of the landscape genre and the photographic medium employed by Naudé in relation to the artist's use of destabilising formal and contextual devices.