Hannah and Joe: Interspecies Art between Bird and Man

Abstract

(This is a shortened version of a longer review at Leonardo Reviews: leonardo.info/review/2022/07/hannah-and-joe-interspecies-art-between-bird-and-man)Hannah is an African grey parrot. She is 24 years old and, based on other African greys that have lived in captivity, she could live double that or more. Her feathers are grisaille in tone, with the ones on her belly darker than those on her crown. In all the photos I’ve seen, her face is alert and attentive. Her bright small eyes contrast with her large dark beak, the two anatomies constituting perhaps the most prized tools of her trade— an aesthetic and artistic collaboration with the artist Joe Havel. While I’ve never met her in person, I’ve come to know her well over the last few years through images and conversations with Joe, an internationally acclaimed sculptor. Friends recognize his many gifts, identifying him also as an animal whisperer. In addition to sculpting and whispering, Joe has been the Director of the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, since 1993, a post from which he would retire in June 2022. Then Joe would move to France with his partner, taking Hannah and Pixel, their teacup Yorkie. For the time of writing, Hannah and Joe’s collaboration continues and is the subject of two exhibitions in Dallas, Texas: a large overview of their work called Parrot Architecture at the Dallas Contemporary (16 April–21 August 2022) and a more intimate show with drawings and smaller works, Joseph Havel: Flight Paths and Floor Plans, at Talley Dunn Gallery (14 May–25 June 2022), also in Dallas.The art collaboration between Hannah and Joe began during COVID-19 quarantining. For fear of contagion, like so many people around the planet, Joe stayed home for months and had life’s necessities delivered. Cardboard boxes piled up and became the stuff of art. In playful and repetitive actions, Hannah created the whittled boxes that are the basic forms of their collaboration. Joe then cast or poured resin atop them in either single or stacked forms, creating the sparse forest of bronze and resin totems standing in the large industrial space of the Dallas Contemporary. Joe worked closely with Ken King’s foundry in Houston to distill in these pieces a striking verisimilitude of form [1]. The tactility of Hannah’s tiny chew marks rendered in bronze invite human touch, forever forbidden in the gallery setting. The burnished bronze of certain columnar forms and tan cardboard of others are, in certain instances, difficult to distinguish. Bronze here mimics cardboard. The vertical bronze cartons of Highrises create a counterpoint to the single-story coffers of Neighborhood. Joe calls the large works on the walls, the flattened boxes with Hannah’s bite marks and his own gestural brushstrokes of paint, “constructed paintings.” A similar type of work, though smaller and sketch-like, hangs on the walls of Talley Dunn Gallery in Joseph Havel: Flight Plans and Floor Plans. Like bird and man, nature and architecture work in tandem throughout. The names of the works—tumble towers, penthouses, high rises, neighborhoods, flight paths, and floor plans—bear out an expansion and layering of systematic complexities. Architecture, infrastructure, bird, and human synchronize and collectively become a network of networks. Empathy is the glue that binds, functioning as a formative material force in the creation of this avian-cum-primate city.The creative partnership of Hannah and Joe is a striking example of interspecies communication within art, a category in which works of art result from the interactions and meaningful connections between two different species. Some time ago, Charles Darwin identified the penchant for cross-communication among different kinds of animals, contending that, “With social animals, the power of intercommunication between the members of the same community— and with other species, between the opposite sexes, as well as between the young and the old—is of highest importance among them” [2]. Interspecies art brings home a pluralist evolutionary theory that includes sexual selection, aesthetic agency, symbiosis, cooperation, and female choice. Reading evolution with these vectors, in addition to natural selection, offers a more replete sense of Darwin the thinker and writer that should be set against the more parsimonious Darwinism, a language that includes scientific reductionisms like fitness, competition, freeloaders, survival, the selfish gene, procreation, and binary sex. For further elaboration, please see the longer version of this essay online.