Lambs to the slaughter

Stella Viljoen

The famed South African artist, Elizabeth Gunter, is an extraordinary example of the kind of political rhetorician whose arguments are made via gestures on a page. Her ethereal yet paradoxically visceral drawings of animals, often unborn and belonging to species on endangered lists, affectively raise awareness in a time of environmental crisis.

Gunter grew up in an Afrikaans family on a farm called Rhenosterfontein in the Southern Cape. Her father studied to become an electrical engineer but became a farmer. Her mother was a nurse who became a farmer’s wife. Their farm had different kinds of livestock including Merino sheep, a breed known for their beautiful wool and frail bodies. Gunter says the Merino lambs died by the hundreds every year, so her father bought a herd of Dorper sheep, a more robust breed with black heads, which he hoped to cross with the Merinos. Around the time Gunter was four or five, the first new lambs were born and her father gave her an orphan to rear by hand. Early every morning, while her family slept, Gunter would open the front door, walk to the enclosure next to the house and bring her lamb back through the house (its feet clicking on the floor behind her) and tuck it into bed next to her. Before the household would wake she would return the lamb to its camp, unaware that her parents were listening (Viljoen 2012: 29). In the 1800s the nursery rhyme “Mary had a little lamb” was used to teach children the reciprocal nature of love (“for everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go”). When the school children in the rhyme ask their teacher “why does the lamb love Mary so?”, the teacher replies “for Mary loves the lamb, you know.”

Via her detailed and realistic yet imaginative charcoal drawings Gunter articulates a fascination with animals that may have started as a clandestine relationship with a lamb but has developed into a lifelong commitment to exploring the perils of being in relationships in a much broader sense. She uses animals as a visual lexicon that affords her the possibility of intimacy and distance, the ability to straddle the domestic and the civic. Through her drawings she awakens the consciousness needed to respond to a political climate in South Africa and across the globe that is confusing and disturbing on so many levels.

In 2021 Olivia Laing published a book titled Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency. Against the backdrop of a polarised political economy, the climate crisis and various ongoing wars, Laing notes: “I don’t think art has a duty to be beautiful or uplifting, and some of the work I’m most drawn to refuses to traffic in either of those qualities” (2021: 2). She explains that what she is more interested in is an art that is concerned with “resistance and repair”. Subsequently, Laing’s book is particularly focused on art that avoids what she terms a “paranoid reading” of the world. This has to do with how we “make sense of the world, how we approach knowledge and uncertainty … particularly at times of rapid political or cultural change” (2021: 3).

As Laing notes, “a paranoid reader is concerned with gathering information, tracing links and making the hidden visible” (2021: 3). Since we are all constantly on the internet, we know this kind of paranoia. We know that whilst it can be informative and “grimly revelatory”, paranoid media have the tendency to ...

loop towards dead ends, tautology, recursion, to provide comprehensive evidence for hopelessness and dread, to prove what we already feared we knew. Whilst helpful at explaining the state we’re in [it is] not useful at envisaging ways out, and the end result of indulging [this] is often a fatal numbness (2021: 4).

But there is another non-paranoid way of understanding the world. Laing refers to “reparative reading” as fundamentally invested in “finding nourishment [rather] than identifying poison” (2021: 4). This state derives from the desire to “invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments” (2021: 4). In this case, the reader “has room to realize that the future may be different from the present” (2021: 5). Here, there is a generosity of spirit, which John Berger termed a hospitality, “a capacity to enlarge and open, a corrective to the overwhelming political imperative” (in Laing 2021: 6).

I want to suggest that the extraordinary time, skill and care that Elizabeth Gunter invests in her drawings can be seen as a kind of reparative reading. The way she draws involves a deep, visceral identification with the animals that emerge from her hand. As she says,

Ek berus my by ‘n hersenskim van saamheid met die dier, en soek deur teken ‘n wisseling sonder woorde, ‘n gedeelde wete van wording, altyd wagtend op ‘n enkele gebaar wat die innighede van my en die dier se eerste tot laaste asemteue sou verraai. Ek leer in die stilte waarmee tekentaal vloei en woed om die stomheid van dierlike bewustheid te ken en merk … Saam uiter ons geen woord wat met die klaarheid van vreemdelinge sou weerklink nie. (2024:10)

I rely on a mental image of togetherness with the animal, and through drawing seek an exchange without words, a shared knowledge of becoming, always waiting for a single gesture that conveys the intimacies of my and the animal’s first to last breaths. I learn in the silence with which drawing language flows and rages to know and mark the dumbness of animal consciousness ... Together we utter no word that would resonate with the certainty of strangers. (2024:10)

STR(A)Y or stry, Gunter’s most recent exhibition (from 2024), continues her investigation into the bodies and subjectivities of vulnerable animals, often those that are yet unborn. To ‘stry’ in Afrikaans means to argue. So Gunter reminds us that we are all astray, lost to ourselves and each other. But, more importantly, sy stry, she is arguing. She is fighting for the grievability of animals that are on the verge of undoing. She uses what she terms the “dreaded sublime powers of drawing” to “imagine the tragic and real demise of these animals” and our subsequent demise with them (Gunter 2022: 1). Her impressions haunt. These strangers from a strange land, which are the object of her affection, make us think of our own humanity and the ways we use this to erase and deny. But she doesn’t make us paranoid or apathetic. Rather hers is an ethics of care that extends to a care even for the human and refuses to shame even mankind.

Gunter says she uses “drawing to persuade of the beauty of animals, even in a pre-birth state of never-to-be-realized life, or in any form death or near-death might render their appearance” (2022: 1). Thus, we are reminded of our own mortality and the profound truth that to care for the other is to care for ourselves. This is the most powerful way to ‘stry’, to fight with and defeat death.

All the animal species in this most recent exhibition will soon be extinct. In figures 1 and 2, the spurned bat, “that, despite its equanimity, finds itself ensconced in the myths and superstitions that our fears have spawned over ages” (Gunter 2022: 6), is drawn with a cuddly warmth that endears and evokes a deep sense of infant vulnerability. By merely looking at the drawing, the viewer feels the tension between skin that is smooth and supple versus bones that are spindly and brittle. The embryonic animal appears to be playing peek-a-boo with a human audience that may well mistake the game and react with violence. Here there is no room for playful error. To mistrust is fatal. In figure 3, poignantly titled it spurns and feigns regard, the skeletal complexity of the bat alienates an uncomprehending viewer. The ominous form seems to confirm our worst suspicions. This animal is indeed weird.

The African sengi (or elephant shrew), seen in figures 4 and 5, is also severely threatened or on the brink of extinction and is also indigenous to Africa. Already odd and eery with legs and snout that are too long, the creature is made creepier by Gunter’s mark-making that enfleshes the small skeletal architecture. The charcoal smudges lovingly, moulds a little body that is nimble in life but frigid in death. Who is this little being and what is its significance to the sensitive ecology of its environment. What will be lost with it?

Gunter offers us an enduring engagement with discourses of animal and human power relations. The conflict as well as the tenderness and identification at the heart of her representations, play out in an intensely personal way but she clearly also situates this discussion in a distinctly African arena. Though removed from the clichéd syntax of dystopian tableaux, her work is political, an attribute most evident in what she omits from view. The images include none of the frantic signalling that typically accompanies ‘political’ art. Gunter, in fact, seems to deliberately exclude references to the violence committed against these animals, a sign of her sensitivity to the power of this rhetoric to render its subjects more precarious. Yet this body of work does more than charm the eyes. To paraphrase Denis Diderot, it has the power to “move me, astonish me, rend me; make me shudder, weep, tremble; fill me with indignation” at the impotence of governments (in Viljoen 2012: 32). The claustrophobic detail of each drawing stresses, by contrast, the neglect of those in power. With threatening clarity Gunter sheds light on the inequality at the core of animal-human interaction.

We are inclined to think art can’t change anything. But perhaps, as Laing (2021: 8) suggests, it can, if only we allow it to “open us to the interior lives of others.” I think of Gunter as good at this kind of ‘opening up’ but we also see that there is risk and vulnerability involved in the work of repair. One must empathise at [one’s] peril. As John Berger explains in his 1977 essay, Why look at animals? (1980: 5), “a power is ascribed to the animal, comparable with human power but never coinciding with it. The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas, are specifically addressed to man.” The question that haunts Gunter’s work, is where man will answer this call and begin the work of repair.

Sources cited