What kind of animal was Marcus?
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Answer:
The art of Marcus Coates allows us to imagine life from an inhuman perspective. He is often his own laboratory rat, using his body to test the boundaries between man and animal. Yet the lot of such unfortunate rodents is certainly not the best analogy as Coates' endeavours are not scientific projects - though they may use science - but are artistic enterprises. His works have no specific theory to prove or disprove, and most importantly are concerned with exploring what humans can learn from animals as much as the other way around. Venturing into the moor or heath, estuary or woodland - or domestic human habitats as we shall see - the artist's videos and photographs tackle the vicissitudes of consciousness and philosophical formulations of ‘the wild' with the stout boots of conviction.
Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of ‘becoming-animal' is a means of escape, a way of unthinking identity and subjectivity where the human and the animal enter into a functional alliance. The reality of becoming lies not in the transformation of fixed points but in an alliance itself. How better to understand the perspective of a small mammal of the family Mustelidae found throughout the northern temperate, subarctic and arctic regions than to walk a mile in its boots? Accordingly in the video Stoat, Mustela erminea (1999) we see the artist in peculiar home made stoat stilts stumbling and bungling in his attempt to walk, approximating the gait of the weasley animal. Coates act is absurd though earnest in its self-mocking hazard at leaving the confines of human locomotion. By operating from an inhuman point of view, Coates does not assume a fixed and unchanging role.
There is no reason why Coates's filmed performances cannot be read as an addendum to both this renegade anti-metaphysical streak in continental thought and a tradition of absurdist British TV comedy sketch shows such as The Goodies (1970-82). It is the presence of apparently cohabiting opposites in Coates's practice - the philosophical and the ludicrous, slowness and speed, the real and the mystical, and not least the animal and the human - which give it its sense and nonsensical energy.
Coates knows just as well as Deleuze and Guattari - or a Red Deer stag - that ‘it is actually through voice and through sound and through a style that one becomes an animal' (1). In his video Indigenous British Mammals (2000), for example, a repertoire of guttural groaning, bellowing, snorting and choking vocalisations are heard apparently emitting from a patch of moss in a rolling landscape. Deleuze and Guattari characterise this state almost too perfectly:
"The animal does not speak ‘like' a man but pulls from the language tonalities lacking signification; the words themselves are not ‘like' the animals but in their own way climb about, bark and roam around, being properly linguistic ... in short, an asignifying intensive utilization of language ... a circuit of states that forms a mutual becoming, in the heart of a necessarily multiple or collective assemblage (2)."
Coates' work studiously avoids metaphorical allusions by focussing instead on behaviour, most conspicuously its explorations of birdsong. The birds that become persons - are impersonated - throughout Coates' work, from the pottering Coot, to the nevertheless formidable Short-eared Owl, seem in any case far too phlegmatic to be symbolic champions. Of course the subject of Coates' 1998 self portrait photograph Red Fox, Vulpes vulpes, in which the artist appears in the distance on all fours in a red boiler suit, is more used to being ascribed human values. The wily and cunning fox is a staple of anthropomorphic children's literature, for example, from the tales of Thornton Burgess to Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970). Yet Coates's image escapes this reading of nature by referring to a genre of photography, and a peculiarly British brew of tabloid sensationalism and folklore, concerning cryptic animals. The grainy, blurred photograph of an indistinct shape is the prototypical evidence of everything from the Loch Ness monster to the so-called Beast of Bodmin.
In the series of works in which the artist makes a transition into shaman, Coates' ‘becoming' skills are applied towards a specific social purpose, testing the power of animal becoming and the role of the artist within the public arena. Coates modifies this ancient tradition of communication with animal spirits into an artistic and functional consultancy tool.
"All over the world learning the language of animals, especially of birds, is equivalent to knowing the secrets of nature and hence to being able to prophesy. Learning their language, imitating their voice, is equivalent to ability to communicate with the beyond and the heavens