How Do You Live?: Lin May Saeed

by Laura McLean-Ferris
Mousse Magazine
3 April 2024
English

To my mind, the pietà for our fraught ecological century is Lin May Saeed’s Reiniger / Cleaner (V02) (2020), a sculpture of a humanoid figure in a bug-like yellow mask and white hazmat bodysuit sitting on the floor with a tiny foal in its arms. In this work, the sixth sorrow of the Mater Dolorosa has been replaced by a sorrow for the era of the sixth extinction (a brief reminder: according to the United Nations’ 2019 biodiversity report, at current, accelerating rates of die-off, one million species will become extinct, some within decades, without decisive action).(1) The foal is painted in black and red paint and sculpted from Styrofoam, as are the hands and feet of the main figure. The yellow mask, with a long tubular snout and large black discs for eyes, is an unusually shaped watering can from Switzerland. We cannot tell whether the small animal is dead or just suffering due to contact with some kind of deadly material, and whether the main figure is human or a benevolent alien on a cleanup mission to Earth. What is clear, however, is its attitude. Its gestures and posture—from the tilt of the head, to the knees drawn up to the body, to the angle of the feet, to the careful, soft contact the gloves make with the creature—convey grief and exhaustion as well as a deep tenderness. This body language seems to communicate that the cleaner is doing what it can during a catastrophe. Reiniger / Cleaner is a somewhat unusual sculpture in Saeed’s oeuvre, but she made more than one version of it, a repetition which perhaps points to its significance, or at least a desire to fine-tune certain aspects. The work does, however, include many of the important facets of Saeed’s oeuvre: interspecies closeness, finely observed attention to the expressive language of human and animal bodies, and Styrofoam as a sculptural material.

Saeed, a German artist of Iraqi descent whose life was cut tragically short in 2023, worked often with Styrofoam, using it to create sculptures and wall-based reliefs. She also made bronze sculptures, steel gates, and silhouette pieces constructed from cardstock and transparent paper. Most of her artworks feature animal subjects, sometimes accompanied by humans or deities. Her work came from a distinct political position: she was an animal activist and vegan who worked against “speciesism”—the belief that some species exist on a lower plane than humans, and that this justifies us treating them however we want. This was both an unusual position and a prescient and true one. That same speciesism, as Saeed would point out, is part of the justifying architecture for intra-human violences, particularly where animals are invoked to suggest that a certain human group is of a lower order.(2) While grounded in these serious and radical foundations, it is also true that Saeed’s work can be abundant with tenderness and wit. In the Styrofoam relief Teneen Albaher Relief / Sea Dragon Relief III (2015), the titular creature—a small fish with delicate, leaflike fins—floats against backdrop of indigo and orange paint. It is extraordinary, magical, and self-possessed.

Saeed’s use of Styrofoam as a signature sculptural medium was always a bit shocking to me. Styrofoam does not biodegrade; it simply goes on existing for hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps millions by some estimations. Apprehending Saeed’s sculptures carved from the stuff, I am always struck by—there must be a German word for this—the feeling of being outlasted. Of the sense of my own decomposing flesh, as it compares to this squeaky artificial material that will remain intact even when life on Earth ceases. And though the work is not ironic, a deep irony feels embedded in these works’ appallingly long lives. It seems strange that the ethical position from which they are made—focused on a cohabitation with animals, and our shared survival—should result in sculptures made from a petrochemical substance that clogs landfills.

Saeed, though she referred to Styrofoam as something “that simply should not be,” actually had a more mixed view of its properties, appreciating its lightness and even its chemical stability, despite that this becomes a problem over millennia.(3) In notes that she sent to the writer and artist Ross Simonini, she mentioned that she liked to think of the little white spheres as atoms, “as if you could work on this microphysical level.” She continued that it was invented to insulate air, creating what seemed to her “a very sincere material in visual matters. . . . I find it inspiring to have air as my main material.”(4) Her studio mates, a pair of large rabbits, were also fond of it, nibbling and burrowing into the substance.

Still, the tension around Styrofoam and its effects on ecosystems contributes to some of the power in these pieces, and their relationship to climate catastrophe. There is a twilight mood to works such as Weather Relief (2017), in which a palm-tree-studded beach is battered by torrential rain from an overcast sky, overseen by a jackal sitting on an abandoned-looking beach chair. From the bottom left corner, a bovine creature looks at us from the mouth of a cave, wearing an imperious, perhaps accusatory expression. Pointedly, the gradations of a measuring device—perhaps a thermometer or sea-level reader—appear in the opposite corner. In Water Relief (2018) we see a city of skyscrapers deep underwater and a monkey floating past on an iceberg. In Panther Relief (2017), a lunette-shaped work, panthers and other big cats roam freely around a deserted Doha-like metropolis.

In The Liberation of Animals from Their Cages (2007–20), a series involving works of several different media, the work itself becomes the space of an opened barrier, like a portal, out of which animals run free. In the large silhouette The Liberation of Animals from Their Cages XVI (2014), constructed from black and transparent paper, a stampede of bulls run through a gap in their enclosure aided by masked activists and accompanied by an array of other creatures such as a duck and a crayfish. This work is lit from behind so that the thin paper shines brightly, and the space of liberation is where the black paper ends and the transparency begins. Similarly, in the artist’s lacquered steel gates, inspired by decorative examples that she noticed around parks and gardens in Berlin, positive and negative space is utilized to represent freedom from enclosure. There is a practical reason for welded, line-drawn images to be connected to their supporting architecture, but in works such as The Liberation of Animals from Their Cages XXI / Lobster (2018), a large lobster uses its claws to clip open the grid that forms the gate itself, creating an opening out of which it might notionally climb. Masked activists also appear in these sculptures, assisting the animals in cutting open the gates, as in The Liberation of Animals from Their Cages IXX / Woman with Pig (2016), where a pair of wire cutters lies abandoned on the ground as a masked animal liberator runs from the scene of a cage break with a pig in her arms. More than just a formal device that speaks to enclosure and freedom, gates are a reminder of an available nearness between ourselves and other species. A gate depicting Saint Jerome removing the thorn from the lion’s paw, titled St. Jerome and the Lion (2016), is a particularly strong example of the possibility of this opening.

The enclosure of animals is physical, actual, yet there is also an ontological and psychological partitioning of nonhuman creatures into categories that separate them from us. John Berger has memorably written about the marginalization of animals that occurred in the West with the developments of Descartian thought and through the apparatuses of modernity. It was not always thus. Nus (2012), a particularly exceptional polystyrene relief work, shows two early peoples making wall drawings in a cave, calling to mind sites such as Lascaux in France, the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, or Kimberley in Australia, and the depictions there of animals such as cows, pigs, and antelope. Nus forges a connection to the primary impulse to make art, to depict, to show what is significant.

At present, I am surrounded by depictions of nonhuman animals. I have an infant daughter, under six months old, and since her birth it has been impossible to ignore the creatures printed across everything that is hers—books, onesies, toys—and how keen everyone is to induct her into the animal world. In Western zones of relative comfort, it is almost as though animals constitute the primary imaginative realm. (As Berger observes, “the animals of the mind cannot be so easily dispersed.”(5) I relentlessly look at pictures of animals, introduce her to their specific noises, or point out their special features. The soft fuzz and translucent wings of bees. Buzz buzz buzz. A beatifically smiling procione (raccoon) in an Italian animal soft book. Before we try and teach what a chair or a fork or a friend is, we impart that cows go moo. It is almost as though the world is desperate for her to love animals. And then what?

Berger writes that, during the nineteenth century, the fashion for animal toys for children emerged in direct relation to the marginalization of creatures. But in Western culture, this marginalization process is now echoed over the course of an individual’s lifetime. As Lydia Millet writes in We Loved It All (2024), the primary world of animals is replaced, in the teenage years, by competition, when “children surrender their imaginary play for structured activities with quantifiable outcomes—grades and scores, winners and losers. . . . Now the leisure prescribed to them is guided competition: play disguised as contests, then contests disguised as play. The animals become relics of a frivolous time.” This neoliberal project of forming lone individuals who come to learn that they are in training for the marketplace is part of a larger lesson: “That nature is a separate domain. That its collective is a distant irrelevance.” This is an “abandonment of the beasts that mirrors a human, cultural turn away from other animals.”(6)

It is also an abandonment that accelerates our own demise. In Marie de France’s twelfth-century lai (a medieval narrative poem of Breton tradition) “Guigemar,” a knight kills a white deer with both male and female characteristics.(7) As the animal dies, it curses the knight to feel terrible pain, and then, even worse, agony for others who suffer. The human and the animal are bound, in that moment, by the knight’s act of violence, and both are wounded. The white deer, and its message, reminds me of one of Saeed’s sculptures: her Pangolin (2020), made before the trade in the scaly creature was implicated in the COVID-19 pandemic. We find in Saeed’s work an image-world depicting humans on a shared plane with other creatures, and a place where a turn toward them is staged. In her large sculptures of creatures, in polystyrene or in bronze cast from polystyrene, the precise expression of the animal, and the point at which it meets the viewer’s gaze, is often disarming, communicating both a connection and a withdrawn unreachability. Pangolin looks rueful and wary, with a spark of soft warmth buried deep in its eye. I also think of Peri (2022), a white lacquered bronze sculpture of a wild dog with large mouse-like ears, which the artist named after a creature of Persian folklore and who looks, frankly, moody. They pause and turn to us for a brief moment. The airy lightness of the life-sized animal works gives them phantasmal quality, as though they are the same creatures of ancient myth whose electrifying speech alerted humans to messages from a potent, magical realm. While it would be wrong to suggest that it is desirable to return to a past where animal and human life were more integrated, there still remain possibilities for more cross-species empathy and attention to the intelligence of the more-than-human.

“Hello to you all, how do you live?” was the greeting on Saeed’s website. Beneath were answers from a rabbit, a hare, and, finally, humans, about their ways of being in the world. The rabbit and the hare tell us about how that they live, about tunnel systems and the birth of their young. The humans simply answer: “We don’t quite know. Until we have found out, we wage wars.”

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Cover Image: Mousse #87—Spring 2024, Survey: Lin May Saeed