The four curious creatures staring down passersby in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art trace back, in a way, to early paintings that Indigenous artist Jeffrey Gibson made on animal hides. At a talk on Monday introducing his new commissioned work for the museum’s facade, Gibson discussed two paintings from 2013 that feature his distinctive dynamic style on the surface of brain-tanned elk hides.
While painting on hides, he said, “you come across scars. You come across hair follicles. You’re reminded that it’s an animal. Had I done these paintings on canvas, they could be read as geometric abstraction and formalism. [But] in this sense, you were reminded that there were 20 animals in the room with you, and I think that was such a turning point for me to understand how to shift the viewer rather than to shift what I was trying to accomplish.”
In conversation with Met curator Jane Panetta, Gibson talked about his latest high-profile offering after his US Pavilion for last year’s Venice Biennale and a big show at MASS MoCA (on view until next fall): four large sculptures of a deer, a coyote, a squirrel, and a hawk, all cast in bronze and presented under the collective title “The Animal That Therefore I Am.”
“The sense of animism in early cultures globally was something I zeroed in on,” Gibson said about the works. “I’ve been talking for a while now about Indigenous kinship philosophies and worldviews, which are about honoring all living beings as extensions of ourselves, and I remembered this series of lectures by Jacques Derrida from 1997, with the title ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am.’ When he delivered these lectures, they were kind of an outlier—about animals. Many people thought, why would this tremendous thinker suddenly be focusing on a cat?”
But Derrida, the French philosopher associated with deconstructionism, struck a chord. “The more I read, I thought, well, this is about our placement of ourselves at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of living beings and not acknowledging how animals have their own integrity, their own community, their own forms of communication, and their own societies—many of which are much more sustainable than ours.”
Gibson said the sculptures connect the Met’s location in Central Park with his home a few hours north in the Hudson River Valley, since the four kinds of animals are known to live in both. “I moved upstate 13 years ago, and I look at the same mountains every day. I look at the same water. We actually find ways to accommodate the animals that live there, because I feel more in their space than I feel like I can control them being in my space.”
Each of the works wears different kinds of ceremonial garments in mind of Native American regalia. “There’s something about that regalia which is a body in and of itself,” the artist said. “In no way is regalia the same as clothing. It is something which is imbued with the ability to transform oneself—while you’re wearing it, you are a different being.”
As for the four sculptures together, spread out across the width of the museum and there to be seen by anyone who happens to be strolling by on Fifth Avenue, Gibson said he ultimately approached the project—as he does all his work—as a painter. “I know I make three-dimensional objects, but I still think about them like four-sided paintings,” he said. “I look from this side, and from that side, and that’s how I determine if I’m interested in four sides—and even more than four sides.”
