The Human Animal
Martin Kemp explores the complex and ambiguous relationships between humans and animals in their depictions by artists, and investigates the ways in which animal characteristics have been used to mirror human foibles.
There is no trace of evil in the beaming face of the proud father balancing his two young children in his arms. Yet Raed Abdel Malik Misk, a religious scholar, was yesterday identified as the suicide bomber who snuffed out the lives of Jewish children barely old enough to walk.
The underlying assumptions – so deeply underlying that we generally fail to notice them – are that we should be able read somebody’s character from their face, even in a photograph, and that a perpetrator of ‘evil’ is reduced to the status of an animal. The assumptions have been woven together incessantly since classical antiquity and are embedded in the way we react to our fellow humans. But they are very odd.
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