Oh My Flesh Lump. ‘The Animal Husband’ by Candice Lin at Talbot Rice Gallery

The exhibitionary is an umbrella term for institutions born out of Western colonial modernity that drew new divides between the epistemology of objects and the shaping of subjects. Exhibitionary apparatuses, such as the Museum, the Cabinet, the Anatomy Theatre or the Zoo, were vital in the construction of the scientific and aesthetic categories at the basis of the modern episteme. They served to spatialise power and knowledge by entrenching a series of ontological divisions – such as Object/Subject, Nature/Culture, Human/Animal, Civilisation/Wildness – that from the era of the Colonial Enlightenment stretch all the way into our present. 

‘The Animal Husband’ by Candice Lin takes these exhibitionary spaces that imposed binary categories on bodies — living or dead — as a place to work through alternative and parallel histories to the ones that have given rise to the conceptual categories still operative today. Wildness is mobilised in a framework similar to that which Jack Halberstam develops in Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (the image on the book cover is actually a sculpture by Candice Lin).⁰¹ For Halberstam, wildness not only offers an alternative, anti-identitarian history of queerness but it also provides a resistant ontology to unmake the lexicon of the colonial order of man, as well as aiding in the disarticulation of the material conditions that produce modernist aesthetics and sensibility.  

Presenting her first solo exhibition in Scotland at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Lin works closely with the situatedness of a space that was formerly the Natural History Museum of the University of Edinburgh. Inherently tied to histories of the snatching, splitting open and exhibition of bodies, Talbot Rice Gallery is haunted by the anatomical, scientific and exhibitionary gaze which constitutes one of the colonial underpinnings of the Enlightenment. Humanist thought developed throughout sites such as Edinburgh’s graveyards, anatomical theatre and Natural Museum, where corpses were unearthed, dissected and displayed in the name of progress. Vision was assumed as the main vehicle to form the subjectivity of what can be categorised as Human in contrast to what is object to extraction and violence. This Cartesian formation of subjectivity through optics continues to shape our present, both within the exhibitionary space and outside it.

Lin does not work with materials or in spaces but through them. She has consistently used colonial commodities such as indigo, cochineal or tea, not just for their material qualities, but as paths to stress their ties to histories of colonial violence and extraction. In ‘The Animal Husband’, Lin specifically centres bodies – human and animal – as subject material worked through in sculptures, videos, carvings and drawings.⁰²

Wolves, cats and lambs are common threads throughout the exhibition, which opens with Piss Protection Demon, a lumpy glazed ceramic sculpture covered in wolf piss. The poignant smell — on the verge of repulsion and pleasure — surprised me and I caught myself wanting more. Piss Protection Demon plays with historical accusations of lycanthropy, which were synonymous with witchcraft and subsequent witch trials. This widespread paranoia, projected on persecuted bodies, emerged during the early stages of the history of capitalism, running in parallel with Britain’s expansion of then emerging capitalist farming systems. As Silvia Federici has argued, during this time, the biopolitical reorganisation of bodies’ productive and reproductive labour through witch hunts and the Cartesian division of body and mind had a vital role in the transition in Europe from feudalism into colonial capitalism. The smell of wolf piss emanating from Lin’s sculpture seems to be a fitting way of summoning these entangled histories and ushering us into the exhibition without demanding the use of our vision.  

At the centre of the gallery, a rotating screen alternatively plays two videos: The Animal Husband and Blueness. The revolving central panel projects some imagery on the wider room, giving the walls, at times, the appearance of a cat. In the titular video The Animal Husband, Lin’s cat Roger, narrates his experience of castration as a sacrifice to enter the human world, his relationship to Lin and his incomprehension of the human urge to police the nervous system, alongside specific stories that illustrate the formation of human-animal relationships underpinned by colonialism.

Husbandry, meaning the controlled production and domestication of animals for activities desirable for humans, is one of the many humorous resources that Lin interweaves in her work. Its double meaning subtly brings together histories of human-animal divisions, the institution of marriage between man and woman, and how both of these dualities play a role in rendering certain bodies as dominant and others as subject of exploitation.

The domesticated animal — as a pet or a farming animal (husbandry) — appears throughout the exhibition as a reminder of those borders between human and animal that police desire and sex. Roger’s account of his castration as well as his intimacy with Lin stresses how the punishment of sexual conduct revolves around the penis and penetration. If in the first part of the video, Roger describes the ways in which he and Lin rub each different parts of their body in what is considered accepted petting, the second part interweaves anatomical illustration of animal husbandry showcased to students with the artist’s own animation. Here, Roger introduces us to Thomas Granger, the first youth who was executed in what is today the United States of America, circa 1625 to 1642. Granger was found guilty of having sex with several animals such as ‘a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey’. While all these animals fall under the categorisation of husbandry, the script of Granger’s witness statement provides unique characterisations for each: 

‘This is the one I feed each day and comb with the bristle brush until her coat gleams. This is the one who knickers softly when she sees me coming up the hill, her mouth anticipating the taste of toasted oats and burnt sugar. This is the one I lifted the tail and plunged my penis into her soft wet opening like a mother’s homecoming kiss. This is the one I loved.’ 

After he had pointed to each animal and shared the names he had for them, their throats were cut open in front of him, before he was also executed. This was the milestone for the development of colonial laws used in the US Constitution as ‘Crimes Against Nature’, which punished and criminalised bestiality and anal sex, to the point they became synonym with sodomy – a punishable offense in some states up until 2003. 

Here we are faced with a contradiction: if we were to take the penis and penetration out of the question, the rubbing of bodily parts for pleasure and the act of bestowing an animal with exceptional status is very similar in both socially accepted pet relationships and Thomas Granger’s account. Furthermore, deepening the double-meaning of ‘husbandry’ and ‘husband’, both terms refer to the policing of how bodies fulfill productive and reproductive labour – penetration does not only represent the scale to measure punishment laws for bestiality, but also for the policing of penetration outside the structures of straight marriage, therefore privileging reproductive over nonreproductive sex.

The centrality of the penis reveals how this apparent universal human is modeled around a very particular body – a white, powerful man, whose penis executes legislation, reproduction, and violence. This image was and is very different to how many other peoples and cultures experience their bodies. In the exhibition, Cicatrix (2024), a wall mural presiding over the back wall of the first-floor gallery, reproduces a medical illustration by American doctor Robert Coltman (1862–1931) depicting the scar that castration would leave on eunuchs in Imperial China. Despite eunuchs having a particularly privileged position in Imperial China, the Western gaze, with its attended scientific, anatomical, anthropological and photographic practices, equated castration with a despicable condition. Robert Coltman’s illustration is one of many examples of exhibitionary practices that parallel the collapse of the cultures outside the Western colonial project that they set out to represent and study.

Whether through a cat that playfully exposes the erotics of humans touching their so-called pets while de-eroticising reproduction, or through the scar left by castration outside the Western gaze, Lin orchestrates a space in which, as soon as the penis is taken out of the question, legislation, violence, reproduction and pleasure might assume more nuanced possibilities. This space reminds me of Paul B. Preciado’s seminal text Countersexual Manifesto (2000).⁰³ Therein, Preciado interrogates the dichotomy between desire and nature going beyond the early-modern definition of crimes against nature that policed and medicalised subaltern desires, and identifying the trace those imaginaries still bear even in contemporary postnatural sensibilities. Favouring artifice over the biologically disguised ‘natural sex’ as a basis for the history of sexuality, Preciado establishes the penis as a threshold for the pathologising of any practice that threatens divides such as Human/Nature or Woman/Man. In Preciado’s account, the phallus is demystified as a spoiled construction of psychoanalysis and the dildo, or the artifice, is offered instead as a way to transcend previous categories – its malleable prosthetic quality meaning that the arm, the head, the chest, the leg can become a dildo too.

If Cicatrix is a scar left by past embodiments, the top-floor gallery is a sequence of walls newly scarred with drawings and verses. The shape of the scars is mirrored in the original structure of the gallery’s cupola. Floating upwards, the smell of wolf piss impregnates the room, and the videos projected by the rotating screen overlay the walls. Challenging the rational, Cartesian principle of the exhibitionary, Lin unmoors the fixity of the gaze/image. All her works spatialise and expand vision rather than confining it within the individual.

The drawings and verses scratched on the walls upstairs awaken a visceral response. The shavings of the walls are still there, as if just carved – their roughness similar to the marks left on the toilets of a club. Reading all the excerpts carved from right to left, a sort of found poem emerges: 

oh my flesh lump / rub me / my nerves / my data / beloved / i’m yours / suck my / ball juice / life / becoming / a r̶o̶c̶k̶ (1620) stone / again

The engravings on the second-floor walls echo some of the images carved on minerals (copper and zinc) placed throughout the two levels of the gallery. Forged as stand-alone pendants or pendants attached to a metallic human collar, these pieces reference tokens that European pilgrims in the Middle Ages used to scare demons away. Shaped as genitalia, these pendants were intended to scandalise evil creatures so that they would leave the pilgrim alone, again resonating with Preciado’s recognition of genitalia as technological objects. The sculptures on display feature images and language that blur categories of human and animal through sex and intimacy: words such as ‘FUCK’, ‘SUCK’, ‘GROOM’ play once again with the double meanings that Lin uses to humorously expose how our desires often exceed the constructed borders in which Humanism encloses Animality.

The minerals on which these engravings are made – copper, metal or nickel – are themselves significant. In modern Western thought, the Human/Animal divide comes on a par with the Bios/Geos dichotomy, which was instrumental to the transformation of geological bodies and territories into resources and land subject to extraction. The differentiation between stone and rock is referenced in one of the upstairs wall scrawls where the 1620 Plymouth rock – a mythical prop of the colonial narrative in North America – is referenced, but the word ‘rock’ is crossed out in favor of the more malleable word ‘stone’. In an extension of the modern divides that govern human and animal bodies alike, minerals are also susceptible to property relations, land division and extraction of resources.

From the first werewolf sculpture covered in wolf piss to the many pendants scattered throughout the space, the lumpy metals join the scarred walls, murals and drawings hanging as kites from the ceiling to provide an exhibition that is rich in textures and transcends vision in favour of other senses such as touch and smell. Wandering through the galleries, I was left with the feeling of a presence I have just missed but want to encounter; it is unclear and unimportant whether hands or paws have left all these delicious shapes and verses behind.

In recent months, the expression ‘human animals’ has been used by Israeli Defense Minister to dehumanise Palestinians and rhetorically facilitate the ongoing genocide. In a column entitled ‘Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom’ published by The New York Times in February 2024, Thomas L. Friedman compared Arab countries to parasitic insects and pests. Faced with this surge in the all-too-familiar use of animalisation and animal metaphors to enable violence on Palestinian bodies and land, at first, I was perhaps a bit resistant to an exhibition commenting on the Human/Animal divide. And yet, ‘The Animal Husband’ treats this divide as textural, not metaphorical. The violence visited on (human and animal) bodies throughout modernity is not abstract but a literal accumulation of forms of physical, spatial and social dispossession. In the same way, the alternative embodiments offered in the exhibition are not a dehistoricised myth but an actual resistance to that dispossession. 

‘The Animal Husband’ does not separate form and medium – it is not a political exhibition, but an exhibition made politically, as Simon Sheikh would put it.⁰⁴ Lin does not privilege the work of vision, but, through various senses, she humorously critiques the fears that stem from our own formation of Humanism and therefore Animality. Lin understands that an anticolonial, materialist approach to the form, space and medium of the exhibition is the only way to unravel and critique the many divides that formed modern vision and thought, and that still prop up settler colonialism and capitalist exploitation. Resisting exhibitionary vision as inextricably linked to the colonial project, she maps cultures and relationships that either historically or in the present constitute non-extractive relationships to one’s own and other bodies.