Nonhuman Artists. Challenging Anthropocentrism symposium, Toronto, 18 Mar 22
This paper begins zoomed in on a very specific piece of visual culture: a vintage wrapping paper from 1988, featuring a bustling, pastel townscape, in which everyone has their role: a goat carries the mail, a bear cooks at the café, and one particular well-known cat rides along on her bike. Activity proliferates: even windows are filled with characters gardening, waving, cooking, or talking on the phone. There is a feeling of extreme density despite the low-rise typologies, which skew commercial rather than residential. The architectural style ranges from medieval European turrets to Las Vegas-esque shoe-shaped buildings, complete with laces. Bears, goats, squirrels, giraffes, cats, rabbits, elephants, sheep, and some kind of vaguely humanoid, gender-fluid, elfish creature all seem to peacefully co-exist in this imaginary ecosystem which suspends many realities, ranging from the food chain to traffic laws.
This one, very obscure piece of Hello Kitty paraphernalia fits into a larger field of idealized urban illustrations, especially those produced in visual culture for children—the most notable example of which might be the books of Richard Scarry, whose iconic “Busytown” has been immortalized by the many printings and memings of his books since the 1960s. I bring these images to a symposium about non-human artists in the hope of beginning to describe and analyze a phenomenon I have been taking notice of the last few years: the flat, colorful, near-utopian townscape illustration, populated either by animals or other posthuman figures. Through representations of animal urbanisms in popular visual culture—from this rare wrapping paper, to digital illustrations, to children’s books—I ask why humans populate their most idealized urban imaginaries with animals. This paper asks what these representations say about both urbanity and animality, and, as a point of departure forward, contrasts them with the actuality of multispecies world-making in practice