3.20.24 — The Human Animal
“The only body part that does not elicit disgust is tears.” It is a sad and lovely thought. It is also just one line in a not at all mournful video by Mary Helena Clark, at Bridget Donahue through March 23.
Lovely or sad, it could even be true, if not for all or for all time. It may leave you wondering whether to turn away in disgust or to cry. Clark sees disgust as a refusal of one’s animal nature, but also its epitome. 
She tracks the wish to transcend and to embrace the body, human or animal, starting with teeth. She leaves it to others to sort out the contradictions, if they dare. She leaves it to you, too, to decide what she herself believes and to shed a tear.
Words appear on a side wall, as the left half of a two-channel video, and more than halfway down, like subtitles. They change in response to the images at right, but never comment directly. They unfold silently, again like subtitles, but also like words without an author or a voice. They could be turning away from humankind itself, along with, as the work’s title has it, Neighboring Animals. The images, too, do not tell an obvious story. They could be chance impressions or a natural history of raw flesh and teeth.
They give due weight to natural history, including clinical studies of animal anatomy and appetites. They linger, too, over a reliquary for, supposedly, a tooth from Mary Magdalene. Piety, it appears, does not turn away from dentistry after all. Not that conflicting desires can ever go away. Footage lingers over the ornate jar but never its contents. Does science itself identify with its animal subjects or see scientists as superior?
You may not care, not as actual apes appear on camera, suitably charming. Humans appear, too, but in Medieval depictions as well-dressed monkeys, with their own appetites and charm. If the body elicits disgust, it also elicits desire. If Freud is right, disgust may itself fuel desire and desire disgust. Does it all come down to piety or basic instinct? Who knows?
An opening room takes you to the zoo, where people get to enjoy themselves, whether animals do or no. Human laughter emerges from windowless steel doors. One can imagine passing through the narrow space between them while the doors press in, like rusted steel from Richard Serra or nude bodies from Marina Abramovic. Do not even attempt it. The gallery forbids it, and it would leave you all too human.
Small sculpture putters along on the floor—deadbolts that slide back and forth or move awkwardly ahead. They are not going to lock you in. Photos could pass for shots of the room itself, sterile and framed. They actually show a hatchery, yet another scientific nurturing of the animal. Clark never lets on to her own degree of desire and disgust. Yet she tempts others to confess theirs.
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