Humans, that other animal

Reconciliation. If I had to choose one term to describe Danielle Burgart's work, it would be reconciliation. But before talking about reconciliation, let's look at what's in conflict. 

Burgart's work is punctuated by bird-headed men. They draw the eye, they question, they even worry, sometimes - but they never leave us indifferent. In fact, they are the place where antagonistic forces confront each other, and this confrontation animates them. 

Each entity, in fact, evokes its original context: on the one hand, human bodies, virile, massive, subject to the law of gravity. Even in unstable, painful positions, they appear heavy and impassive, determined and calm.

 

On the other side, bird heads - more precisely, birds of prey. Birds escape gravity. And this juxtaposition of man's body and bird's head creates tension, as gravity is abused, dominated by the body and flouted by the head. This tension is reinforced by the fact that a bird of prey has a neck whose mobility allows the head to rotate more than 180° - and this mobility, too, contrasts with the mass of these bodies, which borders on immobility. What's more, these birds have the visual acuity to see movement at a distance of a few thousand meters or more - and the wings to swoop down on it at 100km/h for the slowest. Acuity, velocity and precision are also at odds with the slowness and clumsiness of these heavy bodies.

 

One being - the bird-headed man - two entities - man and animal. Beyond the physical details evoked by each, it is a world - its world, from which it is extracted - that each summons. Two worlds that cohabit in the same being, two worlds that tend to be mutually exclusive: that of man and that of the animal. Two worlds that meet to collide, to clash, provoking friction, tension, almost deflagration. 

In fact, these men with bird heads make visible the conflict of which humanity is the theater - a conflict never resolved, never solved: the one that has animated man since he extricated himself - or wanted to extricate himself - from nature in order to dominate it. The conflict between his social, civilized, standardized side and his socially repressed animalistic side - his spontaneous, uncontrollable natural side. The human being is the seat of this conflict - a conflict denied by the sacrosanct belief that he has dominated nature and freed himself from his animality.

By endowing her humans with bird heads, Burgart restores to humans their repressed, denied, muzzled part - their animal part. She lets it happen, without judgment or bias towards one or the other. By juxtaposing them, she lets these two entities - human and animal - rub shoulders, confront each other, clash without ever achieving equilibrium. It gives conflict a space in which to unfold. Better still, it gives it a language. 

This language gives expression to the conflict as it is, without seeking to camouflage or resolve it. In so doing, it makes it visible, or rather, exhibits it. It lets it be - hence the impression of friction, of tension, even in a scene as peaceful as The River of Life, where in this paradisiacal landscape, the central characters - humans with bird heads - continue to exhibit their dichotomy. Dichotomy at the heart of Burgart's universe.

If Burgart's work is a work of reconciliation, it is because it reconciles man not with the animal, but with the conflict within him that he has forgotten, denied or repressed. This conflict will never end - at least as long as both parties exist. Letting this conflict be, accepting it without seeking to resolve it, is what reconciliation is all about. This is why Burgart's bird-headed men restore humanity to human beings: because they let the conflict that inhabits and constitutes them speak for itself. Reconciling man with his dichotomy.

 

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