İnsan-Hayvan İkiliğinde Tahakküm İlişkisi ve Sanattaki Görünürlüğü

Abstract

Domination means ‘to rule or rule by coercion’ (Kılıçoğlu, Araz, Devrim, 1973, v.11, p.684) and is based directly on the concepts of 'possession' (to have) and 'property'. Domination refers to one person making another person their property through 'owning' their freedom and abusing this situation as they please. Fromm explains the distinction between the concepts 'to have' and 'to be'. 'To have' is the desire to want more, the desire to dominate with the ambition for owning everything (2003, p.48). However, the person inclined to have / to possess can never be satisfied by having enough. Sartre's thoughts concur: "the desire to have aims at the for-itself on, in, and through the world." (1992, p.763). The opposite of 'to have' is ‘to be’. In this case, the person does not try to acquire and dominate everything with the desire to ‘to have'. Domination over animals expands with the growth of capitalism and industrialization. So much so that today the idea that humans have the right to rule over animals has become a common ideology. This is why Singer states that ‘the majority of people are speciesists’ (2018, p.56). The theoretical analysis on domination, which is carried out in the first and second chapters, displays that not only the living being under the domination but also, the person who establishes the domination faces a destructive action. Due to the domination carried out with the desire to possess / to have, the damage done to the world and to themselves retaliates. In other words, with the domination they created, they actually put themselves under domination as well. When the motives for domination are examined; the phenomena such as 'fear of death', 'alienation', 'self-creation', 'speciesism' and 'anthropocentrism' come to the fore. These issues are examined in the third chapter through exemplary ceramic sculpture, installation, photography, video, performance art-works. While some artists’ works pursue objectifying animals or benefiting from animal exploitation, others’ works criticize these phenomena based on the fact that animals do not exist for the interests and service of people, thus tries not to instrumentalize animals. According to the conclusion developed from this theoretical and artistic research; the course of domination that takes place in human-animal duality – from how it started to how it ended- has been artistically studied and correspondingly applied into art-works in the fourth chapter. The state of being under the invasion of one's own creation of domination is depicted artistically with the dynamics of games such as 'backgammon' and 'chess'. The phases of domination are embodied in video, ceramic sculpture, and installation art-works. Thus, self-created domination, which makes freedom one-sided and ultimately suppresses one's own freedom as a boomerang that returns to oneself, is made visible without instrumentalizing the animal phenomenon or image.