In his video installation, Kracina has
"revived" the extinct Tasmanian wolf THYLACINUS CYNOCEPHALUS (by way of
editing a 16-second television recording, he virtually prolonged the wolf's
life to a few minutes on the monitor), thereby archiving it for future
generations of mankind. Of all his works, which almost exclusively deal
with problems concerning animals (the extinction, extermination, exploitation,
fetishisation, and manipulability of animals), this is the one that urges
me most to deal with eco-philosophical questions: in general, we consider
the extinction of a biological species something deplorable, but this feeling
is far from answering the question why this should be the case.
It is tempting, and also plausible,
to start out from an approach which is only oriented towards man's own
interests according to which other species are seen as instrumental goods
which are there to serve man's interests. From this point of view, it does
not seem to be so tragic altogether if one species becomes extinct while
various others that are "biologically close" to it live on. Furthermore,
given the current state of bio-molecular development, man now even has
the potential to "raise a species from the dead" - be it in an entirely
synthetic way, by means of genetic engineering, or through the storage
of deep-frozen genetic material. The extinction of a species would therefore
not be final in any way.
But we may, and have to, go further
than this: by applying the idea of value, since species not only have a
purely instrumental value - for man -, but they are also valuable per se.
It would be too simple to deny nature any value of its own and to solely
attribute a value to it from the perspective of human desires, thereby
denying any other species the intrinsic value we claim for our, i.e. the
human, species. We might call these values metaphysical in the sense that
they refer to the innermost part of existing things, to their "raison d'?tre."
In his reflections on being, man tends to classify being - not only in relation to himself (in an anthropocentric way), but also in relation to being as such. This necessarily influences the way man acts and deals with being: being (and therefore also the species) is normatively devided into priority levels. This reminds me of Aristotle: in physics, he admittedly orders the types of things being in successive grades, but he also attributes to every type of thing a usefulness of its own, ranging from the biggest to the smallest, from the "highest" to the "lowest" of things. This Aristotelian approach is to be found again in Saint Thomas Aquinas: "Although in absolute terms, an angel is better than a stone, two natures are nevertheless better than just one, and this is why a universe containing angels and other things is better than a universe containing angels only." In this sense, the disappearance of certain animal species is a loss within the "universe according to Aquinas", a deterioration in the world's diversity, and in the diversity of the values of being.
One does not exactly have to be interested
in metaphysics to understand what Kracina tells us, among other things,
through his longstanding preoccupation with different (extinct, endangered,
fetishised, tormented or "just" existing) species of animals: The existential
values of the various types of animals are neither to be defined along
aesthetic lines (inasmuch as these might e.g. have to do with creating
"pleasure" in contemplation, as has been true for some products of art),
nor along moral lines (inasmuch as they are directly connected to the evaluation
of human actions), nor are they to be seen from a purely pragmatic point
of view (inasmuch as they relate to use, consumption or "pleasure"). They
concern the pure existence of animal species themselves, not necessarily
just the area of human purposes and interests.