journal of visual culture ‘Living Flesh’: Animal–Human Surfaces Ron Broglio journal of visual culture [http://vcu.sagepub.com] Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) Vol 7(1): 103–121 [1470-4129(200804)7:1]10.1177/1470412907084505 Abstract While historically animal art served cultural ends toward appropriating and domesticating animals, contemporary art considers the possibility of meeting animals outside of human terrains and outside of cultural ideas about human and animal subjectivity. In such art the relationship between canvas as surface and animal body as surface undoes historical appropriation of the animal. The work of artists Olly and Suzi provides a test case for breaching the divide between human worlding and the ‘poor in world’ or mere surface lives of the animal as explicated by Martin Heidegger. The artists’ paper spread out as surface between the animal and the artists creates a contact zone between the surface lives of animals and the work of art. What develops is a productive site for pidgin language that counters human interiority as the space of rational thought. Keywords Agamben ● animal ● contact zone ● contemporary art ● Heidegger ● language ● performance This article pursues the following premise: that which is most animal, including the biological element of the animal rationale, lives on the surface of things and the animal with its surfaces is an overlooked site of productive meaning. Animals are said to be poor in thought; they have little interior reflection and, consequently, little by way of selfhood and no means of attaining transcendental thought. So, to take up the animal means valuing that from which we differentiate ourselves, the animal and its life on the surface. I’m interested in imagining how the surface as a theoretical space occupied by the animal has a productivity and meaning different from the privileged self-reflection of the human subject. In other words, how does the animal and its non-interiority produce thought differently? How might