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Image credit Unknown via f*** yeah, wild horses

Last week I wrote about the curious dual-natured relationship we seem to have with horses. In books and film and popular media horses are situated as both friend, companion, partner and as disposable beast, object, mere chattel. Last week, too, I teased the case of Jasha Lottin and the relationship she had with a horse. Her story is surprisingly simple at first blush. Lottin and her friend bought a 32-year-old, near-dead horse already scheduled to be euthanized. They shot it in the head with a high powered rifle—apparently killing it instantly and painlessly. Then Lottin, a nudist and Star Wars fan, staged a photo shoot featuring her and the now-dead horse. Throughout the following post I’ll be discussing her pictures with the horse. They are excessively gory; there is some nudity. Discretion advised. Not safe for work content after the break.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

Here Lottin is tucked into the now emptied out horse—Skywalker style. Its organs and blood are splayed out on the ground; she has replaced them. Her smiling face pokes out near its back legs. There’s no certainty of the horse’s sex, but in either case she takes the place of its genitals. These photos, especially those with Lottin tucked inside, trend towards neither horse nor human but instead a combination of the two. They’re, together, an inverted centaur composed upon and within the body of a horse. The combination is, as we must be sure to remember, not equal. Even though she has positioned herself within the horse, in its belly, its Lottin that consumed the horse both figuratively and literally.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

There is something strange about these images of her eating some bit of the horse. Last week I wrote about Daenerys’ ritualistic consumption of the horse heart. She was glistening and bloody, and while she and the heart were prominent there was no horse to be seen. Lottin’s consumption, though, doesn’t have nearly the same pop, the same flare. Her bloody hands look like they were dipped in red corn syrup; the piece of horse she tugs on seems small and insignificant. The banality of her representation forces the viewer to actively recall the embodied reality of her act. These photos point toward an actual woman and an actual horse and actual death.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

Throughout almost all of the photos Lottin wears a broad grin. Here Lottin and her unnamed friend are posing with the horse’s heart. Both grinning, they hold the heart up in what must be a pretty common hunter’s-fresh-kill-trophy pose (I’ve taken any number of such pictures while fishing). Her constant grin is one of the most intriguing aspects of these pictures. There’s no sense of gravity, no notion of sadness or remorse or really any hint that this entire event is anything but lark. It should be noted that after posting these photos Lottin was reported to the authorities; after investigating they found that she broke no laws. What I think people found so shocking, though, was her smile. Because of that smile—a fixed photo smile, unconscious, reflexive, ubiquitous—there isn’t any real room for anything but the snap acknowledgement of these photos as simple snap shots of (what many saw to be) grotesque activity.

Image credit Jasha Lottin via Seattle Weekly

Here Lottin stands naked and covered in blood, perhaps having just emerged from inside the dead horse. This photo, though, subverts any sense of hybridization or actual relationship between Lottin and the horse. She has killed the animal and eaten it and played within it, but still there’s nothing but a facile connection. The blood remains on the surface as she looks down at the dead horse as nothing more than a hollowed out prop. What is there here to separate her from the spectacle of the films written about last week? Her horse, though specifically killed in order to make the photos, is little more than a prop.

Image credit Ars Electronica 2011 via New Scientist

Next week I’ll be looking at a different kind of horsey performance. In 2011 Marion Laval-Jeantet undertook a piece of performance art that explored the possibilities of a more substantial, embodied, relationship with a horse.