ABSTRACT
In September 2018, city officials quietly removed Billy, a life-sized bronze goat, from Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square Park. Billy, in its creation as well as in its slow disappearance, marks the culmination of a sustained and remarkably consistent artistic project, a career-long striving to create “pet-able” sculptures capable of figuring the complex co-constitutive entanglements that define our relations with other companion species. Demanding prehension, frustrating comprehension, Billycontinues to offer a radical vision of public art’s capacity to civilize, one in which significant otherness is a thing to be continuously embraced, not cleansed away. Even the signature of Billy’s creator, the Philadelphia-based sculptor Albert Laessle, had been burnished away by time. Informed by the artist’s own sustained and sensitive observation of individual animal models, Laessle’s animal sculptures explicitly draw viewers into intimate, proximate and sympathetic relationships with nonhuman collaborators.
