‘Meerschweinbau’
Hannah Lutz Winkler

April 5 - 6, 2025

Gallery Hours: 11am - 7pm

The name is a lie: “guinea pigs” are neither originally from Guinea, nor are they pigs. We sculpt our language from the clay of the already known: the 15th century naturalist Conrad Gessner, in his Renaissance encyclopedia Historia animalium, beheld a rabbitlike body and heard a piggish squeak and thought he’d split the difference—De cuniculo vel porcello indico (“On the Indian rabbit, or piglet”). We humans keep at it, tidying and chiseling our linguistic sculptures for ease of articulation by the human mouth; and so “pig-cony”—cony being an old word for rabbit, grandchild of cuniculo—is thought to have relaxed into “pig-guinea,” the hard /k/ of cony softened to guinea’s /g/ like the predator’s teeth gone dull in domesticity. 

How else to think and speak of these creatures, these little hybrid pig-rabbits from afar? We might otherwise taxonomize in keeping with the animal’s needs. John Wilkins’s An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) imagines the interior of Noah’s Ark designed not in deference to temple dimensions or numerological diktat, but simply by what an animal eats; here you’ll find the “ginny-pig” munching among the Squirril, Baboon, and other Beasts feeding on Fruits, Roots, and Insects. The ark is an experiment. Before the new world comes, we’ll have to learn to care for other species; every apple passed to a guinea pig is a prayer.

Hannah Lutz Winkler’s Meerschweinbau is another experiment in care and hybridity. Presented over the course of 32 hours from April 5th-6th, 2025, Hannah the human and Gumbo the guinea pig—Hannah’s pet, collaborator, subject of study—will coexist, turning Stephen Street Gallery into a hybrid cage-installation. The piece will proceed with pre-flood quiet: Hannah will not speak, only mimic Gumbo’s behavior, studying her with intense, prolonged focus. An ark in miniature—Hannah and Gumbo will be on felt U-Haul pads covered in oceanic blue fleece; Meer is German for “sea,” Meerschwein the pig from overseas—Hannah will be part Noah, part creature. Dressed in an embroidered onesie she fashioned after the pattern of Gumbo’s fur, Hannah is interested in the fruits and limits of mirroring: we don’t have to fully understand something to care for it; we have so much to learn by simply paying attention. 

The performance is inspired by and a departure from Joseph Beuys’s 1974 I Like America and America Likes Me. The German Beuys flew into New York, wrapped himself in felt, and was transported by ambulance to the René Block Gallery, where he spent three days with a coyote. Beuys figured himself as patient and healer, accessing a supposedly shamanic, indigenous power symbolized by the coyote to remedy “the whole American trauma with the Indian.” The force of Beuys’s performance derives less from the artist’s hammy, messianic iconography—a stack of Wall Street Journals as a premasticated image of “capitalism”; the coyote, reportedly, peed on these—and more from the morphing relationship of Beuys and coyote over time. One feels the thrill of a man and a dangerous animal in the same space; one is bewildered at the coyote’s increasing calm. Where Beuys’s title reached for all of America, Hannah’s begins bottom up, erecting, if not an ark, then a home at least—a Meerschweinbau. Where Beuys’s audience could only watch, an attendant at Stephen Street will allow visitors to purchase a bag of vegetables for 50 cents, and feed both Hannah and Gumbo. Where Beuys lived with a predator, Hannah will live with an animal wired to be prey, for whom care requires a great deal of trust and attention, and with whom she has a yearslong history. Both pieces are inseparable from their historical context, as experiments of coexistence under stormclouds of pain: the Vietnam War for Beuys, for Hannah the decommodified labor of today’s art world and the divisiveness of the Trump era; emergence from the flood requires a new vision of interspecies care.  

Beuys founded a political party for animals who, he claimed, could not “speak for themselves.” But guinea pigs, like their names, are always speaking in hybrids. It isn’t difficult to interpret the semaphore of a lupine tail, or the garish geometry of bared teeth; when a guinea pig gurgles, though, it might be expressing contentment or demonstrating dominance; its squeaks are by turns distress calls and overflows of excitement. Meerschweinbau explores the almost religious attention these creatures encourage, how our silence might encourage a new language, a new way of being. (After the performance, Hannah will watch security footage of the piece, and react to it as if in confessional.) “Attention, taken to its highest degree,” wrote Simone Weil, “is the same thing as prayer.” You hear “prey” in “pray”; you hear a guinea pig squeaking; you try your best to understand it.  

Natan Last, 2025