Man And Beast: A Meat And Greet Tale

The Age

Saturday October 14, 2006

ANDREW DYSON

The Melbourne Festival's visual centrepiece blurs the boundaries between human and animal, art and portent, writes Andrew Dyson.

THE RELATIONSHIP between humankind and the planet's less demanding species is an ambiguous one, as anyone who has been stuck on a two-lane highway behind that confronting mobile installation the cattle truck will confirm. One one hand, we are acutely discomforted by the mute agony of the sloe-eyed innocents within. Yet we know this suffering underpins a vital network of fast-food venues offering employment to rural youth, clean toilets and cheap refreshment. The traveller is racked by the competing demands of heart, bowels, stomach and wallet.

Equally confusing is the mutually exploitative domain of pet ownership. We comfort ourselves by referring, jokingly, to the alleged symbiosis between owners and their pets. Yet it is a documented fact that people who own pit bulls look like Jack Russells, and that siamese cat owners are seldom elegant. Do pets see their owners as companions or meal tickets? Are our pets idealisations of our none-too-perfect selves? Hitler, after all, was both an animal lover and a vegetarian.

The human tendency to anthropomorphise is explored in Unsettled Boundaries, the centrepiece of this year's Arts Festival visual program. This exhibition offers a multiplicity of animal-related images ranging from the innocuous - William Wegman's aristocratic Weimaraners, Ariel Orozo's soccer-ball spotted cur - to the addled. Why, exactly, has that girl placed a budgerigar's head in her mouth? What, exactly, is the nature of the relationship between that woman and that bear?

More rewarding are Laetitia Bourget's delicate video evocations of animals in the human environment, and Hubert Duprat's lustrous caddis-fly larva. I am not certain why Zhou Tiehai has airbrushed Joe Camel's head onto Ingres' odalisque, but the effect is amusing. Brook Andrew's installation featuring a boxing ring and "taxonomised" black cockatoos jolts our certainties.

It is impossible, viewing these works, to avoid the conclusion they are yet another form of animal exploitation. There is, of course, nothing new about this. The Lascaux cave painters who depicted bison so elegantly were guided not by altruism but by the certain belief that this would help stock their larders. Hieronymus Bosch's lurid Hell, with its transgenic melanges of man and beast, convinced many a penitent merchant to contribute lavishly to the cathedral building fund. The nobility of Napoleon's charger, so stunningly rendered by David, reflects the court painter's not unnatural desire to make his undersized and tetchy boss look good. Images of animals have always been appropriated artistically for profoundly human reasons.

If stealing from the animal kingdom is an integral component of High Art, it has also defined lesser fields of human expression. We remember the expertly rendered pipe-smoking, pool-playing dogs that so enraptured our ancestors. Strip cartoons daily offer us the philosophical insights of animals, and political cartoonists seldom squander an opportunity to underline the bestiality of their targets. The portable video camera alone has created a new category of folk art by which, thanks to the magic of free-to-air broadcasting, we can all enjoy amusing representations of dogs singing arias or cats performing backflips.

And once in a rare while this popular-culture netherworld produces something exceptional. I need only cite Chuck Jones' Academy Award-winning animation One Froggy Evening, in which Mephistopheles (Michigan J. Frog) raises up, toys with, then cruelly destroys his human victim. Regarded by Steven Spielberg as "the Citizen Kane of animated films", this masterwork serves as the perfect metaphor for the complex and often devious dealings between pet and owner.

One can only wish that some of the works in this exhibition were as accessible. Yet Unsettled Boundaries is timely, not least because it abuts and complements those other great fixtures of the Melbourne calendar, the Show and the spring carnival. Both these events provide bizarre insights into relationships between the species.

It is thought-provoking indeed to watch hot-dog munching humans barracking for pigs, especially when those pigs are dressed in tutus. The sight of these chiffon-clad delicacies scrambling round the track made me despair, especially as the pig I was backing, Pork Chop, was running last. I was drawn too to the plight of a dog being upbraided by its owner in the judging ring for dropping its tail at the wrong moment. It looked beaten, and somehow betrayed.

And the carnival. Those magnificent creatures, the product of centuries of breeding, obliged to perform for a mob of howling bipeds who have none. The squat owner receiving the trophy, standing ridiculously adjacent to the gleaming mass of muscle and sinew that did all the work. The indignity of being goaded by a small man perched on one's back.

Excuse me, some anthropomorphising there. This exhibition is indeed pertinent. The recent advances in eugenics only serve to further complicate things, and the harrowing works of Patricia Piccinini, Kate Ellis and others are all-too-likely portents of horrors to come. Rationally, one can accept that the now rapid narrowing of the gulf between the species could herald the beginning of a Golden Age in which humans, lions, lambs and genetically transposed versions of the above can lie down peaceably together. Yet no true progress can be made until we overcome the one constant that has characterised the history of humankind - we win and our dumb chums lose. Until then, we're back where we started, stuck behind the cattle truck and facing another 200 kilometres of hairpin bends. Time for lunch.

Unsettled Boundaries, October 12-18, is the Melbourne International Arts Festival's Visual Arts program.

melbournefestival.com.au

The Age is a sponsor of the festival.

© 2006 The Age

Back to News Index | Back to Home