‘Meat is murder’, as Aristotle probably once said. And if you didn’t agree with that sentiment before, the new group show at Marian Goodman might make you reconsider. Curator Jens Hoffmann has pulled together a seriously museum-quality exhibition on animals in art. Part historical investigation, part contemporary art exploration, it mixes tons of mediums, throwing together more than 70 artists, scientists and filmmakers, and mingles high art with low art. It’s a zoological art party and it’s the best show the Wellcome Collection has never done.
You enter through a little canopy of foliage and squawking bird sounds. The first room is filled with display cabinets holding all sorts of pre-modern illustrations. There are eighteenth-century drawings of crabs and walruses, sixteenth-century anatomical images of monkeys and mythical beasts, and even an appearance by Albrecht Dürer’s famous rhino. Next to this biological madness, Hoffmann has placed contemporary and modern art. There’s a big purple octopus by slide-master Carsten Höller, photos of birds by Roni Horn and a giant stuffed white squirrel by Mark Dion. Throughout, there are detailed wall texts with almost zero art-speak bullshit. It really does feel like a museum show.
As you go through, you realise Hoffmann’s done the show in stages. It starts with humans and animals as two distinct things. Animals are foreign and unintelligible, something to be studied. Then we start to figure them out; films by Jean Painlevé and Steve McQueen show animals as something for humans to relate to. Then you head upstairs – past Fischli and Weiss’s cat videos and Maurizio Cattelan’s adorable, tiny, chatty mouse house – to see the links and bonds become stronger, as humans and animals mesh together. There’s a tightrope-walking calf/boy by Yinka Shonibare and a fox-headed woman by Stephan Balkenhol. The line between human and animal starts to disintegrate.
Animals become symbolic too, like in John Baldessari’s massive white camel trying to figure out how it will squeeze through the eye of a giant needle. You start to realise the metaphorical heft we've imbued animals with.
The show ends with Pierre Bismuth’s Jungle Book Project, where he’s given each character in the original Disney film one of the 19 languages it was dubbed into. Sitting in the green carpeted room on colourful pillows watching Kaa hiss in Italian, you realise how much symbolic weight we put on to animals: they become vessels for ideas, beliefs and history, and then we hunt them into extinction, or farm them for food. It's a complicated, messy relationship.
Not everything here is ‘high art’. There’s some properly cheesy animal portraiture and they’re even showing the original animated ‘Animal Farm’ movie. But that’s a good thing – it levels everything out and makes you concentrate on the theme of the show. Hoffmann wants us to think about our relationship with animals, properly and deeply, and it works. I mean, sure, it didn’t turn me into a vegan, but I thought about it, and that’s got to be worth something.
Hoffmann has created something approachable, fun and engaging here. It’s the opposite of what commercial galleries are normally like. It really is a rare beast.
@eddyfrankel
