Bruce Armstrong’s Strange Creatures pop up at Melbourne’s NGV

Bruce Armstrong’s often large, deceptively simple and enigmatic animal forms can have a deep effect on the beholder.

Bruce Armstrong with one of the Guardians at the NGV, Melbourne.

Anthropologists stress the efforts human beings make to distinguish themselves from the animals among which they live, and which they either hunt or raise for food. The cooking of animal flesh before eating it, for example, is not only designed to make it easier to chew and digest as well as taste better, but also to assert implicitly that we do not feed on raw flesh in the same way as animals.pre

When meat is not cooked, it is prepared in even more elaborately artificial ways, such as salting, curing or smoking. And the rituals that surround the eating of raw meat are notably elaborate: the preparation and serving of steak tartare or beef carpaccio are particularly painstaking, while the preparation of raw fish in Japan is even more refined.

The almost universal prohibition of cannibalism, except in the most darkly superstitious tribal cultures, reflects a similar concern: animals eat each other, but we do not; to eat another human is tantamount to renouncing humanity and sinking to the level of beasts.

And yet our anxiety to distinguish ourselves from animals is occasioned by our very sense of their proximity and our affinities with them. If you live in the country or spend much time travelling in rural locations, you can’t help being struck by their vital and even disturbing presence, whether cows in a field in Australia or goats and sheep strolling on the side of a road in the Mediterranean. We apprehend these are sentient beings, moved by appetite and sometimes by hints of more sophisticated impulses.

The minds of animals are deeply mysterious: there are creatures, such as insects, whose brains seem almost entirely pre-programmed and which are only able to respond to a narrow range of variable conditions during their brief existence. At a far more developed but still essentially instinctual level, we see that migratory birds find their way back to a nest thousands of kilometres away; other birds such as starlings fly in tight swarms that seem to suggest a kind of networked or collective mind.

Bruce Armstrong’s Bast (c.1990).

Some animals, like possums and wombats, seem remarkably dim. Others demonstrate surprising powers of inference. I once watched an otter climb up to a hand basin and put a finger to the tap to produce a spurt of water it could drink, something I would hardly have thought possible if I had not witnessed it. And what of whales and dolphins? We are told they are highly intelligent, but it is hard for us to imagine a consciousness not articulated by language.

The variety of familiar animals provides a rich and universal source of metaphors. We think of individuals as being like cats or dogs, foxes, wolves, jackals or lions. Our sense of the types each animal represents is so distinct they become proxies for humans in fables such as those of Aesop, retold by La Fontaine in the 17th century.

In mythology, human beings are sometimes turned into the animals they resemble in a moral sense, like the cruel Lycaon transformed into a wolf: a symbolic reduction to a pre-human condition. And conversely, tribal peoples often imagine the ancestor of their race was an animal or an animal spirit, so that the animal in question remains the totem of the tribe.

Even more complex civilisations have a fondness for symbolic animals as personifications of virtue and strength, guardian figures endowed with apotropaic powers. From the winged bulls of Assyria to temple guardian figures found in many forms throughout East Asia, large sculpted figures of stone, wood or even ceramics defend the entrances to palaces and sacred precincts.

Bruce Armstrong’s Still life (mirror) (1994).

And this brings us to the often very large, deceptively simple and enigmatic animal forms of Australian artist Bruce Armstrong, which occupy the open spaces on each floor of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Federation Square building. The biggest are displayed in the ground floor foyer, massive wooden sculptures that can hardly fail to have a visceral and surprisingly deep effect on anyone who gives them a few moments of attention.

We respond in the first place perhaps to the enormous animal forms that seem charged with a contained but powerful life force. The precise nature of the animals is ambiguous, for the figures are so broadly cut, and this is part of their attraction: they are more like bears than anything else, but the ambiguity allows the artist to avoid a specificity that could be distracting or even kitsch, and maintain their general status as great dark beasts of the imagination.

Next, from an analytical perspective but simultaneously from an experiential one, there is the material from which these creatures are made: huge sections of ancient tree trunks. Each of the massive animal figures is made from a single section of trunk, and it is clear they could not have anything like the same power if they were made of many pieces joined together. It is details like the cracks and splits that run through the figure and emphasise at once the unity and the materiality of the timber block that make these objects so fascinating.

The roughness of the cutting, indeed, serves not only to define a huge but ambiguous and atavistic dream-creature, but to preserve the sense of the timber as part of a colossal and once living tree. The organic matter of the tree trunks, the texture, grain and structure of the timber are emphasised, as though the creatures emerged spontaneously from their material, expressing the potential energy that has built up in the course of centuries of natural growth.

It is for this reason that Armstrong’s figures, charged with a power that arises from the force of life itself, have the capacity to act as guardian or apotropaic figures. The energy of life symbolically opposes the negativity of envy, anger and evil, and even when we no longer imagine these negative forces as occult agencies, such images can appeal to the moral imagination.

Scale is important in these works principally because of the material used: the power of a massive tree trunk is based on its size compared with us, and on the time we sense it took to grow to such dimensions. The works could not have the same impact if made from smaller pieces of timber. But there is also another consideration: Armstrong’s subjects can verge on, and sometimes deliberately play with, the whimsical. In these colossal figures, where whimsy is not appropriate it is avoided by the sheer bulk of the objects and the deliberate roughness of their carving.

Bruce Armstrong’s Bete Noir (2012).

Also significant in this regard is the artist’s avoidance of any reference to Australian fauna. Lovable as Australian native animals are, they would be completely unsuitable for this purpose. Kangaroos, koalas or wombats would be not only whimsical but almost unavoidably kitsch. They are too specific and local. Instead, Armstrong chooses more generic theriomorphic forms, closer to bears than anything else, as well as birds based on the eagle or hawk. In one striking work, he evokes a hawk-headed sarcophagus, reminding us of the depth of historical memory that underlies his work.

Upstairs we can see where he started, already with simplified forms and ancient archetypal animals such as Gryphon (1983) or Tyger (1984), whose spelling is an allusion to William Blake’s poem and invites a symbolic and spiritual reading. The sculptures are not yet monoxylic, but already carved in a deliberately simplified form; there is a feeling for characteristic animal movement that is present in all Armstrong’s work, but it is hinted at rather than overt, leaving the viewer to read ferocity into a barely defined feline head.

In later work, imagery grows organically out of the artist’s process, his handling of the timber and the qualities of particular pieces — since he uses found and aged timber, rather than freshly cut trunks — in dialogue with his repertoire of generic or archetypal animal forms. Thus in one case, as he cut away rotten sections of a trunk, he was inspired to carve a crocodile that turns out to be characteristic in its unsentimental and ambiguous presence.

In other cases meaning is more expressly evoked, but it still remains suggestive rather than obvious. Bete Noir (2012), for example, is clearly important to the artist, for when he sold the original he had a bronze cast made to keep for himself, and this is the piece included in the collection. Even in this form we can see the grain of the wood, and a visible crack goes through both figures since they were, in the original, carved from the same block.

The title of the work is similar to a French expression meaning someone to whom we feel a chronic antagonism, but here it seems to refer more simply to the black beast that stands behind and appears to embrace the human figure. The relation of the two figures recalls Michel­angelo’s Rondanini Pieta, which he reworked at the end of his life, and although the bear does not seem hostile, the French title may be justified by the hint of some obsessive quality to the relationship evoked, perhaps that of the artist to his own imagination.

Whimsy and a sense of humour have their place in some of the smaller pieces, perhaps most notably in a couple of works in which a kneeling bear and a seated cat, respectively, look at their own reflections in the mirror. There is an aesthetic risk in compromising the blocky wholeness of the sculpted form that Armstrong usually pursues, but he is able to carry it off because the mirrors are in fact painted surfaces consistent with the material quality of the sculptures.

There is also a certain thematic risk, when his sculptures usually evoke precisely the non-reflexive, non-self-conscious presence that seems characteristic of animals. These works are not ultimately inconsistent in this regard, since the reflected gaze of the animals is almost completely neutral. But a slight glimmer in the eyes reminds us of the question mentioned earlier: what goes on in the animal mind?

Bruce Armstrong: An Anthology of Strange Creatures

National Gallery of Victoria. Until January 29.