Exhibitions devoted to man’s beast friends

TWO interesting exhibitions are in their last weeks: the first devoted to horses, the second to our connection with animals.

A World War I recruiting poster in the National Museum of Australia exhibition Spirited.

TWO interesting but vastly different exhibitions about animals are in their last weeks in Canberra and Melbourne, the first devoted to horses and their history in Australia, and the second to our connection with animals and their place in our affections and imagination.

Spirited deals with one animal with which humans have shared a long history and an intimate relationship, rivalled in this respect only by the understanding we have with dogs. The horse is one of the only animals that we ride, and the closeness of the connection between rider and mount, the instinctive understanding that can develop, perhaps explains the fantasy of a man-horse composite such as the ­centaur.

From swift chargers to the powerful draught horses developed in the Middle Ages, they have been our companions in travel and in war; the cavalry has always been the aristocratic elite of armies and fine horses the pride of monarchs. Since antiquity horses have been bred for racing, prized for their speed and elegance.

Native to the Eurasian continent, horses were brought to Australia, as to the Americas, by European settlement. In early days they were a vital adjunct to life in a vast new land, for travel and for work of every kind. But the exhibition reminds us how pervasive a part of life they remained until comparatively recently.

What we tend to forget is the extent of infrastructure and the network of associated businesses that accompanied the reliance on horsepower. There were stables, including private ones in larger houses; blacksmiths and vets; saddlers to make not only saddles but bridles, stirrups and other equipment; and people to collect the considerable quantity of manure that was left on the streets.

Some of the material and information in the exhibition is expected, but there are other things we may not have been aware of: thus horse breeding rapidly became an important business in Australia in the 19th century, and it was Australia that supplied most of the horses used by the British Army in India.

When the Great War began, horses still played an important part in warfare. Apart from providing the mounts for our own units such as the Australian Light Horse, we once again supplied the British Army: in the course of the war, more than 120,000 horses were sent from Australia to Europe and the Middle East. Virtually none of them returned.

The role of horses in World War II was far less significant, and since that time their use as working animals has almost disappeared, except for a few specialist roles in managing flocks and herds and in mounted police in cities. Otherwise their role has become ceremonial and recreational, in activities such as showjumping and racing.

Spirited is an interesting exhibition that casts light on the social history of Australia and will appeal to anyone who loves horses, but it is essentially predictable. The same cannot be said of Menagerie, which is engaging and surprising, not only in the eclectic range of material that is brought together but in the spectrum of imaginative and affective responses evoked.

The first thing we encounter is a slowly moving video work in which a bird appears to hatch from the mouth of the artist: a strangely evocative image that draws on everything from the Homeric formula of “winged words” to the pervasive image of the soul as a bird. The next work, in contrast, is a late 16th-century Italian painting of Noah loading the animals into the Ark. Two hares, regular symbols of lust, look at each other tentatively and a dog, which would normally hunt the hare, sniffs at one of them in curiosity, but normal instinctual drives seem to be in abeyance.

We pass a series of erotic collages that are variations on the theme of Leda — in one, woman and bird seem to merge and the phallic swan neck appears between her legs — and soon afterwards find ourselves before a hanging of mostly 19th-century animal prints, hunting images and portraits of hunting dogs: works that vary from minor to kitsch, yet which, in this context, invite reconsideration as testimony to the special rapport humans have with dogs.

Throughout the exhibition, quotes from various authors are printed on the walls: mostly well-chosen, they remind us of the striking number of intellectuals and others who have pondered our relationship with the animal world, considering both what we have in common with these creatures and the gap between their experience and our own, mediated by language, consciousness and the sense of identity.

In this regard we find ourselves looking again at James Giles’s Roe Deer (1860) — an idyllic view of a young stag and two females grazing under a summer sky in Aberdeenshire — as at HT Dicksee’s dark and intense etching of a pack of furious wolves baying at a precipice (1903), and wondering what to make of the expressions we read in each case: is this anthropomorphic projection or real empathy?

Humans have always identified with animals in various ways, from the totemic beliefs of tribal people to the theriomorphic gods of Egypt or the animal disguises temporarily adopted by the Greek gods. It was from the Greeks too — although it undoubtedly has even older roots — that we inherited the idea of animals standing in for humans: from the fables ascribed to Aesop to their modern adaptation by Jean de La Fontaine or more recently The Wind in the Willows or Beatrix Potter’s tales.

Such themes are touched on in one of the most striking works in the exhibition, a short film by Henry Coombes about famous Victorian animal painter Edwin Henry Landseer, whose Monarch of the Glen (1851), a dramatic portrait of a great stag in a heroic mountain landscape, became, in reproduction, one of the most popular images of the Victorian age.

The film is loosely based on a true story and follows Landseer as he travels to Scotland to visit the Duke of Bedford and paint a portrait of his family. The duke, in this version, is Spartan and remote, the duchess appears emotionally and sexually starved — she finds some relief with Landseer in the library — and their son is cosseted, neurotic and sadistic.

Landseer, who in reality suffered a serious nervous breakdown in his late 30s, witnesses a frightening vision when he goes out deerstalking with the duke’s gamekeeper: instead of stags he sees two men with stags’ horns, recalling the myth of Actaeon, fighting it out on a mountain top, a sight that fills him with alternate horror and hysterical laughter. That night at dinner, as the duke carves the venison, everything turns into a grim charade.

Particularly memorable is the footage of Joseph Beuys’s famous performance I Like America and America Likes Me (1974). Beuys flew to the US, landed in New York and was taken by ambulance to the Rene Block Gallery, where he spent three days in a caged space with a coyote, before leaving, travelling back to the airport again in an ambulance, and thus not setting foot on American soil except in the airport and at the gallery. The coyote became the embodiment of the America to which he referred in the title of the performance.

Characteristically, Beuys wrapped himself in a felt blanket, concealing his human shape and assuming a strangely bent form like the silhouette of a medieval monk. To the coyote, this apparition would have been unfamiliar yet without any such connotations. The animal has a different way of interacting with the things around it; it moves its water bowl, urinates on the pile of newspapers. (Many years later I saw some of these papers that Beuys had given to his collaborator, Caroline Tisdall.)

Beuys tosses a glove to the coyote, which plays with it like a dog, then oddly rolls on it. But the really striking part is when the animal tugs at the blanket and tears a strip off it. Then it keeps coming back to tear off more pieces, but the whole rhythm of its action is subtly but profoundly different from the way a human would go about the same process. There is nothing systematic, or even purposive, about its actions: they are rather playful, sporadic, without intention — though indeed they grow bolder with success — and punctuated by moments of what seem to us like distraction as the animal follows its profound instinct to be alert to any changes in its environment.

The mental life of animals — the play of appetite and apprehension — is also the subject of Mircea Cantor’s video of a wolf and a deer brought together in the blank white box of a modern art gallery. Their actions and reactions are in part natural, instinctual and inevitable, but an encounter that would normally be played out in the rich and complex environment of the natural world seems almost inhibited by the sensory deprivation of the sterile setting; and although the deer looks at one point almost frozen with fear and resignation, the wolf appears to lose interest and even has a little nap. But as the video is on a loop of less than three minutes, we have no way of knowing how this relationship finally ended up.

Annika Eriksson’s video of dogs in Istanbul also develops some of the implications of Beuys’s coyote: in particular the way that animals, without our sense of individual or even collective identity, exist transhistorically, rather the way that believers in reincarnation assume that we live life after life in succession.

The most dramatic image of the subjectivity of an animal is Rosa Bonheur’s portrait of a horse. We are puzzled by what seems to be a surprisingly anthropomorphic expression, but cloying sentiment is effectively counterpointed by the touching video in the adjacent space of five women doing horse impressions.

Spirited: Australia’s Horse Story

National Museum of Australia, Canberra, until March 9

Menagerie

Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne, until March 1