Walk on the wild side
A show that looks at animals in art... from Tigger to Turner
Animals & Us
Turner Contemporary, Margate
There’s a distinctive pizzazz to the exhibitions programme at the Turner Contemporary gallery on Margate’s seafront. Their last show explored the impact upon modern art of TS Eliot’s influential 1922 poem The
Waste Land, which was partially composed in a shelter overlooking Margate sands. Next up is Animals &
Us, featuring around 100 works of art, which explores the relationship between humans and other animals.
It’s one of those big, sprawling, essayistic shows, encompassing everything from an ancient Egyptian statuette of the cat-headed goddess Bastet, once owned by Sigmund Freud, to a 15-minute video by the contemporary American artist Cory Arcangel, splicing together 170 Youtube clips of cats walking across and “playing” keyboards, set to Schoenberg’s 1909 Three Piano Pieces, Op 11.
While the quality of the art on display is patchy, the show’s energetic ideas, which bounce around like AA Milne’s springy Tigger (whom we encounter, in a lovely sketch by EH Shepard), are all thought-provoking and compelling.
The first gallery provides some historical perspective upon the central theme. Alongside Freud’s statuette, there is a medieval bestiary, illustrated by someone clearly intoxicated with Mother Nature’s scaly, sharp-clawed, leathery-winged variety, and two miniature 12th-century ceramic Chinese dogs, possibly toys.
We also find a gorgeous 18thcentury Mughal watercolour depicting a winged noblewoman riding a composite horse made up, like a puzzle, from many different beasts, and a portrait by Stubbs of an elegant bay horse, with cropped ears, standing before a lake.
Little historical context is provided for these works, which are presented higgledy-piggledy, in an ingenuous, wide-eyed fashion, as if to say, “Look! Another animal from art history!”
If any common thread ties them together, it is, perhaps, that historically man has defined himself by emphasising his dominion over the animal kingdom. An ancient bronze standard finial from the Middle East, depicting a “master of animals” restraining two lions, suggests that this impulse stretches back as far as the 9th century BC. The picture by Stubbs, produced millennia later, looks very different, but it, too, implies that the horse’s aristocratic owner is a “master of animals”, in a way.
This emphasis upon man’s stewardship of nature is, however, far from a hard-andfast rule. As befits the setting, there are several deft watercolour sketches of animals by Turner, including a curled-up cat, which demonstrate nothing more than our capacity to be charmed by the natural world.
As it happens, Turner’s cat hangs in a sweet little section devoted to pets (he had lots of Manx cats, apparently, and used a painting as a cat flap at home on Harley Street), directly above a beautiful etching by Lucian Freud of his whippet Pluto.
“I’m really interested in people as animals,” Freud once said, explaining why he depicted his human subjects naked. “I like people to look as natural and as physically at ease as animals, as Pluto my whippet.”
In the second and third galleries, inspired by critic John Berger’s seminal 1977 essay Why Look at Animals?, the show marches rapidly onwards, into the realm of contemporary art. The starting point here is German artist Joseph Beuys’s infamous 1974 performance, in which he spent three days locked in a New York gallery with a wild coyote.
The past few decades have witnessed a profound shift in the artistic treatment of animals. In part, this is because, as Berger argued, those of us who live in cities feel detached from the animal kingdom in a way that was never the case for our prehistoric ancestors.
Moreover – and this factor has only accelerated since Berger wrote his essay – more and more species of animal are facing the threat of extinction, as plastic clogs up our oceans, and climate change thunders on. As a result, the melancholy spectre of ecological catastrophe overshadows the exhibition’s second half.
Mishka Henner’s photographs depicting Texan cattle feedlots, pieced together from hundreds of aerial images found on Google Earth, offer a chilling – if necessarily distant – exposé of the stark industrial realities of mass-produced meat. Confronted with one of his powerful, apocalyptic-looking landscapes – in which cattle waste, coloured scarlet with chemicals, slops about in a vast pit like a gaping wound on the surface of the Earth – even the most ardent meat-lover would consider vegetarianism.
Another recent trend within art is to treat animals with empathetic respect, as intelligent, emotional creatures, rather than witless beasts provided by God for our exploitation. In the past, artists used animals to understand ourselves; now, they seek to understand them on their own terms. Mankind’s historical arrogance is giving way to enlightened humility.
For instance, the British artist Marcus Coates goes to seemingly absurd lengths to “become” animals, by, say, wearing strange homemade wooden stilts, designed to make him walk like a stoat, or fastening himself to a lofty Scots pine, a favourite vantage point for a goshawk.
Some of Coates’s work is on display in the final gallery, which contains many fascinating revelations. The Japanese artist Shimabuku, for instance, foregrounds the extraordinary intelligence of the octopus. According to a wall text, this mollusc’s “alien-like” brain consists of 500 million neurons spread out across its body.
If you can spare half an hour, though, I highly recommend the three-channel video work A Natural History of Nest Building (2017), in which the artist Andy Holden and his ornithologist father, Peter, deliver a delightfully nerdy visual essay, more Open University lecture than sleek Attenborough-voiced production.
The finale rhapsodises over the elaborate structures built by male bowerbirds to attract mates (even though, technically, they’re not nests). These extraordinary birds appear to have a surprisingly fine-tuned aesthetic sense: they embellish their sculptural structures with found objects, including scraps of plastic, which they often categorise according to colour, and place just so. Humans, it turns out, aren’t the only species with “artists” in their midst.
Until Sept 30. Details: 01843 233000; turner contemporary.org