This is a post about a rather unsettling piece of artwork I saw on the internet today.
But first, since we’re talking about carriers (the title is the name of the artwork), let me just document the demise of a couple of birds that I know about in Agulhas over the last two days. Both from avian influenza, one a Cape Gannet (species listed as Vulnerable) and one an African penguin (species listed as Critically Endangered). Two deaths is bad, but it’s not a lot to go on scientifically. However, AI (the virus not the annoying computer thing all over Facebook) is rife in South Africa at the moment. Are these discoveries just unfortunate chance or is this a sign of a bigger problem on the way?
Watch this space, I guess.
But then the artwork thing. And this is not AI in any sense of the acronym.
A hyper-realistic sculpture from Australian (but born in Sierra Leone) artist Patricia Piccinini. It’s… yeah. It’s this:
Created in 2012 as part of her Curious Affection exhibition, it’s a bit odd and a bit disturbing, but then so is a lot of her other work. I’m really not sure what to read into this, so I went and found someone that (thought they) did:
It seems the carrier and woman are connected in some way, physically but also emotionally, therein lies the conflict. Perched up high, she looks comfortable and content to rely on his assistance, yet what is their relationship, why is he carrying her, is it an equal partnership, or is he just performing a service? We can wonder if the carrier is the next step in post-human technology, his life seems perfectly engineered to the task he performs, and it is feasible that he is happily self-employed.
It’s a lot to take from an odd ape carrying a woman in a frock, but it’s far more than I was able to get from it. So fair enough.
But this isn’t an unusual piece from Piccinini. Her work regularly drags DNA across species boundaries:
Her Madonnas are not clothed for piety but brazen and naked, half-ape, bristling with hair. Babies in swaddling have adult faces and snouts. Nature’s expected laws of delineation – defining scales from skin, bones from feathers, sacs from follicles – are collapsed, all rules rewritten.
Thank goodness she wasn’t set loose on anything for Canberra’s centenary celebrations in 2013. She’d probably have come up with a giant 100ft hot air balloon called the SkyWhale with eight pendulous breasts and a friendly face. Ha.
I’m sorry… she did what? It had… ten… ten pendulous breasts. Oh, OK then.
Of course it did.
What’s uncanny about Piccinini’s work is not that an artist’s mind can conjure such creatures. It’s that the finesse of their detail make every variegated body that she crafts seem suddenly possible.
Amazing skill, but actually I don’t want them to “seem suddenly possible”.
Really not my thing. Properly odd and yes, deeply unsettling.
Sleep well this evening, won’t you?