Brother Beast
2011
Beasts have provided a subject matter for allegory and metaphor reflecting the human condition at least since Aesop, the folk teller who, in the fifth century BCE, spun stories that featured a range of animal characters. The figure of Aesop himself is shrouded in mystery – rumoured to have been a Greek slave whose cleverness as a fabulist moved him to be advisor to the authorities of his time, he is also elsewhere identified as an Ethiopian storyteller or a Nubian fantasist. He has been variously described as a hunchback, as physically distorted, and as repulsively ugly; the point at which all of these descriptions cross is that the man was definitely an outsider, and a profoundly gifted one.
Perhaps this outsider status lead to his adoption of animals to play out the main roles in his Aesopica – a collection of moral and ethical tales that have found their way into the cultures of countries all over the world and that continue to enchant to the present day. Within the characters and attributes of his animals we can see ourselves reflected all the more clearly.
This series Brother Beast is part of a larger series titled Fully Exploited Labour on which I have been working for the past three decades. Simply, this series has looked at a range of manifestations of what we class as labour, or work, and how we choose to value those kinds of activities. In this series the paradoxical work of training wild animals provides subject matter around which other activities are alluded to: targets featuring images of species that have been introduced to Australia have been pierced by a myriad arrows seeking their mark; inside those targets images of idealised homes have been made by the repetitive piercing of needles drawing threads through the laborious labour of stitchery. Smaller panels feature more ephemeral material – the ‘fragile’ icons of cardboard packing boxes carry images of refugee vessels; elsewhere plastic versions of the Australian Spider Eucalypt Pod are suspended from native hardwood and screen printed imagery of an ‘imperfect’ or creolised English alphabet are arranged around the larger images. Together they suggest a range of connections – some particular to Australia Felix, the Lucky Country that is often so cautious about sharing its sense of ‘luck’; some suggest more global interconnections.
Aesop suggested that the way animals treat each other reflects the way we comport ourselves as human beings. The way we treat animals may reflect other aspects of our behaviour, and the way we treat humans who, like Aesop, may be considered as outsiders may also reflect our capacity to behave humanely as humans beings that are part of a broader world order.
