Patricia Piccinini’s hyper-real sculptural depiction of a man cradling a near-extinct blobfish typifies the contentious relationship between animal and human that this recent ANIMAL/HUMAN exhibition explored. The incongruous nature of Piccinini’s Eulogy (2011) is made manifest in the nurturing disposition of the kneeling man and the awareness that human intervention is responsible for the endangered status of the creature he holds so tenderly. Curated by Michele Helmrich at the University of Queensland Art Museum, Piccinini’s sculpture was exhibited in ANIMAL/HUMAN alongside a diverse selection of contemporary artworks. This exhibit emphasises the complexities that exist within the environmental, psychological, ethical, philosophical, scientific and cultural considerations of the animal human relationship. And, as animals appear increasingly regularly within artworks of contemporary artists, the curatorial premise of this exhibition is of remarkable relevance to current art practice. The frequent depiction of the animal by many artists is undermining the construction of the animal as ‘other’ and destabilising the binary relationship between human and nonhuman. Subsequently, this exhibition weakens the animal human divide, encouraging viewers to question the subordination of animal species.
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green’s artwork Ark (2009) is indicative of the exhibition’s concern with hierarchal re-evaluation. This sizable oil on linen, positioned within the first section of the gallery, features a re-modified depiction of the ‘Darwinian Tree’ that is exhibited in the Natural History Museum of Chennai in India. While the original image includes a human being at the pinnacle of evolutionary order, Brown and Green re-configure the phylogenetic tree to represent an equalised gene map. The human being, which is absent from the duo’s diagram, is featured within the work’s background scenes, wherein the only animals in view are humans