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| Ilona Szwarc, Camree and Chaynee, Canadian, Texas, 2012. |
We’ve gone from workhorses to pleasure horses, from horses for men
to horses for women … The world of horses has become a woman’s world.
– Yann Arthus-Bertrand
A horse is a horse, of course, of
course not. Last weekend in May this year, a band of twenty-five auspicious, advantaged
and likewise (unsurprisingly) ideologically possessed women galloped, neighed,
scratched their “hooves” in the dust and peeved their way through Stockholm during
a two-hour-long protest against the “Patriarchy”. “Our performance is a fun way
to confront it [by posing] viewers the question of how women can occupy the
public domain without being objectified,” the City Horse choreographer explained to the Svenska Dagbladet daily. “Horses are a symbol of power, but at the
same time they represent equestrianism and dance – both female activities which
are often marginalised. And just like the female body, horses can symbolise
both the restrained and the wild.” The cortège gaited around centuries-old equine
sculptures and the insignificant lives of (white) males of flesh and blood.
Like Roland Barthes wrote in Mythologies, “toys always mean something”. So really, what is this thing about women
and girls and the second sex, the horse? “We press against the striking stallion,
throw our arms around his neck – we kiss him on the nose – and tell him how
beautiful and gallant he is. It is all so innocent – and yet we are learning
about the elusiveness of affection, about beauty and longing,” as AM Homes swoons
in Jill Greenberg’s starkly carnal and so elegant photobook Horses from 2012. “At night we dream of
rescue, of being delivered from our lives to this more beautiful, more perfect
place, the dark knight charging through the forest. The unicorn under a full
moon. The raven-haired woman riding bareback by the sea. This is a world where
good triumphs over evil.”
When all the handshakes between the
races of the Universe are over and done with to Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in Luc
Besson’s Valerian and the City of a
Thousand Planets (2017) we are four hundred years into a future on the
paradisiacal planet of the oh-so beautiful, androgynous Pearls and their
companionable, fabulous pets the Mül converters (as they are called), a
creature that poops mother of pearl and who has the inner power to restore a pastel
Eden. Sophie Mörner is the curator of Like
a Horse at Fotografiska in Stockholm and she has dotted the corners of her
show with alchemic horse manure. “The exhibition is more than an exhibition and
it represents everything I wanted it to be” is her one comment. Mörner’s selection
of equine photography is generous and playful, concentrated and quietly
passionate. She brings us the fellowship, the freedom and debauchery of
equestrianism, the legacy and contemporariness of the horse, and the silver
spurs of identity politics and its miserable luxury of solipsism.
“Horses once held a slightly
mystical connotation for man. Physically, with their perfect movement, they
seemed to contain an element of divinity. Seated astride them one could move at
great speed – almost fly. What does that mean now to the motorway driver? Yet
there is a difference, and perhaps when we have come to terms with scientific
advancement we shall gain a better sense of values. Hopefully, this might bring
a new confidence – another rebirth bringing with it new creative artistic
activity,” suggests John Baskett in his book The Horse in Art. “There is, on the other hand, an aspect of the
animal that has appealed to the more sophisticated requirements of human nature
– the need for excitement, for aesthetic satisfaction and as an expression
of spiritual aspiration. To be seated on a horseback, five feet above
contradiction, brings authority, to gallop hell-for-leather with the wind in
you face lends the rider wings, as if one with the gods.”
Like a Horse is like that scene in
Scorsese’s greatest film Goodfellas
(1990) in which the gang is having dinner with Tommy’s mother (played by
Catherine Scorsese) who shows them her latest painting with the dogs. Tommy: “I
like this one. One dog goes one way and the other goes the other.” Mrs DeVito:
“One’s going east, the other’s going west. So what?” So what plenty: Like a Horse is going one way with the
choice photography and the great stuff about the romance with this really big
pet, about the effort of being present as much as being in touch with what our
ancestors knew, and hence raising us to a more commendable level, and certainly
about females expressing their own power. And it is going the other way with the
demagoguery of the feminist narrative on gender politics – dominance and
submission, don’t you know – and the pathological rules of sexist formulae and
ghastly old Freud all over again.
Sophie Mörner claims that she wants
to undo the clichés of cowboy masculinity. Or something like that. “My focus is
to lift the woman and playing with the concept of queerness. For me the horse
is both masculine and feminine, dominant
and submissive, mastered and wild [italics mine]. But the notion of
masculinity in what is widely regarded seen [sic] as a women’s sport or hobby,
is interesting to me,” she states on the wall text which is the same as in the Like a Horse book, a smaller but great
compilation of the pictures in the show published by Max Ström. As a Manhattan
publisher of Capricious magazine with
sixteen issues so far and the grand High
Tails in 2014 (the Year of the Horse in the Chinese calendar), perhaps Mörner
should have known better than to use Jill Greenberg’s words above as if they
were her own. This is the curator in the press material: “The culture of
equestrianism and horse sports is often vilified. It’s interesting to ponder
how this is connected to the fact that it’s a phenomenon that is related to
women and girls. I think of this exhibition as a reflection of Western
prejudices about ‘the sport for privileged girls’.” Mörner got her first horse
when she was ten.
“The horse went into a
semi-retirement with a part-time job as a recreational item, a mode of therapy,
a status symbol, and a source of pastoral support for female puberty,” writes
Ulrich Raulff in his Farewell to the
Horse memorial in which he considers horses to be the most noble of creatures,
even “more spectacular in their suffering”: “Standing in their stables like
living sculptures, they would nod their shaped heads, signalling distrust or
suspicion with a twitch of their ear. The horses had their own pasture, to
which never a cow would stray, to say nothing of the pigs or geese. No farmer
would consider surrounding his horses’ meadow with the barbed wire which was
often used to enclose sheep and cattle. For the horses, a bit of wood or a
simple electric fence was sufficient to stop them escaping. One does not
incarcerate aristocrats. It is enough to remind them of their word of honour.”
One of Ilona Szwarc’s schoolgirl
amazons from her excellent Rodeo Girls
series (2012) has a full-size cardboard figure of John Wayne in the corner of
her bedroom. (Wayne was afraid of needles and horses – so much for that cowboy machismo.)
One horse goes one way and the other goes the other in Camree and Chaynee, Canadian, Texas (2012) with these
seven-year-old twins astride. Their tiny bodies are not much bigger than the
heads of these animals and still they have the clout to master them. It is like
Jean Cocteau’s sibylline words one hundred years ago in Cock and Harlequin: “The little girl mounts a racehorse, rides a
bicycle, quivers like pictures on the screen, imitates Charlie Chaplin, chases
a thief with a revolver, boxes, dances a ragtime, goes to sleep, is shipwrecked,
rolls on the grass on an April morning, buys a Kodak, etc …”
Szwarc who grew up behind the Iron
Curtain in Warsaw in the 1980s was lucky to have a father who was an airline
pilot. In her teens, she spent a year as an exchange student in this small town
Canadian on the Texas panhandle where she encountered the rodeo business. During
her recent trips to Texas (and to Oklahoma and New Mexico) as an artist living
in the States, Szwarc discovered a whole new culture of young girls taking part
as professional rodeo contestants. “I found their spiritual and emotional
connection with their horses very beautiful. They loved the feeling of being
one with the animal,” she told National
Geographic (May, 2014). The little women in these powerful small
photographs (taken with a large-format camera) are both tender and
rough-handed. Mörner: “These girls have a different approach and attitude to
femininity and traditional gender roles. Engaged in activities that have
historically been reserved for men, they display strength and dominance over
the animals.” The reality is that the horse industry in the US generates a far
greater share of GDP than Hollywood or the tobacco companies, and that the rodeo
business stops at nothing in order to incite the horses for this brutal form of
entertainment.
Two girls have written “Love
horses!!!” with a marker pen on their forearms in Theresia Viska’s black and
white documentary series Stallflickor
(Swedish for stable girls), which came out as a photobook in 2006. Viska claims
to avouch herself in the “animalism” and the “unbelievable courage” of these
“three-apples-tall seamen”. It is true that shovelling manure in a stable isn’t
the most glorious assignment and that there are injuries aplenty in dealing
with horses and that being on a horse is more dangerous than being on a motorcycle.
But women are also more than welcome to play with the concept of queerness when
it comes to the grimy, gruelling and hazardous duties that men perform every day
and then and always under the yoke of traditional demands and female acquiescence.
Horses can survive almost
everywhere and in any climate. But how much human can a horse put up with? In
the sensitive documentary Buck (2011),
the original “horse whisperer” Buck Brannaman, who was badly abused by his
father as a boy, explains that he is “helping horses with people problems”. Craig
Cameron’s call in Ride Smart is to “Realise
that horsemanship is all about working on yourself, not so much working on the
horse. The horse is a rhythmical, balanced, patient, trustworthy and consistent
animal. It’s you who needs to develop feel, timing, rhythm, balance, patience,
consistency, and understanding.” In The
Domestic Horse, Daniel Mills and June McNicholas direct attention to the
horse as an anthropomorphic plaything and refer to a 1983 study which reported
“that the majority of riders considered their horse to be part of the family
and that most related to the horse as if it were a child (although there was a
suggestion that male riders more frequently relate to the horse as an adult
family member). However, despite this childlike projection, they would confide
in it and speak to it as if it were a person of the same age.”
Signe Johannessen has supported her
altar to the horse with hay bales. In her “stable” at Fotografiska there is
also a video with horses looking at this affectedly dramatic pile of skeleton
parts from their own species. I don’t know what this thing is doing in a
building dedicated to great photography, but the meta level of the video made
me think of the Norwegian children’s film Oskar’s
America (2017) in which the gentle village fool Levi takes his white pony –
or Horsie as he calls it – to a birthday screening of a film called The White Horse. (Then there is young
Oskar himself who dreams of horse riding with his absent mother in Monument
Valley.) Mörner: “Providing an opportunity to reflect on the impact of humanity
on other species or the concept of race itself, the work highlights issues
about prevailing power structures.” I am sure that these unidentified “power
structures” do not include the misandria and eugenics of Swedish feminism.
But there are works by thirty
artists in Like a Horse and most of
it is good to very good. In Ridley Scott’s latest (and mediocre) Alien film Alien: Covenant (2017), one of the
Michael Fassbenders delivers a horse tip in space: “Breathe in the nostrils of
a horse and he’ll be yours for life.” Perry Ogden, a filmmaker himself, spent
two years in the mid 1990s at the Smithfield Horse Fair in Dublin (which takes
place the first Sunday every month) to photograph the boys head-to-head with
their animals. These intimate pictures, taken against a white background, have
something of the mood from The Selfish
Giant (2013) with Arbor and Swifty and the horse. When Ogden’s book Pony Kids was released in 1999, he told The Irish Times (February 6) that he was
sure “that my early wish for a pony had something to do with my interest in
Dublin’s pony kids. And the mixture of cultures. The global culture of Nike and
Adidas sportswear, which all the kids were wearing, meeting this local culture
of keeping ponies and horses in your backyard.”
Yann Arthus-Bertrand is a French
artist and director of nature documentaries who also originated the bestseller The Earth from the Air (which has sold
in 2.5 million copies) with those picturesque images from a hot air balloon. “Arthus-Bertrand
was the first to photograph pets with the attention devoted to top models,”
writes Lara Marlowe in The Irish Times
(April 23, 2005), referring to his spiffy photographs of farm animals and their
owners at the annual Salon d’Agriculture in Paris. But his most interesting
work is found in his book Horses from
2014. Here he creates a kind of indoor situation with his rusty outdoor
backdrop for his photographs of people truly wanting to show off their great
affluence with their horses – remember the episodes from The Sopranos centred around “Whoever Did This” (2002) with Paulie
Gaultieri’s alteration of the painting of Tony Soprano and the racehorse
Pie-O-My? Their owners can think whatever they want, but the stars in these
pictures are the horses.
Like so many others in Like a Horse, Jill Greenberg is not just
crazy about horses but perhaps even more so about the idea and the reality of
the sexual control over this powerful yet submissive force. “The horse project
is not only a homage to the physique of these sexy beasts but also an
exploration of the paradoxical gender identities cast into this unique animal.
We see them as masculine, strong, muscular, even phallic. Yet they have been
made subservient, so their position in the world relates to the role women
continue to occupy,” she argues. “Their heads are remarkably phallic, and I
have chosen to exploit this in my photographs. I have long been concerned with ‘exposing
the phallus’ in a playful, mocking way. The horse’s neck is presented as
confrontational image.” Sorry, but this is like listening to a woman with a
purple or blue or green hair colour doing karaoke to “(I Want) Muscles”. So she
is tantalising male energies yet lusting for them in the “sexy” (subjugated) Black
Stallion?
What Greenberg brings out with
expertise, flashes and Photoshop is an absolutely fantastic art aligned with
the complicated punch of commercial photography, a mismatch that matches very
well. (The ones that Mörner has selected for the show are as libidinal as the
Pirelli calendars in the age before political correctness.) She seems to have a
grip on the anatomy of the horse, much like the famous horse painter George
Stubbs who based his laboured works on his eighteen months in an English
country barn near Hull where he dismembered horses for what would result in the
publication of The Anatomy of the Horse
in 1766. Greenberg has actually nourished the idea to erect a full-size statue to
commemorate the memory of Emily Wilding Davidson, a suffragette who walked
right into the track at the Epsom Derby in 1913, as the rumble was approaching,
to attach a Votes for Women scarf on one of the galloping racehorses – without the
slightest consideration for the life and safety of the horses and their jockeys
– and who had a fatal bang with King George V’s horse Anmer: “In that one
visceral moment, the idea of the horse and the idea of feminism manifested
itself for posterity, in a woman’s failed effort to halt the forward motion of
the animal of the most powerful man in the land.” Shall we move on?
Thus begins Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011): “In Turin on
January 3, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the door of via Carlo Alberto
6, perhaps to take a stroll, perhaps to go by the post office to collect his
mail. Not far from him, or indeed very far removed from him, a cabman is having
trouble with his stubborn horse [at piazza Carignano]. Despite all his urging,
the horse refuses to move, whereupon the cabman – Guiseppe? Carlo? Ettore? –
loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to the throng
and that puts an end to the brutal scene of the cabman, who by this time is
foaming with rage. The solidly built and full-moustached Nietzsche suddenly
jumps up to the cab and throws his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing. His
neighbour takes him home, where he lies still and silent for two days on a
divan until he mutters the obligatory last words: ‘Mutter, ich bin dumm,’
[Mother, I am foolish] and lives for another ten years, gentle and demented, in
the care of his mother and sisters. Of the horse, we know nothing.”
Alexandra Vogt’s horses – from her
book The Dim Feet of White-Maned Desires
(2005) – are wounded and uncared-for creatures in weird and gloomy but highly
interesting settings in which she plays a girl who never read My Friend Flicka as a child, and who
only seems to manifest herself as a sad memory, uncharged, unable to connect. In
Sleek magazine (issue 26), Annika von
Taube talks about “The moment in which the thought of hurting the horse doesn’t
hold the girl back, but rather pushes her forward. The moment in which she begins
to feel powerful, for mean reasons, but it doesn’t matter, because she’s good
at making herself believe that these beings are much bigger and stronger than
her.” Still, Vogt’s “dysfunctional” series of the eerie girl and her dirty
horses is like John Lydon’s “This is Not a Love Song”. Of course it is, only a
very different one.
“There is something about the
outside of a horse that is good for the inside of man” was something that
Churchill never spoke. “Early on [horses] taught me to be articulate, assertive
and to believe in myself. These are not self-evident characteristics for
anyone, especially for a young girl. They also taught me to be empathic, to
understand how strong our body language is and to become aware of which signals
I send and to be more attentive and sensitive in interpreting theirs,” writes
the Swedish elite rider Lisen Bratt Fredricson on the other wall text in the
show (which is also in the book); again with that trite saying that life is so
much harder for women and girls, again that female chauvinist bromide about
masculine glamour and taming this sexy beast between your thighs: “I think of
their fantastic, long necks, the rounding of the of the muscles over their
backs and buttocks, their large dark eyes and their silky-smooth muzzles. And
what I find truly fascinating is the relationship between humans and horses.
With its enormous strength the horse could have very easily ignored the will of
humans, but we succeeded in taming it. And the horse allowed itself to be
tamed.”
Kathleen Herbert’s Stable (2007) is the video work to watch
in Like a Horse. In this eight-minute
film (shot on 16mm), we hear the clip-clop of hooves and observe the doings of
three horses, as through a surveillance monitor, as they spend a night in
Gloucester Cathedral. The history behind the piece – with Lord Leven and his
anti-Royalist army using the Cathedral as a stable during the English Civil War
in the mid 1600s – is good to know but the piece carries itself beautifully in
a chimerical dream state. Charlotte Dumas, who presented her book Work Horse in 2015, is from the
Netherlands and her horses in the Anima
series (2012) are the living residents of Arlington National Cemetery in
Washington DC. Their task is to be graceful and to pull the caissons (that were
once for the cannons) with the caskets of casualties from US battlegrounds.
Makes me think of the skipper’s words to the boy who will die on the Moonstone vessel in Christopher Nolan’s tremendous
Dunkirk (2017): “There is no hiding
from this, son.”
Anima is the feminine energy in the
male, but in portraying these reposed, elegant animals in a near state of
sleep, Dumas seems to have focused on “the gap between wakefulness and slumber,
a space for dreaming and reverie”. “Animals are at the outer end of our
emotional experience […] we need them and use them to catalyse this emotional
response,” she told John Mahoney in American
Photo (January 8, 2013): “As it evolved it became much more apparent what
it really meant to me to photograph these animals, because of course, they are
portraits of animals, but they’re really about us. It’s all about our
relationship with animals, and also symbolically the relationship between our
species, with the human species being very solitary in this world and needing
the animals, basically. And it’s about the diminishing existence of animals in
our daily life.”
The eight pictures from Hans
Silvester’s Fighting Stallions in the
Camargue series (1974) bring on the frisky, dancing, almost wild horses, relieved
of human obligations. He spent five years with these white animals in the
wetland of Camargue and gained their trust with his camera. Silvester was quite
an early practitioner of modern equine photography and his book The Horses of Camargue came out in 1976.
“Like humans, horses in a band are notorious squabblers. Also like humans, band
members fail to thrive without friends and family,” explains Wendy Williams in The Horse: The Epic History of Our Noble
Companion, comparing the spectacles in those bands to a Shakespearean drama:
“When you watch wild horses and you know their life histories, it’s like
following a soap opera. There’s a constant undercurrent of arguing, of
jockeying for position and power, of battling over personal space, of loyalty
and betrayal. The show never lets up. Alliances are made and broken. Underlings
often defy power. Sometimes a horse’s great patience is rewarded and he gets
what he wants. Sometimes it isn’t and he doesn’t.”
Leland Stanford was a business
magnate and politician who engaged Eadweard Muybridge in 1872 (after Muybridge
had just murdered a man) to burn vast sums of money to develop a clever system
for motion photography, primarily to prove that a horse is airborne during each
stride of the gallop. Muybridge originated a string of great inventions, which
forwarded photography and later made motion pictures possible, like fast
emulsions, ingenious shutter devices and the trip wires for the wager that was
won on June 15, 1878. The three kinetic charts in the show are all from that
year and it is always a delight to see his images again, especially the ones
with the horses. When American artist Susan Rothenberg’s daughter was born in
1972, Rothenberg suddenly started with her great and many horse paintings
loosely based on Muybridge’s sequenced animals. Some of these paintings look
like the horsy foetus floating in black space in a series by Tim Flach called Equus (2008).
There are two series by Flach in
the show: nine pictures of horses in different headgear that at a first may
appear as ceremonial display, but these are mostly protection gear against human
conflict such as gas attacks and riots – and then the fascinating Equus (also a book in 2008) in which the
embryo sprouts to a foetus and the foetus to a foal. This is colour photography
in black and white. These are not the psychedelic 2001-wombs of Lennart Nilsson’s but the magic of life in a purer essence.
“I am in awe of nature, but while my subject may be an animal, at the same time
I am exploring things to do with what it is to be human,” Flach told the
Photoshop website (no date):
“I am aware that the viewer may
have already seen a subject intensely and that others have covered it. Part of
my challenge is to de-familiarise the subject. I need to make people see the
world as a little strange again, with fresh eyes and new insight. Perhaps I do
animals as I do because I see so many people shooting wildlife images, going
about documentary work with a subject. I am more interested in how we, humans,
are involved in this subject: how we are anthropocentric, inevitably putting
ourselves at the centre of any understanding of animals. We also respond to
them by imposing our behaviours on theirs, and see them as we see ourselves.”
Life magazine photographer Peter
Stackpole is famous for his vertiginous photography from the bridge
constructions around San Francisco Bay in the 1930s. His mighty exciting
pictures in Like a Horse from Atlantic
City’s Steel Pier, which was a much bigger thing then, induce another kind of
dizziness. They are all from July 1, 1953 and feature a horse and its female
rider that fly into a pool of water from a jump tower as tall as twelve to
eighteen metres (compare this to the highest plateau on a diving platform which
is ten metres). On the ramp there was no way of turning, but according to the
greatest name in horse jumping the horses just loved to fly. Her name was
Sonora Webster and she was “Blind Venus” to her adoring fans after an accident
in 1931 when she smashed her face into the surface of the water, but still went
on for another decade despite her handicap. Most of Stackpole’s work was lost
in a house fire in 1991, but his wingless Pegasus soars with unflagging resolve.
Completely unnecessary in the show
are the really big names and the ones included for readers of Vanity Fair. The picture by Guy Bourdin
(if I ever dare to mention his name again) has been on show before at
Fotografiska, and Helmut Newton’s little Saddle,
Paris (1976) is mostly a variant of the stronger Saddle I (1976) that was in the Newton show and which depicts
Gunilla Bergström as a superb cowgirl tacked up with a saddle; in a black bra,
cream jodhpurs and riding boots – a ponyplay on a bed at the Lancaster hotel in
Paris – and she is looking like a human turtle, uniting Heaven and Earth in a
way that sex should be like all the time. Newton explained that “I’ve always
liked the idea of cowboys – the way they look, the way they walk, especially in
the movies. Why? A cowboy stands in a certain way. He’s got a gun here, a gun
there, his hands are always ready to draw. So I make the girls into cowgirls –
with their hands ready to reach for the guns.”
There are works by David LaChapelle
(featuring a Hollywood celeb) and there are works by the overexposed Martin
Parr (British horseracing as a spiritual desert in high-pitched colours) and
the true nadir of Herb Ritts (Calvin
Klein, a video and a Hollywood celeb). Who in the right mind would care for
another picture by Herb Ritts? It would have been great to see Richard Prince’s
Cowboys (late 1980s) with the “appropriated”
Marlboro Men roaming the West included in Like
a Horse. Richard Prince danced to the music of time but his fake cowboys – they
started to die one by one from lung cancer – ride into the sunset of eternity.
“Historians have largely neglected
the tremendous influence of the horse, economically as well as culturally, in
agriculture, transport, sport, and war, as a companion to humans, a cause of
accidents, a prime mover of machines, a source of food, and, of course, a
shaper of cities,” write Clay McShane and Joel Tarr in The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the 19th Century.
Martha Camarillo photographed her Fletcher
Street series in 2003–04 – a book with the same title was released in 2007
– on this street (which is only a few hundred metres long) in central Philly
with its eight horses and the young black males doting on them. “They have been
here for years, when the African American community thrived in Philadelphia,
before drugs and unemployment steadily encompassed healthy neighbourhoods and
they disintegrated into urban war zones,” Camarillo explains. “Despite it all,
the horses have stayed, and they have because of the small, passionate,
dedicated group of men determined to reclaim their neighbourhood and their
children. In this fight, they use the one thing they know, love and trust, the
horses.”
In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, David Anthony describes how the
first signs of the domestication of the horse became visible in the
Pontic-Caspian steppeland after 4800 BCE: “What was the incentive to tame wild
horses if people already had cattle and sheep? Was it for transportation?
Almost certainly not,” he argues. “Horses were large, powerful, aggressive
animals more inclined to flee or fight than carry a human. Riding probably
developed only after horses were already familiar as domesticated animals that
could be controlled. The initial incentive probably was the desire for a cheap
source of winter meat.”
A favourite picture in Like a Horse is Beni Bischof’s old and
new Bowcoy (2011) where the heads of
the horse and the cowboy in John Grabill’s 1888 photo from the Wild West have
switched bodies. Bischof works with all sorts of hybrid combos, like in The Last Unicorn (2013) with a human
finger horn drilled through the picture of a white fairy tale horse. His
numbskullery is too silly to be Dada but too great to be Mad magazine, or as the Swiss artist puts it himself: “I have a
darker side. It’s very important for me. The jazzy expression is only the tip
of the iceberg. The nice look is the Trojan horse that gets into the viewers’
brain to unfold its real essence. An important motivation for making art is to
channel my anger over specific stupid facts on Earth.”
“So the horse occupies a peculiar
and privileged position, not quite a pet, no longer a working animal, rooted,
for many people in the past, but flourishing in the present,” reflects Michael
Korda in his book Horse People: Scenes
from the Riding Life. Bianca Pilet’s Falabella baby horse is portrayed as a
baby pet doing baby pet things, like fair
pipi on the bath rug. “The hair work on each horse was about four to five
hours. The horse absolutely adored having been groomed and being played with,” says
Julian Wolkenstein from Australia in the
F Stop online magazine (no date) about his super-styled horses for
real-life Barbies from the Pony Pin-Ups
series (2007). “I thought that a painterly, classical rendition of the horse
was a little bit more serious and it was a better way to get the humour across,
rather than going with a light, fluffy, oversaturated look.”
Horses in art were really only out
of fashion during the millennia of hardcore Christianity. Wendy Williams argues
in her book that we have lost the art of observing these animals: “We see what
the horse is doing, but we don’t always know why he’s doing it. We know little
about how horses really behave when
they are out of sight. We see horses in our barns and pastures and mistakenly
assume that we see the essence of the
‘horse’. I’ve always thought this rather strange.” Look at the exquisite
Vogelherd Horse, a less than five-centimetre-long sculpture in mammoth ivory
carved 35,000 years ago, or at the over one-hundred-metre-long Uffington White
Horse in the UK. Here it is – the entity of the horse.
“Horses are the stars of Ice Age
art,” she writes and muses on that Ice Age artists must have spent “months and
years just watching. They understood horses’ facial expressions, how their
nostrils flared when they were frightened, how their ears betrayed their inner
emotions, how they sometimes stood together in small bands, and how, sometimes,
they would wander alone and seem rather forlorn. From this art, we know that
before horses became our tools, long before the bit and the bridle were
invented, Homo sapiens adored watching
wild horses.”
I adore watching Erika Larsen’s People of the Horse (2011–12), perhaps
the greatest joy and surprise in the show. “I believe I am searching for a
moment of silence between myself and whatever it is I am photographing,” she
says. The series is about the horse in Native American culture, and the six
super-sharp and beautifully composed pictures at Fotografiska embrace both
conceptual art and the language of National
Geographic. They are splendid.
John Wood describes the final
destination for the protagonist in Gulliver’s
Travels from 1726 in the foreword to Ezekiel’s
Horse – how Lemuel G “encountered two vastly kinds of creatures: the
Houyhnhnms, those intelligent, wise, gentle, truthful, reasonable, and
beautiful horses who were in control of the society; and the Yahoos, a savage,
cruel, deceitful, unreasonable, ugly species that looked frighteningly
familiar. They murdered, raped, fought, stole from one another, and, but for
being a bit more hairy, looked like us. They could not speak, but apart from that,
they were the frightening mirror of ourselves. Gulliver was understandably
repulsed; and during his stay tried to model himself as closely as possible on
the kindly and noble Houyhnhnms. When he asked his teacher the meaning of that
strange word Houyhnhnm, he was told
it ‘signifies a Horse’, but means ‘the Perfection of Nature’.”
This is naturally the Disney
version of what Jonathan Swift intended with the story about these sordid elitists,
how they owned the discourse and yet were unable to examine their own behaviour.
“The notions that life here and now is worth living, or that it could be made
worth living, or that it must be sanctified for some future good, are all
absent,” as George Orwell wrote in his essay “Politics vs. Literature: An
Examination of Gulliver’s Travels” in
Polemic magazine (September/October,
1946): “There is something queerly familiar in the atmosphere of these
chapters, because, mixed up with much fooling, there is a perception that one
of the aims of totalitarianism is not merely to make sure that people will
think the right thoughts, but actually to make them less conscious […] The Houyhnhnms, we are told, were unanimous on
almost all subjects. The only question they ever discussed was how to deal with the Yahoos. Otherwise there was no
room for disagreement among them, because the truth is always either
self-evident, or else it is undiscoverable and unimportant.”
Three hundred years into the future
in Houyhnhnmland, and our hope is complex societies that create the art we see
in Like a Horse.
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| Peter Stackpole, People Came Out to See the Diving Horse, July 1, 1953. |
Like a Horse at Fotografiska in Stockholm through September 3, 2017.
