What does mounted bullfighting have to do with it? : Human-animal relations and a mythology for the anthropocene in the art of Patricia Piccinini

Australian artist Patricia Piccinini is famous for her life-like sculptures and images of fantastical but possible humans, animals, objects and their hybrid combinations. Her work raises questions about the environment, animal ethics and genetic manipulation, whilst confounding the boundary between human and animal. In 2011, the Art Gallery of South Australia staged the largest collection of Piccinini’s work, accompanied by a series of public talks where academics were invited to comment from the perspective of their own disciplinary background and research. I was invited to contribute the perspective of an anthropologist specialising in the study of human-animal relations. As I walked around the gallery, Piccinini’s art evoked sensations and responses in me that I immediately recalled from my research on mounted bullfighting. In that research, I used the metaphor of the part human- part horse centaur from classical Greek mythology to symbolise the ways in which the human-animal boundary was confounded in mounted bullfighting. In so doing, I adapted a mythology of the past to explain an art form of the present. This paper describes how I saw the same human-animal boundary blurring occurring in the Piccinini exhibition. As I walked around the exhibition and wrote reflective notes, I was struck by the thought that Piccinini’s art revealed a mythology of the present. Her work is commonly interpreted as suspending for critique the medico-scientific developments of the present historical period referred to as the anthropocene. However, by embodying those developments and their possibilities in her work and sculpture, Piccinini can also be understood to be presenting an overlooked mythology of the present. She challenges the human-animal boundary in a hybrid move that Bruno Latour considers characteristic of the modern human condition. By collapsing art and science into one another, her work can be seen to fulfil another distinction of the contemporary human which, according to Alfred Gell is the sacralisation of art. In Picinnini’s work, however, art equates with religion in an iconic modern mythology. Through the enchanting magic of science, this is a mythology that no matter how fantastical it may appear, is wholly within the realm of possibility.