My Monster: Human-Animal Hybrids by Julie Clarke (2018)

Maja Smrekar with Manuel Vason, Slovenia.

Sam Leach, Australia.

Oleg Kulik, Russia

Lis Roet, Australia

Let's set things straight since it's the 200th Anniversary of the publishing of Mary Shelly's novel Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (1818).

Contrary to Evelyn Tsitas's, curator of My Monster: The Human-Animal Hybrid (currently showing at #RMIT Gallery, Swanston Street, Melbourne) statement that the monster was a hybrid, he was NOT, rather, he was assembled from bodily parts taken from a charnel-house, a place where human corpses were kept prior to burial.  When Dr Frankenstein 'collected bones from charnel-houses'  to bring together what he considered the most perfect parts of each body to ultimately reanimate into a new human he unwittingly constructed a creature that was scarred and deformed, a 'demonical corpse' to which he had 'miserably given life' (56).  The monster was an abomination but he was NOT a human-animal hybrid as hybrids are an amalgam of the qualities of two organisms of different species and many of the artworks selected for the exhibition appear in part to be based on Chimeras, imaginary animals with distinctly different bodily parts that coalesce in the one creature. However in many examples it is the human being who exhibits animal parts.

Although Frankenstein's monster is a 19th century construct it remains a potent metaphor for the collapse of the biological and the technological, especially in the present milieu, in which human bodies are carved up, fragmented and reassembled in seemingly less sinister ways through medical CT scans, DNA splicing, stem cell technology, genetic engineering, organ transplants and cosmetic surgery.

Tsitas draws a long bow by including several artworks that depict erotic liaisons between humans and animals, however these brief couplings do not a hybrid make. Some people have deeper relationships and compassion for animals than they afford to human beings. We have complex relationships to animals as companions, as food to consume and we tend to shy away from images that reveal our exploitation of animals, such as medical experimentation, slaughter, neglect, torture and bestiality.

The four artworks  I've shown here from the exhibition do raise issues around bestiality and the nature of human desire or animality when it comes to consent or denial. Bestiality has been depicted in pornographic images for eons so we can assume that it has a lengthy history, however, we cannot know whether the animal is being exploited simply because it is not cognizant of its obligation or loyalty to the human or because it has no mind (in the way we consider mind) and what may look like compliance may not be taken as consent when it comes to the sexual act.

The images are confronting for some but I found them provocative to the extent that they are not commonplace to our experience and further because they raise questions about our relationships with those entities we regards as not human, those not like us that under normal circumstances we'd consider inferior. I wonder if these images are about equity between the human and the not human or is it simply that 'we' find it convenient to bestow equal rights to animals because the human players in these dramas benefit from the liaison? Consider post-humanism which acknowledges the collapse of human/animal boundaries, most convenient at a time in which pigs have been genetically altered so that their body parts can be used in organ and tissue transplants.

I found little new in the exhibition, which showed works to support mostly mythical creatures and take issue with the curator beginning with an incorrect premise. This does not mean that the works were not good, they were excellent. It was just not as I expected since I had written extensively about the Posthuman in my PhD thesis thirteen years ago.