Addendum to my post on 14 July My Monster

Although Dr Frankenstein did say that 'the dissecting room and slaughter-house furnished many of my materials' (53) nothing in Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus prior to his statement suggested that he intended to make anything other than a human being. In fact there is no direct evidence to suggest that animal body parts were used in the construction of the creature. 
Possessing the 'capacity of bestowing  animation' (50) Victor did not 'doubt his ability to give life to an animal as complex and wonderful as man' (51). Indeed, he declared 'I began the creation of a human being'. (51) Even if parts from a slaughter-house  formed part of the materials in the solitary chamber at the top of his house, it does not mean that they were used in the construction of the monster; they may simply have been part of his experiments with reanimation. Given Dr Frankenstein had access to 'dissecting rooms' and  'the unhallowed damps of the grave (page 52) and any number of human body parts why would he need the bodily parts of animals?
The word 'corpse' refers specifically to human remains not that of an animal and Shelly herself in the introduction to the novel declares 'Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated' (9) and as such I maintain that the 'monster' was constructed as human and as much as we might like to imagine that he is an amalgam of human and animal biomaterials he is not visually a hybrid.
I argue that since Victor Frankenstein selected 'with infinite care' to create the new creature, describing it's limbs in proportion, his features beautiful...his hair a lustrous black and flowing, his teeth pearly white (55), not for a moment did I imagine that this scientist would select animal bodily parts to represent a beautiful human. So, I maintain the creature animated by Dr Frankenstein was not a hybrid, he was not the mutant offspring of two separate and distinct species nor does he look part animal of any other species other than human. He may (at a stretch) be an amalgam of human and animal biomaterials, but visually he was, in the text and in filmic representations a human being.
Within art historical accounts hybrids are visually distinct as sporting the characteristics and features of humans and animals and he does not exhibit animal features in any way. When Victor first sees the creature years after it escaped, he sees 'the figure of a man' (97). Indeed, the monster aligns itself with a human subject, one formed out of clay when he says to Victor 'I ought to be thy Adam'. (99) Also, if there was any hint at all that the Frankenstein monster was part human/part animal why was he represented in the first Frankenstein film as human? We do not refer to contemporary individuals who have had a pig's aorta inside their body as hybrids, because they are not!

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.