Why look at animals?

Learn more about Bob Wanurr Namundja's ‘Ngarrbek’ Here.

In his essay, ‘Why Look at Animals?’ John Berger writes that animals were the first subjects in art, their blood likely the first paint. What’s more is that they constituted the first metaphor, providing in their like and unlikeness a counterpoint for “humanness”. Before mass farming, pets and animal-aided industrialisation, Berger finds animals entering the human imagination as messengers and promises, worshipped, bred and sacrificed.

In this week’s collection, artists call on this complex and compelling relationship, coming eye to eye with the animal’s gaze. In her masterful graphite drawing, Anne Marie Hall draws the ultimate animal farm – pigs twist together, cats scamper and crows perch. Kordelya Zhan Sui Chi too evokes the personality of animals, picturing echidnas and penguins. In ‘White Rhino’, John Olsen pays tribute to an endangered species, capturing the white rhinoceros as both precious and bursting with life.?

Berger argues that to return the gaze of a wild animal, is to become aware of oneself – an idea that underlies Brett Whiteley’s revered zoo series. ‘Young Baboon’ was created while Whiteley was living within walking distance of Taronga Zoo where he would often escape to, an anonymous voyeur of the animals who in response, revealed unspoken truths about human nature. Perhaps Whiteley too felt like a caged monkey.?

In puzzling over our relationship with animals, Berger recalls that the earliest civilisations relied on animals to understand themselves. Now still, animals remain the carriers of our traits, fears and hopes.?

“Everywhere animals offered explanations, or more precisely, lent their name or character to a quality, which like all qualities, was, in its essence, mysterious.” John Berger