July/August 08
An Ever Expanding Universe (WA) > WA
Because of its title, my initial reaction to this exhibition was one of curiosity. Read More
Art Deco 1910 - 1939 (VIC) > VIC
With its Bakelite radio, Tamara De Lempicka painting and luxurious dressing table complete with intricate ivory inlays, the opening room of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Art Deco show says it all. Read More
Melbourne Art Fair (VIC) > VIC
With 80 commercial galleries, 10 project spaces, two specially commissioned installations and anticipated sales at the $10.5 million mark, the Melbourne Art Fair isn’t the sort of place to play things down. Read More
Puberty Blues
To stay sane in this world it is sometimes necessary to step back and laugh at the sheer nonsense that follows in the wake of a moral scandal. Read More
Robert Jenyns (NSW) > NSW
Pop psychologists and armchair analysts are masters of the succinct and the obvious. Read More
The enchanted forest: new gothic storytellers (VIC) > VIC
Curiouser and curiouser... a new approach to gothic. Read More
Turn, Turn, Turn: the past talks to the present (NSW) > NSW
Nick Waterlow is the only person to have curated more than one Biennale of Sydney. Read More
VIVID National Photographic Festival (ACT) > ACT
Australian photography festivals are seemingly multiplying at a rapid pace, with VIVID being the latest member to join the growing team. Read More
Animalia: Joanna Braithwaite
By Tracey Clement
It’s OK to laugh at Joanna Braithwaite’s paintings. In fact, she encourages it saying, “Humour for me is a good thing, I like it. I want it in my paintings.” And she certainly has succeeded. In Braithwaite’s solo exhibition, Animalia, an eclectic menagerie of critters perform amusing tricks and acrobatic antics worthy of an old-school circus. But her paintings aren’t just funny-ha ha, they are also funny-peculiar.
Joanna Braithwaite, Egg comes first, 2007, oil on canvas, 112 x 137cm
Braithwaite paints animals slightly skewed by the eccentricities of human behaviour. They have the surrealist quality of a subtly twisted reality; a manoeuvre so deft that the bizarre is rendered believable. In the mirror world of Animalia, fourteen sparrows effortlessly perch atop a unicycle and several pairs of white chooks stalk across the gallery walls running egg and spoon races, as if this were a perfectly normal way for chickens to entertain themselves.
In Braithwaite’s Telling Tales series, two rats drag each other around by their tails and use them to make emphatic gestures. Their dramatic poses could be tableaux lifted from an all rodent performance of Beckett’s black comedy Waiting for Godot; ratty versions of the hapless duo Vladimir and Estragon, pondering the vagaries of life as they wait and wait.
Braithwaite is deeply intrigued by animals which seem to be acting like humans. As she explains, “At certain times, even within the realms of their own kingdoms, animals do things that are similar to humans. I try to isolate that.” Braithwaite also tweaks and amplifies these seemingly anthropomorphic behaviours. In Tall Tails, the skills used by mice to negotiate a field of barley in the wild inspired a painting of two mice confidently walking on stilts.
Despite their obvious humour, Braithwaite’s works also have a darker, bitter edge. Left to their own devices, animals don’t really mimic human actions; they simply do want they need to do in order to survive, procreate and kill time. An animal turning circus tricks does so at a human’s bidding, either to gain affection or under duress. Either way, in doing so they present a warped reflection of humanity; they look foolish and we look worse. Our relationship with animals, especially
domesticated ones, is complex, volatile and murky. It encompasses both symbiosis and subservience and is capable of oscillating wildly between cruelty and adoration.
Joanna Braithwaite, Brief Encounter, 2007, oil on canvas, 152.5 x 152.5cm Braithwaite herself is an animal lover. This is clear not only from the fact that her constant painting companion is her happy black pug, but also from her 2005 show, Relative Moments, in which she painted dogs, birds, cows and fish with an earnest dignity and overblown sentimentality usually reserved for Victorian family portraits. And even though there is an undercurrent of sadness in Animalia, Braithwaite is keen to point out that her aim is not didactic, “I’m not trying to be moralizing. I don’t like things to be black and white, I like them to be suggestive and maybe from being suggestive people are able to make up their own minds.”
Braithwaite’s canvases ooze a potent mix of pathos and humour. In this way they push some of the same buttons as iconic examples of kitsch. Although Braithwaite’s paintings are considerably more sophisticated, like distant cousins, they share a common gene with the numerous rip-offs of C.M. Coolidge’s poker and pool playing dogs. And while the mass production and over exposure of these images has placed them firmly in the category of pop culture tat, Braithwaite’s work teeters on the edge, treading a fine line between the intellectual cool of surrealism and kitsch’s cloying embrace.
Joanna Braithwaite, Balancing Act, I 2007, oil on canvas, 122 x 122cmBrief Encounter comes closest to falling in. In this painting, two sprightly fox terriers seem to kiss while walking a tightrope. And to make matters worse, one is sporting a blue tutu, the other a matching bow tie. Braithwaite admits, “I put the tutu on and I took it off. Then I put it on and I took it off and in the end I just thought I’d push it that way… It’s bordering on kitsch.”
This unstable border zone is exactly where Braithwaite wants to be. She is fascinated by a certain slipperiness, as seen in animals like the platypus and flying fish which, “almost seem to break down so you can’t pigeonhole them”, and by the collapse and rupture of boundaries in general. Her works precariously and deliberately balance on the blurry edges between high and low art, fact and fantasy, humour and tragedy.
Tracey Clement is an artist and writer currently living in Sydney.
