Art and Artifice of Captivity

There comes a time in everyone’s life when one must front up to unpleasant truths about oneself. Today is that day, when I lay bare my soul and allow others to glimpse my shame.

I own a poodle.

Now, to be fair, when the family chose it we were assured it was a labradoodle, a cross between a Poodle and a Labrador, but when it arrived (looking more like a gibbon than anything vaguely canine) it was clear that there was precious little Labrador coursing through its shaggy veins.

But it was a dog, and so the family was happy. Because every family needs a dog – don’t they?

It got me thinking about why we, as a culture, surround ourselves with dogs or cats or birds, fish, rats, lizards, in fact any number of vertebrate and invertebrate life forms. The dog, in particular, has been with us for eons. Some evolutionists believe that the arrival of the dog, with its superior snout, led to our own snout becoming less and less useful. We relied on the dog to track those tasty mammoths.

Today, where food actually advertises itself with giant glowing billboards, the dog as a hunting companion is less useful. But the dog remains with us. My theory is that the dog reminds us of the wild, of those days when we also roamed the grasslands, free of all laws, contracts and expectations. It is a link to our primeval selves.

Yet no-one looking at my dog (remember it, the poodle?) could ever imagine that it could survive on its own. It is the result of hundreds of years of selective breeding to make it more ‘convenient’ to us. It doesn’t shed hair, it’s small, child friendly and cheap to feed. So we have constructed a form of irony, where we want animals to remind us of freedom, then immediately set about changing that very ‘freedom’ we claim to admire. And we do it all the time, as pets, in zoos, in movies, on posters and in art, the animal is changed to make it more convenient to us.

This is a theme picked up by a variety of artists whose works are in the Dubbo Regional Gallery – The Armati Bequest Collection. The captive animal often tells us more about ourselves than the animal in question. Works by Ben Quilty, Beverly Veasey, Hayden Fowler and Simon Cuthbert all explore this issue. These artists and others, have been on show at the Gallery as part of In-Captivity: Animals in the DRG Collection. It closed last Sunday but this Thursday the Curatorial and Collection staff from the Centre (Adnan, Jessica and Kent) will join with Taronga Western Plains zoo keeper Heidi Quine, to talk about these issues in the third of the Animal in Art forum series. Heidi’s section, on how Zoos judge, in part, the happiness of animals and how they use enrichment to encourage natural behaviours, promises to be hugely informative.

So if you have an interest in animals, art or even the family mutt, come down to the WPCC this Thursday night at 7pm to hear how the zoological and art worlds have confronted this issue. Ring 6801 4444 to register or for more information.