“Contemporary art seems stampeded with equimania. Petrified horses are closing in on the West End of London where ‘War Horse’ commands the stage. David Backhouse’s ‘Animals in War’ memorial on Park Lane features a noble patriotic dobbin.”There are also Nic Fiddian-Green’s decapitated and a bit shattered outsize horse-heads for company. In fact, the animal fetish carries with it a rather heavy pack of associations. The bestiary close to the heart of British modernism, its obsessions have usually been cow-eyed and sheepish, with an ironic yearning to explore the weird connection between sacrifice, salvation and butchery enshrined in Christian iconography.
For example, ‘Saint Sebastian, Exquisite Pain’ (2007) by Damien Hirst has its precedents, not only in the multiple piercings of Piero del Pollaiuolo’s 15th century Sebastian, but also in ‘Flayed Ox’ by Rembrandt. Hirst’s contemporary bestiary bears witness and pays backhand homage to the perplexing equation between salvation and sacrifice in Christianity. ‘Away from the Flock’ (1994) is another noteworthy sheep piece by him. Simon Schama explains:
“Anyone who really knows the much-despised art historical canon will also know that, far from artists like Goya having been unaware of the relationship between sculpture and slaughter, many went out of their way to put it down on paper and canvas. What, asks Goya over and again, are we? We are the butchers – and the chopped meat. It’s also a feature of the most thoughtful artists – Rembrandt certainly – and the greatest practitioners of nature morte to indicate their awareness of the self-defeating quality of painterly immortality.”However, today’s horse-mania is different, disconcertingly heroic and upbeat, the art expert concludes.
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