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In
1907, German impresario Carl Hagenbeck opened a revolutionary new
zoo near Hamburg: the Stellingen Tierpark. For the first time in
zoo history, Stellingen presented wild animals uncaged, roaming in
apparent freedom, artistically arranged across stylised rocky
landscape settings. From the distorting perspectives of the
interlocking concrete terraces, rival species seemed to enjoy a
harmoniously close co-existence, suggestive of the pre-lapsarian
wilderness. Ingeniously constructed moats offered visitors the
thrill of proximity to even the most fearsome of beasts, in an
awe-inspiring illusion of unfettered nature. This zoo without bars
became known as the Freianlage,
or free enclosure.
In 2005, Andrew Bracey began to construct his own Freianlage:
a playful menagerie of creatures, painted onto scraps of mdf,
corrugated cardboard and sea-scoured beach-glass. Like Hagenbeck,
Bracey took care to display his exhibits in appropriately
evocative habitats: a knob of blu-tac makes a meerkat mountain;
the bowl of a set of kitchen scales makes an ideal penguin pool.
The zoo has always been an artificially constructed meeting place
for wild animals and city dwellers: a mock wilderness in the midst
of the urban environment. Bracey’s Freianlage
acknowledges the artifice, whilst easing the menagerie into its
surroundings with the aid of domestic props.
The works in the Freianlage series aim to understand and replicate the essence of the
zoo-going experience, recreating the pleasures and disappointments
of engaging with animals in this way. To view polar bears, you
must peer through the glassy curve of a jam-jar; to spot the owl,
blink into the gloom of a cardboard box. Examined through a
model-maker’s magnifying glass, (Dance, 2005), a painted monkey slips in and out of sight, offering
up tantalising glimpses of tail-tip or ear-tuft before
mischievously disappearing from the observer altogether. In Getting Started (2005), a
jumble of animal
portraits are propped randomly along a shelf. Tapirs rub haunches
with hippos, each jostling to catch the viewer’s eye; while
other (less confidently-painted) beasts shrink from view,
hunkering into a hiding-place in the background. Scale is in
constant flux: a pachyderm’s trunk is the same size as a
parakeet’s beak, a jaguar is dwarfed by a treefrog. The shifting
perspectives of receding and advancing genera mimics the visual
confusion of first emerging through the turnstile, as the
zoo-visitor attempts to wrestle with the conflicting choices on
offer.
The growth of zoological gardens in the nineteenth century
mirrored the rise of the public art museum. Both institutions
became emblems of civic pride - essential amenities for any
self-respecting municipality – salubrious places of edifying
enjoyment for all decent folk. Both remain pillars of Sunday
afternoon culture. Freianlage
reminds us of the links between gallery and zoo, and the parallels
between how we consume works of art and works of nature. A 1985
study at London Zoo revealed that spectators stood in front of the
monkey enclosure for an average of 46 seconds and spent 32 minutes
in a pavilion containing a hundred cages - probably about the same
time it takes to scan glazily past a wing-full of art treasures,
before succumbing to exhibition overload.
The
visual saturation of contemporary life is central to Bracey’s
work. In Various Titles
(2004-5), 750 matchbox-sized canvases are crowded together,
Victorian salon-style up the walls. Flitting from subject to
subject, these mini-paintings pluck their imagery from everywhere
– pop videos, holidays snaps, furniture catalogues. Slipped
between the saccharine and the banal, more poignant images manage
to filter through – a pre 9/11 New York skyline, a torture
victim at Abu Ghraib. Bracey exhibits all the canvases with equal
legitimacy. It is for the viewer to apply discernment and add
significance. The miniaturisation process seduces the viewer into
closer engagement. Unable to keep the work at arm’s length, the
viewer becomes absorbed and enfolded.
From
a distance, Clout (2003-4) appears as a constellation of brightly coloured dots.
Only up close do you realise each dot is a separate teeny
painting, painted onto the head of a roofing nail, hammered into
the wall. Supermarket logos vie for attention with football club
insignia, pricetags, fastfood slogans – the garish afterglow of
21st-century-life in hyperdrive. The eye darts around,
blocking details out, then zoning in on something familiar;
focusing in on an individual image in the same way a lion might
pick an antelope from the herd.
“It’s
like flicking through a Sunday supplement, where you pass over
most things,” says Bracey. “In this culture we live in,
we’re used to moving between things, using the remote control,
and only giving a small snippet of time to anything. It’s like
the way the internet works. You click on a site which takes you
somewhere else.” No two visitors will take the same route
through the images. Depending on eye-height, colour preferences,
cultural associations, attention span, everyone will browse
differently, picking different patterns from the flock. “You
couldn’t see all of them,” says Bracey. “It’s about trying
to give everybody a different experience.”
The
mechanisation of the nail-making process in the eighteenth century
was one of the major breakthroughs of the industrial revolution: a
pivotal moment in the history of mass production and mass
consumption. This historical footnote brings a certain irony to
Bracey’s Clout, with
its painstaking individuation of so much mass-produced
ironmongery. It’s as if he’s trying to turn back the tide of
globalisation, in a crusade against sameness, and a return to the
unique hand-made object. Although mass-media imagery forms most of
the source material on works such as Clout,
Various Titles, and Getting
Started, this over-familiar iconography is re-personalised
through the act of painting.
In
It’s Still, Still Life
(2003) Bracey breathed life into a series of plastic pound store
garden ornaments. Decorated with his trademark spotted paintwork,
the ornaments were re-ornamented. Dotted with red, pink and green
acrylic, these plastic-moulded squirrels and caterpillars became
even more artificial, even more abstracted from reality. Yet
paradoxically, when this jauntily-painted fauna was introduced
into the landscape to frolic in woodland and meadow in a series of
photographed interventions, the figures revealed a vivacity they
had altogether lacked in their dowdy mass-produced plumage.
Despite the absurd patterning, the act of hand-painting had
restored an energy and variation to the animals which rendered the
synthetic somehow more natural.
The
inherent tensions between the man-made and the hand-made, the
individual and the crowd, the artificial and the natural are
recurrent themes. In Healthy
Snacks (2002-3), Bracey spray-painted thousands of pistachio
shells in jelly-bean colours, displaying them, like Felix Gonzalez
Torres, in sensuous candy-mountain spills. Beneath the shiny
artificial surface, however, knobbly bits or organic brown shell
still insist on poking through, refusing to hide their origins.
Showing an impressively obsessive diligence, Bracey ate a packet
of nuts a day for a year, to complete the piece. As with much of
his practice, the component-parts accumulated naturally before it
became apparent they were taking shape as an art entity. Palette
(1998-2006), an on-going endeavour, gathers all the paint scraped
off his palette since 1998. Slowly accreting like a coral reef,
the different strata of purples, tangerines and aquamarines give a
forensic insight into the nature of past work through the story of
its residue.
“I
like to draw attention to the significance of what people might
consider worthless,” says Bracey. For Migrate
(2005), Bracey has assembled a collection of found objects –
bits of roadside detritus picked out by his magpie eye on his
walks through the city. A crumpled cigarette packet, a discarded
name-badge, a twisted set of spangly devil’s horns lost on the
way home from some Halloween revelry: these shards of past-lives
and hidden narratives are rounded up and put out to view. But as
the seasoned zoo-visitor should know, not every silent cage is
empty. Look closely enough, and Migrate
reveals itself as an aviary. A flock of little painted birds has
settled imperceptibly amongst the random bits of broken plastic
and everyday fragmentation . A woodpecker clings to the needle on
a forgotten mending kit; a kingfisher waits on the stem of a
shattered wine glass. Like the robins who build nests in
post-boxes, and the starlings who know how to imitate Nokia
ringtones, Bracey’s avians are learning to adapt to the modern
world.
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