The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

Give adog abone 1995 Colour photograph Courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Give a dog a bone 1995-96 is Fiona Hall's portrait of civilisation. It is a jumbled collection of objects, mainly carved out of soap and presided over by a life-sized photograph of an old man draped in mesh. Souvenirs of nature and culture, such as seed pods, animal bones and domestic artefacts, represent the bits and pieces of human experience, summing up a life and a society. The frail but stately man is wearing a blanket made from aluminium Coca-Cola cans which were cut into thin ribbons and knitted by the artist, creating a glittering fabric which offers neither protection nor comfort. Coke is perhaps the most familiar icon of global consumption. This cloaked tribal elder of an industrialised society is therefore wearing a trophy, like the richly feathered or furred cloaks made from the creatures consumed by a tribal hunter. The title of the work is a line from an old English song. The following line of the song is 'this old man 114 I ART I s T s • PA c I FI c came rolling home'. The old man in the photograph is at home, surrounded by his worldly goods. The words 'give a dog a bone' also suggest the paltry reward of scraps in 'a dog's life', an expression which traditionally means a wretched existence. Hall's installation is an ironical reference to images of the victorious warrior posing with his conquests, or a potentate displaying his riches. The man in the photograph has a pink, vulnerable look, as though fresh from the bath and tenderly wrapped in a towel by a loving parent. The knowledge that none of this can possibly be true gives a rather cruel edge to the irony of the entire work.The man at the centre of it, with a large sticking-plaster on his chest, seems more victim than conqueror. He has the innocence common to youth and old age, and the purity of the soap in his surroundings embodies this innocence. The great conquering crusade of civilisation has been to defeat and harness nature.This crusade was motivated by the desire for food, then shelter, warmth, wealth and, ultimately, power (power in almost every conceivable sense of the word). Manufactured, material objects symbolise the uniquely human capacity to conquer nature, but in distinguishing itself from other animals the human race has also become alienated. One of the details in Give a dog a bone is a small altar for the ritual of shaving, a symptom of people being out of harmony with their bodies. The steel-clawed cat's paw shaving brush and Christian Dior's swaggeringly named Eau Sauvage aftershave lotion hint at the beast still lurking effetely within. The picture of humanity which emerges from this work may be compared with one of the central images of the European tradition, humanity reduced to its original, rudimentary state: the 'poor, bare forked animal' in Shakespeare's play King Lear. Fiona Hall visualises the human reduced further, until even the animal nature has been largely driven out. Scrubbed, shaved and scented, the de-natured modern man faces a world of soapy neutrality. The artist's reduction of everything to the same bland substance suggests that progress has led us to a world of artificially processed experiences. The collection of trash and treasure exquisitely remade in soap gives some insight into Hall's dedicated love of the discarded, disordered and unloved stuff found at the stalls of junk markets. She is best known as a photographer of carefully created studio arrangements of objects found or made by her. However, Hall now often exhibits the actual objects. This work physically recreates the profusion of a junk market, where everything has its own history, involving the lives of various people who have made, bought, used or sold it in the past. However, all manufactured objects eventually become the leftovers of human existence and in the end they are lost forever. Changes in society render products obsolete. Soap, which washes away to nothing, is made for a brief life and Hall has carved her memorials to vanishing objects from a vanishing substance. This extinction of objects implies the transition and extinction of our society. All things must pass, and this installation is a place to think about transformation and loss. Part Pharaoh's tomb, part hobo's stash, it is a poignant shrine for civilised humans in the late twentieth century. Timothy Morrell,Curator.Contemporary Australian Art. Queensland Art Gallery