Ross, Anne. 2001. Muybridge, Hills and me. Patinated cast bronze sculpture. Bayside Gallery, Bayside City Council Melbourne, Australia.
Photograph by Elizabeth Cole of Anne Ross's bronze sculpture Muybridge, Hills and me, 2023.
I saw this work on 26 August 2023, at the Whichway exhibition of Anne Ross’s work. It exemplifies a work with multiple layers of cultural meaning (Ross and Bosse 2023, 60-61). While appearing initially to be a playful work based on the self-described iconic Australian clothes line (the Hills Hoist) , it raises questions for me on closer consideration. For example, does the suspension of multiple figures, the lower half of a presumably female body, reference women tied to repetitive domestic labour, and hence the lower value placed on women by society (Ortner 1972, 71). If so, is this a feminist work? Through referencing herself in the title, is the artist suggesting this is her experience, or is she expanding more generally on the fair weather life of a creative?
Does the reference to Muybridge in the title refer to Eadweard Muybridge, the early English photographer known for photographs of animals in motion (SFMOMA), and familiar to me through the work of Francis Bacon? If so, are women being likened to plough-horses? Drawing on the work of Rene Decartes and his mind-body split (MacLachlan 2004, 3-4), do the legged forms function as robots, absent a controlling brain? Are women being compared to mindless robots?
Am I hermeneutically reading too much into this work? Would someone who had never hung out washing raise these questions? Would I, if I had not experienced the backyard Hills Hoist or knew nothing of Muybridge?
All these questions remind me of the role of symbolism and its cultural (and gendered) context in the viewer’s interpretation of art.
Bibliography:
MacLachlan, Malcolm. 2004. "Embodiment: Clinical, Critical and Cultural Perspectives on Health and Illness." Maidenhead, UK: McGraw-Hill Education.
Ortner, Sherry B. 1972. "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" Feminist studies 1 (2): 5-31. https://doi.org/10.2307/3177638.
Ross, Anne, and Joanna Bosse. 2023. Whichway / Anne Ross ; curator, Joanna Bosse. Brighton, Vic: Bayside City Council.
SFMOMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "Eadweard Muybridge." Accessed 27 August 2023. https://www.sfmoma.org/artist/eadweard_muybridge/.
Comentarios