Whenever Superman (who of course is blessed with X-ray vision) looks hard at a horse, he must see something rather like the life-size horse sculpture Adrift, shown at the National Museum of Australia on Thursday.
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For Suzie Bleach's and Andrew Townsend's iron and steel gee-gee (made from salvaged objects and materials, augmented with lots of forged mild steel) is a kind of transparent, skeleton horse – albeit a skeleton still equipped with some exciting internal organs. It was put on display on Thursday not only because it was the eve of August 1, the official birthday of all horses, but also to help get us in the mood for the museum's galloping blockbuster exhibition Spirited: Australia's Horse Story.
Adrift is an allegorical work and refers to how the dear horse, once so central to our lives and economy, has been set adrift. The horse sculpture stands upon the deck of a stylised ship, adrift on an ocean.
"Adrift is made from mild steel," Bleach said, "and from assemblages of objects we've found in our community [Braidwood] that refer to mechanised agriculture of the past, sometimes horse-drawn things, farming equipment. And then there's the mild steel structure, this [horse-shaped] frame, this cage, the skeleton."
The horse is an intricate creation. It's made of iron and steel but is also, somehow, dainty, like a mechanism.
"What we've done," Townsend said as we stood beside the beast, "is to try to employ some kind of logic so that where there are legs and joints, we've tried to use linkages and structural elements from machines."
"So, for example, where the heart and a lung might be, we've put [salvaged] filters. There's a sort of absurd kind of logic about it all. There's drainage [pointing to a length of old rubber hose, perhaps representing a stretch of intestine] and this ridiculous shower head. There's a sort of absurd jerry-built logic to what we've done. We didn't just willy-nilly throw things in there."
The star "appropriate element" from a machine is the horse's "spine", a fine, old, beautifully engineered linked chain from a harvester. It is perfect. Each individual link/vertebrae can be effortlessly detached from the "spine" just as it can be from the weathered skeletal spine of anything with a backbone.
"We have a massive scrap heap," Townsend rejoiced, from which there is the occasional "happy, fortuitous collision" of exactly the ideal piece of scrap for the thing being assembled.
Another "fortuitous collision" was the finding on the scrap heap of just the thing, a giant shackle, to be the horse's bottom lip.
"This is an allegorical piece," Bleach said.
"We want it to entice and bring people close so that we can then talk about other things. We're not really just talking about the horse, we're talking about the human condition ... and so we use the horse in an allegorical way to bring people close ... And just this morning, after it had been installed, we watched all these people walk in the door and they all go 'Ooh, a horse!' Why do people do that?"
She hopes people will wonder: "Why is he standing all alone on this boat? Where is his mooring? Why is he cast adrift, with no anchor?"
Do you have a (hopefully well-grounded) horse? How are you celebrating its birthday? The museum invites you to tweet and Facebook stories and images of your celebrations, using #nmahorses.
The artists have loaned Adrift to the museum to promote the major new exhibition Spirited: Australia's Horse Story, which opens on 11 September.
Vladimirs everywhere
"Snap out of it, Ian. This has to stop!" I chided myself as, visiting the Step Into The Limelight exhibition of public school art at the ANU school of art I imagined I could see on one wall, a supernaturally huge portrait of Vladimir Putin.
It had to be a hallucination. Russia's supremo has been made such a bogeyman by "our side" that one begins to imagine seeing him everywhere, finding his face in the froth on our coffees, seeing him shopping for vodka at Local Liquor, standing next to him at the urinal at CBR Brave matches.
And yet this time, at Step Into The Limelight, it turned out one's mind was not playing tricks. Rhys Hulkkonen of Gungahlin College has created a gigantic black-and-white portrait of Putin. Our little reproduction of it here doesn't do it justice. In a big and busy exhibition, it somehow dominates things. Its eyes follow you around.
Hulkkonen tells us he actually did the portrait, as a class assignment, many weeks ago, with no idea that Putin would be dominating our news now.
He tackled Putin because he is so striking and because many people find different personalities in the enigmatic man's face, some seeing "a dictator", some finding him "more laid-back".
"And I made him so large-scale because he's such a large political figure and so his portrait needs to be big. Making him small wouldn't really work."
Black and white seemed right, too, "and more his style" the artist said. The blackness was achieved with black ballpoint pens "and [given the size of the work] I got through a lot of them".
Step Into The Limelight, with the work of more than 300 public school students, continues at the ANU School of Art until August 9.