The Political Animal exhibition takes the animal fable and makes an existential examination of the bestial and instinctual sides of our political and civic life in word and image.
A long term collaboration between a curator, an artist and a writer, the work examines how diverse formations of the collective - the mob, the pack, the crowd - pay into everyday behaviours.
All three of the show’s creators have a strong point in common in their respective practices: awareness of and engagement with space. Thanks to the curatorial situated approach, the artistic site-specific and place-making oriented practice, and the ‘architecture’ of the writing, the result is a spatial reading of the themes.
The exhibition consists of ten animal drawings by Prabhakar Pachpute as well as a series of spatial interventions including large scale coloured chalk drawings across the walls of the interior of the Reid Building and 3-D sculptures and cutouts. The exploration of spatial depth and disposition both through the biomorphic forms of the animals and the geometry of objects adds an unexpected dimension to the conventional moral range of the fable here. One might speculate on the mining background in the families of both the artist and the writer of Political Animal to understand how and why they bring to this universal and traditional cultural form such a new profundity of investigation of questions of inside/outside, presence/absence and conceptual/material.
Pachpute’s artworks are indeed inspired by the work of writer Johnny Rodger, who has been experimenting with a type of modern prose-poem fable in order to come at the question of the ‘contemporary’ through the very different angle of literary form. There is now a collection of twenty of these modern fables. Rodger’s work takes the simple but fantastical elements of the conventional talking-animal fable and reworks them with political complexity in an engaged and discursive existential style which creates its own literary space.The reworked fables are assembled together in the book which accompanies the show, also titled Political Animal (copies of the book can be found laid out in the driven void). In the show itself the display of these animals is organised by order of the length of their average lifespan -from ant via gull, elephant, fish, donkey and others, to the long surviving tardigrade.
The intention of the curator, Viviana Checchia, is to take these basic literary and visual formats and recreate the gallery itself as a section of a book. Having wondered for years about the relevance of primary sources in the creation of the exhibitions, Checchia has designed Political Animal to incorporate an extensive series of books and texts used by Pachpute and Rodger as an integral part of the show in the form of references, footnotes, and extracts. This is a move against the current practice of the use of ‘source rooms’ to delegate contextualisation: it is becoming a rarity to find gallery spaces without a room devoted to reading materials. This show is a source room in itself. The public are thus invited to experience the exhibition as a reader. It is a book written in space: a book about books.
Prabhakar Pachpute’s new series of work was commissioned by the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), The Drouth and The Glasgow School of Art; sponsored by Leverhulme International Network of Contemporary Studies, to accompany the publishing by CCA of the book Political Animal.
This show will be part of a two day event presented with the same title, Political Animal, and focused on the phenomenon of the Contemporary City. The Glasgow School of Art and the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) have invited a collection of international artists, writers, performers, academics, musicians, dancers and activists from all over the globe to come together on the 21st and 22nd of June 2019.
