Bunnies
Supervert's review of an exhibition of contemporary art grouped around the theme of bunnies (yes, rabbits). Originally published in Artforum Magazine (May 1995).
Exhibit at the Nolan/Eckman Gallery, New York
Bunnies — unlike the Death of Painting, the Rebirth of Abstraction, and the Transformation of Incomprehensible Gobbledygook — rarely tend to be the subject of a group show. Bunnies are thought to be cute, huggable, cuddly; even the word, which rhymes with "funny" and "sunny," connotes something infinitely friendlier, happier, goofier than art, which almost never aspires to cuteness and only infrequently allows itself to be touched, let alone cuddled. The apparent incompatibility is embodied by one work in "Bunnies," Dieter Roth's Rabbit, 1975, which insinuates that even shit is fitter for Art than cuteness: few people would find Roth's sculpture of a rabbit cute, precisely because it's formed of such artistically acceptable materials as straw and the creature's own "pellets." And though it's encased in a vitrine, prohibiting viewers from touching what they may not want to touch anyway, the sculpture inevitably makes you wonder if the artist molded it by hand.
Most of the works in "Bunnies" veer toward the anthropomorphic. Peter Saul's cartoonish Jesus Was A Girl Like Me, 1995, shows a green bunny crucified: each floppy ear impaled by three nails, big tits spilling out of a red and white striped jumper, legs churning the air. The title of the picture floats in a yellow text bubble beside the bunny's orange halo. Jesus, of course, was neither a girl nor a rabbit, and yet the work suggests that, if you can already entertain the paradox of a being simultaneously human and divine, it's not much of a leap to a Jesus girlish and possibly hare-brained. That there should exist a second work of this genre, William Copley's Crucified Bunny Rabbit, 1961/1964, implies that bunnies are somehow especially appropriate for religious pictures. Perhaps it's the conjunction of anthropomorphism and imitatio Christi: if animals imitate humans and humans imitate Christ, it follows quite logically that every bunny is headed for the cross
Barbara Zenner's Black Jack, 1990, depicts two bunnies in a position normally named — as if it weren't natural to civilized human beings — after dogs, and yet there's something uniquely human about the way one bunny mounts another from behind in the life-sized cloth sculpture: the active partner stands a la homo erectus on two feet, not leaning his entire bodyweight but merely resting his paws un-bestially on the passive one's back. In a pocket of his plaid fur he also happens to have a packet of Black Jack condoms: "Schwarz und Samtig" the label says. The work is less anthropomorphic than its inverse: there's really no term for it, for the recognition or release of animal qualities in humans. It's what happens in "The Metamorphosis": Gregor Samsa doesn't project his humanity outward, he loses it as the insect takes over from within. In Black Jack, it's less a matter of projecting human qualities onto animals — why would rabbits honestly need prophylactics? — than coping with the animals rising up in us: when we fuck like bunnies, we still have to be man enough to remember our condoms.
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