A R T & D E S I G N: Strange Creatures

STRANGE CREATURES – source: Sculpture Today – Judith Collins

Last two decades artists concerned themselves with the influences and effects that microelectronic communications and bio technologies are having on the human body as well as on animals and plants. Boundaries between humans and animals are being transgressed. The categories of human/animal/machine are steadily merging into one another.

Cyborgs – Human beings whose bodies have been taken over by electromechanical devices – not new to literature – 1818 – Mary Shelley’s – Frankenstein – inspiration for writers, filmmakers and artists alike.

1985-Donna Haraway – American sociologist wrote essay entitled A Manifesto for Cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980’s in which she presented the cyborg as a trans human and transgender entity. Haraway’s ideas have reverberated through the art world, and recently she declared herself a cyborg, a fundamentally technological body plugged into the scientific power networks that control our world.

Luciano Fabro – Ovaries (1988) – shiny steel cables+ white marble ovals

- eggs are identical and infinitely reproducible and call up ideas about mass production , genetic cloning and fertility experiments

- Fabro uses inorganic and industrial materials to make a statement about the reproductive capacity of female body, not necessary a human one in fact, the scale and grandeur of the work turns the implied body into that of a mechanical giant.

Paul Mc Carthy – Spaghetti Man (1993)

Young Japanese artists – Naturally inclined to work with new technologies and materials living as they do in one of the most advanced technological countries on the world. Momoyo Torimitsu, Takashi Murakami, Chiezo Taro.

Artificial creatures inspired from Japanese youth culture and its obsession with animation, comic books and cartoons. Japanese animated cartoons first appeared in the 1960’s, portraying and imaginary world filled with superheroes and cyborgs living a life of innocence and fun. Japanese cartoons and comics inspired by American culture Walt Disney’s animated films.

Contemporary Japanese artists turn the cute, innocuous quality of their source material into something darker and more anarchic. They also add a touch of Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons.

crawling businessman robot | Momoyo Torimitsu

Takashi Murakami

Murakami - DOB

Chiezo Taro - Superlamb

Lee Bul - Amaryllis 1999


Yue Minjun - uses his own likeness in his work - figures smile boradly

Ken Feingold - Sinking Feeling 2001, author uses silicone, pigments, fibreglass, software and electronics. In other instalations like If/Then - two disembodied identical heads in a cardboard box that talk to each other in an attempt to determine who they are: 'I wanted them to look like replacement parts being shipped from the factory that had suddenly gotten up and begun a kind of existential dialogue right there on the assembly line', the artist said.

Tim Hawkinson - Penitent 1994 - Kneeling skeleton from dog chews repents his or her sins and seek forgivness - whistles 'as if calling for a dog'. Los Angeles - leading centre for the cyborg/hybrids artistic production = artists technicians hired by the film industry to produce special effects. Recycled domestic items is his favourite material.

Paloma Varga-Weisz - Bumpman sick - 2002 - who sits in calm contemplation. Nothing to do with modern technology. She carves wooden figures and animals from limewood, and act that harks back to her predecessors in the world of medieval religious German sculpture. Her figures are amalgam of acient and modern - she looks for inspiration on medical websites and children stories.

Patricia Piccinini - Still Life with Stem Cells, 2002, a life-like child sits among grotesque, embryonic lumps with veined and hairy skin. Patricia is looking at the latest developments in genetic engineering and presenting creatures that appear to display the unpleasant side-effects.

Jake and Dinos Chapman - Zygotic acceleration, Biogenetic de-sublimated libidinal model 1995 (enlarged x 1000). 'Dysfunctional' is an adjective that has often been applied to the mutated bodies by Chapmans who often reconfigure shop-window mannequins in their work.They make obvious references to genetic engineering , and they are also aware of the way in which the Christian Church has commissioned from artists millions of mutilated and wounded bodies, most notably that of Christ himself.

Tomas Grunfeld - Misfit 1990. Monsters of animal kind - combines taxidermied animals in unlikely and grotesque configurations. In this case three different species fox, pheasant and duck.

The First notable hybrid in world sculpture appeared as long as circa 5,000 BC, the Egyptian Sphinx, with the body of a lion, female breasts and the head of the ruling pharaoh. Then followed centaurs, minotaurs, fauns, satyrs, all hedonistic creatures who live by their instincts. In medieval times, sculptors carved numerous anthropomorphic creatures to help promote moral virtues. And in more recent times, cartoon figures of rabbits, mice, dogs and cats have enlarged the repertoire of the human-animal amalgam, one of the most notable being Mickey Mouse. Another kind of mouse, the 'oncomouse', a patented creature bread in an American laboratory and given a human immune system for the purpose of cancer research, served as the inspiration for Brian Crockett's large marble sculpture ecce homo, a life-size amalgam of man and mouse.

Brian Crockett - ecce homo 2000 - Crockett made the work in 2000, the millennium year, and decided to 'reinterpret the ultimate figure of salvation, Christ, through the ultimate actor of contemporary science, the oncomouse'. Material pink-tinted crystalline marble dust cast with polymer binding, another nod towards modern technology.

Carlee Fernandez - 7100 Goat , 1999- uses taxidermic animals, altered in various ways so that they function as weird household objects, such as a deer/laundry basket, a deer/ice-cube tray, and a stuffed rhino converted into a stepladder.

Theseare the types of animals that indigenous peoples ate, or trophy hunters shot, stuffed and displayed in their homes. Fernandes brings human and animal into more sympathetic relationship by turning them into useful domestic items.


Alain Sechas, Hugh, The Guitarist Cat, 1997

Kiki Smith stated in 2002: When I first started making figurative work...I was interested in the symbolic morphing of animals and humans. I found this anthropomorphizing of animals interesting; the human attributes we give to animals and the animal attributes we take on as humans to construct our identities....What do animals mean to us in terms of the construction of our own identity, our well-being, our environment?

Kiki Smith - Harpie - Sirens and harpies seductive figures from Greek mythology that combine the head of woman with the body and claws of a bird. The Harpies were known for their destructive qualities and the Sirens were the malevolent monsters of the sea, luring sailors to their death with their beautiful songs. Nowadays they carry a message of potent femininity and archetypal power.