works 2021 - etwas totems

This second body of work comprises of groupings of smaller canvases, again in panel formation, that creates resonant contrasts in their juxtaposition to the edges of canvasses butted up to each other. Some contrast in pairs while others are composed in a sequence of panorama of four panels.

These works adopt the cartoon subject again but focus on the Australian native koala as a kind of totem animal or cipher for the way that colonial Australian culture fetishizes and infantilizes threatened animals as cute and cuddly props for tourism and photo-ops. The visual language of this dangerous fantasy about our native wildlife, is contrasted with half-tone dot photographic images of koalas being rescued and bandaged from recent devastating bushfires in 2019/2020. Sam the koala is one such animal featured in the images, who gained worldwide fame and sympathy when she was rescued during bushfires in February, but ultimately died during an operation.

Koala as totem

Koalas function in these works like a totem spirit animal that foreshadows a grim future. A prophetic omen that portends calamity resulting from dangers of our complacency in the face of climate change and our disconnection from our natural environment. The fate of the koala makes a stark example of the human tendency to anthropomorphize. At the core of anthropomorphism lies a false positive cognitive bias to over-attribute the pattern of the human body and/or mind. We stylize, infantilize, and reduce a complex and fascinating animal that deserves our respect to a gaudy advertising or tourist logo, just as we like to reduce complex concepts to cheap headlines and nativist slogans.

‘..Marx wrote of totems and fetishes mainly from the perspective of political economy. Freud delved into their psychological import. We argue that Marx and Freud dealt with the same thing and in similar ways. They both treated totems and fetishes as things and practices functioning to ward off anxiety. Also, they both treated totems and fetishes as promoters of illusion, one from the psychological and the other from the political perspective. Totems and fetishes
represent ways people try to ward off anxiety, and they function as building blocks of illusions…’

“…Hegel says that Understanding leads to turning things into “etwas Totem” –– a little totem, i.e., an ordinary, profane object invested with impersonal powers via the projective practices of those that alienate their own energies and invest them in an external object –– transforming the object into a powerful and sacred Thing over and against the practitioners…”

-From Totems, Fetishes, and Enchanted Modernity: Hegelian Marxism Confronts Idolatry by Mark Worrell and Dan Krier