Anyone who wants to know what cuts it in contemporary art – and what doesn’t – should look no further than animals. Beasts are a perfect case in point. The mere depiction of a tiger, say, faithfully observed in all its striped stealth, or burning brightly in some lyrical vision, might play in the shires but it won’t get an artist into a high-end, scene-changing gallery such as Marian Goodman. There has to be something more.
The tiger that opens this museum-class show, for instance, looks like a giant wildlife photograph – the glowering face magnified to billboard height. Yet there is a strangely human inflection to the jaw and whiskers, and the head-on confrontation feels eerily personal. The image is black and white, but the contrasts exceed reality, and indeed this is not a photo but a spectacular charcoal drawing. The US artist Robert Longo specialises in these super-real feats that shift the terms of exchange. The predator, here, turns dictator.
Where the image is a photograph, the animal (or its context) must be reframed. Roe Ethridge uses names – Diane the horse, Joy the goat – to elevate their farmyard status. Hiroshi Sugimoto, philosopher-photographer, shows five antelope standing sentinel in the veldt like proud African tribesmen. And the analogy is exact, for these are in fact specimens in a dubious museum diorama.
Vietnamese art star Danh Vo presents a sepia shot of a pekingese on an ornate throne. The dog belonged to Queen Victoria, plundered from Beijing by British troops during the second opium war; Looty is its punning name. All of which one could have learned from a book, but Vo has brought the image into a gallery as a conscious rite, commemorating the pet and its emblematic political history.
Mimesis, on its own, is never enough. Carsten Höller’s lifelike octopus sprawls on the floor, swivelling a blue eye on us: the colour an unsettling shock. A mesmerising film of peacocks mating, shot at twilight on antique stock, finds a mystery in their shuddering movements that a television crew never would, and preserves it in silence.
Steve McQueen’s film Running Thunder shows a beautiful brown horse lying still in a meadow. After a while, a fly settles near its eye, and then another, yet the horse never blinks, so one realises with a wrench that it is not sleeping but dead. Time is perfectly harnessed: all it takes is a minute for innocence to turn to sorrow. McQueen is catnip to museums of contemporary art.
Animal sculpture is ubiquitous, global, from equestrian statues to bronze hares. But you’d never find either in a white cube gallery. The German sculptor Stephan Balkenhol hews a raven in an overcoat out of solid wood; the means are medieval, the effect frighteningly gothic. John Baldessari, veteran conceptualist, employs Ferrari to manufacture a life-size fibreglass camel contemplating a gigantic needle (still too small to get through, however): a modern proverb for a rich collector. And the Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset make even more from the mismatch of medium and expectation. Their sculpture shows a boy contemplating a slug – both cast in bronze and painted white, equalised and anonymised so they stand in for all boys and all slugs since boys recognised something compulsively fascinating in these squirmy unevolved forms. The work is pointedly titled Dawn.
All sorts of ideas are explored in this fascinating zoo of a show, organised by the American writer and curator Jens Hoffmann: the connection between people and animals, our shared empathy and ethics, our fear and love of beasts. There are images of mythical creatures, of hybrids like the mermaid and centaur and wonders as yet unseen, such as Dürer’s great 1515 etching of an armour-plated rhino, based on travellers’ reports. There are symbolic creatures – hoarding squirrels, sly foxes, a superstitious magpie that gives you the evil eye – and no end of anthropomorphism, from Yinka Shonibare’s calf brandishing a revolutionary gun, straight out of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, to Maurizio Cattelan’s tiny mouse house, a miniature garbage can outside the door.
Not all of it compels. The Jungle Book, with every animal dubbed in a different language, doesn’t test our racial prejudices as much as it should. And for some artists, animals are just another pretext for excursions in style. Shonibare’s calf boy is dressed in the artist’s trademark pseudo-African fabric, muddling the metaphors, and Karen Kilimnik’s creatures are painted with her usual wan and deliberate cack-handedness.
But that whimsy is what made Kilimnik’s name on the scene, and explains her presence in this show. For whatever else Hoffmann has in mind, with his wide-ranging references to Voltaire, Darwin, Orwell and Foucault, his marvellous panoply of zoological drawings across four centuries and his musings on animal rights and emotions, he is still a contemporary art curator, and not a naturalist.
And so it goes with his artists too. They want to be eye to eye with animals, not at an appreciative distance with paintbrush, lens or binoculars. They want to think about creatures in the wild, but also in relation to life and art, representation, character and history. It’s the reason why Balthasar Burkhard’s portraits of sheep, pigs and donkeys against a studio backdrop are here, singled out in all their unique and mortal beauty against encroaching darkness, and a wildlife photographer’s images might not be. It is the reason why the fibreglass camel is here and all those bronze hares are not.
• Animality is at the Marian Goodman Gallery, London W1 until 17 December
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