Animals in Amsterdam

At the FOAM photographic gallery in Amsterdam, in a lovely canalside town house, there were two exhibitions, one by an African photographer, Malick Sidibe, and the other with an African subject , The Hyena and Other Men, by Pieter Hugo. The photographs in the Malick Sidibe exhibition were mostly taken in his studio in Bamako, Mali in the 1970s. They are devoid of the all too familiar stereotypes of Africa. Instead, sharply dressed, mostly young people went to his studio to have a photo taken, which conveyed their strength of pride about themselves, as if they were setting off for a night on the town, perhaps with romantic conquest in mind. Many of the outfits give them a kind of gangster quality, complete with mirror sunglasses. Not gangsta in the contemporary sense, but gangster in the sense of 1930s Chicago: dapper men in sharply cut suits; feminine, glamorous women.

Malick Sidibe also specialised in wedding photography and these photographs convey all the joys of crowds and community, of spontaneity, celebration and hospitality that one might struggle to find in Europe nowadays. Finding celebration and crowds might be particularly difficult in Amsterdam, where all is cool, distant, elegant and now conservative. How different to the 1970s when Amsterdam was colour, youth and freedom, whilst London was grey, old, broke and broken.

The other exhibition by Pieter Hugo could not be more of a contrast. Instead of the small studio portraits, the huge photographs are of men with hyenas, dogs and monkeys on chains. These men are a group of travelling musicians and performers in Nigeria whom the photographer has got to know. But the subjects do not seek to reveal intimacy or vulnerability. Instead they want to convey strength, control and, above all, mastery over the hyenas, muzzled and on the end of a thick chain. These animals are forcibly controlled, not tamed – and God knows how they were made to suffer in order to contain their fear and aggression. Aggression must have been beaten out of them.

The men are exotically dressed in beads and animal skins, whilst some of the animals are dressed up in human clothes: two monkeys are wearing football shirts and they stare at the camera in a defiant, knowing way. So somehow the so-called hyena men have tried to pull off a kind of anthropomorphic role reversal. The men are posing with their legs apart and their chest out, as if they are wild, dominant animals. The animals are supposedly becalmed and deferential. But the pose is obviously fake. The viewer senses immediately not that these men are powerful, but that they are powerless, poor and desperate. The animals, however, still suggest their barely contained wildness. The human trick has failed. We are not the masters of wild animals. We only convey an illusion of brutal power, seeking more than anything to convince ourselves, whilst those over which we claim power know that our power is conditional and temporary. One day the fight will come and the fight will be to the death.

Human anthropocentric delusion is a subject which John Gray addresses in Amsterdam. He tells the story of a vegan cat. A friend of his told him that he had trained, cajoled and tricked his cat into being a vegan and therefore to eschew meat and other animal products. The animal had apparently thrived on this unusual diet. Even a cursory acquaintance with cats confirms that there is no cat in the world that does not eat meat and fish. But then one of John’s questions hit the bullseye. Was the cat kept indoors, he asked his friend. No, came the reply, the cat was free to come and go as it pleased. The owner apparently believed that the cat maintained its vegan habits whilst out on the town alone.

The cat, one suspects, may have had a friend like Yvonne who feeds Herman the cat from next door, to the point where he is now overweight; some might even say obese. His owners think he has a poor appetite. They may even think he is a vegan.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets/ for a few photographs of Amsterdam