"Horses Shed Their Tails Once A Year In The Fall"

Photographer Gennady Revzin

I have had the most amazing few weeks with it's climax being on Tuesday night; the opening of my first solo exhibition influenced by the carousel. WOW! What a great night and great response to my installation. If you're in Melbourne anytime between now and the 17th of December, please do pop into BUS Projects and check it out. I'm very proud of this little baby!

I've decided to upload the catalogue essay written by Laura Castagnini who is a Melbourne based curator, writer and artist. She has her own blog and you can find it here. You may notice a spelling error with the word 'tail' within the title and throughout the essay. This was my mistake as I ran around like a headless chook on the day of the opening to get the catalogue printed. Crazy, I know. I should've taken ten extra minutes to read through it before sending it to the printer, but, alas, I didn't. The funny thing is that this was a TOTAL DISASTER for me when I realised it but now, as the days go by and I'm noticing articles written about the exhibition are doing the same with the spelling, I'm kinda liking it! It is one of those mistakes that seems really, really right.

I have included video documentation of walking through the space at the end of this post. Please enjoy the essay and the images of the work and feel free to post a comment below.

Photographer Gennady Revzin

Santina Amato: Horses Shed Their Tails Once a Year in The Fall

29 November- 17 December, 2011

 

When Santina Amato was volunteering at an antique carousel restorer’s studio in Los Angeles, one of the ladies working there, a Mrs. Caverly, told her a story that has since remained ingrained in her memory.  At the turn of the 20th century, when carousels became widely popular in the United States, wooden carousel horses were affixed with a tail severed from real horses.  The ugly truth is that the hair was bought from animal disposal companies, who collected dead horses and sold their tails to carousel makers. Often children were riding on the carousel would ask Mrs. Caverly where the horse tails came from, to which she replied: “Horses shed their tails once a year in the fall.” Her reasoning behind this white lie was that “you can't possibly talk about death to children, and especially not in front of such a beautiful carousel!”

This protective “sheltering” of the carousel from the dark truth of its own manufacturing is a powerful symbol of its perceived innocence. It sheds an uneasy light on the ways that adults structure childhood and nostalgia. For Amato, for whom this solo exhibition is the result of a year- long research project, the fascination lies in the sinister edges of the subject. As written by the artist, “a universal symbol for childhood and heavily surrounded by nostalgia, my initial attraction to the carousel was to investigate how I could intertwine a child-like aesthetic into society’s perspective of feminine beauty, attraction, sexuality and death.” Hence, the eroticization of the carousel in popular culture has been an important element of Amato’s research. Her blog,[i] which functions as an electronic visual diary of her discoveries, is sprinkled with historical facts and insights into the manufacturing of carousels but perhaps most interestingly it examines images of carousels created and circulated in contemporary media. For example, Louis Vuitton’s Spring/Summer collection of 2012 presented pastel clad models perched atop a spinning ice-white carousel, while the Joe's Jeans Fall 2011 collection campaign boasted Fellini-esque imagery of a model ‘reverse 'cow-girling’[ii] a carousel horse. Amato’s blog reveals how the carousel has in fact been transformed into a loaded fetish symbol, embodying at once female sexuality and childhood innocence. Carousels are lacquered, candy-coloured, thrilling and safe at the same time, thereby employing an aesthetic that befits fetish aesthetics quite readily. This sensory experience combined with the carousel music might lend itself to both nostalgia and eroticism.

Elements of Amato’s research emerge in Horses Shed Their Tales Once a Year in The Fall, however she has avoided overt references. Instead we are presented with an intelligent reimagining of the carousel, carried via three structures that remain in constant dialogue with one another. Cohesion is emphasized by recurring visual motifs; all three structures utilize red as their focal colour, employ an oval or orifice shape, and have their back side painted black.  

The first structure is a hand crafted “funhouse mirror,” the type often seen in carnivals that distort the viewer’s reflection to be fat or skinny depending on the angle viewed from. The mirror’s sleek shape and red glossy frame is reminiscent of lipstick packaging, forming a seductive sculptural object. We are reminded here of Amato’s earlier work, I want to swing on an invisible swing (2009), which presents a pair of legs dangling from an oversized office chair wearing size 16 red high heels. Combining a voyeuristic ‘under the desk’ shot with the childhood notion of being ‘too small’ for furniture, the work complicates the connotations of women’s fashion items. Horses Shed Their Tails Once a Year in The Fall returns to this mode of thinking, demonstrating the infantilisation of women through their various, mass-marketed, accouterments and accessories.

The central structure in Horses Shed Their Tails Once a Year in The Fall is the most obvious aesthetic reference to the carousel. A white antique door, with its central oval panel removed and the frame painted red to function as an orifice- shaped viewing device, has been redecorated with gold detail painting and a country landscape inhabited by a flock of sheep. This element of the installation exemplifies Amato’s interest in redefining domestic objects, first explored in her graduate piece Tea Party (2007); a large antique cupboard whose open door revealed a tiny teacup, into which was projected a video of the artist spinning in a green field. The playful, child-like aesthetic employed in Tea Party is echoed throughout most of Amato’s work to date, and it again resurfaces in Horses Shed Their Tales Once a Year in The Fall.

The final structure is a wooden screen, onto which is projected the image of a dark haired girl in a red dress. She stands still aside from occasional blinking, yet her mouth is stuffed with horse- hair and a long tail flows out of it. An uncomfortable scene unfolds; the tail been inserted through a hole in the screen, therefore the viewer sees what is unbeknownst to the subject. Voyeuristic tension is a recurring theme in Amato’s work, exemplified most explicitly in her video Vito (2007), in which she filmed herself watching Vito Acconci’s sleazy video Theme Song (1973). Vito is a highly personal work that functions simultaneously as performance documentation and video art, however the use of a model for the video in Horses Shed Their Tales Once a Year in The Fall reveals Amato’s shift towards a more distanced narrative.

Horses Shed Their Tails Once a Year in The Fall is inspired by the artist’s investigation into the carousel, yet the ensuing installation drives us towards something deeper, something darker, that lies beneath it’s lacquered surface. Amato divulges the truth of where carousel tails came from- but she does so in a voice no louder than a whisper, as the faint sound of carnival music fades into the background.

Laura Castagnini, 2011

 

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[i] Amato’s blog can be found at: http://myyearincarousel.blogspot.com

[ii] ‘Reverse cowgirl’ is a sex position in which the woman is on top facing away from her partner.

Photographer Gennady Revzin