Becoming-horse: Jenny Watson, Art Oriente Objet and Berlinde De Bruychkere

Abstract

There has been a significant increase in the visibility of horses in recent art. This is in spite of the fact that horse power was replaced by horsepower over a century ago, and the presence of horses in daily life has been limited to the arenas of leisure or sport for the few. The phantasmagorical return of what is extinct or absent from our lives was something John Berger warned about in his essay from 1977 “Why Look at Animals?”: “In the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared. Today we live without them. And in this new solitude, anthropomorphism makes us doubly uneasy.”