Trophies Remain

Abstract

Rebecca Schneider insists that performances ‘remain’, but they ‘remains differently’, often through ambiguous corporeality. This article presents Meat Fence (2011), a series of photographs by Justin Spiers on which I collaborated. It documents over 400 pig hides located outside the township of Macrae's Flat, South Island New Zealand. Recalling a porcine Stations of the Cross, these trophies are hung along a piercing, flagellating barbed wire fence by hunters who are protecting their farms, engaging in recreation, and harvesting game. Macrae's is the last site within New Zealand from which significant quantities of gold are extracted, once driving national prosperity before being surpassed by agriculture. These porcine signs embedded within the landscape encapsulate New Zealand's history of resource extraction, colonial approaches to land, human/animal relations, the contribution of such factors to nationalism—and what is leftover. Drawing on Gotthold Lessing's essay on suffering and art, I propose that the sacrificial porcine victim dramatizes the violence of resource extraction, confusing boundaries between animate and inanimate, the landscape versus that which rests or preys upon it, between wild and domestic. Like Pentheus in The Bacchae, pigs have been ‘torn limb from limb, / And through the interweaving forest … / Scattered’, before their heads and skins are hung out for all to see. Where once they ‘ramped and gloried’, now they are ‘Tossed with rent ribs or limbs of cloven tread./And flesh upon the branches, and a red/rain from the deep green pines’ falls across the land—not only in those marginal spaces left over in New Zealand's drive for prosperity and national identity, but at all those landscapes where resources are violently harvested. Meat Fence asks the viewer to listen for the pig's groan which continues to emerge.

Notes

1 Research for this project included both formal interviews and informal discussion with locals and stakeholders, including Ken Tisdall, Jim and Rhonda Thompson, the former publican of Stanley’s hotel, cultural geographer Guil Figgins, author Bill Westwood, participants at the North Otago Pig Hunting Competition, Maheno Tavern (2013) and the Mornington Tavern Pig Hunting Competition (2013) and others. Out of respect for these confidences, this material is unattributed. I also surveyed representative magazines such as New Zealand Outdoor (founded 1937), New Zealand Fish and Game (1994), New Zealand Guns and Hunting (1995), New Zealand Rod and Rifle (1990), New Zealand Pig Hunter (1992), More-Pork (1998), Hooked on Boars (2006), and websites such as pighunt. co.nz, www.nzpighunting.org.nz/, http://dogbox.squarespace.com/, www.oceanagold.com/, www.heritage.org.nz/, www.doc.govt.nz/, and www.TeAra.govt.nz/.

2 Justin has previously explored issues of human–animal relations, as well as those of place and site. One print of the pig fence was included within the group exhibition Intimacies (Wallflower, Mildura, 2013), before Justin and I assembled fifteen prints and a video for a thematic exhibition under the title Meat Fence (Perth Centre for Photography, 2014). Spiers’ work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (Remix, 2011), Perth Institute for Contemporary Art (Hijacked III, 2012), Fremantle Arts Centre (The Detour, 2010), National Portrait Gallery, Canberra (National Photography Portrait Prize, 2009–10), Red Gate Gallery, Bei Gao, Beijing (Surface Tension, 2010), Blue Oyster, Dunedin (Castleland, 2011), Guilford Lane, Melbourne (Greenwood Guardian, 2009), Wallace Art Award, Auckland (2011), A-Gallery, Dunedin (The Sides of My Intent, 2012), Dunedin Public Art Gallery (Sleight of Hand, 2014), State of Princes, Dunedin (Sportsmeat, 2015), National Contemporary Art Award, Waikato (2012–16), Cleveland National Art Award (2017) and elsewhere.

3 Barnett (2008) authored a premature academic celebration of these commissions, but the project was never completed and the artistic consultant, John McCormack, left Otago to run Starkwhite Gallery in Auckland.