Essay

Contingere

samuel te kani on work by Dayle palfreyman

with cello forrester and henrietta fisher

The world was conquered with horses. There’s a reason ‘horsepower’ persists as a phrasing of might and speed, of locomotive force even when carriages started coming with their own mechanical torque. Take Napoleon for example; a small man whose ambitions had to be carried on the backs of thousands of horses, their superior flesh doing what his own couldn’t. That gluttonous saboteur could only bend the world to his will under the plated hoofs of equestrian hoards, and even then the delusion of his independence, of his fixity, meant his dream was only partially fulfilled—though it was a history-making part. Perhaps if he’d listened more closely to those living avatars he took so much for granted, realized in them the bounty of alliance instead of just dumb martial instruments, he might’ve extended himself beyond his own ravenous project into the realm of myth. Other great men who’ve missed the opportunity to tap into the subtler animal wealth under their saddles include Alexander the Great, King Herod, Dark Lord Sauron from Lord of the Rings, and the armies of Genghis Khan. Arguably, Joan of Arc is an exceptional case whose powers of communion saw her to the stake—charred but sublime. 

In CONTINGERE we see the mundane rigors of horses being kept, led round and round a fenced pen, hair clipped and collected, hooves washed. What is usually the cloying grooming of a caged animal here becomes an exaltation, a fealty of equals. In Luca Guadagnino’s supernatural horror film Suspiria (2018) the female dancers of a covertly witch-run dance school have their hair and urine sampled for purposes of entrapment, to have the mesh of an intangible net (of conspiracy, of parasitism, and of black magic) drawn tighter around their bodies; as if they were a stable of captive mules, existing only to carry out the high coven’s inscrutable designs. It’s impossible not to draw parallels between Suspiria and CONTINGERE here, as both share an image system of suffocating pastoralism (Guadagnino’s austere Mennonite corn-belt), of haunted dreamers, and of a woman’s hair as her fatal key. As if she were Samson and Delilah both, dreaming dreams of freedom and restriction, of open fields as well as the binding-bustling grids of Babylon doomed to burn. In both films, the restrained but underlying tic is the horse finally bucking and ridding itself of the presumptuous freeloader. Unless of course that freeloader preventatively acknowledges kinship over utility. 

If hair is a woman’s fatal key then water is the element of her liberation, or at least consolation—the native salve, the placental reminder. Like Ophelia in Sir John Everett Millais’ painting (1851-2), the woman showering in CONTINGERE is relinquishing the weight of the flesh, its lethargies and pains, its unending complaints, its reticulate memories; letting these go in life’s profuse current, surrendering to the inexorable forces that make and unmake bodies, that dictate every triumph and tragedy with cosmic indifference. So similar then to the assembling of horses and bodies of water in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), where the Millais’ painting lives again in Kirsten Dunst’s Bride of Suffering. Here woman as sibylline archetype—of being sensitive enough to move between worlds—finds a contemporary outlet through the disaster movie genre, albeit a more elegant entry than Roland Emmerich’s obnoxious (but fantastic) orgies of urban destruction. Dunst, as a kind of Ophelia, suns herself in the opal light of a heavenly body that promises release from life’s essential evil, from the brutality of its animal character (denial of which only sharpens its claws). On the bank of a river she avails herself of every mask and quivers to be taken by her doom. Letting the animal win (‘erotic melancholia’; Ophelia’s official diagnosis). 

Finally, in Melancholia, horses bear the same reluctance to perform as those in CONTINGERE. Though in Palfreyman and Fisher’s film they find a certain uneasy supremacy, whereas Von Trier’s horses arrive at a single gesture of despair, refusing the rider and sitting. Not out of petulance, not a tantrum of the unbroken; rather, presupposing the assumption a horse needs to be broken, implying there’s an easier route involving both mutual benefit and mutual respect. It’s easy to read notes on the Anthropocene here, that the horse is what we have rested on, which we’ve assumed will always be there to move us. Like horses, this planet has historically been an ambient factor in humanity’s projects, a narrative device as opposed to a fellow actor with its own agencies. Now, we seem to have reached a point where the givens of ride and rider no longer serve either party, except towards mutual destruction. Like Melancholia’s Abraham; refusing to take us over the bridge, laying down in the dirt with mute defiance. Necessarily mute because the language of animals isn’t something we’ve concerned ourselves with. And so, as a rebuttal to our suicidal hubris, the human figure in CONTINGERE lies at the horse’s feet instead, a sincere but futile genuflection. Likely a little too late.

This essay response was commissioned by Gus Fisher Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition Three Approaches, Three Rooms, 2024.