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Play, download and edit the free video LONELINESS Hayden Fowler, Goat Odyssey, 2006, 15:10 min.

Recorded scenes of two white goats roaming a constructed hermetic set deliver a message of dystopian alienation in Fowler’s looped video. Tiled pink walls and a green carpet frame the castrated and de-horned animals, as they enter and exit through the two built-in doors bordering the futuristic set. The enclosed stage is connected to the outside world only through a turning mechanical fan. Alienated from their native landscape, the goats are depicted in their lonesome, individually or as a pair, at varying locations in the set: sometimes sprawled on the stage’s steps, and other times standing precariously against the fan. The passage of time is mostly betrayed by the moving wings of the fan; the goats remain, for the most part, fixed in position in every frame. Beyond alienation, Fowler’s editing emulates the randomness of the living condition, where the scenes appear to be arranged haphazardly, devoid of a specific pattern, chronology or narrative.

The artificiality of the setting underscores the artist’s fascination with the dichotomy between man and nature. Developing an affinity toward animals on his grandparents’ farm in New Zealand in his formative years, the artist obtained a Bachelor of Science in Biology that equipped him with the training and empathy necessary for his artistic exploration. Habitually incorporating wildlife in his practice, Fowler personally constructs his sets and manages the animals featured on them to explore themes of imposition, repression and freedom that are common to all living species. In ‘Goat Odyssey’, Fowler’s placement of the tamed goats in a sealed vessel visually illuminates the absurdity of man’s relationship with nature: though a natural being, man has violently and egotistically defaced nature in the name of domestication. Long-standing symbols of fertility, the goats are castrated in Fowler’s video. Despite being one of man’s earliest security to milk, meat, fur and tools, the goats here are de-horned and draped in gold trimmings – ultimately, commodified for the sake of man. Fowler’s interventions and embellishments blur the line between service and servitude.
‘Goat Odyssey’s’ dystopian setting further toys with our very understanding of that which is “natural”. Fowler depicts the goats as equally born out of and removed from nature by juxtaposing their natural being against his deliberately devised stage. He further confounds human and animal intuition by using these goats to personify modern-day humans, many of whom are quick to judge, through technological and economic advancements, their innately symbiotic relationship with nature as primitive and unnecessarily inefficient. Furthermore, the artist’s placement of the goat’s head against the turning fan parallels the Catholic imagery of Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, through which Jesus is depicted as a holy lamb, often accompanied by a signifying halo. In this way, Fowler not only contrasts the natural with the manmade, but also with deity.

Fowler’s work characteristically aggrandizes this paradox of the “natural” by complicating it with notions of agency. In ‘Goat Odyssey’, Fowler’s strategic juxtaposition of adorned yet deformed goats against a meticulously designed backdrop reduces carnality to commodity, vis-a-vis a Marxist process of alienation. The goats are well-kempt and appear to roam freely, yet are constricted to Fowler’s stage and subjugated to his design. How free are the goats in Fowler’s stage? How free is man in today’s fast-paced and repetitive world? These prompts are echoed in Fowler’s other works, most notably in White Australia (2005), where he places a pair of mice in a futuristic, strategically enclosed space to evoke a similar sense of eerie hum-drum and deliberate estrangement. However, the title of ‘Goat Odyssey’ further alludes to the artist’s navigation of agency. Drawing on Homer’s similarly titled epic about the decade-long journey home, ‘Goat Odyssey’ is a horrifying call to return the goats, and by extension man, to nature. Whether that journey will take a decade or a lifetime is left up to us.

Alya Alawadhi

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