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Lot Essay
My works serve a similar purpose as do still-life paintings of animals created in accordance with traditional Western art doctrines as well as convey sarcastic messages full of paradox and mockery. Conventional systems and inexplicable vanity are treated with contempt. They reflect my feelings towards situations in the colonial era, which have transcended into post-colonialism and the following era to an extent that I cannot classify. There are mixed feelings between passive acceptance and strong denial urged by the inner self. – Natee Utrati
Painted in 2013, Are you in the Game is the largest work in Natee Utarit’s critically acclaimed series 'Optimism is Ridiculous.' Executed with sophisticated techniques acquired from 17-century Flemish School still-life paintings, the towering masterpiece stages a gazelle amid a deliberate array of objects. The thickly-veiled title adds to the sense of suspicion and, when decoded, deepens the work from an exquisite still life to a true piece of contemporary art that confronts the social-political issues and identity crisis in the post-colonial era.
Standing in front of the picture, the viewer encounters the chiselled back of a gazelle standing in a dim, confined corner with its head slightly tilted as if alerted. The surrounding is not unlike a hunter’s barn--a saddle sits on a rack, from which the stock of a shotgun protrudes out, and a hat is carelessly thrown on the floor near the gazelle’s foot. The scenario gets more surreal when a stowed stadium chair enters the picture from the lower right corner. Every object seems displaced; with every plausible interpretation, the mystery persisted.
Well-known for the incorporation of lingual expressions in his oeuvre, Utarit once explained: “the expressions I selected for my works are those conveying so factual messages and profound emotions that we don’t even want to hear, or the sayings that sound simplistic but thought-provoking and are subject to multiple interpretations.” In the case of Are you in the Game, the title belongs to the latter category. The artist deployed a pun in the deceptively harmless question—the ‘game’ can be interpreted in several ways. It could suggest a playful pastime such as hide-and-seek if one imagines the gazelle as a child looking for his playmate. It could suggest an athletic competition, especially the sport of track and field that gazelles often stand for as a metaphor. And most explicitly, it refers to the targeted animal in trophy hunting, of which gazelles, for their large sizes and impressive horns, are a typical kind.
Since its invention, trophy hunting has been a privilege. Dead games thus became popular subjects in Dutch still-life in the latter part of the seventeenth century as signs of affluence and power. Many such paintings create a heightened sense of reality by featuring full-scale representations of the objects they portray, which is absorbed by Utrati in his representation of the nearly life-sized gazelle here. Yet by capturing the animal in an ambivalent pose between alive and taxidermized, and by juxtaposing the game with the gun, Utrati rebels the tradition and reveals the cruelty and arrogance lying behind the activity.
However, considering Utrati always anthropomorphizes his animal subjects to reflect human society, it would be oversimplified to read the picture as advocating for animal rights. At first as an activity to show dominance over nature, and later on as a sport to exhibit physical superiority and skills, and most recently, as a conservation method to factitiously intervene animal population in nature, trophy hunting has been deeply entangled with colonialism and racism. In Are you in the Game, the above historical controversies are joined by childlike innocence and the notion of spectatorship. Rather than a voice-over or a hint, Utrati raises the title as a question, leaving the viewers to reflect and ponder upon the cynical meaning of the picture.
Painted in 2013, Are you in the Game is the largest work in Natee Utarit’s critically acclaimed series 'Optimism is Ridiculous.' Executed with sophisticated techniques acquired from 17-century Flemish School still-life paintings, the towering masterpiece stages a gazelle amid a deliberate array of objects. The thickly-veiled title adds to the sense of suspicion and, when decoded, deepens the work from an exquisite still life to a true piece of contemporary art that confronts the social-political issues and identity crisis in the post-colonial era.
Standing in front of the picture, the viewer encounters the chiselled back of a gazelle standing in a dim, confined corner with its head slightly tilted as if alerted. The surrounding is not unlike a hunter’s barn--a saddle sits on a rack, from which the stock of a shotgun protrudes out, and a hat is carelessly thrown on the floor near the gazelle’s foot. The scenario gets more surreal when a stowed stadium chair enters the picture from the lower right corner. Every object seems displaced; with every plausible interpretation, the mystery persisted.
Well-known for the incorporation of lingual expressions in his oeuvre, Utarit once explained: “the expressions I selected for my works are those conveying so factual messages and profound emotions that we don’t even want to hear, or the sayings that sound simplistic but thought-provoking and are subject to multiple interpretations.” In the case of Are you in the Game, the title belongs to the latter category. The artist deployed a pun in the deceptively harmless question—the ‘game’ can be interpreted in several ways. It could suggest a playful pastime such as hide-and-seek if one imagines the gazelle as a child looking for his playmate. It could suggest an athletic competition, especially the sport of track and field that gazelles often stand for as a metaphor. And most explicitly, it refers to the targeted animal in trophy hunting, of which gazelles, for their large sizes and impressive horns, are a typical kind.
Since its invention, trophy hunting has been a privilege. Dead games thus became popular subjects in Dutch still-life in the latter part of the seventeenth century as signs of affluence and power. Many such paintings create a heightened sense of reality by featuring full-scale representations of the objects they portray, which is absorbed by Utrati in his representation of the nearly life-sized gazelle here. Yet by capturing the animal in an ambivalent pose between alive and taxidermized, and by juxtaposing the game with the gun, Utrati rebels the tradition and reveals the cruelty and arrogance lying behind the activity.
However, considering Utrati always anthropomorphizes his animal subjects to reflect human society, it would be oversimplified to read the picture as advocating for animal rights. At first as an activity to show dominance over nature, and later on as a sport to exhibit physical superiority and skills, and most recently, as a conservation method to factitiously intervene animal population in nature, trophy hunting has been deeply entangled with colonialism and racism. In Are you in the Game, the above historical controversies are joined by childlike innocence and the notion of spectatorship. Rather than a voice-over or a hint, Utrati raises the title as a question, leaving the viewers to reflect and ponder upon the cynical meaning of the picture.