Ernest Hemingway loved going to the zoo, but not on Sundays. The reason, he explained, was that, ‘I don’t like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.’ He would probably have enjoyed Animality, an entertaining exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, Lower John St, W1. It contains quite a few jokes, but generally the laugh is on Homo sapiens.
The humour tends to comes from an age-old ploy: birds, reptiles and mammals wearing clothes. It was the basis, for example, of many works by the caricaturist J.J. Grandville of cats, bears and other such fauna dressed up as early 19th-century French citizens.
The contemporary sculptor Stephan Balkenhol carries out the same metamorphic prank with a couple of wryly weird figures on plinths: one with very hairy legs, shorts, T-shirt and the face of a fox. Yinka Shonibare contributes a life-sized, gun-wielding, beast-headed acrobat balanced nimbly on a tightrope.
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