All the Better to See You With: Fairy Tales Transformed (review)

Since their emergence through a pervasive oral tradition, fairy tales have inspired a myriad of artistic interpretations and aesthetic responses. Whereas art, like the fairy-tale genre itself, is variable by nature, contemporary artists frequently seek to liberate the fairy tale from its more conventional shackles. In an effort to acclimatize fairy tales to a modern audience, explicit themes (especially with respect to sexuality and gratuitous violence) are often highlighted. Borrowing its title from the Red Riding Hood tale type (ATU 333), All the Better to See You With(2017–18) explores the current function, attraction, and staying power of fairy tales. The exhibition, curated by Samantha Comte, boasts artwork from twenty-one Australian and international artists and includes a selection of fairy-tale books sampled from the University of Melbourne's Rare Books collection.

From video games to surrealist sculptural work, All the Better to See You Withshowcases a variety of art that extends across all three levels of Parkville's Ian Potter Museum. Upon entering the exhibition, visitors are confronted with a room as red as blood. The walls are painted with a shade aptly called Vengeful Red, signaling the violent content of the artwork displayed therein. Most explicit is Amanda Marburg's series of paintings entitled How Some Children Played at Slaughtering(2016), inspired by a selection of graphic tales included in the first collection of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmärchen(1812). Marburg contextualizes sinister narratives within brightly rendered, plasticine environments, paying credence to both child characters and their tragic storylines. For example, Marburg's Maiden without Hands(2016) juxtaposes the virgin ingénue dressed in white against the gruesome nature of her disability. Blood oozes from her freshly cut forearms as the shinning marrow of a bone peeks through her flesh.

Marburg's plasticine protagonists pair well with Allison Schulnik's Claymation films Mound(2011) and Eager(2014). The medium is an appropriate choice for Schulnik, given that she populates her work with a cast of human figures who metamorphose into haunting skeletons and decaying flowers. Their constant state of flux pays homage to the very nature of the fairy-tale tradition, which is similarly bound to mutability.

The earliest works in the exhibition are a series of silhouette animations directed by pioneering animator and shadow puppeteer Lotte Reiniger (1899–1981). Composing over forty animated shorts in her lifetime, Reiniger crafts a world of whimsy and charm with only cardboard and wire in her arsenal. Reiniger's playful animations contrast with Kara Walker's nightmarish silhouette Burning African Village Play Set with Big House and Lynching(2006). Whereas Reiniger's influence is evident, Walker's silhouette subverts the traditional function of early-twentieth-century paper silhouettes by supplanting Reiniger's coquette girls with shackled African American slaves, Confederate soldiers, and a plantation mansion to match. The title "play set" insinuates that the silhouettes can be rearranged, thereby inviting viewers to speculate on the appropriate arrangement of each figurine.

Unsurprisingly, several artworks make either subtle or overt allusions to the Red Riding Hood tale type. The innocuous figure of a curious girl dressed in red wanders from room to room via a myriad of mediums. She features as six playable avatars—all named after various shades of red—in Michaël Samyn and Auriea Harvey's video game The Path(2009). She is hinted at in Patricia Piccinini's Still Life with Stem Cells(2002): a hyperrealist sculpture of a girl dressed in a red sweater who is cradling a lump of flesh in her arms. She is avenged in Paula Rego's Little Red Riding Hood(2003), a series of six pastel works, concluding with the protagonist's mother stroking the pelt of the adversarial wolf. She is resurrected in Kiki Smith's Born(2002), a lithograph that displays both grandmother and granddaughter embracing as they emerge from the carcass of a dead wolf. With its...