Artwrite

By Poppy Galloway

Jurassic Lounge, Simon Cardwell

Jurassic Lounge, Simon Cardwell Image courtesy of The Festivalists / Australian Museum

Fancy a drink with a dinosaur? I did, but my brain gave me a stern ultimatum to put down the wine as I realised that for a concept devoted to the prehistoric, this was going to require some 21^st century thinking. Take, for instance, the live taxidermy session I stumbled upon on the second floor, headed by an Australian Museum taxidermist. Fundamentally, it was a live demonstration on how to gut and stuff dead animals. Factor in the post-modern experience that is Jurassic Lounge, however, and the audience is suddenly thrust into the deeper realm of performance-based artwork, à la Mike Parr. In the milieu of the museum, we watched as scientist was transformed into artist, and corpse into canvas.  Being a vegetarian, I found it slightly challenging to maintain this state of mind, but judging from the entranced expressions on a large portion of the faces surrounding me, each incision, slice and dice performed by the taxidermist-come-artist could have been strokes from the brush of Monet himself. Contextually, this is art. Pushing it a bit though, isn’t it?

Jurassic Lounge, Australian Museum, Tuesdays, 5.30pm-9.30pm, winte