All the King's Horses: Ella Cronjé

Ella Cronjé
All the King's Horses
Wax sculpture to be cast in bronze 
40 cm high
The TLC Extension Collection (2020, South Africa)

Reflections by Pamela Allara and Mark Auslander


Overview:  A sculpted hybrid being has a human body with a large horse head. Left foot atop a small crocodile, right foot tied to  a pencil. 

Artist's Statement: I would like to invite the viewer, for a moment, to imagine the feeling of standing on a walking crocodile with one foot, and the other foot tied to a pencil drawing a line.

It will be difficult to balance due to the uncomfortable movement a crocodile makes, and the line drawn will not be straight. Nor can it ever draw the same line twice.

In the times that we are facing, in and after COVID-1i, it is important to realize that we can never go back to the way things were,  Some things  can never be put together again the sooner can make peace with this reality, the sooner we can move forward towards a hopefully better future.

Pamela Allara:   The horse has been ridden into battle since 4000 BCE, and although its military/social role at present is reduced to a perch for law enforcement officers, it still speaks to the authority of the person astride its back. Ideally, the human in charge with enforcing social rules will steer the powerful energies of the horse toward enlightened ends. The image of the knight in shining armor riding his horse into battle to fight for truth and justice remains lodged in our collective unconscious despite its anachronism. This sculpture thus projects power despite its small size.

In creating her reversed Minotaur-like creature Cronje has deliberately upended the horse/rider order, with the result that the horse is without clear guidance. Moreover, the horse/man is not grounded, but rather precariously perched on a crocodile, an aggressive, dangerous reptile whose movements cannot be controlled. The horse’s head may have the configuration of the Knight in chess, but his human torso is naked and vulnerable rather than armored. Cronje is asking us to accept the fact that we have no control over the pandemic, nor can we draw a straight line to its aftermath. We are involved in a lethal chess game where none of the accepted moves are operable, and “we can never go back to the way things were.”


Mark Auslander: The work's title, "All the King's Men," references one of the most famous of all nursery rhymes, "Humpty Dumpty":  "All the King's horses and all the King's Men/Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again."  Here we see one of the King's men and one of the King's horses united as a hybrid being, facing the impossible predicament of remaking the old world in the wake of our great "fall," the disorienting legacies of the COVID-19 crisis.  The instability of our present moment, as so much that was once solid now melts into air, is evoked by the image of trying to stand with one foot on the dangerous, writhing figure of a crocodile. As the artist notes, the other foot, tied to a pencil, inevitably creates a jagged line that will never be the same each time.

There is something profoundly uncanny (that is to say both disturbing and eerily familiar) about the zoomorphic figure of this human-horse hybrid, a kind of reverse centaur. Perhaps the artist is evoking the Löwenmensch (Lion-human), the oldest known figurative sculpture, of a lion head on a human body of indeterminate gender, dated to the Upper Paleolithic (c. 35,000-40,000 years ago), or the mythic figure of the Minotaur, classically depicted as a human body with a bovine head. Horseheads were at times used in pagan and early modern ceremonies, as ritual paraphernalia and masks, perhaps echoing ancient Indo-European horse sacrifice.  Horsehead masks have recently undergone a resurgence in Halloween and other settings, as figures of linked horror and humor.  The sculpture may also evoke the important chess piece of the Knight, capable, like horse-mounted warriors, of leaping over its opponents and striking unexpectedly.  There might even be a touch of the warrior seahorses of Aquaman, telepathically bound to their riders.

Whatever the work's precise referents in antiquity or popular culture, hybridity does seem to be the spirit of our strange new era. We are painfully aware that while we have long fancied ourselves as masters of our destiny, our species is currently relegated to the position of serving as passive host to invading RNA strands of the novel coronavirus, hijacking our own cells for the purpose of mass reproduction.  We are not quite the beings that we thought ourselves to be, and are gradually being forced to accommodate ourselves to living with a virus that is simultaneously radically other and also "us" as well.  We are indeed walking on the crocodile, bound to a force that at any moment might violently consume us. As Cronjé's pencil suggests, we can under these circumstances still create something, still leave a line tracing our own presence, but we are not fully independent authors of these new creations. Welcome to our brave new world, that has such people in it 

For more information:

www.artistproofstudio.co.za
 https://www.thelockdowncollection.com/extension-collection

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