Graphic Boars
A hunting genre of wild pig representations
MAKE BROADER GENRE PIECE SPEAKING TO VIOLENT HUNTING REPS AND HOW SHAPE POPULAR REPRESENTATION
Pig hunting with dogs in Australia choreographs a highly provocative encounter with pigs, which produces them as highly elusive and aggressive game. Pigs are located, chased, and caught by dogs, an interaction that forces a limited degrees of freedom for the pig – in other words, fight or flight. Both reactions are desired and central to the atmosphere of the hunt.
Catching and encountering a 'good pig' is the challenging and risky experience that hunters chase after. Such experiential aesthetics are also reproduced in a brand identities for pigdogging social media.
While not capturing the primal movement and vitality of animals in these stilted, stylised depictions, these logos attempt to depict a graphic representation of agood boar or good pig. Undoubtedly the most common illustration is that of an angry snarling tusked male, either at the precipice of or in the middle of the fight, whether facing the viewer or engaging dogs.
Originality is not a concern, with brands sharing the same theme and motif, refrains with only minor variations across multiple Instagram accounts. The wild pig, their power, and the experience they induce is distilled into lined art and mimetically created, endlessly replicated and reaffirmed as being central to pigdogging identity.
The images are then printed on caps and t-shirts, sold to followers of Instagram and Facebook accounts, and then worn during a hunt. These hunters, with a good boar emblazoned on their chests or head, then venture out, looking to reproduce such an encounter, animal and challenge.
These are images that can also find representation beyond hunting. Below is an image not of hunting brand, it does show the changing logo of the Arkansas Razorbacks American football team over the years. Note how time goes on, the logo adopts a form that closely resembles hunting aesthetics.
