Do You Love Me?: Pet Sounds

In “Do You Love Me?” curator Kim Fullerton laid bare the ever-so-human desire for affection and companionship by choosing work that scrutinizes our relationship to pets, with a focus on woman’s best friend, the dog. The exhibition derived its title from Hot, Tanya Mars’ 1998 video projection of the artist cuddling her dog, Woofie. Shot with tightly framed close-ups, passages fade in and out in balletic slo-mo. In one instance, viewers see Mars’ scrunched-up face while she is being affectionately licked, the artist’s blond locks intermingling with Woofie’s black fur. All this is hauntingly editorialized by a woman’s voice that repeatedly and plaintively asks, “Do you love me?” This paradox of anthropomorphism and celebration was a recurrent motif throughout the exhibition.

G.B. Jones’ soft-focus graphite drawings present intimiste portraits of pets and their owners, with only the most rudimentary indication of setting. In Jena von Brucker and Big Ethel (A Girl And Her Dog) we meet the gaze of a grim-faced von Brucker (a zine publisher Jones has worked with), who straddles a large (and rather benign) boxer that stares unconcernedly off into the distance. Is this dog-and-mistress dyad the meeting of two complementary forces, or is it sexually charged theatre in the manner of Tom of Finland—with the boxer as prop?

Christina Zeidler’s 16mm film-to-video hymn to her deceased dog Mica, Traces, is a searching portrayal of the bond between woman and animal. The confessional and emotionally charged voice-over (again in the artist’s voice) ruminates on Mica as a guardian angel, a model citizen who took being a dog “seriously” and deserved a measure of freedom outside the role of pet. In poetically titled short sections, the artist frames city streets, grocery-store aisles or the interior of a car stuck in traffic on an expressway—the interstices of everyday life that might evoke Mica. The shuttering of the tinted black-and-white film, in tandem with a wonderfully moody electric-guitar soundtrack by Zeidler’s band, ina unt ina, creates an air of heightened melancholy that interrogates mourning the loss of a pet with a measure of critical exaggeration.

I’m Worth a Million in Prizes, a single-channel video and sculptural installation, was presented as being created by artist Shari Hatt’s chihuahua, Garry-Lewis James Osterberg. The artist-pet collaborative team’s work has produced a number of chewed-up stuffed animals and a delightfully silly and snappy altered music video that features rocker Iggy Pop performing his 1977 song Lust for Life along with the dog. Garry-Lewis bumps and grinds, chews toys, humps a stick and Pop does more or less the same thing. In her authorial ruse, Hatt points to the reciprocal nature of living with our furry friends: our pets also imprint on us.

Ian Phillips’ Lost, a long-term mail-art project, is comprised of reproductions of lost-and-found pet posters the world over. Apart from dogs and cats, it references a rabbit, rat, hawk, wolf, guinea pig—the list goes on. Anxious pet owners of all ages lavish great care in the description and illustration of their heartrending, and at times humorous, pleas. This work was collected in a book of the same title published in 2002 by Princeton Architectural Press, which in turn created a bit of media buzz in Japan resulting in talk show interviews and a wack o’ cutesy-pie lost-pet ephemera, which was on view in a vitrine at the entrance of the exhibition.

These artists (and/or their surrogates) have based their work on careful observation or firsthand knowledge of the interactions between people and their pets: it is wondrous indeed to get pets to do tricks, but better still to watch ourselves as equal performers.