April 28, 2006
Art Brut
I’m just calling it “Affordable Europe”. It’s not a staged photograph. In any event, I didn’t stage it, but you might argue that my cat Lena did. The slippers and the newspaper lay as you see them. Lena deposited the dead shrew as you see it.
No mistake, that cat has a certain je ne sais quoi.
It’s interesting. Nearly every day I have to do a little crime scene clean-up. My husband, Jonathan, lives in Galena, Illinois — a seven-hour drive from my house in the southernmost neck of the state — and not long ago I was telling him about one recent job that made me a little queasy. Lena had gotten into a whole nest of mice, killed the mother and the babies, then lined up all the corpses on the porch. The bodies were intact, but the whole display struck me as excessive.
Jonathan said he was sorry I’d had to deal with it; then he asked, “Lined them up? Did you say ‘lined them up’?”
“Well, no,” I replied. “She didn’t line them up like circus pachyderms — it didn’t look like a scene out of Dumbo — but she did lay them out more or less in a line with the largest — the mother — at one end, the left, so you sort of read the thing from left to right.”
“That’s interesting,” he said. “She could have just heaped them up. It would seem to be evidence of an aesthetic sense in animals. ”
Aesthetic sense in one animal, at any rate.
So I’ve been making a documentary record of Lena’s trophies and sharing them with a few friends. Many call to mind images from David Cronenberg films. One friend observed, “Lena is an artist when it comes to mauling! She paints with her jaws.”
Maybe I’ll mount a gallery show next winter. I won’t promote it as an exhibition of photographs by myself but of art works by Lena.
Previously Kinetic Sculpture is the label I’m thinking of using. ‘Previously . . . ‘ has that nouveau gauche ring, yes? — like ‘previously owned’.
Yeah, you know, that cat could make me rich. There is a market for animal art: paintings by Thai elephants, by gorillas, you name it. In fact, ever since I bought a Gorilla Foundation membership for a young friend a few years back, his mom and I have had a running joke about the ‘gorilla artist’ Michael, who lives at the Gorilla Foundation HQ along with the celebrated Koko et al. Our favorite of the whole of Michael’s oeuvre is a striking floral abstract to which the artist, an American Sign Language adept, applied the even more striking title, “Stink Gorilla More”.
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One Response to “Art Brut”
an unusual site, this is, sheila–a collective blog would you say? and this post is also unusual. love the image of Lena ‘lining up’ her poor prey. i do think she is very much trying to impress you–’schmichling’ (spelled how??) as Mom would say–and she has. i remember my lovely ManaCat–did you ever meet her in Madison or on Talman?–hunting so elegantly from the porch roof of my apartment in Madison and bringing me–as I sat in the sun trying to digest (no pun of course) my latest case law readings–plump chipmunks dangling from her lips. How’d she’d growl when I tried to rescue them. Yuck. What memories. I see I’ve lasped into capitalization…what can that mean other than it’s after 1am?