Exhibition review for Kunstforum International
While David Chipperfield’s extension of the Museum Folkwang on the premises of the former Ruhrland Museum is slowly but steadily taking shape, and works from the collection at Villa Hügel are being selected for display, Sabine Maria Schmidt, curator for contemporary art, and Ute Eskildsen, curator for photography, have relocated their exhibition programme to Horst Loy’s construction from the 1960s – a museum building, which in terms of light, space and proportion remains one of Germany’s finest. Their agenda, which focuses on contemporary art, perpetuates the institution’s long-standing pioneering role in showcasing conceptual works which are rarely – if at all – put to the test in the museum.
For their latest exhibition, Ute Eskildsen drew on a previous collaboration with the artist, for Jo Longhurst (b. 1962 in Chelmsford, Essex) had already exhibited at the Folkwang in 2006 as part of “Nützlich, süß und museal. Das fotografierte Tier” [The Photographed Animal: Useful, Cute and Collected] (reviewed by Claudia Posca in Volume 178 of Kunstforum), a group show which undermined widespread clichés of animal imagery by revealing its underlying cultural structures.
Jo Longhurst, who studied at the Royal College of Art in London from 2001 to 2008, entertains a twofold relationship with the object of her study: dogs – short-haired Whippets, to be precise, a particular breed of British dog. Longhurst, the owner of two Whippets, holds a personal and emotional affinity with dogs. Dogs are the subject of her philosophical enquiry into both ideas of Identity and ideas of Perfection. The title of Longhurst’s exhibition – The Refusal – was inspired from an expression by the French philosopher Michel Foucault (quoted in English in the catalogue): “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are.”
This dialectical approach – simultaneously emotional-subjective and intellectual-objective, if one were to simplify – is reflected in the artist’s photographic mises en scène. Addressing the personal aspect of her relation to the dogs, Longhurst shows them sleeping or resting, and uses circular-shaped canvasses. These tondi, whose impact derives in part from their implicit reference to high Renaissance, where such untypical and elaborate formats were confined to remarkable topics, also stand out among the pictures in the catalogue, where they are literally floating over the double pages like soap bubbles, as opposed to the rectangular formats, which Longhurst reserves for her philosophical investigations.
The best illustration of this type of work is “Twelve Dogs, Twelve Bitches” (2001–2003), a series of pictures showing three bitches and three male dogs each standing in four rows that seem to form a grid pattern on a neutral backdrop. At the Folkwang, the photographs were hung facing each other on the short walls in one of the long rectangular rooms. In addition to the generic title, Longhurst names all 24 dogs individually, thus identifying them as individual beings. But the animals are simultaneously exposed to a typological gaze, with their postures arranged for perfect match. This sort of display is reminiscent of the presentation favoured by racial theorists or dog owners in pet shows and breeding competitions, which the single-channel video work “The Decisive Moment (Study II for Show Ring)” from 2006 explicitly refers to: a dog owner sitting behind a Whippet standing sideways in the foreground is seen relentlessly correcting the dog’s posture, which is supposed to express tension and symmetry.
This dialogical approach, which characterises man’s dealings with animals, is a leitmotif throughout the exhibition. While the pictures hang low (and the labels even lower), the display in the first space is a genuine challenge, since spectators are asked to look at stereoscopic images of whippets in a natural setting through a set of oculars. The height – or rather lowness – of the oculars forces spectators to kneel down or, at the very least, to bend dangerously forward, a situation documented by the only black-and-white photograph in the catalogue.
This installation comes across as somewhat irritating, even though it rewards spectators with the enticing illusion of three-dimensionality. Yet it also conveys the idea that we need to revise our attitude towards animals if we are to be genuinely interested in them. The natural settings refer to the dogs’ original use in hunting, while the installation could be said to convey the idea of a hunter crouched low in the grass, as the dog, with its outstanding sight, becomes his extended eye.
The explicit title of the exhibition – “The Refusal” – refers to three works in particular, the first of which is found in the space that holds George Minne’s well. The painterly tondi from the “Breed” and “Vincent” series create a formal and atmospheric correspondence to the well. At first sight, the Whippet represented in a 1,90 meter high by 1,29 meter wide work is merely an enlargement of one of the images from the aforementioned typological series. But comparing the two, the spectator will notice that the dog’s right hind leg stands before the left one – an obvious digression from the “correct” posture. Longhurst has had to learn that by breed standards her two dogs Breed and Whippet stood no chance in dog shows as their morphology was nowhere near the norm. While this could be seen as an example of the conflict between the image of the Other and the individual, the diptych “The Refusal (Part II)” and the series of six images that form the third part analyse the conflict between the individual and his or her self-image. To this effect Longhurst put the Whippets in front of mirrors and recorded the dogs’ reactions to their played Selves. Following Foucault’s thread, “The Refusal” does not only ask the question to what extent an individual entity conforms with the pattern and the norm of the many that compose its category (in this case, Whippets), but also to what extent the Self matches the image it constructs of itself and which, in the optimistic vision of the late 1960s, simply had to be developed.
Longhurst treads more difficult ground with her series of four horizontal images of a naked man and various Whippets lying on a black leather sofa. This series is vaguely reminiscent of Fragonard’s “Girl with Dog” (at the Old Pinacotheca in Munich) and bears slight echoes of the thematic nexus of sodomy, zoophilia and cynophilia. In this relationship, man and animal transcend the frontiers of race in a socially (though not mythologically) reprehensible way.
Artistically speaking, Longhurst also transcends genre limits with her near-portraits of dogs, as in the four images entitled “I Know What You’re Thinking”, in which the dogs look straight into the photographer’s lens. Longhurst’s work can be said to perpetuate a tradition exemplified by her 18th Century countryman George Stubbs, who painted portraits of horses and dogs commissioned by their owners. He often pictured the animals on neutral backgrounds, thus underlining their particular status in the society of men. A joint exhibition with works by Jo Longhurst and William Wegman (b. 1943 in Holoyke), whose approach is thoroughly different in that it anthropomorphises the animals, would be functional in deepening this set of relevant questions about the sign of the dog.
Kunstforum International, No.191, May-July 2008
The Refusal, Museum Folkwang, Essen, 5.April–15 June 2008
Translated from the German by Patrick (Boris) Kremer. See orignal