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Lance Morrow: Woof! Woof! I spot an artistic Straw Dog

By Lance Morrow

(TIME.com) -- Sarah Boxer writes a bemused article in The New York Times that asks: "Why have real animals -- clothed, splattered, slaughtered and hatching -- become players in the art world?"

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The effect that the artists seek might be described as disgusting metaphysical whimsy -- sophomoric, and yet ineffably vicious.

• At the Trapholt Art Museum in Denmark, an artist named Marco Evaristti displayed 10 live goldfish, each swimming in its own blender. Museum visitors were given the option of turning on the blender. Seven goldfish were liquefied before the police pulled the blenders' plugs. (Surely the artist stole the idea from Dan Aykroyd's old Bass-O-Matic ad on "Saturday Night Live"?)
• At the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, artist Thomas Grunfeld offers the head of a sheep seamlessly attached to the body of a dog. "Get it?" asks Ms. Boxer. "Sheepdog."
• In the "Sensation" show in London and Brooklyn (famous for a controversial portrait of the Virgin using elephant dung), Damien Hirst presented various animal corpses tricked up with wordy titles. Hirst had a shark in formaldehyde ("The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living") and a pig sliced lengthwise so that its intricate insides could be seen from tail to snout ("This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed at Home.")

And so on. The genre has a history, Ms. Boxer notes. In Germany in 1965, for example, the artist Joseph Beuys lectured to a dead hare ("I speak for the hares that cannot speak for themselves"), and later came to America and caged himself for a week with a live coyote ("Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me"). Annette Messager dressed up dead sparrows in little wool sweaters, which she knitted herself.

I confess that stuff like this is, shall we say, outside the range of my enthusiasm. It tends to bring out the philistine in me. My first disquiet on the subject is not so much aesthetic as economic. If a sucker is born every minute, then a con artist is born every minute and 15 seconds; the latter fastens upon the former as the truffle pig snouts up the truffle. I worry. Are there really enough customers to support such highly specialized charlatans? Can a hard-working artistic genius cover the mortgage on the sales of his fancifully mutilated animals? We do not see eviscerated sheep adorning the lobbies of American corporate headquarters -- although, come to think of it, a hapless and enigmatic sheep in a sling serves as the breast-pocket logo for Brooks Brothers shirts, as the alligator adorns Lacoste "chemises"; perhaps in tracing the origins of this aspect of postmodernism, we might seek a doctoral thesis in the shirt drawer.

Or does this art, with its in-your-face actuality, represent a darker and more daring extension of the motif of dogs playing poker? In my mind's eye, I see some 21st-century Michelangelo leap up from his computer and ruffle his hair, crying, "Yes! A stuffed schnauzer -- eviscerated, maybe -- holding aces and eights! The dead man's hand! What a statement!" Where are the nuts from PETA when we need them?

All of this gives some emphasis to the speech, in "The Wind in the Willows," that Ratty, I believe, delivers to Mole as he describes the world beyond the river and the Wild Wood: Out there lie the cities of human beings. Their civilizations come and go. People are, Ratty implies, pretty weird, and to be regarded with much suspicion by sensible animals.

Copyright © 2000 Time Inc.