Thursday, June 1, 2017

Dog-Construction

White God
A while ago I was under the spell of dogs, I suppose I still am. I found that many painters and movie makers, even novelists, used dogs in their art in different ways. But their dogs were not characters, they were passing figures. Nevertheless, their presence would change everything. What does the dog do? why the dog? Why did Francis Bacon choose dogs to paint animality? Becoming-dog. I tried to borrow the dog. I still fail at it. I just make really good drawings of dogs. I used the picture of two snarling dogs for my friend's cover art, they looked very aggressive, their jaws wide open very close to each other, and they both seem to project their violence on someone else, a third party. Yet, their jaws being so close makes them threatening to each other as well. Their eyes were red from the invading night camera, and for me, they were the emblem of erotica and extreme passion. Their jaws were directed at me, the invader, and the borrower.
There's a whole unspecified genre of books that are written about charming dogs, about dogs which are loyal, friendly, and filled with love towards their owners. Breeding dogs is a selective process, certain dog traits and genes are favored over others. Some dog breeds are treated horribly and banned because of certain prejudices, such as bulldogs. There's nothing innocent about the way humans have constructed the dogs. I wonder if in China they breed the tastiest dogs. Dog genocide.
There's a movie called White Gods (Kornel Mundruczo 2014), about canine revolution. A house dog is set out into the streets to suffer because his owner wouldn't pay a tax on mixed-breeds, the fact that such a tax on non-pure-bred dogs exists shows how brutal and selective our domestication of dogs has been. The abandoned dog, joins an underground canine pack and in an act of canine revenge, fight against all those who want to obliterate them. Running Dog (1954), a painting by Francis Bacon of a white dog, a white stray dog with not much facial features, a blur of colors, a movement which reaches the color white. Bacon's dogs are seen near sewers, even if as in his painting Man With Dog (1953), they have a partner. Being near sewers indicates that this dog is from the street, closer to death than ever. Bacon's dogs are existential dogs, ready to run into oblivion. Stray dogs are the most vulnerable to death, they don't fit the category of domesticated friendly home dogs who are loyal and die by their owner's grave. They die and live alone. They are the debris of dog construction. They are the other side of the mirror. If you shatter the mirror of humanity, you would find dog bodies stacked near dumpsters. Stray dogs have no purpose, this is why they're disposable. Humanity instrumentalizes everything, function beats form. If you are not a home dog, if you were not food, if you were not a drug detector or a tool of torture, you stray. Hunting dogs are something else.