Curator’s text for the exhibition Breed at Studio 1.1
As the last words of Dutch Schulz infamously testify, pets have a prominent place in our subconscious (‘Oh, Oh dog Biscuit, and when he is happy he doesn’t get snappy…’) If only they could talk: how often have we stood before a painting – some Sargent beauty rendered in sumptuous brushstrokes – and uttered that banality? She every bit as mute as these bitches, dogs and spays who in the normal scheme of things reside at the margins of the painted portrait, and who since the beginning of depiction have had a mostly symbolic function.
In Longhurst’s photographs they take the centre stage. Not dressed up like Wegman’s (though his perverse disguises in a parodic manner also serve to reveal the gap between dog and human). Here is the bare four-legged animal.
Can the choice of breed be an accident? The whippet’s divergent class associations – aristocratic dogs in the past now stereotypically connected with the Northern working class – confirm the constructed nature of their positions. Our differently constructed relationship is also revealed – our assumption of the role of pack leader (the photographer’s position itself is similarly implicated – the dogs defer, as we do, to the lens).
Liberated from the dark edges of the painted allegories of Reynolds, whose dogs deserve better treatment, (rather as Gainsborough’s dogs from ‘Bumper’ onwards obtain equal attention from the artist and us), here in ‘Breed’ dogs, bred, and in a sense defined by people (owners) begin to define themselves.
In opposition, say, to those in a high bright Venetian ceiling painting, these dogs are no longer supernumeraries but contort themselves directly into our space from a dark space close by or beneath – de bas en haut. This series of photographs form a tempting antinarrative as the focus pulls in and out, isolating quirky moments. But the real dialogue is with us as viewer.
In another the whippet is as artfully posed as the Chardin hare he might just have been coursing. This suggests the multiple scenarios in a recent work of Longhurst’s at the RCA – (where they were our game, as we peered through a series of stereoscopic binoculars, stooping low to view them). There they frolicked, sniffing through the long grass, perhaps hunting the erased (never materialized) pheasant in the lap of Mrs Andrews. Here they might lay that imaginary and allusive quarry at our feet, an attempt at an exchange.
‘I know what you’re thinking’ throws that questionable assertion straight back at the viewer. The problem of knowledge between species attaches itself to that same problem intra species – if only we could talk.
A dumb animal but not a dumb photo.
Keran James, 2005