ART&RESEARCH

MW: In the interior photographs that you were talking about Steve there is actually an invitation in those photographs to place yourself in them and imagine yourself in that environment in the design of the clinical interiors and so that’s the invitation in those photos. In these photographs there’s an invitation too but this is, by and large, a human environment. And the name of the animal is a human attribute. So it’s been given a human name and so again in this space you have something which isn’t human but which is constituted by things which are human, which is kind of strange. That’s the kind of tension I think

SB: One of the things I was struck by again, looking through this on the train on the way up here - with the exception of the one’s where you’ve clearly got a cat basket or a dog basket – was that we’re talking about human-shaped environments where the only bit of decision-making that the particular domestic animal has been able to do is to decide where in a particular room they’re going to bed down or whatever, and I think those photographs do point up that limited choice really very well. The one I was particularly struck by in relation to this was one that’s rather kind of symmetrical; the animal’s name is Kolli and you’ve got this very organised, structured, decorative symmetrical display at one end of the room that has rather little to do with whatever kind of animal it would be. And well all we can say is that, for whatever reason, the cat or dog has decided that, yeah, that’ll do.

MW: That’s its best option.

SB: Yeah, given the choices available for me, I guess I’ll go for that one, possibly just because it’s the only one where there’s a rug over bare floorboards at that point in the room.

RB: I think the reference to the ghostly quality of the image is I suppose spot on in that way and I think there is the sense that the awkwardness of the angle confronts you, it keeps you out of the room. What I want to ask is about the use of the text, the use of the animal name to inhabit the space, to demarcate the image as a dwelling or as a populated image in some respect, because I can imagine that with no signposts at all in the way would maybe make it more enigmatic or more ambiguous as to what you’re looking at. It is to do with the relationship of ‘enframing’ and ‘unframing’ and I think Heidegger says in ‘The origin of work of art’ that art is a kind of ‘enframing’ and that seems to be something that you’re critiquing in nanoq perhaps. But here the enframing is vital and maybe it’s different from the un-framing process of nanoq, that you referred to in the opening out. Ok, these works might be related in terms of animals, but maybe the Fly project and nanoq project are actually very different in their relationship to enframing and unframing.

MW: One of the ways that people have looked at this, and it came up in Penn State, is was that there was a suggestion that they were like photographs that might be taken at the scene of a forensic investigation and, in that sense, the framing of them also becomes very important because it’s the demarcated area where you’re invited to scrutinise; for example, the cat hairs on the chair.

BS: But that’s assuming we’ve been led into these areas of investigation – we hardly ever are. I mean they are marked off and we’re talking about the feelings you have when you look in, because you become compelled to look into areas which have been marked off and where some kind of investigation is going on.

MW: Because it’s actually denied to you.

BS: Yes, because there is something denied to you in that image, that’s where the similarity is. I think that’s it, we didn’t set out to photograph the scene of an event, that was not part of the work.

MW: But maybe the event was ‘something has happened’ or ‘something happens’.

BS: Not an event I would say. Well it’s an event that has been.

MW: An event of something passing through.

SB: I think that’s actually where the captioning helps to pull this open as a space rather than as the record of an event because it’s almost a naming of, and indeed it is the naming of whose space this is, of whose space this is a photograph of and maps out as it were the gap that the animal fits in.

BS: I think that’s what we were intending with it but, in some sense, travelling with this work through different cultures you become aware of different emphases and now I’m not so sure if the name needs to be there, having taken the work to Sweden and people don’t understand these names at all, they’re just utterly foreign, whereas in Icelandic we know that these names are human names.

SB: But I think in English, and evidently in Swedish as well, what’s useful about that is to point out the thing that we too easily forget about which is that there are significant cultural differences in attitudes to domestic animals in different parts of the world that are part of their history and what was so interesting hearing you talk about this project at Penn State was talking about the kinds of legal restrictions on pet ownership in Iceland that are quite distinct from what they are in this country, for example. I mean, that is part of writing the history of animals, if you like, because it’s a pointing to the non-taken-for-granted-ness of stuff that most of the time we do take for granted, that there is a cultural specificity to the whole set of attitudes that we very often just think about as being, not necessarily self evident, but we take as part of our immediate experience; that you’ve got cats around the house here and dogs around the house and those of us who have (or have had) pets assume that our relationship with those animals and our affection for them is something relatively straightforward: it’s not that we don’t know that pet keeping has a history, but we assume, as presumably Derrida did up to the point where he suddenly spots his cat looking at him…

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