Jan. 13, 2010 - Issue #743: Broken Embraces

EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: Man’s best friend

Chris Cooper's Every Dog Has Its Day is a pleasant surprise. Although the show contains a handful of sculptures, they have a playful presence and can provoke some real interest. It's a long way better than Harcourt House's inadequate and inaccurate promotional description: the work is effortlessly likeable and although simple, at its best it suggests complex themes with reference and intimation.

The main attraction of Every Dog Has Its Day are three approximately life-size sculptures of dogs with various contraptions attached. "Emergency Self-Destruct" features a rocket and associated apparatus strapped to its back. The dog leans forward and looks upward, along the rocket's likely trajectory, but despite this attitude it's not clear what the rocket's function is. It might be to launch, perhaps with a violent purpose, but as hinted by the title, the awkward switches and construction of the "launcher" make it equally possible that it wouldn't go anywhere.

This ambivalent play of purpose, with an undertone of violence, is really what the show is all about. Another dog, "Oliver," has its head inside a smooth all-glass helmet. What the purpose of the helmet might be is similarly unclear: it brings up associations of space-travel or diving, ways of protecting the dog's breathing to allow new experience, but the glass seems fragile and lacks any connected apparatus. Even as it suggests a dramatic widening of horizons it closes in on its wearer's experience, cutting the dog off from the outside world and encumbering it much as a white cone might after coming back from a serious trip to the vet.

"Oliver" has some more complexity. From behind it's quite clear that the whole rear half of the sculpture is quite distorted, and missing most of one leg. The distortion, and sense of pain, is made much more explicit in "I promise we'll get to the lake next summer," the third life-size sculpture, where the dogs' bronze, sculptural nature is brought to the forefront. This dog is hollowed-out, parts of its belly replaced by rawhide, and mechanical bits of metal stick out of its sides. It's hard at work pulling a trailer stacked high with tarp-covered crates—the weakest part of the show, which doesn't clearly fit the rest of the work, although it might leave the gallery feeling a little empty in its absence, although the other half wouldn't suffer much.

Cooper writes that she sees dogs as existing in an overlap of the human and animal spheres: augmented by centuries of breeding and training as well as their awkward loads, these bronze dogs are doubly so. The suggestion here, that helpfully intended technologies become oppressive out in the wild, or that maybe they weren't helpfully intended at all, is intriguingly complex. The dogs' cybernetics cannot simply expand their abilities, but they change them for better and for worse.

I am not as much a fan of "Good dream/bad dream," a diptych of miniature sculptures. These are binary and unexciting, compared to the rest of the works: in one a dog fits into a wall built of wooden fragments, and in the other the dog scratches itself and the wall collapses. In some ways this seems to cheapen the experience of the rest of the show: we realize that of course the dog in the "happy" story is still unhappy because there is a wall on its head. It's very pat. When Chris Cooper leaves us room to imagine and suggests difficulty with incomplete bodies and empty bronze forms, rather than spelling it out in a tumble of balsa wood, it does much more. V

Until Sat, Feb 13
Every Dog Has Its Day
Featuring Works by Chris Cooper
Harcourt House Art Centre (Third Floor, 10215 - 112 St)

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