Small Dead Animals at The Parisian Laundry
Everything about The Parisian Laundry simply works. Cozy wooden floors, high ceilings, that spacious loft feel and sunlight streaming in through large open windows. The latter could have potentially taken away from one’s enjoyment of the art exhibit, especially on the 2nd floor, where Trine Søndergaard & Nicolai Howalt’s photos of Denmark’s bleak winter-beaten countrysides were distorted by the sun’s bright glare. Recognizing an opportunity for some inventive photography, Oletha and I took advantage of the situation and snapped photographs from various angles, playing with reflections of objects in the room and “superimposing” them on the artworks we were photographing. That was probably the highlight of our experience at The Parisian Laundry, once again indulging in a slightly more tactile, interactive experience with the artwork we were assigned to observe.
The Danish couple’s exhibit featured selections from their How To Hunt (2005) photo series. The dozen-or-so photos often showcased barren snow-covered plains with vaguely defined, sometimes out of focus hunters trudging along ominously, in some cases holding dead fowl or rabbits. The exhibit certainly evoked a feeling of impending doom, or even dread. The barren landscape portraits, coupled with the sombre hunters and our knowledge of the animals’ unfortunate fate created a certain emotional heaviness as one strolled through the bleak gallery. Less than a week earlier I’d been fishing and experienced a minor pang of guilt (heavily diluted by my obvious pleasure, however) when I suddenly found myself grappling with a bass on the end of my line. After having reeled the fish in securely, I methodically clubbed it on the head to end its misery, later gutted it and ate it. Staring at these photos, I couldn’t help but wonder why I felt a greater sense of gloom strolling through this sun-filled art gallery than I did a week beforehand, when I was yanking a sharp hook through a clueless fish’s mouth. So I thought immediately of Hegel (shudder…I don’t like him any more than you do, but it’s relevant in this case and it fulfills the quotation requirement for this assignment).
In his Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel writes that a “human interest, the spiritual value which attaches to an incident, to an individual character, to an action in its plot and in its dénouement, is apprehended in the work of art, and exhibited more purely and transparently than is possible on the soil of common unartistic reality. This gives the work of art a higher rank than anything produced by nature, which has not sustained this passage through the mind.”[1] Similarly, are we sometimes not more susceptible to being moved by the stylized portrayal of a homeless person on television or in a painting rather than the actual human beings we walk past unflinchingly on a daily basis? But I’m getting far removed from The Parisian Laundry, Danish photographers and our Intermedia class here…
[1] Hegel, G.W.F. “Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics.” Art in Theory: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Ed.
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