Title: Still Life with Artificial Plant and Cat.
Materials: Cat (Amigo, age four); artificial plant; tablecloth; table.
Commentary: In this deconstruction of the relations between artifice and nature, human and animal, object and living creature, the cat's own artistic agency asks the viewer to reflect on our assumptions about the act of aesthetic production. By crumpling the tablecloth, the cat subverts human attempts to impose order on a chaotic universe, while also repurposing single-use domestic consumer goods for his own playful mode of being. The cat's gaze further implicates the photographer in the act, inasmuch as the "appropriate" response (as determined by the parents of said photographer) would be to summarily remove the cat from the table in order to save the tablecloth from the cat's claws. By photographing the cat and uploading the photograph to the Internet, the photographer attempts to recuperate the cat's carnivalesque disruption of the social order (which forbids cats from being on the dining-room table, for example) for the well-known genre of the "cute cat photo"; however, the cat's knowing gaze suggests the extent to which such recuperation can only be partial, as the tablecloth's displacement remains as the trace of the cat's rejection of human norms. Moreover, the juxtaposition of the artifical plant with the cat troubles the always-porous boundaries between the natural and the (art)ificial: in its hyper-realism, this representation of a cultivated flower hints again at human attempts to exert control over the natural world, even as it also necessarily hints at the extent to which the real flower evades capture, much like the paradoxically non-domesticated domestic animal on the table.
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