Walking out of Ciprian Muresan‘s show at the Wilkinson Gallery, we tried to think of happier things. The free bar. The clement weather. The fact that it was also Keanu Reeves’ birthday that day, which was weirdly comforting given the fact that he never ages, and the fact that we’d rather enjoyed Bill And Ted, in a dumb sort of way. However we tried to spin it, though, the fact remained – in the form of Muresan’s disturbing film Dog Luv, we’d been forced to examine the most repellent and violent aspects of human nature for a good thirty minutes, and staring into the abyss had made our eyes ache.
To summarise: The film – so dark as to be almost black in every sense, with the light and shade looking as though it’d been smoothed in with an enormous, heavy-grade pencil – depicted a group of dog marionettes discussing the human desire to torture, maim and murder, either for enjoyment or within a legal or judicial system. Beginning at the inception of man, they moved through the aeons through newer and newer forms of violence; the text itself came courtesy of the Romanian playwright Saviana Stanescu, and the resulting footage was both eerie and arresting, looking like a shadowy children’s puppet show, but relating almost unbearable atrocities. The timing was pure coincidence, of course, but it immediately brought to mind something that a woman had said in a terrifying documentary about sex trafficking on television a few days earlier: ‘I envy the dogs in this country. People love them and take such good care of them. These people treat me worse than their animals.’
Elsewhere in the show, Muresan continued his exploration of politics with a print-out of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, translated into pidgin Latin as a means of converting it into playful gibberish; this was accompanied by a book in which the artist had rendered paintings by Vermeer in intricate pencil, and a film depicting the inside of a factory which had been made as a salute to Philip Glass. None of these undertakings, however, were able to tear the eye away from Dog Luv for very long, as words like ‘rape’, ‘execution’ and ‘torture’ flashed up onscreen beside the twitching, whimsical puppets. It’s safe to say that fond memories of a slew of children’s television programmes were tainted forever for a fair percentage of the audience – those who hadn’t just come in because they’d heard that the bar was well-stocked and free, at least.
Every dog has its day, as the hackneyed saying goes. These ones, we think, are better suited to night.
- Wilkinson Gallery (Click Here)
- Ciprian Muresan (Click Here)
