Dog Show #3: I Love Aging and Dying
Text by Marina Molarsky-Beck
Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, recounts a story about the illusory potential—and pitfalls—of painting. It goes like this: two great painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasius, face off in a contest of skill. Zeuxis paints a still life of grapes so realistic that birds descend upon it, pecking at the painted fruit. What could be more fantastic a feat of artistry than to produce something so lifelike that it would confuse the very birds in the sky? Then Parrhasius takes Zeuxis to see his attempt. But when Zeuxis goes to draw away the curtain obscuring the painting’s surface, he finds, to his amazement, that the curtains were not curtains—they were a painted trick. So Zeuxis is forced to concede his loss. His painting fooled the birds, but Parrhasius has fooled him. This tale, oft repeated and riffed on throughout the history of art, presents effective illusionism as the ultimate display of artistic mastery. Producing an illusion so potent that it fools the human eye has the effect of destabilizing reality—the viewer cannot tell where painting stops and the rest of the world begins.
Stephen Morrison’s paintings seem, at first, to be turned backwards. Floral still lives are splayed across the wooden stretcher bars, cascading arrangements of tulips and peonies. The flowers themselves are dying—not dead, yet, but beginning to wilt and crumple before our eyes. But, of course, the flowers here are not real at all—their death frozen in time in pictorial form. The flatness of this apparently three-dimensional space becomes apparent. The still lives and the stretcher bars on which they rest are revealed as painted constructions. We are looking, in fact, at the front of these works, the support beneath remaining hidden behind canvas and paint that only pretends to be wood. Morrison’s paintings seem to simultaneously reveal and conceal the apparatus of painting. A picture is shown to be not a window into another world, but a made thing. We get a look behind-the-scenes, under the skin. And yet what is offered is not a look at all, but instead a dazzling and seductive trick.
And then, a second trick: hidden at the core of each floral bud, emerging from between tightly packed petals, is a canine face, a miniature cartoonish dog with short snout, some with tongues lolling out of mouths, others gazing piteously out. Morrison has employed dogs as a motif in innumerable inventive, humorous, and sometimes unsettling ways over the past several years, incorporating their faces into sumptuous landscape scenes, oddly realistic sculptures of everyday objects, and sometimes, large-scale tableaux in which the dogs become the players in staged dramas. The dogs disrupt a practice that otherwise largely delights in the sensual pleasure of convincing mimesis. They remind us, again and again, not to trust what we see. But they also propose a strange and surreal animism of the quotidian world. A sponge might be just as alive as a strawberry or a tennis ball or a shoe. A plate of spaghetti and meatballs or a mountainscape. Morrison’s works deploy classically skillful painterly tactics to an absurd end—not only to trick us, but to pop the balloon of illusion with a decisive bang. Interior and exterior, surface and depth, back and front, animal or mineral—all binaries are unsettled, made strange, turned on their heads.