Jo Longhurst – The Refusal
Museum Folkwang, Essen, 05.04–15.06.2008
Thomas W. Kuhn, Kunstforum International, No.191, May-July 2008
While David Chipperfield’s extension of the Museum Folkwang on the premises of the former Ruhrland Museum is slowly but
steadily taking shape, and works from the collection at Villa Hügel are being selected for display, Sabine Maria Schmidt, curator
for contemporary art, and Ute Eskildsen, curator for photography, have relocated their exhibition programme to Horst Loy’s
construction from the 1960s – a museum building, which in terms of light, space and proportion remains one of Germany’s
finest. Their agenda, which focuses on contemporary art, perpetuates the institution’s long-standing pioneering role in
showcasing conceptual works which are rarely – if at all – put to the test in the museum.
For their latest exhibition, Ute Eskildsen drew on a previous collaboration with the artist, for Jo Longhurst (b. 1962 in
Chelmsford, Essex) had already exhibited at the Folkwang in 2006 as part of “Nützlich, süß und museal. Das fotografierte Tier”
[The Photographed Animal: Useful, Cute and Collected] (reviewed by Claudia Posca in Volume 178 of Kunstforum), a group
show which undermined widespread clichés of animal imagery by revealing its underlying cultural structures.
Jo Longhurst, who studied at the Royal College of Art in London from 2001 to 2008, entertains a twofold relationship
with the object of her study: dogs – short-haired Whippets, to be precise, a particular breed of British dog. Longhurst, the owner
of two Whippets, holds a personal and emotional affinity with dogs. Dogs are the subject of her philosophical enquiry into both
ideas of Identity and ideas of Perfection. The title of Longhurst’s exhibition – The Refusal – was inspired from an expression by
the French philosopher Michel Foucault (quoted in English in the catalogue): “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover
what we are, but to refuse what we are.”
This dialectical approach – simultaneously emotional-subjective and intellectual-objective, if one were to simplify – is
reflected in the artist’s photographic mises en scène. Addressing the personal aspect of her relation to the dogs, Longhurst
shows them sleeping or resting, and uses circular-shaped canvasses. These tondi, whose impact derives in part from their
implicit reference to high Renaissance, where such untypical and elaborate formats were confined to remarkable topics, also
stand out among the pictures in the catalogue, where they are literally floating over the double pages like soap bubbles, as
opposed to the rectangular formats, which Longhurst reserves for her philosophical investigations.
The best illustration of this type of work is “Twelve Dogs, Twelve Bitches” (2001–2003), a series of pictures showing
three bitches and three male dogs each standing in four rows that seem to form a grid pattern on a neutral backdrop. At the
Folkwang, the photographs were hung facing each other on the short walls in one of the long rectangular rooms. In addition to
the generic title, Longhurst names all 24 dogs individually, thus identifying them as individual beings. But the animals are
simultaneously exposed to a typological gaze, with their postures arranged for perfect match. This sort of display is reminiscent
of the presentation favoured by racial theorists or dog owners in pet shows and breeding competitions, which the single-channel
video work “The Decisive Moment (Study II for Show Ring)” from 2006 explicitly refers to: a dog owner sitting behind a Whippet
standing sideways in the foreground is seen relentlessly correcting the dog’s posture, which is supposed to express tension and
symmetry.
This dialogical approach, which characterises man’s dealings with animals, is a leitmotif throughout the exhibition.
While the pictures hang low (and the labels even lower), the display in the first space is a genuine challenge, since spectators
are asked to look at stereoscopic images of whippets in a natural setting through a set of oculars. The height – or rather
lowness – of the oculars forces spectators to kneel down or, at the very least, to bend dangerously forward, a situation
documented by the only black-and-white photograph in the catalogue.
This installation comes across as somewhat irritating, even though it rewards spectators with the enticing illusion of
three-dimensionality. Yet it also conveys the idea that we need to revise our attitude towards animals if we are to be genuinely
interested in them. The natural settings refer to the dogs’ original use in hunting, while the installation could be said to convey
the idea of a hunter crouched low in the grass, as the dog, with its outstanding sight, becomes his extended eye.
The explicit title of the exhibition – “The Refusal” – refers to three works in particular, the first of which is found in the
space that holds George Minne’s well. The painterly tondi from the “Breed” and “Vincent” series create a formal and
atmospheric correspondence to the well. At first sight, the Whippet represented in a 1,90 meter high by 1,29 meter wide work is
merely an enlargement of one of the images from the aforementioned typological series. But comparing the two, the spectator
will notice that the dog’s right hind leg stands before the left one – an obvious digression from the “correct” posture. Longhurst
has had to learn that by breed standards her two dogs Breed and Whippet stood no chance in dog shows as their morphology
was nowhere near the norm. While this could be seen as an example of the conflict between the image of the Other and the
individual, the diptych “The Refusal (Part II)” and the series of six images that form the third part analyse the conflict between
the individual and his or her self-image. To this effect Longhurst put the Whippets in front of mirrors and recorded the dogs’
reactions to their played Selves. Following Foucault’s thread, “The Refusal” does not only ask the question to what extent an
individual entity conforms with the pattern and the norm of the many that compose its category (in this case, Whippets), but also
to what extent the Self matches the image it constructs of itself and which, in the optimistic vision of the late 1960s, simply had
to be developed.
Longhurst treads more difficult ground with her series of four horizontal images of a naked man and various Whippets
lying on a black leather sofa. This series is vaguely reminiscent of Fragonard’s “Girl with Dog” (at the Old Pinacotheca in
Munich) and bears slight echoes of the thematic nexus of sodomy, zoophilia and cynophilia. In this relationship, man and animal
transcend the frontiers of race in a socially (though not mythologically) reprehensible way.
Artistically speaking, Longhurst also transcends genre limits with her near-portraits of dogs, as in the four images
entitled “I Know What You’re Thinking”, in which the dogs look straight into the photographer’s lens. Longhurst’s work can be
said to perpetuate a tradition exemplified by her 18 th-century countryman George Stubbs, who painted portraits of horses and
dogs commissioned by their owners. He often pictured the animals on neutral backgrounds, thus underlining their particular
status in the society of men. A joint exhibition with works by Jo Longhurst and William Wegman (b. 1943 in Holoyke), whose
approach is thoroughly different in that it anthropomorphises the animals, would be functional in deepening this set of relevant
questions about the sign of the dog.
Translated from the German by Patrick Kremer