Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong
220
Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong
220eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781566894128 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Coffee House Press |
| Publication date: | 09/07/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 220 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
MARIA BUSTILLOS
HOPE IS THE THING WITH FUR
I once dreamed I was a Gray Kitten of perhaps four months of age; in the best part, I jumped from a table onto the distant wooden floor. The soft pads of my paws cushioned my landing in a deeply pleasurable and unexpected manner, and I found myself sashaying around and swishing my tail in contentment. This dream (a favorite, and one I often relive in memory) demonstrated my long-held belief in the many superiorities of cats to humans. The bodies of cats are exquisitely mobile; they can leap huge distances relative to their size; they are fast and alert and elegant; they have long, sensitive whiskers and delicate ears that can focus in any direction they choose. They can purr, communicating a delight that reverberates through their whole bodies. They also sleep half the day! There's so much to envy there. So much to admire.
Before we enter into the question of cat videos, we must talk about cats themselves. Cat videos are the crystallization of all that human beings love about cats, the crux of which is centered in the fact that cats are both beautiful and absurd. Their natural beauty and majesty are eternally just one tiny slip away from total humiliation, and this precarious condition fills us with a sympathetic panic and delight, for it exactly mirrors our own. The director of a cat video is thus typically motivated either by an unmixed appreciation and love for the excellence or cuteness of his subject or by a desire to capture a cat in a dignity-impaired moment. Those videos that succeed in communicating both admiration and ridicule are perhaps the best ones of all, producing the most loved characters in the genre (e.g., Maru, Henri the Existential Cat, Surprised Kitty, and so on).
In this way, cats exactly reflect our feelings about ourselves. To demonstrate, let us consider Hamlet's complicatedly sarcastic views on the ridiculous and the sublime in man, with one small substitution:
What a piece of work is Cat! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!
But notice how it doesn't work at all if you should substitute turtle or chicken or cow for cat, here. Even the estimable dog doesn't quite work in the subject passage, for dogs, while they may from time to time be noble in reason and express and admirable in form and moving, are not quite infinite in faculty, nor godlike in apprehension; dogs are in general simpler and more trusting, and lack the extra dimension of mystery that belongs to cats, and to ourselves. Cats share something more with us than mere creatureliness: They share, somehow, our central predicament. Beauty and panic, laziness, and the potential for real idiocy. A certain predisposition to cruelty and indifference, mixed indiscriminately with a certain unaccountable warmth and gentleness. Each one different, unpredictable, full of surprises. What we can but dimly apprehend of our own condition, we can readily see and identify in cats.
"He thinks he's a person," people will say, when what they really mean is that they think so.
* * *
Return with me, then, to the dawn of the internet, to those days of wonder and delight before any of us had heard of Twitter or Facebook; before Anonymous, before the revelations of Edward Snowden, before BuzzFeed, before even Google. Before all the terrible things Adrian Chen wrote about at Wired in October of 2014.
At the close of the twentieth century, the dissemination of cat videos was but a distant dream, owing to the minute amount of bandwidth that even the fanciest computer systems could provide to the early "web surfer." On a 56K modem, it would have taken ages and ages to download a single one of the cat videos we can blithely knock back by the dozen today.
But there was something coming, that much was clear from early portents. Something hilarious, something absurd, something infinitely compelling. The websitehampsterdance.com went live in late 1997 or early 1998, and by the following year, a quarter of a million visitors were tuning in every day to hear a weirdly addictive audio loop consisting of twangy music and an infernal giggle, which accompanied the rudimentary animation of rows of dancing hamsters. Well, "dancing" is a bit much to say — it was more bopping, ambling, or quietly rotating. "Legions of dancing hamsters will drive you mad with their inane de-do-de-do he-he-he!" promised one viewer, accurately.
The avalanche of interest in thoroughly idiotic videos of ridiculous animals was barely beginning. But with each increase in bandwidth came a slightly more sophisticated video, and another, until there were countless thousands. By 2002, Joel Veitch of rathergood.com had created his first primitive Kitten Band, soon to be joined by the irresistible Punk Kittens, Northern Kittens, Gay Bar Kittens, and Sweary Kittens. The apotheosis of Veitch's cat video oeuvre would, however, not come until 2010, with "The Internet Is Made of Cats," a work that joins a snappy, sing-alongable tune to internet cat scholarship of a very high order, observing, "The Internet Is Made of Cats: Cats! Cats! Cats! Cats Cats!" and telling the tale of the catgod "powerful beyond imagination," Maru, who would manipulate the cosmos in order to summon the savior of the Internet Cat Race.
* * *
Maru ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], Japanese for "circle" or "round"), emperor of internet cats, requires a moment of reflection on his own. He is "a boy of Scottish Fold" and "a lazybone basically," belonging to the Japanese YouTube user mugumogu, whose videos have racked up millions of views. Maru is so resplendently beautiful, so thickly furred and magnificent, and so utterly mellow that even watching mugumogu clean his ears with Q-tips is an entirely relaxing and pleasurable experience. But Maru is also a kook, and it is this kookiness that is responsible for the love his legion of fans bears him. Maru is perfectly capable of making a fool of himself over a bit of string, and he can fall off a cat tree with the best of them — but it is his determination to inhabit every available box, no matter how small or inconveniently situated, that seals his greatness and ensures his immortality. He's a master, the Michael Jackson of the cat video world, whose performances are as fresh and appealing today as they were six years ago when he made his debut in "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]" ("I am Maru"), the video in which he first beguiled the world by lying on his back in a bathroom sink, swatting a ball on a string, and bounding across the floor and into his first box.
No one will argue that there is much to regret about the evolution of the web since it took off in 1989. But against the swamps of Reddit, the deplorable authors of GamerGate, and all the horrific incursions of the Man, we may measure the lush, quiet satisfaction of watching Maru hurl himself into a box and then lie comfortably still, plump hind legs splayed, luxuriant tail swinging contentedly back and forth.
Such pleasures recall the words of Evelyn Waugh regarding P. G. Wodehouse, whose works similarly provide us with a balm against the sadness and grief of the world. Wodehouse, Waugh observed, had made for us an "idyllic world [that] can never stale." His characters "exist in a world of pristine paradisal innocence. For Mr. Wodehouse there has been no Fall of Man. ... His characters have never tasted the forbidden fruit. They are still in Eden."
So it is with the feline demigods who kindly soothe away our daily hurt by falling off a wall, sleeping with a pit bull, or purring in a box on the internet. Cat videos too "will continue to release future generations from a captivity that may be more irksome than our own." They too are "a world for us to live in and delight in." They are the internet's crowning achievement, a realm of universal mirth and innocent fun.
* * *
The charm of cat videos crosses all boundaries of class, gender, and nationality. Of what other medium can this be said? Cat videos are the ice cream of moving imagery, a lingua franca rivaling or perhaps even surpassing that of Disney cartoons or action movies almost universally understood and adored. Those few impoverished souls who cannot yet find it in them to adore may seem to the rest to be suffering from an attack of biliousness from which one cannot help but hope they will soon recover.
Aside from their philosophical function, and their function as an international language of friendship and fun, cat videos serve a number of other valuable purposes worth mentioning. A cat video is ideal for use as an olive branch after a dispute; it's the perfect undemanding and friendly hello to a distant friend, intimate without being intrusive. The cat video can lend a welcome note of silliness to lighten the tone of a flirtation, or to express a bit of mirth to a grouchy coworker. They make every message to which they are appended feel softer, lighter, easier.
* * *
As I write this, the sleek, ebony-black Sam is purring in my lap. How to describe our long companionship? In all the conventional ways, of course: "He's a member of the family," "He's just a big old baby," and "He's a very good boy." Sam showed up in our backyard fourteen years ago, a tiny kitten in the company of his stray mama and siblings, all of whom were more conventionally attractive than he: there was a lovely tabby one and another like a puffy ball of gray smoke. I was able to find homes for them very easily. But it was Sam, with his great golden eyes and playful, even slightly rascally manner, whom my daughter begged us to keep. (We've never yet made a video of Sam, though he is by far the best laser-pointer hunter I've ever seen, and it would be fun to show off his prowess.) In any case, there's nothing but goodness and love that has come of taking care of this little cat — even if he is making it harder to type, at present. Loving a cat is a way in which a person can feel and express goodness and happiness, and cats express these things back to us in return. The cat video documents it all, in a form we share all over the earth.
Most of us get to know only a few cats intimately IRL (though I've met heroic rescuers of hundreds or even thousands of them, like Ben Lehrer of Kitten Rescue, a favorite charity here in Los Angeles). But through cat videos, we admirers of cats can know any number of them intimately and recognize multitudes of others like ourselves in Japan and Russia and France and everywhere else. The internet is home to millions of records of people just quietly at their best, sharing love and humor with a pet. Here are serious philosophical implications that it would be foolish to discount.
* * *
It's all too easy to see how the sad idea of a vengeful God has taken hold throughout human history, our perilous situation and the mysteries of the cosmos being what they are. For if I were God, and I were to come back after a few millennia to see how the planet I had made was faring, and I found human beings had grown so senselessly cruel, so ignorant and destructive, and visited such ruin on their beautiful home, their fellow creatures, and on one another, I can well imagine wanting to smite them to pieces and send along a lot of frogs and locusts and boils and things to reckon with. Maybe even wipe them out completely for making such a godawful mess.
But — even then — if, before I smote, I were to chance on a video of a cat riding placidly around on a Roomba? Then I believe I would have to spare the human race, keep the jury out, give another chance: forced as I would be, in the face of this incontrovertible evidence, to conclude that there was something in us still worth saving.
CHAPTER 2JILLIAN STEINHAUER
THE NINE LIVES OF CAT VIDEOS
The position that an epoch occupies in the historical process can be determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-level expressions than from that epoch's judgments about itself.
— Siegfried Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament"
The spectacle creates an eternal present of immediate expectation: memory ceases to be necessary or desirable.
— John Berger, "Why Look at Animals?"
1
One evening in the summer of 2013, I joined 11,499 other people — give or take — at the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand to sit and watch cat videos. I had spent the day leading up to the Internet Cat Video Festival (or CatVidFest, as it's nicknamed) wandering the fair in extreme heat, eating assorted fried foods on sticks, watching butter sculptors, and paying money to take off my shoes and traverse an artsy blow-up castle with "rooms" of saturated color (think Dan Flavin goes to the fair). Hours later, dehydrated and probably sunstroked, I met up with a journalist from Minnesota Public Radio for a brief interview. He wanted to talk to me because I was an art critic, and because I had served as a juror for that year's CatVidFest.
Seeking a relatively quiet place, we sat down on a concrete ledge just outside the Grandstand. As he readied his equipment, I readied myself, trying to pull together some thoughts about the jurying process and my love of cats. He was friendly, and we started with a brief introduction, a little banter to ease the awkwardness. Then he got serious and posed the Big Question he'd clearly come (and/or been sent) to ask: "Are cat videos art?"
It was, somehow, a query I hadn't expected, even though I was in Minneapolis specifically to attend a festival of cat videos put on by an art museum (the Walker Art Center). I suppose this was because I found the question absurd — not to mention unanswerable and inaccurate. Asking me to determine if cat videos, in general, were art seemed like asking beauty pageant contestants to deliver a concise but convincing vision for the attainment of world peace. It was a question without an answer.
In her essay "Trash, Art, and the Movies," film critic Pauline Kael lays out the "simple, good distinction that all art is entertainment but not all entertainment is art." Some cat videos may rise to the level of art, and some are even made by artists (seeCory Arcangel's mashup of cats playing Arnold Schoenberg's op. 11, for starters), but all cat videos are not art, nor are they meant to be. Cat videos, as a phenomenon, are "fundamentally amateur," as critic Mark Greif once described most of the content on YouTube. They are entertainment in the vein of burlesque and talent shows and America's Funniest Home Videos. They are good old-fashioned spectacle.
2
Spectacles are one of the best forms of distraction we have. Ideally, an encounter with a work of art makes you think — it challenges you or causes you to feel so overwhelmingly that you're compelled to figure out why. A spectacle, on the other hand, seeks to envelop, and in doing so invites you to dial down your brain. As Walter Benjamin once put it, "Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. ... In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art."
Benjamin uses the work of art as his example, but why bother with it today when we have so many ready-made modes of distraction? If I'm in the mood to make an effort, I'll watch the Antonioni film that's been languishing in its bright-red Netflix envelope atop my DVD player for three months. If I want to unwind after nine exhausting hours of work, I'll watch cat videos. YouTube has done art a favor in freeing it from the need to quickly gratify.
Distraction isn't new; it seems safe to assume that as long as we've had to work, we've sought — and found a way to achieve — distraction. In 1926, critic and theorist Siegfried Kracauer published an essay called "Cult of Distraction," examining the grand movie palaces of Berlin. The all-encompassing shows there, which featured live performers and orchestras in addition to film screenings, "raise distraction to the level of culture," Kracauer writes. "They are aimed at the masses."
Germany at the time was carrying out its first experiment with democracy. Censorship had been lifted, and journalism and photography were booming — illustrated magazines littered Berlin. Sound film was becoming a phenomenon; thanks in part to the failing economy, so was Nazism. Kracauer saw distraction as deeply political, tied to industrial capitalism and the plight of the worker. "Critics chide Berliners for being addicted to distraction, but this is a petit bourgeois reproach," he writes. "The form of free-time busy-ness necessarily corresponds to the form of business."
Although Kracauer was critical of the picture palaces and the way they manufactured distraction, he also saw potential for a meaningful kind of distraction that would not be "an end in itself" but rather "a reflection of the uncontrolled anarchy of our world." He urged the theaters to "aim radically toward a kind of distraction that exposes disintegration instead of masking it." Unfortunately, he didn't specify what that would look like. I have trouble envisioning it myself, though if it exists at all — a twenty-first-century anarchist circus? — I suspect it lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Cat Is Art Spelled Wrong"
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Sarah Schultz and Katie HillFeline Darlings&the Anti-Cute: Sasha Archibald
Watching Cat Videos Together: Will Braden
Prologomena to Any Future Poetics of the Cat Video: Stephen Burt
Title TK: Maria Bustillos
Cats: David Carr
Walls Divide Humans and Their Cats from Other Humans but Cat Videos Are Our Digital Cat Doors, Peepholes into a Great Cross-species Love: Matthea Harvey
Title TK: Rhonda Lierberman
Sparrow Martinez: Alexis Madrigal
Finding Half-Cat: Joanne McNeil
Title TK: Ander Monson
Title TK: Kevin Nguyen
Jeoffy (Felis catus): Elena Passarello
The Nine Lives of Cat Videos: Jillian Steinhauer
Title TK: Carl Wilson