My Life and Thoughts

Well, yes, OK, this might not be the last time I ever write about cats. Still, I definitely promise at least a moderate cat hiatus—right after this post, which is about modern-day cat literature classic Why Cats Paint: A Theory of Feline Aesthetics.

The existence of Why Cats Paint was first revealed to me early in 2007, when I happened to attend a calendar sale at Kepler’s Books in the company of n+1 editor Mark Greif, who purchased a Why Cats Paint calendar, as a gift for the mother of a certain young person. “The genius of the thing,” Greif later observed, of the Why Cats Paint calendar,

is that they never tell you why cats paint—they just show you that cats paint. Which they don’t. But there is this further horizon of promise that distracts you from the original problem.

I remember thinking that this was an ingenious formulation, and that I could be the calendar girl for a Why People Dissertate calendar… but would it successfully distract my committee from the “original problem”? My committee of course was made up entirely of benevolent schnauzers:

Time passed—no doubt marked, for many fellow Americans, by a measured parade of painting cats. And yet I myselfsomehow gave little or no thought to the question of why cats paint. This state of affairs continued for more than a year, at which point a friend (Emily Collette Wilkinson, of the functional library card) happened to mention a book called Why Paint Cats, which she described as another sign of the apocalypse.

“Oh, I know that book,” I said, urbanely. “You mean Why Cats Paint.”

But Emily did not mean Why Cats Paint. She meant Why Paint Cats: The Ethics of Feline Aesthetics. (Note to self: is this where Stanford undergrads get their interest in the ethics of aesthetics?)

“Following the international success of their previous collaboration of feline aesthetics, Why Cats Paint, the authors turn their scholarly attention to the cat as canvas.”

Such images have sparked a lively debate, on subjects including: the involvement of animal cruelty or Photoshop; the legitimacy of cat-painting as a subject of dissention; and, finally, the rather Foucauldian question of who may paint cats. Should the cat-painting function be restricted to “trained professionals”? Some say yes. Others, no:

Give me a break! Do people think professional cat painters are born into the world? When you paint your very first cat you are an amateur, so if these artists had left it to the professionals, as you suggest, they never would have painted a cat. Only with practice does a person become a professional. I think any cat lover and artist, with patience and research, should do this if they desire (without having to obtain their “Professional Cat Painters Degree”).

At this point it struck me that there was something familiar about the names of the authors of the cat-painting books (writer Burton Silver and photographer Heather Busch). What could it be? Well I’ll tell you: Silver and Busch are the same visionaries who brought us Dancing With Cats! My next thought was to wonder where all these dancing, painting, and painted cats were located. What if they were in the Bay Area? Like, maybe Stanford had an interdisciplinary consortium for them or something? Because then maybe I could get some famous New York magazine to assign me to write a story about them. Probably that famous New York magazine would then not publish the story, but at least they would pay me. Probably.

A moot point, it turns out, since the nexus of cat art is actually located in New Zealand, where the dancing and painting cat phenomena are under rigorous investigation by the Museum of Non-Primate Art (MONPA). Upcoming exhibits at the MONPA also include “Termites: Their Art & Architecture” (”A Cross-Sectional Aesthetic Analysis of Australian Magnetic Termite Structures”), and “Hanks & Coils: The Shaping and Placement of Canine Defecatory Structures” (with a “multimedia” component); but if you look at their page on research funding, their commitment to cat aesthetics really stands out. Grants are available for scholars seeking to:

• Consider psychomotor disturbances including cerebral dysphoria and cephalagia in immature Spanish cats following flamenco shoulder dancing;
• Formulate an effective, non-toxic, and easily administered digestible florescent dye to enable owners to examine the nocturnal marks made by male cats during territorial spray marking activity, for examples of aesthetic intent; or
• Undertake a study of the dermatology of the feline paw as it relates to the over-use of scented acrylics and resulting post-painting morbidity of the cuticle with a view to developing a paw protection device.

But before you apply, dear readers, you should probably give the MONPA a call and make sure the listings are still current. Because that page also advertises a grant for “the collection and preservation of Road-runner (Geococcyx californicus) splays for the MONPA 2002 biennial Avian Dejecta exhibition in Riga,” and one imagines that this ship has long sailed, and been duly sung about in some published or unpublished Postcard from Latvia. Avian dejecta, by the way, is just what you think it is.

In addition to housing the MONPA, New Zealand is also the home country of Burton Silver and Heather Busch, whose other collaborations include a book on “kokigami,” which they claim to be an ancient Japanese art of folded paper penis-decorations. Their detailed kokigami web site includes: a sizing guide (”For accurate sizing the organ should be firmly pressed against the screen image”); sample dialogues to go with the different designs (squid, moth, fire engine, etc.); and user testimonials, only one of which I can bring myself to reproduce:

…we’ve made up all the kokis and have them arranged in a big wooden bowl my grandmother gave us for our wedding. She’d probably roll over in her grave if she knew what we use it for but they look really attractive and the kids like to play with them as finger puppets.

Melissa, Santa Rosa.

(You can see the horse design here.)

Dear readers! Here is my parting question for you: what is up with New Zealand? First Kamal, and now this. I mean, I guess all these things are jokes (all of them? even the dancing cats?)… but they look so real! And labor-intensive! Maybe it’s one of those weird micro-effects of our new global economy: satirists can be hired for especially cheap in New Zealand? So now they have a local industry of constructing parodies which are so elaborate and “realistic” as to achieve Baudrillardian hyperreality and cease to be merely parodic? Is this valuable evidence that the “supply side” really does dictate economic growth? Or just another receding horizon, distracting us from… the original problem?

Tags: animals, birds, cats, comparative literature, dissertation, n+1, New Zealand, publications

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 5:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.