A Dog’s Death: Art as a Work of Mourning

Abstract

Dogs are the animals who have co-habitated with human beings for the longest period of time. They take part in the building of the modern world and cannot be separated from human culture. They are a challenge for every species-centered conception of history and thus call for a relational (art) historiography. However, the meeting of humans and dogs is often asymmetrical, and especially the death of a dog is usually not considered as severe as a human death. That makes it sometimes hard for humans to adequately deal with the loss of a beloved companion animal. However, some artists who have a deep personal relationship with dogs find ways to mourn their deaths in different artistic media in ways that bear witness to the singularity of their lost lives: In Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s surreal video installation, “The Hour of Prayer” (2006), a woman tries to come to terms with the death of her dog by becoming an artist in Africa. Media artist Kathy High speaks for/with the voice of her dead dog, Lily, in a video called “Lily Does Derrida” (2000–2012)—perhaps referring to Derrida’s collection of texts “The Work of mourning.” A different approach tells of Taiwanese photographer Yun-Fei Tou: He does not work with or about his own companion animals but has spent the last 5 years documenting shelter dogs’ final minutes of life right before they are euthanized. He spends time with them to make the last (and usually also the first) photographic portrait of them in order to honor the nameless animals. As we all know, the other is crucial to define the self. In this way, the dogs in these artworks also function as means for constituting human identity. Thus, the videos and photos perhaps tell more about the artist’s beliefs and ideas concerning the other animals than about the dogs themselves. However, they also connect, in both symbolic and literary terms, two different worlds of perception that existed in a network of relationships and that generated the identities of the artist as well as that of the portrayed dog. In the proposed essay, I show how these artistic eulogies aim to visualize the interconnectedness of all creaturely lives.

The misery of keeping a dog ... is his dying so soon.

—Sir Walter Scott (quoted in Mangum 2007, 25)