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Hide and Seek: Puppies Puppies •Mousse Magazine

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Hibernateand Seek: Puppies Puppies •Mousse Magazine × Share on:TropicalHomeWell-nighIssues Subscribe Newsletter Ipad Edition Advertise Publishing AgencyTropicalArchive Filter: Order: Most recent Oldest Category: CONVERSATIONS CURATORS ESSAYS EXHIBITIONS INTERVIEWS OTHERS PUBLISHING REVIEWSTropicalSearch:TropicalUsername Password Remember Me Mousse Magazine Search Follow Us Facebook Instagram Pinterest Twitter Archive Previous Shohei Shigematsu: Flexing Landscapes Next Empathy and Contradictions: Eric BaudelaireTropical1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Lord of the Rings Ring, 2014 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, Detroit Minion Performance, 2015 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, Detroit Minion Performance, 2015 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, Detroit Minion Performance, 2015 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, DetroitUntriedinstallation view at What Pipeline, Detroit, 2015 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, DetroitUntriedBrain, 2014 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, Detroit Two Faces, 2015 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, Detroit My Last Breath surpassing turning 22, 2011 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, Detroit Toothbrushes (Green), 2014 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, DetroitUndecorousM&M Shirt, 2014 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, Detroit Previous Next CONVERSATIONS Mousse 57Hibernateand Seek: Puppies Puppies Share Facebook Linkedin Pinterest TwitterTropical1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Lord of the Rings Ring, 2014 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, Detroit Minion Performance, 2015 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, Detroit Minion Performance, 2015 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, Detroit Minion Performance, 2015 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, DetroitUntriedinstallation view at What Pipeline, Detroit, 2015 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, DetroitUntriedBrain, 2014 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, Detroit Two Faces, 2015 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, Detroit My Last Breath surpassing turning 22, 2011 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, Detroit Toothbrushes (Green), 2014 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, DetroitUndecorousM&M Shirt, 2014 Courtesy: the versifier and What Pipeline, Detroit Tenzing Barshee and Forrest (husband of Puppies Puppies) in conversation   The work of Puppies Puppies is often triggered by a unrepealable push-and-pull dynamic between that which is intimately tropical and that which is far away, removed. For example, the versifier relinquished their name, effacing the idea of authorship, but their chosen identity is that of young dogs, an unprepossessing well known for marking any territory versus its largest judgment. Puppies’ works are usually readymade, sourced from the Internet, referencing the personal ideas and experiences of the artist, and tied to cultural and industrial production. There is an speciality of assemblage, an order in which the versifier arranges these objects in an exhibition and over a sequence of exhibitions. Throughout this narrative the versifier is hyper-present, as much as they disappear overdue a convoluted structure of signs and pathways—a maze, maybe. When I sent Puppies an interview request, I received a reply from their husband, Forrest, saying, “Puppies has asked me to handle interviews as a kind of hired performer. Is it alright if I wordplay your questions well-nigh them as myself, the artist’s husband? Puppies asks that only gender-neutral pronouns are used to refer to them, and that I be referred to only as Forrest.” At first, I felt like a door was stuff shut. Then I understood that the witlessness of someone who’s intimately tropical with the artist, stuff their husband without all, playing the “distancing” role in their practice, was mirroring that push-and-pull dynamic that seems embedded in many of their works. They didn’t shut a door but unquestionably opened one; I was stuff invited into their maze. “Trust,” Forrest wrote later on, “is an important thing here, you’re right, both practically and conceptually—normally I don’t requite it easily, but considering of the artists you love, I do trust you.” Curious well-nigh these two actors, the versifier and their husband, and how their visitation is intertwined with their identity’s disappearance, I decided to return the trust, precisely considering they love each other.   TENZING BARSHEE: I’ve heard that you’ve enacted the role of the stand-in performer before, conducting IRL studio visits in Puppies’ place at your shared home. How did this wilt the way to be in touch with them? FORREST: First of all, I don’t interpret this part of Puppies Puppies’ practice as motivated by a personal wish for privacy or loftiness any increasingly than I interpret the use of the name Puppies Puppies that way, for example. I often segregate to read such decisions with the theorizing that they are artistically motivated. You are not Puppies Puppies, and I am not Puppies Puppies, and yet we are now, together, doing their originative “work,” which is a strange and interesting situation. TB: So what is the originative motivation overdue these decisions? F: Puppies Puppies approaches the question of “How do I wordplay a message initiating an interview” the way they would tideway an invitation to make an exhibition. The nomination to ask me to self-mastery the interview is like the nomination to hang a painting made by flipside versifier as a work by Puppies Puppies, say. I would, personally, connect this to Josef Strau’s The Non-Productive Attitude (2006) and the broader question of what an versifier is besides a producer of new things. TB: How do you finger well-nigh performing this role? F: It was strange at the whence of our conversation to be suddenly thrust into what quickly became a very emotional place plane without having met you in person—discussing my personal life, framing the work of flipside person in front of an important audience, plane comforting you in response to a feeling of rejection.Planeas you have rearranged our threads and tempered some of your questions, some intensity remains in my responses. But I appreciated the endangerment to finger as conscious as I did saying this the first time, just without waking up. It’s hard. I felt taxed once without our back-and-forth well-nigh my involvement. My role is complicated, but I well-set to it and don’t regret doing so. TB: Can you talk well-nigh how their creative process is unauthentic by emotion? F: I often learn things well-nigh my spouse’s emotional life first through the work of Puppies Puppies. For example, it wasn’t until I was halfway through writing the printing release for an exhibition they had this past summer that I realized they were considering raising a child. Coming to understand the exhibition led to a realization that may sooner have dramatic implications for my own life that completely shocked me, and that filled my heart with emotions. TB: To what extent does your representing them act as a sign, and what is stuff signified? F: I would say that the “lover” relationship is stuff used as a guiding image, to point to the perhaps overlooked intimacy of stuff interviewed, of reading an interview, of art as a social discipline. Already, we have both risked alienating each other, apologized to each other, tried to take superintendency of each other’s feelings. We are, intentionally or not, treacherous our true selves in the words we choose, the ideas we refer to, leaving the subtle fingerprints of our minds everywhere in this text. It’s not so unlike stuff married. TB: Can you say increasingly well-nigh Puppies’ visualization to at times hibernate unrepealable aspects of their identity, and at other times remove their presence altogether? F: Hiding has unchangingly been inside for Puppies Puppies. The first work I was overly given was a sealed brown-green plastic bag printed with a hush-up pattern of oak leaves used to siphon the sufferer persons of birds murdered by hunters. I only learned many months later that a sufferer oak leaf was subconscious inside. That leaf is as true an avatar for Puppies Puppies as I am writing this, or as their legal name might be. That said, on the one hand, Puppies makes incredibly personal work that is directly informed by the artist’s life, plane confessional. But on the other hand, there is a relentless move to remove some aspects of the artist’s human identity, to be camouflaged, or to disappear. There is flipside very early work that is quite important, Untitled (Antibacterial Gel Dispenser) (2012), which will squirt a dab of fluid onto the viewer’s hand. The fluid quickly evaporates. In a performance work, which was performed by a stranger in a mascot costume and spoken by a computerized voice, Puppies Puppies parenthetically described the work by saying, “I am the gel.” Disappearing can be read any number of ways. It does have a personal dimension—I can testify that the urge to disappear is a true and deep one in the person, too. But it is moreover an art historical image connecting many of Puppies’ most important sources—for example Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s piles and stacks wizened to nothing in early exhibitions, leaving an empty gallery, Sturtevant’s mimesis of existing artworks, or Bas Jan Ader’s In Search of the Miraculous (1975). For me, the act of not participating in an interview is moreover an insinuation of the artist’s death, of the desire to work in a way that does not require the physical, living presence of the artist. Puppies Puppies has expected to live transiently for as long as I have known them. TB: I’m sorry to hear this. F: Yes, thank you. This comes from a history of life-threatening illness, but moreover from a feeling of profound, scrutinizingly cosmic, bad luck. TB: How does the artist’s nomination to use the name Puppies Puppies, as well as their nomination to have you represent them, reflect in their usage of signs, which can be read as part of our shared conventions? F: Puppies Puppies sees conventions as opportunities for contradiction. So the nomination to take the name Puppies Puppies is indeed a disruption of normal patterns of signification within the field of trendy art. But the name is moreover a found object, well-timed from the urban legend of Kittens Kittens, a person who replaced their Facebook profile with uncounted photos of cats and then disappeared into the wilderness. Puppies Puppies was originally a Facebook profile, first name and last name are both required. So it is an invocation of a story of disappearance (and maybe plane madness). It is also, formally, an echo, a word repeated twice, which is flipside recurring image in Puppies Puppies’ work. It is moreover a ways of creating loftiness between the versifier and the person, of obscuring facts well-nigh the artist’s gender, ethnicity, age, and other things that can be unsupportable from a name. And, of course, Puppies are moreover an expressive image, an image of perpetual youth, of a kind of manic unhealthfulness that greets strangers by immediately falling in love with them, of total trust in the world and, then, intense vulnerability. TB: Can you say increasingly well-nigh the artist’s use of readymades? F: Puppies Puppies is a Duchampian versifier in the sense that they in some wholesale way see every work or gesture or worriedness that falls within their project as a readymade, as found. Puppies Puppies is an extremely emotional person who I think believes that the deepest things that they finger are moreover shared with many other people, and that empathy as a vehicle for understanding underlies the field of art. TB: How so? F: The weightier illustration I can think of is to therapy. My relationship with my therapist is a tightly intimate one. It’s just variegated from normal relationships considering it mostly flows in one direction; it isn’t reciprocal. But it is still based on bilateral trust and understanding and empathy. That’s what art is like. TB: It’s an uncanny liberty, which allows an versifier with unbearable vision, audacity, and preposterousness to treat basically anything as an object of their work. This makes every move a potential originative gesture, which can be either executed with a lot of precision, relatable and legible, or diffused into opacity. Is this uncertainty a vital part of such an art? F: I can’t think of many examples in the work of Puppies Puppies that are unquestionably zipped or opaque. I think of uncertainty as a barrier, a wall. Puppies Puppies, and much art that I’m interested in, might be increasingly like a maze, one with lots of entrances and no exits. I don’t think it’s true that it is nonflexible to talk well-nigh any specific aspects of Puppies Puppies. It’s just nonflexible to permanently resolve them. TB: When everything is potentially an originative gesture, the sequence of an artist’s moves can be viewed as a pattern, a geometric, utopian form, a strategy or algorithm perhaps. Aren’t those nature of a machine? F: Puppies Puppies is inevitably the work of a person born during the rise of the Internet. The rhythm of their life has been established by machines. In some ways, this contradicts the personal and the emotional. But the Internet, expressly in the beginning, was moreover tightly involved with intimacy and emotional connection between strangers. Sex with strangers reveals something very deep well-nigh human existence, and maybe coming to know some artists and their worriedness is like having sex with strangers. TB: I find it relieving that the idea of the unexclusive originative gesture is often reduced to the yellowish essentials of human activity: the bathroom, the toilet. In flipside interview Puppies said, “I tend to laugh well-nigh the idea that a kid is so excited when first learning how to use a toilet, that very emotional and heady moment where a child says to their guardian, ‘Look, I pooped!’ I think there’s the same ‘Look what I did!’ moment with art.” F: Yes, I think this is important and comes up a lot, for Puppies Puppies and for me, plane surpassing I knew them. It is my lot in life to unremittingly refer to Thomas Nagel’s “The Absurd” (1971). If you want to understand what makes humans unique, ask why we scarecrow to walk the twenty paces to the toilet when we all know that sooner entropy will yield to the heat death of the universe, or some other exotic nightmare. TB: One of the reasons overdue Puppies’ predominant use of the readymade form stems from their intention to counter the idea of uniqueness and preciousness of an artwork. But most objects they pick seem to be charged with the most precious and unique human quality there is: emotion. F: All readymades are both worldwide and rare, then, both precious and disposable. Like our toothbrushes—which are, in pairs, artworks—the increasingly time a person spends with the objects, the increasingly information they might have well-nigh us. Anything that lives with us gathers our DNA, hypothetically unbearable information to reproduce our persons and brains, though not our experiences. Human beings all over the world are telling each other “I love you” dozens of times a day, a perpetual, tyrannical roar that will reverberate for as long as humans are alive. When I tell Puppies Puppies that I love them, we both know how much and how little that means. TB: But Puppies takes it further. The idea that Duchamp’s urinal should unquestionably have been functional swims through Puppies’ practice like a red herring, leading us on, like yoyo in something that isn’t possible to be believed in; it doesn’t exist, or only paradoxically. It begins with the industrial or found object that is made and owned by joint society, which is introduced into the art sphere by declaration, and becomes elevated in status and value. Then the artwork crosses when into the sphere of very life, rhadamanthine an object of both terrains, suggesting a unity of both or the existence of life among the art objects that we make. This spin feeds both ways and seems rather utopian. Life constituting art and vice versa. F: The functional urinal is indeed a recurring idea, but I wouldn’t say that it’s a red herring. It’s a very touchable dream, an platonic for many works that are currently in use while moreover stuff artworks. For example, the exhibition at Balice Hertling this past summer featured a working shower that was misogynist for use by the public. I’ve just eaten dinner from a untried plate that is simultaneously an voluntary work and part of a larger configuration of objects that is flipside work. Our dog Spider-Man is at my feet, and she is gnawing on a plush untried and undecorous squid that she murders over and over then throughout the day. Lately, that object is precious to her for reasons vastitude my understanding, increasingly precious than all of the other balls and wreck and creatures littering the floor. That has nothing to do with the fact that it is an artwork by Puppies Puppies. TB: The signs used by the versifier are hands recognized, traded, and projected on. Aren’t these signs possibly the “functioning urinal”? F: I do stipulate that signs have utility, and that Puppies Puppies definitely does not distinguish between kinds of utility. A photograph of Gandalf using an Apple palmtop has as much utility as a urinal; it just has variegated utility. TB: Can you talk well-nigh your wedding? F: Puppies Puppies’ proposal to marry me is a performance work. They were wearing a smuggle Minion costume, and used a solid gold reproduction of the One Ring from the Lord of the Rings, inscribed in Elvish. This could be understood as alienating to me. Such a personal moment was given to the public, and the use of a costume could be a similar insertion of distance. But, for me, it landed as a double symbol of their humility in asking the question, positing them as a slave, as a jester, as Gollum, the wretch, who would never think of giving up their precious ring, except to me. Neither of us is at all sentimental well-nigh the institute of marriage, but the use of signs, I guess, widow a lot to certifying our plan to stay together indefinitely. It was cemented when we prestigious getting married. We had a party by the ocean, and I wore a yellow M&M costume while they wore a undecorous M&M costume. TB: What is Puppies’ obsession with the yellow-plus-blue-equals-green scheme? F:Oftenthe untried works relate to love, to the combination of two separate entities into a single new entity.Scrutinizinglyeverything in our little apartment, most of our clothes, so much is blue, yellow, or green. I think Puppies Puppies, perhaps quixotically, intends to mark this ubiquitous verisimilitude combination in the minds of their audience, so that any yellow flower with untried leaves in front of a undecorous sky will trigger an undertone to “Puppies Puppies” in the mind of the person who sees it. There is a series of works you might have seen that are our toothbrushes, unchangingly one undecorous and one yellow; I mentioned them before. The yellow skim is unchangingly mine, and the undecorous one unchangingly belongs to Puppies Puppies. TB: Then there is the recurrent motif of the binary: the pairs, the lovers, the colors. What well-nigh that? F: I do believe that Félix González-Torres was right, that two things that reverberate each other can be rightly understood as homoerotic. And anyway, Puppies Puppies is a Gemini.     Puppies Puppies Woof woof Puppies Puppies woof woof woof, woof woof woof woof woof. Woof woof woof woof woof woof. Woof, woof woof woof woof woof woof woof – woof woof, woof woof woof woof woof, woof woof woof woof. Woof woof, Woof Woof woof Woof, woof Woof Woof woof woof woof woof. Woof woof woof woof woof. Tenzing Barshee is an self-sustaining writer and curator currently living in Berlin. Last year he curated a two-person exhibition with Anne Speier and Judy Fiskin at wellwellwell, Applied Arts University Vienna, and the exhibition Le Mérite. 2014-2016 at Treize in Paris. He co-curated Rochelle Feinstein’s exhibition In Anticipation of Women’s History Month with Fabrice Stroun for Centre d’Art Genève, the group show Passo Dopo Passo with Molly Everett and Dorota Michalska for Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Torino, and Margaret Honda’s exhibition AnWordplayto ‘Sculptures’ with Fanny Gonella for Künstlerhaus Bremen. He’s a wordsmith for Starship magazine.     Originally published on Mousse 57 (February–March 2017)   Related Articles CONVERSATIONS The Long-Term Repository of Half-Ideas: Liam Gillick, Esther Schipper, and Nadine Zeidler (Read more) CONVERSATIONS Toxic Environments, Sensitivities, and Planetary Times: Susanne M. 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