(via blog: A Friend in Need)
The previously blogged Vengeful Tiger, Glowing Rabbit post lead me to this painting. Pulling this from a blog where it is accompanied by the following reflections:
Most of them appear to have their own separate personailities. The one on the far left is a chuckling son of a bitch(literally), he’s just there to have a good time and pretend he’s people, then we go into the more serious players like the one in the middle. He’s not there to fuck around, he wants your dog money so he can go and gamble it away on the people races. That’s what dogs would do in this parallel universe, right?
The writer of Vengeful Tiger… has a different perspective:
Cassius Coolidge’s famous painting of dogs playing poker, “A Friend in Need” (circa 1903 and still going strong), typifies the retrograde consciousness that a more enlightened cultural public will, perhaps, someday transcend.
Coolidge’s weird image has been reproduced endlessly in cigar ads, on calendars, on throw rugs, and in velvet. Dogs cannot sit on chairs around a card table in the way that Coolidge depicts; they would not want to. But Coolidge has made them.
The punch line of this painting, and the ethical harm of it, is the disjunction between what is depicted and our realization that dogs do not smoke cigars or gamble. Dumb dogs. But we have made them do so. Clever us. It reminds me of the Web site that suggests that if a cat could talk, what she would say is, “I can has cheezburger?” (LOL!) Coolidge reifies the fantasy that ours is the best of all possible worlds, and that other species could do no better than to emulate humans, however ridiculous they might seem in so doing, and however foreign our humanity may be to their animality.
I would be less offended by Coolidge if he, or other artists, also created art that involved human animals in the guise and context of nonhuman animals (and did so without casting aspersion on the “swinish,” “beastly” humans so represented)—that is, if there were a reciprocity that bespoke a sincere desire to broach the species barrier and see how the other half lives. But that wouldn’t sell many cigars.
My perspective? I’m not taken in by the painting. It does, however, remind me of this observation in Ecce Canis:
…the dog was often taken as the ideal test subject not just because of the relative similarity of its internal anatomy to ours, but also because its expressions of pain or displeasure are for us so easy to read and understand.
Which is to say: painterly experimentation on dogs like this works, because a naturalistic rendering of canine faces still allows us to interpret the intended character.