Casey Caroline - Cat is art spelled wrong : essays

CAT IS ART SPELLED WRONG

Copyright 2015 by Coffee House Press

Cover design by Dante Carlos

Interior design by Dante Carlos and Kirkby Gann Tittle

This book has been produced in partnership with the Walker Art Center.

Coffee House Press books are available to the trade through our primary distributor, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, .

Coffee House Press is a nonprofit literary publishing house. Support from private foundations, corporate giving programs, government programs, and generous individuals helps make the publication of our books possible. We gratefully acknowledge their support in detail in the back of this book.

PERMISSION

Poem (As the cat) by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems Volume I, 19091939, copyright 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Cat is art spelled wrong / edited by Caroline Casey, Chris Fischbach, Sarah Schultz.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-56689-412-8 (eBook)

1. CatsHumor. 2. Internet videosHumor. I. Casey, Caroline, 1976editor. II. Fischbach, Chris, 1972 editor. III. Schultz, Sarah, editor.

PN6231.C23C345 2015

818'.602dc23

2015014710

FIRST EDITION | FIRST PRINTING

CAT IS ART SPELLED WRONG

CONTENTS

WE WENT TO THE FIRST Internet Cat Video Festival as an office. Wed been going to Open Field, the Walker Art Centers happy mutant smorgasbord for outdoor, madcap, and inspired fun, all summer, and this seemed like the perfect way to cap the season. Though in Minneapolis in August, you dont need much of an excuse to spend an evening outside on a blanket with friends. But that night was something that no oneour small group from Coffee House, the Walker curators and programmers, the media in attendance, the people who came in full cat regaliaexpected. It was magical. What did it mean to feel joy in sync with 10,000 other people? How did that happen? By the time Henri, le Chat Noir had been awarded the Golden Kitty (the Oscar of cat videos), we knew we wanted to answer those questions.

Theres something about cat videos. Theres something irresistible about them that doesnt transfer to dog videos, or parakeet videos (though baby goat videos might come close). And theres something about experiencing a phenomenon and pleasure particular to the internet, offline. But whats so special about watching what is essentially YouTube with a few thousand strangers? Why do that, anyway? Because people watch cat videos togetherthey have in Minneapolis (three times now), Honolulu, Providence, Los Angeles, Athens, London, and other cities. More than 100 times, all told.

Over the past three years, Coffee House Press has been collaborating with the Walker Art Center to answer these questions. We put together a list of writers we loved, we thought a lot about Carl Wilsons Lets Talk About Love (our urtext), and we Kickstarted the project with the help of a few hundred supporters. What came together was as unexpected and delightful as that first night watching Keyboard Cat and Kittens Inspired by Kittens and Boots and Cats. Its about cat videos as poetics and politics. Its about the boundaries of what art is, about spectacle and the communal and the personal, and about all of the places those things overlap. Its about an eighteenth-century cat, and Felix the Cat, and contemporary art, and #catsofinstagram.

As Will Braden, creator of Henri, le Chat Noir, said in our first meeting, the interesting thing about cat videos is that theyre really about people.

Here are some of our favorite people on what it means to be a person at this moment in time, i.e., a person who watches cat videos.

Coffee House Press

CAT IS ART SPELLED WRONG

MARIA BUSTILLOS

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! Theres 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 Hamlets 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 doesnt work at all if you should substitute turtle or chicken or cow for cat, here. Even the estimable dog doesnt 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 hes 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.