Jonathan Miles
‘DOG-MAN-WORK’

I grew up in the 1950’s in an area dominated by the mining industry. Life was divided by the relationship of the space inside the house and the space outside in the form of streets. The threshold between the two spaces was the stepping- stone on the front door. These stones were polished on a weekly basis. I think that this was a symbolic sign that the house was clean inside. The problem of the space outside was that dogs appeared to dominate this space. Adults would carry sticks in order to beat these dogs if they attacked, but the dogs had attacked many of the children in the area I lived in. I was attacked twice and then I started to carry a hatchet. The dogs left me alone once I had started to brandish this axe. If I was given clay to work with at school I invariably made sculptural representations of dogs because they dominated the space I lived in. So I guess that my fear of dogs was the beginning of becoming an artist.

I often dream of dogs, even though I only tend to see dogs on a lead now. The dogs I see in my dreams tend to be hunting or wild dogs, so there is always an air of menace in these dreams. I think that I associate open space with dogs. I can never experience the open without a dog entering the frame at some point. This could be seen as the result of straightforward trauma. I try and work out what these dogs represent at the deeper level of my psyche, but then I think that it is too literal. In some ways dogs represent the deepest source of terror in my life because this is what they did. Of course I also experience dogs curled up in front of fires, totally inert and harmless. I used to like talking and stroking these dogs of the inner sanctum. These dogs appeared to morphe themselves around the human world. I used to imagine that the other dogs hated these dogs for their compliance with humans.

At school there was always several children who we used to think had a common nature to the dogs of the open space. We tried to keep away from these children. At play- time they would always be fighting and attempting to draw blood. They always attempted to isolate other children in order to attack them. I used to wonder if they had a secret dialogue with dogs in order to learn all their techniques. Sometimes we would shout at these children and even call them dogs.

All of this might seem strange to those who live in a world in which dogs are controlled. They might even think that this is all a fiction drawn from an over imaginative childhood, but I have scars to show that it is not imagination. I paint these scenes of children and dogs because this is what I experienced. Of course it has taken on the features of imaginative reconstruction but this is obvious. Painting for me has to be rooted in memory and memory sits equally on the edges of both reality and imagination. When I see dogs now tucked up behind the heel of their owner I am not really looking at a dog anymore. For instance the last thing you can imagine is these dogs been feed raw meat dripping with blood. When humans domesticate animals they extract pleasure from them and make them comfortable instead.

Even though I have experienced terror because of the dogs of my childhood I think that I now secretly admire these dogs for not wanting to enter the human world. I think that they lived a life that was true to their nature and for this reason we could call them dogs. At least they lived with the open sky above and could follow all the scents of the wind. In this condition dogs do not hide themselves. They do everything in the open. If we call someone an animal it is because they show too much of their raw nature. Someone was talking to me recently about a sexual relationship they had been in and they said that it was purely animal. This term might indicate that they felt disgust, as if they had been entirely raw in their acts and conduct. The other mark of this term is of course the lack of speech, or even the impossibility of being able to say anything.

When I was young I watched humans with their dogs and noticed a level of intimacy with their dogs that they would never afford to their partners or children. They would rub their ears; whisper things and exchange noises, look at every sign of affection and in all totally live in the space determined by the dog’s gestures. I think that I understood that humans felt at ease in a world dictated by gesture rather than a world regulated through language.

When I started at art school I was questioned about my desire to paint dogs. I think that many of the tutors felt that I should move on and connect more strongly with the world I lived in but I always felt that this presumed the ability to know a world in common in the first place. I used to say that I understood everything through dogs. I hated having to paint from the model because I felt that the model was a form of tamed nature. Being naked for me meant the possibility of animal exchange so I hated this civilising procedure. To place a plumb line in between the model and the line of vision seemed to be at the heart of this transformation of the other into measure. The whole civilising enterprise for me was based upon procedures of measure. I wanted to make an art that would dissemble measure in order to create a fraught and wild order of the space of encounter.

I remember a tutor showing me a book on Titian with all the different paintings in which dogs played an important role. In a way Titian really entered into the world of dogs because there is such a spectrum in his work. I am not sure how evident this factor is, but I tend to gravitate to those paintings in which there is a depiction of dogs. Although he did not necessarily paint many dogs, I also see Francis Bacon as a great dog painter. Most of his actual paintings of dogs date from 1952 and they show dogs alone in space. I think that the painting I really like though is from 1953 called “Man Kneeling in Grass” which depicts a crouching, naked man caught in a sharply illuminated space. I think that he understood in this painting that he could incorporate the sensation of the dog world in ways that would probe the human figure as a site of visceral intensity. In this respect I think that he painted human beings as if they might also be dog like, vicious, wild, howling, naked, in the open, enslaved, tamed, humiliated, beaten, and above all alive to sensation.

Someone told me about a conference in Canada which was attended by a number of New York art critics including Benjamin Buchloh. He was discussing the regressive tendencies of post-modernist painting and in particular a painting by Eric Fischl that depicted a naked women and a large dog. He said that it was obvious that the dog was in the process of preparing to sodomize the women. Many of Fischl’s paintings included depictions of dogs but this was quite a starting analysis of this painting because it introduces such a wild possibility into the reading of the painting. Buchloh had proceeded then to read the painting as if this was this case and in turn used this reading to denounce the painting as obscene. Thus post-modernity was a form of regression because it betrayed the speculative mission of the modern project. In a sense Buchloh had introduced a relationship between a dog and a woman as standing for the relationship between post-modernity and modernity, the wild boys wishing to sodomize the civilised in an act of regressive and unthinkable terror. We might think that this might indicate a whole series of unconscious projection on the part of Buchloh rather than anything that was implicated in Fischl painting but when dogs are in evidence we can expect troubled reading.

I have this image of a film by Kurosawa, Yojimbo in which a samurai (a man without proper name) enters into a warring town. The main street is deserted as all the two factions are hidden inside. Suddenly a dog appears holding a severed hand in his mouth and as he runs past the samurai an uncanny sign of what might follow is presented. In this respect the dog serves to propel the narrative forward through the force of sudden interruption, the dog serves a messenger of a heightened sense of the reality principle.

I once had a dream about being shot. I was lying on the ground with my eyes closed. I think that the bullet had entered into my gut region but the pain was diffuse and all over which caused me to twitch and shudder. I generally think of the moment of death being like a shudder, in a way the last emission of a life force that runs through every human being. This level of our being might be seen as a striation over which we compose a smooth surface in order to conceal the fact that we shudder. I could go on about the sensation of this shudder but I felt I was dying and I could feel an accumulation of cold sweat of my face. Then I had a sensation of my face being licked. The only other time my face had been licked was by a lover once, in fact she licked my entire body, but it was my face being licked that was memorable. It was a like this sensation, so it is infiltrated a strange pleasure into my body. I think that I lost consciousness so that is my last recollection before awaking in a hospital bed. I was told that I had been found with a dog standing over me licking my face. They said that I was lucky to have survived. I was surprised by this dream because it altered my feeling about dogs. I wondered why the dog had come to me as I was drifting away from life? Equally had the dog helped me ease back into the direction of life? I think that it was lucky that a dog had found me rather than a human being. Could you imagine a human being licking the face of another in order to save their life? Somehow dogs appear to know things that humans appear incapable of understanding.

I have heard people say in circumstances in which they have been treated badly that they personally wouldn’t treat a dog in the same way. “I am not a dog,” someone might protest as if it is expected that dogs should be treated with indifference or even badly. Being treated like a dog is thus a kind of existential bottom line for the human being. This mode of protest reveals something about our understanding of freedom as something that is granted or conferred upon us as an exterior dimension of our life. Thus we might often talk about certain countries being freer than others. If we protest about being treated like a dog it is because we feel we are being treated without ethical measure.

Un Chien Andalou, or An Adalusian Dog by Luis Brunuel and Salvador Dali was a film that was like the bite of a dog. It was said that Andulsian dogs howl when someone dies so the question of the film revolves around the question of who or what dies. The structure of the film creates a disjunctive logic in which the relationship between the sexes is played out within a heightened series of vignettes or dream like passages. The howl itself signifies the convulsive force of passion that erupts with the striated narrative which itself is untamed by rationalising logic dictated by the structure of speech. Behind all acts of speech there is the basic and wild sound of the howl, which is the vehicle of primal becoming. The howl is the cut within narrative flow just as the cut of the eye is the rupture of optical continuity.

There is a painting by Robert Moscowitz of a dog howling at the moon. There is just the dog, the moon and a vast amount of empty space. The painting might be viewed as a form of Zen meditation on the reality of the true nature of reality. The dog will never confuse his howl with the moon itself even though with each appearance of the full moon he howls. Both moon and dog give themselves to the other in equal measure. It is a sparse painting because nothing gets in the way of the clarity created out of moon-dog-howl residing as such. There is Goya painting in the Prado called ‘Drowning Dog’ which appears to anticipate both the figure-ground relationship and the stark use of image that are such a powerful feature of Moscowitz’s work.

When I was young I used to visit a house, which was also the home of a boxer dog called Mitzy. It was a large dog and when I was given the lead to walk him he would literally drag me along. Somehow everything revolved around Mitzy. My younger sister was extremely close to Mitzy and when we left the area he pined everyday for several weeks for her. This makes me think of a photograph of Salgado of a dog in a cemetery sitting on the grave- stone of a deceased owner day after day.

When I was at college I had a studio and living space in a large series of squatted buildings. There was a large garage like space below which had formerly been used as a delivery bay. One day I found that a man was living there with five dogs. In some ways the sleeping space resembled a nest with all the bodies intertwined together. The space smelt of urine and faeces. The man had long creasy hair and never spoke. Within a few days of living in this space other people coined the term dog man. I think that all the dogs were strays he had found on his travels in the local streets. Apparently he had been employed in the University as a technician but had undergone a strange withdrawal from human contact. His withdrawal from speech appeared to correspond with his process of accumulating dogs around him. It was a strange sight to see this tramp-like figure with five dogs attached to him with rope and knotted string. When he was looking elsewhere I would snap photographs. After I had almost a hundred photographs of him. In some ways it felt like I was stalking him. He must have been aware of me but he never indicated anything to me. I put up the most interesting images in my studio space and from there I started to paint this strange hybrid pack of dogs and man.

I do not think that my tutors liked my paintings. They felt that painting dogs was an attempt to create my own arena outside of the prevailing discourses of painting. Not that I had an outsider attitude about paintings but rather it appeared to fuel my desire to do so. I used to say that dogs had both been initiation into the experiences of terror and tenderness. I felt that if I stretched my arms out to the furthest extent on either side I could feel the tingle of both these sensations as the extremes of my sensation of living. Of course this is just an extension of the power of my imaginative understanding relative to the working of memory. I found the words terror and tenderness had a wonderful resonance for me, so I would whisper them to myself constantly. It was so easy to say that my paintings were really about finding a centre between terror and tenderness. I have to say that this was not a fake way of talking about my work but it was to some extent a form of evasion because even without these words I still wanted to paint dogs. I guess painting dog man had a great symmetry for me because I was a kind of dog man as well. Anyway I called this series Dog-Man-Work. I am not really sure what happened to Dog-Man. I guess it is hard to survive year after year living in those conditions When I look back I think that I looked at him as a kind of thing, or even composite thing, that in passing out of the social sphere in the proper sense of the world had aligned himself with the animal world. I think everyone felt disgust about the squalor that he lived in, rather than his withdrawal or refusal to speak. He was beyond reach or touch and because in other respects the fact that this was a cohesive company meant that he signified a different kind of limit within a world that was itself composed of those who understood themselves through a refusal to integrate with the social mainstream. Personally I think that I found it hard to really look at him and yet I spent two years making paintings of him. Perhaps it was the impossibility of entering his world that was the source of my fascination with his image. I found that everyone appeared to find these paintings interesting but I cannot remember anyone wishing to buy one so they have remained stacked in a corner of my studio. I feel that there is some fundamental difficulty with these paintings that I still cannot grasp.

If I think of Joseph Beuys and his performance in New York with a Coyote dog then I believe that everyone can identify with this work because his gesture of entering and leaving America in an Ambulance only to live in a caged space with them places him in an ethical space which has almost transcendental qualities. In this respect it is Beuys who becomes super-human because he has refused to enter the space of American civilisation but rather the space preceding it in which the ecology and order of beings retained a wholly different order. As a gesture we can thus understand a heroic aspect because of the attempt to disclose a condition that is now largely covered over by concrete. In this way Beuys is a symbolically potent figure, a history maker, and thus a leader of sorts, whereas I think that my paintings signified the condition of abject impotence and the very loss of forms and figures such as history. I am not trying to compare my work with Beuys in anyway. As an aside I think that people enter into that shamanic-myth provoking realm far too comfortably because it preserves the potential potency of the symbolic realm for us. I think that Beuys would have found dog man uncomfortable because there would have been no basis of a dialogue, no shared understanding of gesture and thus no possibility of play that would open a visual space of interaction and meaning. Beuys acts in such a way that made us all want to look at his image in order to be able, in some way, to hope for better things, even though we might otherwise mock such a possibility. With dog man you simply faced the worst, a type of zero point in which the working of culture was exempt. I still do not know what I am looking at with these paintings because I have little by way of a grasp of the way they look at me. I am still thrown by the way they might catch me in odds moments. I associate them with spikes. They will be eventually shown together I am sure but not in one of those smart “becoming-animal” shows that keep appearing everywhere. It is obvious that I have always been interested in difference rather than identity but I am feel that the way this theorisation has spread itself into the art world says everything about the art world rather than the nature of becoming that is being addressed. I am not anti-theory but I distrust the packages that theory is mobilised in order to create categories of understanding. Ultimately we should look toward more difficult spaces in which work is shown rather than making everything smooth and thus possible. In a strange way it feels as though it is now more difficult to show my work despite the fact that a theoretical assemblage would have opened out the space for its reception. Ultimately it is just one more thing to feel resistant to.

I read a quote of Leon Golub who said that “now is the time for dogs.” Dogs are a persistence motif in his later work. In his painting ‘Snake Eyes 11’ Golub uses a quotation from Nietzsche, “You have given a name to my pain and call it dog.” In another painting called ‘Scratch’ he quotes a line from the poet W.H. Auden “In the nightmare of the dark, all the dogs of Europe bark.” Overall his work displays an unsettling energy, balanced on the edge of the different levels of the economy of violence. At times I feel undone by his work, they are heavy, dark, cruel, but his dogs stalk in ways that are completely convincing within the post-world setting evoked in these canvasses.

Sometimes when I am sitting at home late at night I start to write down things about my work and attitude. I have never been asked to lecture or give a seminar about my work but this does not stop me from trying to work out what I might say if the occasion arose. As you grow older it is easier to accept the lack of success. I think that it makes you occupy who you are more fully. I am far less verbal than I used to be which in some way relates to this situation so this makes the imaginary idea of writing a lecture appear more remote. There are a few things that have stuck with me, for instance, I always wish to state that I am not an exotic painter, nor an outsider painter, or for that matter an allegorical painter but as I compose such a list of what I am not then I start to realise I am not very much at all other than indeed a painter. I then start to think of what I might have brought to painting and this begins to make me anxious because, even though my influences might be evident, what I am achieving as a painter is not necessarily distinct. Following from this I could never claim to be being a “painters” painter even though I am attracted to such a possibility. This should of course lead me into talking about issues of singularity but I am not attuned enough to the ways in which such things are articulated. Instead I am drawn to thinking of myself as an odd painter. For instance I am strongly influenced by Titian and Bacon but I also look at Chinese Classical painting and Zen paintings. Sometimes more search for paintings of dogs have lead me to look at things such as Tibetan painting so I am all over the place in the way I have evolved as a painter. I have an attitude that constantly leads me to break with a certain kind of look within my work so although my work has explored a singular relationship to subject matter it has moved around a lot in stylistic terms. Yet this state of affairs is not an outcome of a failure to find myself as a painter, whatever that such an idea appears to indicate, rather it is keeping alive a desire not to settle into something. I think that I just want to make paintings that might unsettle so I have to keep unsettling myself within the constancy of painting. Dogs are just the first staging post for such an act, in this sense I do not see them as my subject matter, but rather as a cipher for a quest. Every time I reach this point I do not want to go on with the thought process because it feels pointless. I wish that I was more articulate but this evades me because I do not really give the process of articulation enough attention. Everything that is, has a type of design that attracts the look of the other, we might call this an encoded intelligence, and within this look we might decipher relational coherence, because without this everything would touch us as strangeness, which is not generally the case. We codify information with such speed and agility that we do not even notice the fact that such processing might have occurred. The reason that we have seemingly introduced dogs into our world so readily is that we notice their ability to process information so acutely. We arrive home and find that our dog as been sitting at the door expecting us back even though we might vary the times of arrival constantly. In this way we acknowledge this mode of intelligence by calling dogs are best friend because they compliment our own powers but I do not feel that such symmetry can be assumed. My paintings explore the fault line in this imaginary construction, because such a construction, articulates something about the cultural and symbolic process that blocks our sense. It is this that stops us from being alert, a power that we often invest in dogs by way of compensation. In a way I want to paint alert paintings, alive to themselves and the space from which they issue forth.

Perhaps it is ironical but there is a photograph by Daido Moriyama of a stray dog in a street that has influenced me more than any painting. It is something to do with the way it captures this corner of the eye feeling, both in the way it is photographed and in the way the dog looks back. The image itself appears to transmit a raw elemental type of energy, it is grainy, dark, askew, qualities that eat into the actual; plane of representation. Apparently it was photographed near a U.S. Air Force base and started to serve as an emblem for his work as a photographer, or at least this is how it appears. I would love to have made a painting like this, a painting that appears both to exemplify but also condense everything at a single point. This photograph serves as both possibility and failure for me so I keep it on my wall to make me feel alive to how both these two conditions might co-exist and contest within creative orientation.