I dropped a stick at the side of the road

The body of work that makes up ‘I dropped a stick at the side of the road’, Raphael Linsi’s first solo exhibition at Oslo10, started with a cat, or more precisely, with the absence of a cat. On a trip to Porto last July, Linsi found the artist friends he was visiting in a state of emergency. Their beloved pet, Penha, was missing, and they were frantically searching for her. It was a side to the couple, who he describes as “Sensitive but tough”, that Linsi had never seen before, and it sparked in him an interest in scrutinising the human/domestic animal relationship: a relationship which first began somewhere between 15,000 and 50,000 years ago with the domestication of wolves. On a return visit to the city, he arrived with a video camera and spent extended periods of time with Penha, hoping to develop a bond with her. The attempt was largely unfruitful. Penha more-or-less ignored Linsi, seemingly indifferent to her key roll in his artistic research.

There is an obvious absurdity to trying to make a cat love you. One that reminds me in passing of the works of the Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader, in particularly his repeated efforts to defy gravity in Falling I (where he films himself falling off a roof) and Falling II (riding a bicycle into a canal). What links Jan Ader and Linsi and makes their attempts intriguing is not the silliness of their activities but the seriousness with which they partake in them. More success was to be had in Berlin with Omar, the pet of another of Linsi’s friends. That Omar is a dog should come as no surprise to any dog owners reading this. The war between canine and feline owners, largely conducted these days via Internet memes, is based on the premise that dogs are either loyal and loving, or stupid and gullible. By the same logic cats are either intelligent and independent or pretentious, unfeeling assholes depending on who you talk to. Whatever the truth, Omar was more susceptible to Linsi’s charms and their interspecies alliance was the starting point for the seven works in this exhibition.

– Chloe Stead