Bookpile 8: From here to there
Bookpile is short posts on Fridays about what I’m reading now and what I’m liking about it. This week, it’s the catalogue which accompanied Canada's 2003 entry at the Venice Biennale, Jana Sterbak's dog-based video work, From Here to There.
From Here to There is the name of both the catalogue of a work, and the work itself. The work itself was a piece of video art which represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2003. The catalogue is a smallish, black hardcover book with a few texts, some images, and some blurry video stills, the whole assemblage repeated three times, first in French, then English, then Italian. The video installation was a work by Czech-born, Canadian artist Jana Sterbak, whose work I first encountered in the enormous and mandatory contemporary art course taken by every first-year student in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Montreal's Concordia University, or at least that was the case circa 2005 when I landed in that lecture hall. And thank goodness I did, or when would I have been introduced to Sterbak's work? Eventually, likely, given her fame, but how wonderful to discover her at such an impressionable and formative moment. Sterbak is perhaps more famous for her dress made of flank steaks, circa 1987, one of her many engagements with themes of body and time.
But From Here to There is different. While Sterbak uses video and technology in other works, the bodily experience in this particular piece is not that of a human, but of a dog. The short video clips shown in Venice for the Biennale, and the images reproduced in the catalogue, were taken by means of a miniature camera worn on the head of a terrier puppy. Today, that's pretty prosaic. Tiny cameras are everywhere. At the beginning of the 2000s, there was something profoundly exciting about being able to see the world from the viewpoint of a dog. The essays in the book place From Here to There into the context of both Sterbak's previous work, and into the context of technical innovation in filmmaking. The stills offer a slightly uncanny view of the world, mapping not what the dog is seeing, but, as John W. Locke argues in his essay, an idea of the movements and attention span of Stanley, the terrier puppy. As Locke writes, "[c]ollecting images with a Jack Russell terrier does not have a John Cage level of randomness, but it is somewhat like having a jazz improvisation group" (p. 101).
From Here to There is viewable on digital loan at archive.org, with the use of an account.
