Sean Paul

[Excerpt]

The meeting - just before the one at my studio where Elizabeth invited me to do a show at her gallery in September - was at the Odeon.  The meeting was really a dinner meeting between Elizabeth and the artist Gareth James that I was invited to join if I liked - I decided to go.

After dining on some chicken and a bit of small talk Elizabeth asked what my work was about, or something along those lines.  It may have been something more like “tell me about your work.”  I had not cleared this up during the first meeting.  I didn’t know what to say, so I looked to Gareth for insight.  Gareth went on to form a response that included at its core an impersonation of Werner Herzog’s voice-over narration in a scene from the film Grizzly Man (2005).  Gareth’s Herzogian enactment drew material from the last minutes of the Herzog / Treadwell film in which, while viewing the late bear lover Timothy Treadwell’s final video footage, taken hours before he and companion Amie Huguenard were killed and partially eaten by a grizzly bear, Herzog declares, over a tight shot of a grizzly’s eyes, his opposition to Treadwell’s identification with the grizzly bear, claiming to see nothing in the bear’s gaze but indifference and bored hunger:

And what haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy.   I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.  To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears.  And this blank stare speaks only of a half bored interest in food.  But for Timothy Treadwell this bear was a friend, a savior.

Gareth also included other very good comments.  I remember saying then that you could take everything Gareth had said and turn it into a great catalogue essay.  This all comes back to me during the writing of the press release. But what I really wanted to get to in this press release was my question…

There was also the idea put forward later by Elizabeth that Gareth could ghost write my press release - I said that I could ghost write my own, but if Gareth was willing to write one I would not turn down the idea.  I was against the notion of writing one at all and was thinking of making silver “press release” stickers instead.

I remember my fifth meeting with Elizabeth - four drinks - Elizabeth had a glass of white wine, I had three vodka tonics - it was nice.  There was a nice moment that reminded me of Gareth’s comments in meeting number two, when Elizabeth told me about how wonderful the television show The Dog Whisperer is.  This show which airs on the National Geographic channel is about unruly dogs that are transformed into well-behaved pets after the “dog whisperer,” Cesar Millan, teaches the pet owners how to be more dominant leaders and treat their pets less like people and more like dogs.

So my question is, what makes me think of Gareth’s “Grizzly Man” and Elizabeth’s “Dog Whisperer?”