Art Lies, Volume 66, Summer 2010 Page: 89
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L & R. Hills Snyder, Cat Tois, 2010; installation views, Three Walls, San Antonio
SAN ANTONIO
Hills Snyder
Three WallsCompelling Cat Tois (pronounced "ca-twa," just so you know) is an abound-
ing Francophilia that purposely tempers the rampant intensification of
U.S. jingoism and imperialism unleashed after 9/11, what Hills Snyder
describes as a "hooray for our side" mentality. Like patois, which refers to
hybrid dialects that poach from other forms of speech and are considered
vulgar and/or nonsensical, its feline counterpart Cat Tois underscores how
the United States revels in its own imbecility, mindlessly regurgitating the
violences of its past through the promulgation of the spectacle, rather than
engaged and sustained political discourse; simultaneously, Cat Tois enunci-
ates a novel grammar of the senses that eschews predetermined paths and
allegiances, opting instead for semantic nomadism.
Various landmarks provisionally map out this "psychogeography."
The candlelit bookshelf, containing a mini-replica of the Eiffel Tower and
French fries for hungry spectators, conceptually guides the show, providing
a corridor between and among themes. The individual and her relationship
to desire, perception, psychoanalysis, mysticism, mass consumerism and
modernity are among the themes, presented through a select repertoire of
writings by French authors, or authors who engage in French intellectual
traditions, such as Michel Foucault, Michel Houellebecq, Arthur Rimbaud
and Henry Miller. A tray of absinthe and accoutrements reinforce the
themes of mysticism and the sensory, as well as the mindless mimesis of
the past in the present through its mirror backdrop. Opposed by social con-
servatives, absinthe, or the "green fairy," evokes the bohemian milieu of
Parisian intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
A French record album playing in the background entitled Sanguinem
Mittbre ("Music to Sip Absinthe By"), whose childlike chime melody isjuxtaposed with haunting string arrangements (think scary clown music),
imparts overall effects of synesthesia and the carnivalesque. Standing
nearly nine feet tall, another mini replica of the Eiffel Tower is composed
of various patterns of Persian rugs, recycled from a previous show, and
illuminated by an ominous pink light. The two shadows cast upon the adja-
cent wall through strategic lighting reference the Eiffel's doppelganger,
the Twin Towers. On a lighter note, the tower also doubles (or quadruples,
rather) as a cat toy, amenable to posing kitties.
However, in participatory or relational art such as Cat Tois, the diagno-
sis is usually that topical and political action is constricted to and therefore
neutralized by the elite and ephemeral space of the artwork, so as only
to reproduce what Jean Baudrillard has called the "DEGREE XEROX OF
CULTURE," a mere reiteration of the spectacle-that which Cat Tois sets
out to critique, despite its adamant refusal of teleology or ultimate objec-
tives. What Snyder does most effectively, though, is underscore that while
the War on Terror is dizzyingly complex and puzzling, as mirrored in his
myriad strings of signification, it is rationalized in popular culture through
a benighted "twin," the symbolic economy of nationalism and consumer-
ism. Cat Tois indeed points out that there is something catawampus in the
U.S. nation-state.
Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson is a PhD Candidate in American Studies at the
University of Minnesota.89 ART LIES NO. 66
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Gupta, Anjali. Art Lies, Volume 66, Summer 2010, periodical, 2010; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228031/m1/91/?q=%22Puleo%2C+Risa%22: accessed June 8, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .