The Paris Review – Do Dogs Know What Art Is?

Do dogs know what art is?

Oscar is a big, “free-spirited” Lab mix. My husband and I adopted him when he was just a few months old. We’ve lived together as a little family for over a decade. When Oscar was a puppy, I did a one-semester residency at Bard College. I used to walk Oscar off-leash on campus, and one afternoon he bounded up to what looked like, from a distance, a small pond. He got into the water—which seemed, in hindsight, a little shallow for a pond—and started splashing around. Within minutes, a furious campus security officer was running in our direction, waving his arms. Turns out the “pond” was actually an installation called Parliament of Reality by the renowned Icelandic Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, though I will forever think of it as the first place I ever saw Oscar swim.

How different our experiences with art must be. My initial response is usually cerebral—a judgment, an idea, an association—but when something really moves me I feel it in my body. Once, at a Korakrit Arunanondchai installation in Paris, I fell briefly asleep on a giant beanbag wedged deep inside the light and noise of the exhibit and woke up sobbing. It took me hours to return to earth, and when I did I felt a lightness, as though something had been exorcised. Dogs, meanwhile, are creatures of sound and smell. Oscar moves with his snout to the grass, pausing for deep, forensic sniffs. His impressions are peopled by the smells of everyone who’s made contact with this same patch of earth. Canine perception is collaborative. Dogs are pack animals; they are always among. 

When Oscar was younger, I would sometimes grow impatient with how much time he could spend smelling one little spot. Then a dog trainer told me, “Imagine someone says, ‘I’m going to take you to an incredibly beautiful place, and we’re going to go for a walk. It’s so beautiful there, you’re going to love everything you see. And then when you get there the person puts a blindfold on you. That’s what it feels like for your dog when you don’t let them stop and smell.’ ”

Now we live in the Hudson Valley, and Oscar and I walk around the Art Omi Sculpture and Architecture Park in Ghent most mornings. Art Omi spans a hundred and twenty acres of rolling green fields dotted with large sculptures and installations. Oscar seems to like interacting with the art, and his way of interacting seems ideal to me—kinetic, bodied, hyperpresent to the granular details of scent and texture. It’s the way more of us might experience art if we were not weighed down by the tug of the future, the call of a looming to-do list. He loves weaving through the colorful Pac-Lab, each wall of the maze hand-sculpted from clay by the artist Will Ryman. He sniffs his way through the maze—some of the walls are painted primary colors, others are black or white—tail held high. Dogs belong to the moment; he takes his time. Cameron Wu’s Magnetic Z looks to me like an abstracted castle or a ship. A long ramp swoops around the back, forming a snail-shell shape; stairs lead to a pyramid tower. The first time Oscar came across Magnetic Z, he climbed into the tower without hesitation. He has a thing about wanting to climb. He likes to find the highest point, whatever it is, and look around—or, more accurately, smell around. His nose will twitch, especially if there’s a little wind.

One morning we came across Beom Jun Kim’s Other Places, which is deep in what’s called the Architecture Fields, one of the more remote parts of the park. Art Omi describes Other Places as a “sunken outdoor room carved into the earth.” From above, it looks like three squares of descending size nested inside one another. Each square provides a shallow ledge for visitors to sit on. The grass covering the ledges has a tufted, almost hairlike look to it. Other Places does not go that deep, but the incline down is sharp. A pale swatch of dirt awaits at the very bottom, in the narrowest part of the hole. This is a site-specific commission, installed earlier this year, and yet it has a forgotten aura about it, like part of a structure or a design that someone started and then abandoned. Or like something Jeff VanderMeer’s team of explorers might discover inside Area X, mysterious and a little menacing.

The first time I found Other Places, I was sure Oscar would want to use his goatlike agility to climb down into the dirt bottom. The description noted that visitors were meant to “leave their imprint on the grass surfaces … a physical embodiment of memory and forgetting.” The hairlike grass was yellowed in places from the strong summer sun and all the bodies that had already descended into the sunken room. Still, I thought I should discourage Oscar from going in. He delights in making any hole he finds bigger. Some serious small-town dog drama unfolded at Art Omi last year—after an unspecified biting incident at the park, dogs were banned from entering for most of the day. Major pushback from dog people culminated in a public town hall, after which dogs were swiftly reinstated, though there’s a lingering feeling of dogs being on thin ice.

I didn’t need to worry. Oscar was not himself in the presence of Other Places. He trotted around this strange gash in the earth, ears pinned; he sniffed the grass. He looked skittish and wary and not at all like the same dog who, upon seeing the ocean for the first time, ran in so far that waves crashed over his head. He held out one paw, as though he were testing a force field I couldn’t see. I sat on the second-lowest ledge, then dropped down to the lowest ledge and wedged myself into the dirt square at the very bottom. I felt the strangeness of being below the surface of the earth. I looked up. The clouds were passing overhead with an uncanny briskness. I was visited by a vivid memory of the basement in my childhood home—the creaking steps, the pooling shadows, the film of dampness on the walls.

A sharp blast of sound pulled me out. Oscar was hovering around the edges of the hole, bouncing around and barking. He didn’t like that I was down there, and he didn’t feel like he could follow me. I had felt comforted down in that hole; he had felt disturbed. Our experiences with Other Places were beyond what the other could understand—which is sometimes how it goes with art. After I climbed out, he raced back to the main path, eager, it seemed, to put distance between us and that hole. It occurred to me that normally Oscar’s the one who explores the art while I play the role of attentive observer—watching, taking photos, calling to him when it’s time to go, brushing insects and grass from his fur. When I get up to write in the mornings, he follows me to my office, where he naps on a dog bed next to my desk. When we’re out on the trails together he likes to stay close. I wonder if my subterranean descent felt like a loss to him, or a threat. He needed to pull me back to where I belonged.

Laura van den Berg is the author of six works of fiction, most recently the novel State of Paradise.