Un Chien Délicieux

Ken Feingold &

»Content warning: as of minute 10:00, the video shows the butchering of a dog.« A warning for the video work Un Chien Délicieux (1991) by the American artist Ken Feingold could appear like this or similar. He has been appearing since the 1970s with film, video, photography, drawing, sculpture and later especially with interactive, animatronic installations. Un Chien Délicieux (A Delicious Dog), which was distinguished in 1992 with the Videonale Award and was broadcast in the following year on WDR, ensures a provocative shock moment that breaks taboos in the narrative interlocking of Surrealism and the everyday practices of indigenous subsistence societies.

The rhythmic tango piece from the opening credits still echoes when the amused voice-over of the Argentinian conceptual artist David Lamelas presents us with a story rich in anecdotes. The black and white photograph of a company at table revolving around the Surrealist poet André Breton provides the starting point. The narrator, a village elder in close-up in front of a hut with a pipe and three parakeets balancing on a climbing pole, remembers his time spent in postwar Paris, the prior encounter with a group of French ethnologists on a research journey in northern Thailand – »It changes things when you have guests, right?« –, thus at the same time also laconically reflecting upon Feingold’s shoots 40 years later. The animated pondering culminates in the lively memory of a goodbye dinner organised for him at Breton’s invitation, at which »dog« was served as a deliberate transgression of boundaries. Decades later, the preparation should now be taught to guests before the camera »like in a cooking show«, whereby a life and death decision should be made concerning the shifting status of pet or livestock. Tango again for the closing credits and the disconcerting feeling of having become entangled with alleged certainties of reception in a complex narrative fabric, in which procedures of both the ethnographic and the avant garde art film are equally put to the test. (Heike Ander)

Camera, sound, editing, text: Ken Feingold
With: Lo Me Akha
Interpreter: Opas Saenya
Voiceover read by: David Lamelas

This work was one of seven historical positions in the anniversary edition of VIDEONALE.20 and was first presented at VIDEONALE.5 (1992).