Chewed books in the Reading Room by Daisy, Grandpa and Lady./Photo: tête-à-tête-à-tête
Before visiting tête-à-tête-à-tête’s “Dog,” I spent my morning caring for shelter dogs as a new volunteer. My favorite of the bunch, Namir, loved eating extinguished cigarette butts and jumping into the cars of strange men during our first walk together. Namir, with his habits akin to a Lana Del Rey protagonist, bumps up charmingly, almost a bit too perfectly against the show’s central conceit: that the figure of the dog, the image of our domesticated companion, is not that of pet but rather totem, shorthand, vessel for the wildness we must often deny within ourselves.
Take this portion of the exhibition text created by curator Pedro Montilla, “Las palabras ya no caben en la boca. Solo el vómito de lo que hemos lamido de nuestras propias heridas. Y la sombra de la bestia permanece.” In English the passage reads, “Words no longer fit the mouth. Only the vomit of what we have licked from our own wounds. And the shadow of the beast remains.” The quote and its longing for, or rather attention to, excess, the impossible, the cursed glut of being in this world possesses a spirit similar to “Le Loup et Le Chien,” a seventeenth-century fable by Jean de la Fontaine, a text also offered by the gallery. The fable is an imagined dialogue between wolf and house dog, with the wolf rebuking the comforts of a domesticated life, instead choosing to run free.
Upon entry to the space’s waiting room there are three prints of Camila Arévalo and Kelan Gill’s performance “Hombre blanco, perra negra — After Oleg Kulik” (2026) installed to the left of Mae Bishop’s sculptural chair piece, “heel to heel” (2026). In the Arévalo and Gill images, we see two nude figures with their faces cut from the frame. One is bent over and obscured by their long black hair. The next image is a close-up of a hand caressing the hair. In the third image, one nude figure is draped atop the other, positioned in a modified “downward dog” yoga pose. The title of the piece can roughly be translated to “white man and black dog.”
The work’s reference to Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik brings to mind Kulik’s 1990s performances in which he acted like a dog for up to several weeks at a time. In Kulik’s 1997 “I Bite America and America Bites Me,” a project in which he, again, lived as a dog in a doghouse at New York’s Deitch Projects, the artist’s animalistic behavior toward guests was meant to be a critique of the belief that we are rational actors motivated by progress, linear creatures able to rise above our base instincts. Yet, one thing I was never able to gather from Kulik’s performances was whether or not we enjoyed indulging our rational or wild sides. Did the freedom offered by one mode of being supplant the pleasures of the other? I could never quite tell.
Four years after “I Bite America,” New York author Jane DeLynn published “Leash,” a lesbian S&M erotic novel where a bored woman decides to give up her humanity and join a community of ex-human dogs to live as a companion to her chosen owner. DeLynn’s vision of humanity, at least through the eyes of her protagonist, is a way of life that’s been irrevocably damaged by the logic of the market. Every relationship is transactional, every day an endless chore. To submit, to give up everything that’s known, opens up a world of pleasure and possibility for our main character. With DeLynn we get at something that I think tête-à-tête-à-tête’s “Dog” hopes to communicate, that the intimacy we share with our canine friends is not just pleasurable for its own sake—for the affection and care we freely exchange—but pleasurable in its uncertainty, its ability to change, to transform. Dogs share between 98.8 and 99.9 percent of their DNA with wolves; the connection that humans and dogs hold then feels equal parts tenuous and baffling, for dogs must hold something of the wilderness they once roamed.
Better put, the body of the dog is a place of friction: a dog is product of the market, shaped by selective breeding and unscrupulous human hands, while also being a sweaty, sweet, intractable little beast that resists humanity’s many ills. Like the gentle lines of Paulina Moncada’s “Coaxing” and “Sigil” (2026), both mounted across from the Arévalo and Gill images, or the endearing creatures stamped upon José Antonio Suárez’s “Untitled” (2026) paper work in the reading room, there’s a tenderness to the canine human relationship that feels a bit like déjà vu, out of time and out of place. For who really is this uncanny little being that I care for and cares for me in turn?
The material in the reading room has been updated for “Dog,” a copy of Argentinian author Julio Cortázar’s short-story collection “Bestiary” sits on the main table. In the titular story, a little girl writes increasingly inchoate letters to her mother as a tiger stalks the grounds where she is staying for the summer. No one really wants to look at, smell or embrace the tiger in the house. Accompanying the book is a bottle of Nasomatto’s Black Afgano, a cannabis-forward perfume smelling of animal, smoke and resin.
Once again, with “Dog,” tête-à-tête-à-tête creates a puzzle box, a jungle room, a playhouse, a space to howl and sharpen your claws as you wonder if there’s not a dog inside you, hungry and impossible, just waiting to be set free.
“Dog” at tête-à-tête-à-tête, 2539 North Kedzie, through September 5.
