Sorcha Dallas

In “over-egging’ one’s interpretation of an art work, one must realise that this does the work of art a disservice. A purely subjective response is not enough - it forces art to comply with our appetites, we only like what appeals to us. The new film ‘Laddy and the Lady’ by Glasgow-based artist Hnery Coombes attempts to detangle this difficult knot, but art should not be easy. The artist makes objective her/his subjective sensibilities within the artwork, so that the work can be understood as such. The viewer must do the same to hers/his. This does not mean that we should hope to bve ‘disinterested, but that our interest and biases be taken into account before being passed over. Coombes’ film is a polished sketch; a small idea made great through the reifying medium of film. We must assume that this is his intention. Is the story nothing more than the superficial employment of tropes to generate a narrative ? Is this Barney-esque ‘narrative sculpture’? To put a human in a dog costume could say something about humiliation, artifice, the suspension of disbelief, or the Brechtian sense of alienation that the best work engenders. There is not separation between art and entertainment, we can only wish that there were. This film is overly generous, easy in this respect; a narrative can be followed, there is a resolution of a kind, the viewer is unthreatended. It sounds mad to say that art should be poorer so that life can become richer, but the poverty of means in art (its limitations) help us realise that life could be better. The flashback scene, while acting as a self-conciously employed filmic technique, both explains the story and forces us to wrongly give the animal a human memory. This slight of hand comments on the recent fashion for anthropormorphistation that has plagued contemporary art , but maybe doesn’t separate itself from that trend convincingly. Is this a film about the failure of language (the dog disobeys on a pheasant shoot) or the phallic mother (an actress with a gun)? these views bring ‘too much’ to the film. The humorous elements of the story act as a salve to the more unsettling scenes; the sense of safely distanced artifice, usually provided by the entertainment industry reigns.