Sowing confusion amongst the titles, or The squatters (Tiger meet Hiller’s Lucidity & Intuition: Homage to Gertrude Stein (2011))
Year: 2020
Medium: wood, latex, resin, synthetic fur, paint, animatronics
Dimensions: 10.8 x 66 x 40.6 cm (4 1/4 x 26 x 16 in.)
Acquired from Lisson Gallery, 2024
There are eight cats that the artist refers to as “The Squatters” (in the sense of illegal occupiers). They seem to appear out of nowhere, claiming the white pedestals that were intended for displaying artworks, sleeping peacefully as if they own them. This piece is one of them, a brown tabby cat named Tiger, as one might suppose from the subtitle. Gander uses animatronics technology in “The Squatters” series to make it appear as if the cats are truly alive and breathing. The circular pedestal on which this cat sleeps was originally for Susan Hiller’s work “Lucidity & Intuition: Homage to Gertrude Stein” in 2011. Like Gander, Hiller is a conceptual artist and is represented by Lisson Gallery. She created the work as a tribute to Gertrude Stein, a collector and poet who was close friends with the Fauvist and Cubist artists, and who built the foundation of the Stein Collection in the US. Her piece features a small Art Deco desk packed with books related to automatism, a field in which Hiller was an expert. As Surrealist André Breton suggested, automatism is a means to separate the consciousness from human reason or the ego. As artificial products of cultural or institutional frameworks, art exists outside the consciousness of “the Squatters” (if assuming these cats have consciousnesses). Although this is a display stand for a historically significant work of art to humans, for these cats who live outside the realm of human reason, it is something to be freely claimed if it takes their fancy. If there is a reason that these non-human, and not even animal but artificial cats are referred to as intruders through the title “The Squatters,” it is because they symbolize an absurd transgression of the boundary line of reason, which gives shape to the human realm.
