Steve Gianakos
How to Murder Your Pet, 2022
Semiose éditions
Text by Stéphane Corréard.
Disquiet among animal-rights activists… How to Murder Your Pet is a cruelly sadistic manual outlining twenty-four sophisticated ways of putting domestic animals to death. The humor in this series aimed at a mature audience, is far from mainstream in our times and certainly intended to rub people up the wrong way: it’s all very funny, but from a distance. It hardly needs stating that these experiments should not be repeated in the home!
These line drawings display all of Gianakos’ hard-hitting, graphic talent, as the series describes practices that are as barbaric as they are amusing and which revel in subtle cruelty. Sade’s sophistication is revisited through the prism of the “American way of life”: the entire catalog of modern comforts is present—toasters, fridges, saunas, cars etc.—and all, as we are sometimes inclined to forget, can turn out to be potentially lethal weapons. Using cruelty to animals as a subversive tool, constitutes an attack on one of the most protected bastions of morality. This was true in 1978 when Steve Gianakos drew this series, and even more so today when the law in France and many other countries has recognized animals as “sentient living beings.” Animal rights are defended in almost all political programs and so far, there have been no protests from either kittens or ducklings concerning political exploitation! Furthermore, How to Murder Your Pet is not just about killing any old animal, it’s about killing your pets! Described with humor that is as black as it gets!
“Obviously the best way to murder something is to tie a rock around its neck and throw it off a bridge, but since I'm so arty and these are all very visual, I make my idea a pretty picture.” Steve Gianakos
Steve Gianakos
A face in profile depicted as a safety pin, a head in high-heels, a snake in a pair of underpants ! The New York artist (b.1938) Steve Gianakos' drawings, collages and acrylics could easily be seen as proverbs, with their trivial truths distilled through a few dark lines. His naïve style in the vein of vintage comics and children?s books depicts mini scenes ranging from the obscene to the cruel, inhabited by cannibal pin-ups and little girls lifting their skirts. The American art establishment, with its morals and metaphysical ambitions takes a slap on the backside; the same treatment is also reserved for the American Dream. Gianakos is a major figure of American Pop Art and his work is included in the collections of the MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Whitney Museum in New York. He is represented in France by Semiose Gallery.