Puns Aplenty in Cats & Dogs

Billed as an exhibition for “everyone to enjoy,” Cats & Dogs at the Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, taps into our love for our animal companions. While there are individual artwork highlights, for a ticketed show drawn from the collection, the exhibition fumbles in its attempt to create a thematic blockbuster through its unconvincing curation.

With the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) in Sydney recently announcing the reintroduction of admission fees from February 2025, there has been a renewed conversation about access to galleries and what shrinking arts funding in this country means for arts audiences. While the MCA’s decision might appear as a cultural watershed moment, publicly funded state institutions elsewhere have already started coyly charging admission fees to view parts of their collection which ostensibly belong to the public. This is the case for the ticketed Cats & Dogs exhibition.

The curatorial premise for Cats & Dogs appears straightforward: a dive into the NGV’s collection to highlight pieces that feature all manner of feline and canine friends (or fiends). The exhibition is vast in scope, including more than 250 works of art and design representing all curatorial departments of the NGV including First Nations art, Australian art, International art, Asian art, Fashion and Textiles, Photography, and Decorative arts. It is through these intersections that Jeff Koon’s Puppy, vase, 1998, sits in the same clear display case as the porcelain Dog, c. 1753, by the Vincennes Porcelain Factory, Paris, avoiding a linear timeline or similar approach. The exhibition also features a number of loans from NGV Australia’s neighbouring institute ACMI, which has provided both historical and archival footage as well as a contemporary feline ASMR [autonomous sensory meridian response] video.

As a team project across curatorial departments and collections, Cats & Dogs attempts to create a space that invites audience engagement based on universal experiences and themes. Whether you know or care about art history or not, the exhibition aims to offer something for everyone. While there are frequent references to Diana from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, there are decisions made by the curatorial team to challenge Eurocentric conventions and mythologies. This is encapsulated through the inclusion of Atong Atem’s self-portrait titled Maria of Mars, 2022 in the “Lapdogs” section of the exhibition. As the wall text of this section denotes, the inclusion of “small and often fluffy dogs” on the laps of women of status from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries symbolised European aristocratic leisure and wealth. Atem’s striking and commanding portrait, which renders the artist in a bright green hue holding an Italian greyhound, upturns conventional approaches to aristocratic portraiture and shifts the narrative focus. The placement of this work within a space typically reserved for depictions of whiteness makes this contemporary critique clear.

There is an undeniable wealth of works included from the Asian collection, with particular highlights from Chinese and Japanese artists. Ishikawa Toraji is one of the rare artists in the show whose works feature both cats and dogs, although they are separated within the exhibition. The curation of Leisure time (Tsurezure), 1934, under the section “Eroticat”, at odds with the placement of a companion piece Sounds of the Bell (Suzu no ne), 1934, elsewhere in “Lapdogs” – reveals some of the limitations imposed by the thematic clusters that stifles wider interpretation. Notwithstanding the terrible puns used in these curatorial demarcations (“Eroticat” is matched by the equally bad “Mythodogical”), the exhibition’s placement of works alongside others risks flattening differences between cultures and forms. The universalising focus removes the necessary context of many of the works, such as the ink scroll Cat, 1989, by Huang Yongyu, a biting social commentary on political unease and anxiety during the period of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Despite curatorial attempts to challenge Western art histories, the natural inclination towards figurative works favours Eurocentric portraiture conventions. There are several lacklustre works in the tradition of genre and narrative paintings in the exhibition, where the presence of cats or dogs are merely decorative flourishes in the background of humanist scenes. Jean-François Millet’s La Baratteuse, 1855, and Cornelis Saftleven’s Interior with soldiers, c. 1620s, do not feel like necessary inclusions, as cats and dogs are relegated to the background in these works. Instead, their appearance yields a kind of Where’s Wally? moment, as one is compelled to search for the hidden beasts in their tableaux.

The curators have maintained a sharp distinction between cats and dogs throughout the exhibition, pitting one against the other on opposite gallery walls. Except for a deliberate “intervention” featuring a taxidermy cat by Melbourne art collective Greatest Hits, this dualistic proposition is maintained for the entire hang as well as the printed catalogue. This oppositional approach feeds into a process of audience self-identification that is foregrounded through the curatorial approach. It is clear that you are invited to enter this exhibition as either a “dog person” or a “cat person” (I am the former), and the wall labels use personalised phrases such as “a scene that many dog owners would be familiar with” to invite self-identification. The last room of the exhibition is a natural conclusion of this appeal to vanity, as visitors are asked to upload a picture of their pet to be digitally displayed in gilded frames on the gallery walls. When I visited the exhibition, this was the busiest room.

As a dog person, I wanted to love this show. However, it’s undeniable that the exhibition fumbled its attempt to present an enriching experience that doesn’t tell us what we already know to be true. The shallow thematic choices removed some of the very aspects that make the artworks compelling. The exhibition being hosted directly across from Reko Rennie’s stellar Rekospective invites further critique. Whereas Rennie’s show is an important art historical moment, showcasing two decades of sustained creative and intellectual practice, Cats & Dogs missed an opportunity to be more than a vanity exercise.

Exhibition
Cats & Dogs
1 November 2024 – 20 July 2025
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne.

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 70, 2025.
Images courtesy of the artists and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.