Among the earliest epitaphs carved into the gravestones in France’s oldest pet cemetery, in Asnières in the Paris suburbs, we can find inscriptions that repeat well-known declarations such as: “The more I learn about people, the more I love my dog,” or “Disappointed by the world, never by my dog.” Darwin believed that the intense love humans feel for their pets was reciprocal, imagining that monkeys smile at us because they are happy; unfortunately, today’s research shows that this superficial smile simply testifies to the individual’s submission to a creature better placed in the pecking order. Although it is currently impossible to scientifically evaluate love and attachment, studies in 2015 measured blood-serum levels of oxytocin, the hormone related to affection and trust secreted by humans and their faithful companions: in a dog cuddled by its human, oxytocin levels can increase by more than 50 %. With cats, this increase is limited to around 12 %.

The bond of love between humans and animals is not built on very solid foundations: according to Professor Jean-Claude Nouët, Honorary President of the French League for Animal Rights, 50 % of rapists committed acts of cruelty against animals in their childhood and 15 % of them also raped animals. For Saint Thomas Aquinas, Locke, Kant and Schopenhauer, there is a general link between cruelty to animals and violent acts committed against humans; moreover, recent sociological studies indicate that the majority of serial killers as well as simple murderers, “learned their trade” by killing or torturing animals when they were young.

For Sigmund Freud, the motive for this is sexual, so it’s hardly surprising that Steve Gianakos was attracted by the subject. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud postulates that the urge to commit acts of cruelty and the sexual urge are linked in early childhood by anastomosis, an interconnection that is biological. This association of sexuality and cruelty—exercised from an early age and against animals of all shapes and sizes—is quickly curbed and ideally even controlled by the emergence of feelings of pity; the ability to empathize with the pain felt by others, including animals, which inhibits the universal desire to dominate and that appears relatively late in a child’s development.

Artistically, empathy takes on an unconventional form in Gianakos’ work. In a now legendary interview with Susan Morgan in 1979, published in the second issue of the magazine Real Life¹, whose cover featured a drawing from the How to Murder Your Pet series, the artist states: “My work is not nearly as offensive as the people who look at it. Just walking the streets, you see things which are much more disgusting than anything I could ever conceive of doing—people vomiting all over the place. I try to sweeten things up, I don’t try to vulgarize them. I try to take things I know exist and make them prettier, rather than trying to make pretty things more ugly. When you talk about rich ladies fucking their dogs, that’s an example of something it would be impossible to vulgarize because it’s already too vulgar. So, the only way to prettify it is to make a nice picture of a rich lady fucking her dog. At least that would appeal to some people.” In 1945, in Bruno Munari’s book for children Animals For Sale, an animal salesman desperate to find the ideal companion for an invisible child, finally discovers that rather than an armadillo, a pink flamingo or a porcupine, what the child really wants is a roast chicken with fries!

In the above-mentioned interview, Gianakos gives free reign to his caustic and iconoclastic humor when addressing the question of subjects of art. For example, he mockingly asks: “How many artists have already painted flowers and are going to paint flowers for the next hundred years? What’s with them and flowers? Why don’t they paint germs? How many artists have painted paramecium? Only Arp. Didn’t Arp paint paramecium? I think that was very perceptive of him.” Pushing his theory still further, he states: “I’m very fond of snots, but I’ve never sold a snot painting. I don’t think even Picasso could sell a snot picture, I really don’t.”

Produced in 1978, the 24 drawings that make up the series How to Murder Your Pet are perfect examples of Gianakos’ art. Firstly, as we have already seen, the subject matter is deeply linked to the primal emergence of sexuality. Secondly, the serial treatment of the subject is typical of his working practice. As he explains to Susan Morgan: “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.” In this series, Gianakos does not depict dead domestic animals, but rather ways of killing them, a variety of forms of torture that are all variations on the childish cruelty described by Freud. While some of them have obvious sexual connotations (the goat, stuck in a doorway with a sweeping-brush in its rectum, which at the time outraged a number of commentators), others depict the brutal—and certainly painful—encounter between an orifice and a foreign body: the guide dog with a walking stick protruding from its eye socket, the bowling ball forcing open the hippo’s mouth, the cow sucking on the exhaust pipe of a beetle (the car), the leg of a modernist chair being force-fed to a duck… There’s also symmetry in the corkscrew tail of a pig penetrating an electrical wall socket, leading to its electrocution.

Clean-Cut Lines and Murky Waters
Since the 1970s, Steve Gianakos, a New York artist of Greek origin, has been producing paintings and drawings firmly rooted in a punk rock version of pop art. Scantily clad pin-up girls, bemused innocents, seashells and shellfish, vacuum cleaners and rodents, all straight out of the comic strips, cartoons, b-movies and pulp fiction from his US childhood, from an era when American hegemony imposed its soothing clichés and consumer norms on Western society.

Gianakos is the direct heir to Warhol’s early canvases with their comic-strip characters, but above all to Roy Lichtenstein’s work and imagery from the 1960s, also borrowed from the stereotypical, sappily sentimental or military comic strips of the era. Yet while the above-mentioned pop artists simply reproduced the original images with no visible modifications other than those related to scale and texture, Gianakos—closer to John Heartfield than Warhol in this respect—cuts out various elements of the images, which he then categorizes and classifies, before re-assembling fragments from these archives to produce works—both paintings and drawings—whose whole riotously exceeds the sum of its parts. If pop art “chilled out” the world, Gianakos’ creations set it alight with touches of Dadaist humor and perfectly assumed bad taste. Water nymphs and their piscicultural eroticism, bodies sawn in two or decapitated, young girls sniffing coke, nymphets of dubious sensuality, a crab pinching an ecstatic pin-up with bomb-shaped breasts while yet another is draped with a snake in the guise of a scarf… Grating images with a whiff of sulphur; as with Heartfield’s oeuvre, these reassembled depictions generate their own criticism, revealing desires concealed beneath the mask of innocence as well as by extension those hidden in the mind of the spectator, as one flirts with sado-masochism, paedophilia, zoophilia and gerontophilia.

Fans of Philip Guston, who renounced New York abstract impressionism in the 1960s, will adore the work of Steve Gianakos, whose early career coincides with Guston’s return towards figurative art. Instead of the hooded Ku Klux Klan members created by Guston, with their cars and cigars (and occasionally paintbrushes) in their hands, Gianakos’ uninhibited starlets are shown in high-heels and pill-box hats, with or without negligees, with boas fashioned from real living boas and occasionally fish clutched between their thighs, in recurring, obsessive images, extracted and enlarged from the artist’s archives. In the work of these two Americans, we find the same insolence and lack of respect, the same refusal of artistic categories and hierarchies and the same taste for provocation.

If these figures jump out from the canvases, it’s due to the ligne claire style of the drawings doing its work in the same way as in the earliest comic strips. On this fishing trip in murky waters, the figures all snap at the bait attached at the end of the artist’s clear lines: deviant eroticism, bodies occasionally dismembered, playful perversity, casually depicted without pathos or judgement. Yet this isn’t the universe of Tintin or Crumb’s counter-culture or even the absurd humor of Glen Baxter. In this world, clean-cut lines are scrambled, broken down and stripped back, revealing what we cannot bear to see, ripping clichés apart, outlining and appropriating the source images, liberating them from any prudishness, doubling up and mutating (adding extra arms and legs to the bodies of these young women, aghast at a variety of grafted animal parts and other gently monstrous metamorphoses).

With the same limpid precision of a deceptively childish comic strip, clear lines are used to disfigure the ravishing females and handsome men, replacing their faces with a range of various incongruous and surreal objects: an antique vase, a rooster or perhaps some potatoes for the women and a joint of beef for the man’s face or even a bunch of bananas, a huge safety-pin, a fairy tale carriage or a Halloween pumpkin… And that’s without mentioning a selection of cubist versions of female faces.

Three of Gianakos’ recent works involve a fantasized or acted change of sex, stage by solitary figures with a mirror as their sole partner. Two women seeing themselves as “men”; one wearing a devil’s mask with a comically crooked moustache and with the inscription L.G.B.Q.T stamped across her forehead, the other dressed in pink negligee. In the third image, a naked adolescent discovers his own reflection as he holds a child’s dress up to his chest. In these works, as elsewhere something is not quite right—the dress is too small, the grotesqueness of the mask, a dubious taste in lingerie—and the reflection disappoints, arousing perplexity and even discomfort, and once again the spectator finds himself in complete disarray!

In this anatomically deviant theatre, where objects and body parts, beavers and penguins, lecherous octopuses and melancholic cuttlefish joyfully swirl around, backgrounds are sometimes lent color with areas painted in the manner of abstract impressionism, something quite surprising for this heir to pop art, but then again why deny oneself in terms of style? In the name of whose rules? In other drawings or paintings, the backgrounds are darker, with long grayish smears due to defects in the photocopying process. “The more I looked at the photocopies,” says Gianakos, “the more I found my interest shifting from the image itself to the texture of the paper.” Somewhat reminiscent of Sigmar Polke’s work, we also find raster-dots, runs and mechanical smudging. In the case of both artists, we observe the same interest in pop imagery, the same integration of content and form and the same provocative juxtapositions, mischievously and assumedly used at the risk of being accused of bad taste.

Rejecting all forms of decorum, unwilling to comfortably slot into any category from the history of art, paradoxically a defender of a certain subtlety, of an unexpected elegance, Steve Gianakos obstinately traces his path far from the well-trodden highways. Some will certainly blench with rage on discovering these outrageous yet delicate scenes. But, you can’t please everyone all of the time, especially when your art is a much punk as it is pop.

Brice Matthieussent

The practice of citation is a common reference point for the roster of artists represented by the gallery and raises complex issues related to the production and dissemination of images, the role and purpose of archives and visual culture in the broadest sense. Semiose champions an aesthetic based on questions of taste and consequently of cultural hierarchies. Techniques such as collage, appropriation and cultural subversion are shared by many of the artists, leading to a converging interest in referencing reality and the everyday world.

Younger artists are exhibited side by side with established names and figures of international renown. Over the years and through a patiently developed professional network, various institutions and public collections have forged strong links with artists promoted by the gallery. Semiose however, is committed to much more than simply representing artists: the gallery rigorously fulfills its role in the eco-system of art through its scientific and curatorial approach. It oversees the production of oeuvres and undertakes meticulous documentary and archival work around the artists it represents.

Semiose has also expanded its activities through a publishing house, Semiose éditions. Internationally available, more than a hundred titles have been published to date, including monographs, books by artists, written works and essays, an on-going magazine and a collection of coloring books.