
Jonathan and Moomin
PET PHOTO BOOTH &
THE INFANTA’S MASTIFF:
Animals as Props in the mise en scène of
Spiers, Doherty & Velázquez
by Dr Jonathan W. Marshall
Standing before the intriguing photographic archive produced by artists Justin
Spiers and Yvonne Doherty under the title Pet Photo Booth (2007-08), one is moved
to concur with John Berger’s claim that true or “natural” animality has disappeared
from modern Western culture over the centuries, its putatively authentic wildness
replaced by an increasingly mediated, commodified or imagined projection of our
own selves or desires.(1) This comparatively rare way of thinking about the animal in
art—to see it as somehow inauthentic, hollow, or at best opaque, ambiguous and over-
determined—is shared by Doherty and Spiers with such figures as Hayden Fowler
(Goat Odyssey, 2006) and Brook Andrews (particularly his inky taxidermy studies,
Ignoratia, 2004, to Parrot, 2006).(2 )This contrasts with the more common strategy, in
which artists as diverse as Sharron Green (the Lonely Empire series, 2005) and Roger
Ballen (from Pensioner With Dog, 1991, to Bitten, 2004) have attempted to suggest
some kind of primal spirit or an irreducible, instinctive, or physical-sexual basis for
our existences, which we share with beasts and the harsh, highly material realms they
inhabit.(3)
Spiers and Doherty have said that Pet Photo Booth constitutes a portrait of
Australia, a vision of this nation and its peoples drawn from a procession of images at
once banal and fabulous.4 Seen along these lines, it seems that Pet Photo Booth
reflects the vanquishing of such Modernist certainties as essential character, realism
and nation. Unlike the landmark photographic portrait exhibition The Family of Man
(1955), which attempted to represent the irreducible heroism shared by individuals
from around the world, Pet Photo Booth offers a dazzling variety of tableau and faces
which allow little access to something which might be claimed to represent human or
animal essences, but which rather depicts an array of wonderfully ludic poses whose
diversity and playful self-representation fractures the unity of both humanity and
nation. In short, it is the inauthenticity of these human and animal subjects, whom we
see showing off with such gusto in these photographs, which lies at the heart of what
makes these images compelling—and, indeed, fun and disturbing in equal measure.
Rather than primal truths, what is on offer is an array of fabulous fictions and glossy
surfaces.
It is useful here to move away from photography itself to consider another
example of how some of these issues have played out within art history, specifically
the famous painting of the Spanish royal family by Diego Velázquez today referred to
as Las Meninas (1656; above). The tableau shows the painter standing to one side of
the heir to the throne—the Infanta Margarita—who is attended by another gorgeously
attired young aristocrat (Isabel de Velasco), a pair of the famous bouffons or dwarves
who entertained at court (Nicolasito Pertusato and Maribárbola), several other
identifiable personages, as well as, framed against the back wall amongst the palace’s
art collection, what appears to be a reflection of the King and Queen standing
somewhere in front of the painting and beside us as we view the scene, or possibly a
reflection of their likenesses as depicted on the very canvas which Velázquez is
shown working on (opinions differ).
Velázquez’s tableau has become one of the central talking points of art
history, with analyses offered by everyone from Eduard Manet to Leo Steinberg.5 It is
generally seen as a virtuosic execution of the laws of perspective and of various
interactions of gazes, spaces and volumes such that the observer is drawn into the
work, and implicated in the issues of illusionism, of painting, and of how one might
see the world through devices such as painting and performance. Michel Foucault
eulogised Las Meninas as encapsulating “the manifest essence” of “representation in
its pure form” which has defined the classical world view since the sixteenth century.6
The images produced by Doherty and Spiers at first would seem to have little
in common with this piece. Certainly the confusions of mirroring, of vanishing point
and of multiple, competing foci of interest are only intermittently present within Pet
Photo Booth. What I would like to suggest though is that these photographs produce
some of the effects attributed to Velázquez’s tableau, yet through a different set of
techniques which might be broadly grouped around performativity and scenography.
Amongst the manifold literature on Las Meninas, the figure of the mastiff in
the foreground and which Pertusato is playfully attempting to rouse with his foot has
attracted little attention. It is perhaps overstating matters to describe the dozing beast
in Roland Barthes’ terms as a punctum or disturbance within the visual field and the
content which complicates the image and pulls our focus away from its formal
mastery or the narrative.7 It is nevertheless true that this creature provides an inroad to
examine some of these themes within the painting, drawing attention to the playlet
which Velázquez has crafted and to the ambiguous interactions of subjects contained
therein.
Velázquez’s painting has long been associated with photography. Nineteenth
century visitors to the Prado such as the British Museum’s William Stirling claimed
that the artist’s realism anticipated Louis Daguerre’s filmic invention by 300 years.8
As John Searle has noted, standing before the canvas “one is left feeling that it is only
an accident of the chroniclers that we do not know the name of the dog” as well that
of the Infanta and her retainers, and that “contemporaries must surely have been able
to recognise” all of those depicted, including the mastiff.9 This grounding of the
image in reality, and more specifically around identifiable figures, is also the key to
the power of the photographic image in general, as well as to Pet Photo Booth
specifically. Exhibitions of the photographs by Doherty and Spiers have typically
identified each owner and pet by first name, whilst media coverage has focused on
particular interactions and identities within the project as it has encountered new
communities, working its way across Australia from Perth and its hills, through to
Kalgoorlie, Sydney and Darwin.10
There is also the issue of scale. While Pet Photo Booth’s prints may not have
the epic dimensions of Velázquez’s work, Spiers does employ high-resolution, large-
format equipment to render the images at near life-size. As with Las Meninas,
viewing these works in the gallery is to be engaged in remarkably sensate encounter
with the subjects, where one feels one could reach out and stroke the fur, scales and
feathers before us. In short, whilst clearly representing a performance of some kind,
the images of Pet Photo Booth reflect an alarming realism and genuine social context
which makes the fabulous, imaginative quality of the images and their masterful
display of artifice and self-recreation all the more intriguing.11
Another photographic quality of Las Meninas is the manner in which time is
represented. Aby Warburg and Georges Didi-Huberman have reminded us that static
images too have a durational quality, for one does not gaze at them for a single
instant. Rather one returns to them, literally and metaphorically, to consider and
interpret them for an extended period, linking the image and its iconography to the
past which moves through it in form and reference.12 Las Meninas and Pet Photo
Booth generate a certain temporal ambivalence, capturing and compressing a limited
sliver of time which immediately raises issues of what existed before and after it—at
least in terms of just who these pet lovers and their charges might be in other
circumstances. The photograph of Scarlet and Rosie is particularly striking in this
sense. The girl stands blankly, like a statue, whilst the golden retriever seems poised,
ready to move forward . . . or perhaps not. The stance is uncertain, possibly suggestive
of movement, but not necessarily so, highlighting the ambiguous quality of the
duration captured here: a momentary depiction which is perhaps not so much a
snapshot per se, but a prelude (or conclusion) to a longer event within the studio.
Velázquez’s work is virtuosic in this sense, the complex arrangement of figures, some
attending to each other whilst others gaze out at the viewer, creating a detailed yet
incomplete mise en scène around the poised Infanta and her entourage. Barthes has
argued that photography is related to death, since it halts time, but it seems to me that
what is at stake here in both Las Meninas and Pet Photo Booth is not the definitive
arrest of time per se, but rather a curious vibration of temporality, never quite
complete and certainly of uncertain origin and extent. Are these subjects always like
this, or only so within this mise en scène, as sculpted by Spiers, Doherty and
Velázquez, the subjects’ true identity beyond the frame forever to elude our gaze and
rather to agitate and complicate this image into eternity? Michel Foucault has
described these spaces of uncertain duration which exist alongside normal social life,
never quite a part of it, yet never entirely divorced from it, as heterotopias, and there
is something of this heterotopic ambiguity, placelessness and timelessness in the work
of Spiers, Doherty and Velázquez.13
Like those shown in Pet Photo Booth, the Infanta is carefully attired.
Enraptured by the light coming from the window to her left, the ravishing fabric of
her dress, the mastiff’s luxurious fur, and the braiding on Maribárbola’s costume, all
positively glow with colour and a sheer gorgeousness of texture. In the work of
Doherty and Spiers, even the shaven-headed gent with the tattoo whom we see
cradling his small dog to his chest has chosen his T-shirt and shorts with particular
care. The crisp, wide blocks of uniform colour and tone which these subjects’ dress
typically exhibits not only produces a magnificent richness of image in these prints,
but it also draws attention to the collaborative nature of the project. Both the court of
King Philip IV and the studio of Spiers and Doherty are manifestly theatrical,
heterotopic spaces, wherein the imaginative recreation of one’s self through costume,
posture, props and backgrounds is celebrated.
One of the reasons painters like Velázquez attained such a high status in spite
of their lowly birth was because such artists served a crucial role within the political
and cultural machinery of Europe. Early modern rulers actively manipulated their
image and that of their lineage so as to secure wealth, power and profitable alliances
via marriage or treaty. Prior to King Henry VIII’s corpulence, the charismatic prince
attracted an impressive range of suitors partly through his erudition as a poet,
performer, dancer and most famously in the competitive revels, jousts and displays of
magnificent costumes which he engaged in with his rival the King of France, in what
was known as the Field of Cloth of Gold (1520). As Kenneth Clark observes, the
Infanta maintains her regal poise in Las Meninas, but she appears somewhat bored
and distracted, because “she has been painted by Velázquez ever since she could
stand”—before later being married off as an adult to the King of Austria.14 Stephen
Greenblatt christened these figures’ attention to the imaginative construction of their
identity and self-image through performative acts, self-presentation, costume and
speech as “Renaissance self-fashioning,” and a similar concern to recreate oneself and
one’s identity through a visibly glowing iconography is active within Pet Photo
Booth.15 Gazing at the serious-looking ensemble of two men and two women posed
on either side of a cat cage, or upon the young girl with a brown-and-white terrier
who wears a pristine red satin dress, and a black ribbon about her throat which
matches her hair, it is evident that these are highly crafted forms of self-
representation.
And then there are Las Meninas’ mastiff and dwarves. As Alpers observes, the
professional clowns and companionate fools of the Spanish court implied “a certain
misrule.” Pertusato’s light kick of the dog was an unlicensed act which could have
had explosive consequences. It is worth bearing in mind that the European ruling class
was renowned for displaying its physical vigour, and its prowess with weapons, by
regularly engaging in large-scale hunts.16 The mastiff was therefore almost certainly
trained to be highly ferocious under appropriate circumstances, and one can only
imagine the Boccaccian chaos which might have erupted afterwards as the hound tore
about the room in pursuit of Pertusato, savaging his robes and upsetting everything in
the vicinity. The presence of Pertusato and Maribárbola also confuses the rigid
hierarchy of class and power which Velázquez depicts. The dwarves are adults, whilst
Maribárbola is even slightly taller than Margarita, yet the dwarves’ lesser status was
that of servants whose provisionally elevated condition at court was utterly dependent
upon the whims of the infant Margarita’s family—as was largely true of Velázquez
himself. Pertusato was in this sense linked to the mastiff not only via his outstretched
foot (as well as by physical size, the dwarf being approximately as large as the
sleeping monster), but also by function. The buffoons and the dog were situated
within this tableau to emphasise what Margarita was not. She—and the reflected royal
couple above her head—wielded authority, whilst those lower beings beside her had
no such power.
Again though, the situation depicted is ambiguous. If dwarves could play at
being aristocrats as well as their betters, then the two orders could be inverted—just
as Velázquez himself was later raised to the knightly Order of Santiago some time
after the painting was completed, and his doublet in Las Meninas was repainted with a
white cross to reflect this.17 Indeed, Velázquez’s fame stems not only from Las
Meninas, but from a wonderful series of portraits which he executed depicting the
dwarves and fools who dwelt within Philip’s court (Clark notes with some surprise
that the Prado holds as many of these works as it does paintings by the artist of his
aristocratic masters). The heightened presence of royal fools within Velázquez’s
oeuvre and the Spanish court highlights how conscious both the painter and his
contemporaries were that universe could be conceived as nothing more than a grand
yet unstable performance or theatre (the theatrum mundi, or theatre of the world), in
which rulers’ identities were dependent on their ability to fashion themselves with as
much skill and verve as their diminutive charges.18
The dwarves in Philip’s retinue were not, then, simply subjects who fashioned
themselves through amusing and at times subversive performances and acts of self-
presentation. They were also objects or props utilised by the king himself. By
possessing these fools (and Philip did effectively own these human subjects, as he did
his hunting dogs), the monarch proclaimed his own perspicacity and self-awareness of
his status as a ruler who had to perform and to create his own destiny by contracting
such performances enacted at his behest by his fools or by his painters—as well as by
deploying these very performers about his palace, much as one would any other
inanimate decoration, statue or painting. The mastiff too functioned in this manner,
since only aristocrats were wealthy enough to be able to maintain an animal whose
role was largely decorative and companionate, rather than functional, whilst the
utilization of hounds in the chase also showed to all the monarch’s military power. In
owning a beast and using it in these very public hunts, the King advertised his mastery
over nature and his worthiness as an adversary. Moreover, according the iconography
of the time, dogs were said to signify an owner afflicted with the lonely complaint of
melancholy. Whilst melancholy was in many ways an unpleasant condition (several
insane monarchs were diagnosed with the malady),19 it was also seen as a sign of a
refined intellect and of one who possessed deep insight into the state of the world—
much like the incorruptible, avenging prince of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.20 It
was claimed that only those who scorned the company of other men could truly love a
dog, so to keep such a beast close to one’s side as Saint Jerome did, or as the Infanta
does in Las Meninas, signified how isolated these religious and political rulers were.
Enfolded within this melancholy world of surfaces, of appearances, and of stage-
managed performances, Margarita remained profoundly alone, her essential nature—
if such a thing could even be said to exist—inaccessible to everyone, including those
courtiers and carers closest to her.
A similar sense of absence, isolation and melancholy haunts Pet Photo Booth.
Surrounded by this dazzling array of artful constructions and self-conscious poses, it
is hard to be sure what, if anything lies at the heart of this project or of those caught
within its ambit. The eye is deflected from one image to another in an exchange of
surfaces and diffractions which resemble more than anything else the way that the
mirror functions at the back of Velázquez’s painting. In the face of such an exuberant
celebration of inauthenticity, one is tempted to either respond as Scarlet does, to
allows one’s poise to drain away and to stand there shocked at the wondrous,
Warholian beauty of it all—or alternatively, to seek solace in oneself and one’s own
fictions. Like the figures of Las Meninas, each of Pet Photo Booth’s human subjects
stares back at us such that we are implicated in its work. Are we too crafting ourselves
through a performance, deploying our own pets like some kind of astonishing living
ruff, and reconstructing ourselves as clever, art-savvy spectators by consuming these
images?
The photograph of the deceptively relaxed looking gent who is lifting his dog
level with his face encapsulates many of these tensions. Going beyond the behaviour
of his companions in the other depictions (such as Mark McEntree with his two fluffy,
diminutive canines, or ballerina Melissa Boniface), this unassuming individual allows
the shadow and the visage of his panting terrier to replace his own countenance. With
his face cast into darkness, he becomes—like the pets in the other images—an
inanimate object within the photographic mise en scène.21 He too becomes a kind of
prop or sculptural element deployed within a fabulous, imaginative tableau where dog
and man alike serve as decontextualised icons, signifying nothing else but Foucault’s
state of “pure representation,” artifice and play.
I would like to close then by suggesting that perhaps the amazing backdrops
recruited for Pet Photo Booth act in a manner not altogether unlike how the mirror
functions in Las Meninas. These backcloths, and their unlikely lunar or neo-Romantic
terrains, reflect back at us our own fantasies and desires—indeed, they echo our
cultural history, from the science-fiction pretentions of the 1980s space shuttle
program, through to the sublime landscapes of late nineteenth century poetry and
music. These backdrops explicitly mark the photographic space out as one of
representation and highlight how by stepping into this circuit of illusions, we too
become fictional—like the cast of Las Meninas. In fact, perhaps we always were.
Maybe that is what we and our pets really are: protagonists and props in a play which
we have been constructing and reshaping throughout our lives. Where Velázquez
draws the viewer in by a powerful illusion of depth and echoed light, Spiers and
Doherty englobe the viewer within the work by an artful deployment of flatness and
surface which in today’s world echoes the nature of our lives even more profoundly
than the convergent beams and spatial conundrums of Las Meninas. As Andrew Frost
says of Fowler’s iconography, works like these “suggest a rather disquieting notion”
that “nature”—and so humanity too—“is blank.”22 In his filmic documentary Grizzly
Man (2005), Werner Herzog observes: “there’s no such thing as the secret world of
bears” only a “blank stare” and “a half-bored interest in food.”23 As such, pets and
animals are infinitely available for our reconfiguring of them into our own selves and
our adornments, to the point that several of the human subjects in Pet Photo Booth
eclipse their own facial identity with that of their animals. Like some kind of
carnivalesque hybrid straight out of those dances of folly which the King’s dwarves
performed, these individuals advertise their own theatrical gameplay and
reformulation of self around a set of signifiers which endlessly defer meaning
throughout this theatre of mirrors which is stage-managed by Doherty and Spiers. The
only thing we can be sure of is that some of these modern fools recruited by Spiers
and Doherty had a lot of fun playing and performing in the shadows of Las Meninas.
— Dr Jonathan W. Marshall
Edith Cowan University / University of Otago
“RealTime Australia”
Originally appeared in: JAC: Journal of Rhetoric And Culture, 30.3-4 (2010), pp. 619-644.
1 John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” in About Looking (NY: Vintage, 1980), pp. 3-30. On the
representation of animality in art, see: David Williams, “The Right Horse, The Animal Eye” and Steve
Baker, “Sloughing the Human,” both in Performance Research, 5.2 (2000), pp. 29-40, 71-81.
2 Geraldine Barlow, ed., Brook Andrew (Melbourne: MUMA, 2007).
3 See: Jonathan W. Marshall, “Dark Illuminations,” RealTime Australia, 83 (Feb 2008),
<http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue83/8909>; Roger Ballen, Shadow Chamber (London:
Phaidon, 2005); Robert Cook, Brutal, Tender, Human, Animal (Perth, AGWA, 2008). For a survey of
recent photographic deployments of the animal as an attempt to evoke a prelapsarian wild nature, see:
Jazmina Cininas, “Dog Days” and Edward Colless, “Performing Animal,” both in Photofile, 79
(Summer 2009), pp. 30-33, 40-42.
4 <http://www.petphotobooth.com/info.html>.
5 Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997); Hubert Damisch, The
Origin of Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997); Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window
(Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006).
6 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (NY: Vintage, 1994), p. 16.
7 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 1993).
8 Svetlana Alpers, “Interpretation Without Representation,” Representations, 1 (Feb 1983), p. 31;
Suzanne Stratton-Pruit, ed., Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002).
9 John Searle, “Las Meninas,” Critical Inquiry, 6.3 (Spring 1980), p. 480.
10 See: Jay Hanna, “Pet Set,” West Australian Sunday Times (21 Oct 2006), reproduced on
<http://www.petphotobooth.com/STM_Oct_06.pdf>; Alexa Moses, “How Much is that Doggy?”
Sydney Morning Herald (18 Oct 2006) and Tracey Clement, “Pet Project,” Sydney Morning Herald (25
Jan 2007), <http://www.smh.com.au/>.
11 For a gloss on Judith Butler’s model of “performativity” as the creation of identity through speech,
language and act, see: Jonathan W. Marshall, “Beyond the Theatre of Desire: Hysterical Performativity
10 and Perverse Choreography in the Writings of the Salpêtrière School,” in Peter Cryle and Christopher
Forth, eds, Fin de siècle Sexuality: The Making of a Central Problem (Newark: Delaware UP, 2009).
12 On the historiography of time in the image from Gotthold Lessing to Greenfield, see: Jonathan W.
Marshall, “Pathos, Pathology, and the Still-Mobile Image: A Warburgian reading of Held by Garry
Stewart and Lois Greenfield,” About Performance, 8 (June 2008), pp. 180-206.
13 On Foucauldian heterotopia, see: Jonathan W. Marshall, “Flatness, Ornamentality and the Sonic
Image: Puncturing flânerie and Postcolonial Memorialisation in the Work of Chesworth and Leber,”
Sound Scripts: Proceedings of the Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference, 2 (2009).
14 Kenneth Clark, Looking At Pictures (London: Murray, 1960), pp. 31ff.
15 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: Chicago UP 1980); Jonathan W.
Marshall, Civilisation and its Discontent Hamlets: Renaissance Melancholy, Modernist Neurosis and
Shakespeare’s Prince, unpublished M.A. thesis (Melbourne: Dept. of History, University of
Melbourne, 1998).
16 Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, eds, History of the Private Life. II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
1988); Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Imagination (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1988).
17 Marshall, Civilisation; Enid Welsford, The Fool (London: Faber, 1968); Barry Wind, A Foul and
Pestilent Congregation (Brookfield: Ashgate, 1998); George Grosse, “A Foul and Pestilent
Congregation” [book review], Sixteenth Century Journal, 30.4 (Winter 1999), pp. 1081-1084; Mikhail
Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984); Michel Foucault, Madness and
Civilization (NY: Vintage, 1988).
18 Las Meninas’ self-referential fictionality and theatricality has also been compared to Pedro
Calderón’s plays and to Miguel de Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote. Marshall, Civilization; Richard
Bernheimer, “Theatrum mundi,” Art Bulletin, 38 (1956), pp. 225-247; Harriett Hawkins, “‘All the
world’s a stage,’” Shakespeare Quarterly, 17 (1966), pp. 174-8; Michael Shapiro, “Role-Playing,
Reflexivity and Metadrama in Recent Shakespearean Criticism,” Renaissance Drama, XII (1981), pp.
145-161; Dawson Carr and Xavier Bray, eds, Velázquez (London: National Gallery, 2006).
19 Erik Midelfort, Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany (Charlottesville: Virginia UP, 1994).
20 Noting the similarity of the Infanta’s furred companion to those beasts which accompanied the saints,
Steinberg observes that sleeping dogs often signified a tranquil, meditative space in which the owner
listened for the music of the spheres and other deep, quiet mysteries. Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl and
Raymond Klibansky, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964); Leo Steinberg, “Velázquez’ Las
Meninas,” October, 19 (Winter 1981), pp. 46-51.
21 Dawn Ades and Krauss identify this is a central characteristic of Surrealist photography, in which the
camera is employed to objectify human subjects, thereby transforming them into foci for the creative
powers of desire, whilst simultaneously humanising objects and animals, rendering them in turn as
protagonists within the theatre of desire (mantises and phasmids figure particularly prominently within
the Surrealist bestiary). Rosalind Krauss et al., L’amour fou (Washington/NY: Corcoran Gallery /
Abbeville Press, 1985).
22 Andrew Frost et al, Hayden Fowler (Sydney: Gallery Barry Keldoulis, 2006).
23 Werner Herzog, dir., Grizzly Man (USA: Lions Gate, 2005).
Jonathan and Moomin