The radioactive cats of Sandy Skoglund
An old couple sit in a drab grey house, the woman opening the fridge, the man sitting on a chair blankly staring into the distance. They’re surrounded, swarmed even, by cats. It’s a fairly typical vision of the kind of social alienation the elderly face, except the cats are neon green. They’re the radioactive creations of Sandy Skoglund, whose conceptual art blends surreal photography with conceptual scenes. These often take the form of an elaborate tableau, and in the case of 1980’s Radioactive Cats, there were over 20 luminescent creatures.
It remains one of her most famous works, evocating a universal sense of loneliness and its name subsequent thoughts about nuclear war. Skoglund handmade each green cat out of plaster, setting them up in a set she’d painted grey. Two of her elderly neighbours stepped in to be the models amongst the cats, their faces largely hidden, but the implication of their age shone through regardless. She relied on tweaking her camera’s F-stop settings to give the photo a sense of movement.
By toying with the exposure, there’s a soft blur which aids the idea of the cats running around in the still frame. “I knew that, from a technical point of view, just technical, a cat is almost impossible to control,” she later explained.
“So it just kind of occurred to me to sculpt a cat, just out of the blue, because that way the cat would be frozen,” she added. “I had a few interesting personal decisions to make because once I realised that a real cat would not work for the piece, then the next problem was, well, am I going to sculpt it, or am I going to go find it?”
The sculpting process was key to arriving at her final vision. In the end, she made about 40 cats, some of which didn’t make the cut. It also promoted several troubled conversations with friends: “What does this look like?” she’d say. “What kind of an animal does it look like?” After realising her sculptures didn’t resemble much beyond a “four-legged creature”, panic gave way to inspiration.
Confronted by 20-odd cats, she decided a big cluster of them looked better than just one of two. “This sort of clustering and accumulation, which was present in a lot of minimalism and conceptualism, came into me through this other completely different way of representative sculpture,” she told the Holden Luntz Gallery.
Drawing comparisons to found art in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, she pointed out that if she’d taken that route and ordered a cat statue: “It wouldn’t be coming from my soul and my heart.”
In keeping with the conceptual tone of her work, Skolglund’s ultimate aim was to include spirit and feeling in her evocative cat image. “My limitations, too,” she said. “Because the cats aren’t perfect by any means.”