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Moo Do
Interactive
by Stefan Blom and Seamus Wilson
IMAGE OF THE EXHIBITION
Our annual spring interactive this year guests will create one of the 200 cow celebrations of the C3 CAPE COW CARNIVAL. Our Moo, settled on her ample, life-size self, a lying cow, like one of those sacred, bovine goddesses photographed beneath a shading tree in a city in India, around whom the traffic swerve and pedestrians tread with reverence, will be the canvas. Come and work together to dress her for the Carnival. The Cow Parade originated in Switzerland, attracting a stampede of tourists to Zurich and generating a turnover in the region of US$ 100 million. Chicago, New York and Kansas City followed in its tracks and were overwhelmed at the response. For each festival, artists are sponsored individually by companies who choose concepts that attract them. Each artist dresses a cow who then joins her entire, majestic herd of 200 to be exhibited throughout the city through the summer season. Our cow is sponsored by Claire Bourquin Recruitment Consultants and Corporate Gift with a Conscience.Their generosity makes our interactive party possible. Most of the other cows have been designed already so that companies can have some idea of what it is they’ll be sharing with their brand! We’ve chosen a different route. Frankly it felt a little cheeky, painting and decorating a cow. It requires engagement, after all, to express yourself upon a cow. They’re probably our closest neighbours, time travelling through the changing geographies of humanhistory with us upright, walking carnivores. They live on their fields, actually our fields, but anyway - they live on their fields all around our cities, cow cities next to our cities. We eat them, huge amounts of them. And wear their skin on our feet and our hands and make bags out of them and what have you else. Some of us trade them as currency. For some they represent our status. Some of us, many of us, maybe most of us - wouldn’t that be nice - refuse, of course, to eat them. Whole half-continents revere them as sacred. Like us, they’re social animals. We control their breeding more success fully than we do our own. So, we thought to invite a group of people round. Give them the materials, give them the expression, let a herd of humans express one facet of our relationship to cows, our shared mode of group living. And, within those groups, the poetic contradictions of it all - your meat is my goddess, your status is my shoe, through you I eat the grass, great mother.
Thankfully, we won’t be doing any of the theory in two weeks time, it’ll just be the joyful, careless, parallel universe of being back at play-school, lost in paint and glue and glitter and a stack of what-have-you that we’ll be providing. And a part in the C3 CAPE COW CARNIVAL, with your cow patiently sitting it out through the festival.
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