The revolution will be adorable

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The Pinky Show's cartoon cats take swipes at institutions including universities and galleries. (SUPPLIED PHOTO)

The Pinky Show, an anonymous artists' collective that deploys adorable cartoon cats to advance radical left ideas, is staging a campus occupation this month. The group's multimedia exhibition at the University of Winnipeg's Gallery 1C03 uses its academic setting to question the institutionalized values of higher education. And while the relationship between artists and patrons has always been tricky, The Pinky Show isn't biting the hand that feeds it. It's just nipping a bit with those darling little kitty teeth.

The group's "human representatives" work in Honolulu, but the cats -- including Pinky and pals Mimi, Kim and Bunny -- admit only to "an undisclosed desert location, somewhere between Los Angeles and Las Vegas." Since 2005, the cats have talked about "interrogating the logic of capitalism" and "dismantling class-affiliated hegemony," dressing up this undeniably didactic content with a fun, friendly anime style. With its comic tone and catchy animal characters, The Pinky Show recalls the Guerrilla Girls, a group of masked and anonymous feminist artists in 1980s New York. But Pinky and her friends are even cuddlier: think Noam Chomsky by way of Hello Kitty.

The Gallery 1C03 show is made up of overlapping mixed-media components. Near the entrance, a video projected onto a chaste twin bed depicts Pinky and a thought bubble in a dialectical conversation about academe. Is university a force for social and intellectual transformation or does it actually perpetuate the structures of power and privilege? Next, a series of banners with sweet, simple graphics try to keep the (supposedly) free-thinking liberal arts student from falling into the trap of the clock-watching, mortgage-carrying drone.

Another station features desks and a monitor playing a collection of Pinky videos (also available at www.PinkyShow.org). In one animated short, Kim Cat offers a giggly, soft-spoken take on the gallery system. "Actually at first I thought there must be some kind of law against having poor people on the museum's board of trustees," she explains in her breathless, faux-naïve way. "But then later I found out that actually there isn't any law like this. That's just the way they like to do it."

Finally, as we leave the show, we are invited to sign a "declaration of intent to commit class treason" and to work towards "a greater understanding of the workings of the world and [our] place in it." ("Print your name nicely," the always polite Bunny and Pinkie remind us.)

The Pinky ShowSSRqs work holds several layers of irony, starting with the cheeky strategy of using a university gallery to critique both universities and galleries. Then there's the flat, wide-eyed animation style, which calls up characters from the Sanrio universe of branded merchandising. Here consumerism is turned in on itself, with all that disarming cuteness used to tackle tough political issues. And then there's the show's gentle, goofy girlyness, which tweaks the myth of revolution as a heroic masculine endeavour. Forget Che fighting in the jungles of Bolivia: Pinky and her stuffed rabbit are ready for anything.

Clearly, this exhibition wants to catch college students before they make the usual middle-class adult compromises and capitulations. For those of us who already have "a house, some kids, a car, a dog," as the cats put it, The Pinky Show might sometimes seem a bit simple. But in their own sweet, sly-boots way, these artists take what is often dismissed as political naivété -- the belief that the world can be different, that people want to do right, that compassion is always in fashion -- and remind us of its hopeful power.

Alison Gillmor, former Free Press movie reviewer and current pop culture columnist, actually got her start back in 1993 as the paper's visual arts critic. Now she's back on her old beat.

ART REVIEW

Class Treason Stories (excerpts), The Pinky Show

Gallery 1C03

U of W, 515 Portage Ave.

Until Dec. 12

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 19, 2009 D3