The (Sad) Truth About Cats and Dogs

You see them everywhere, bearing messages as simple as they are plaintive:

“Lost: Black-and-White Tuxedo Cat.”

“Have You Seen Lulu? Blond Beagle, No Tags.”

“Bixy Is Missing. Please Help Us Find Her.”

They’re accompanied by a phone number and usually a crude drawing or photocopied picture of the missing pet. Sometimes a reward is mentioned, or a wrenching bit of information (“Needs Medication”).

Sad? Yes. Effective? Sometimes. But art? Well. . . .

“To me, they just have more feeling than most art that I’ve seen,” says Erik Brunetti, the 28-year-old Los Angeles designer and president of an iconoclastic fashion label. For the past four years, he has been a passionate collector of lost pet posters, amassing nearly 500 examples, mostly from L.A. neighborhoods. The cream of his cache has just been exhibited at the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York City’s SoHo district.

“It’s folk art,” Brunetti says. “When you talk about desperation in art and what art is really trying to show, this stuff cuts right to the root of it. It’s art in a crisis.”

The show consisted of 70 posters haphazardly tacked or stapled to the gallery walls. And while many people would certainly roll their eyes and murmur “What next?” at the idea of presenting as art items pilfered from Laundromat bulletin boards and telephone poles, others see the collection as perfectly legitimate in that context.

“What he’s done is taken actual objects from everyday life and, in combining them, created a larger piece which transcends the original components,” says Barry Neuman, associate director of O.K. Harris. He likens the effect to that of a mosaic. “They have texture and they have physical presence. Each is on a different paper. Some are Xeroxed, some are done by hand. It’s no different than looking at a collection of rocks or bricks which comprises a unified sculpture.”

Well, maybe.

Academically, Brunetti’s work has its roots in a movement born in early 20th century Europe. That’s when Dadaist founder Marcel Duchamp stuck a urinal in an art gallery, titled it “Fountain,” and dared to call it art. But Brunetti tends to dwell on the emotional aspects of the collection.

“When people look at it and go ‘Awwwww,’ that’s my favorite reaction,” he says. “Because some of them are so pitiful. Like the lost Chihuahuas that need their medicine. From what I gather, people look at it and get really sad or they laugh. It’s either of those extremes, which is pretty much what I wanted.”

Brunetti is particularly partial to posters that feature hand-drawn likenesses of the animals and that eschew the MacIntosh. He deflects criticism from animal lovers by explaining that he always makes sure a duplicate poster is hanging nearby before adding one to his collection. And, as further evidence of his compassion, he says he’s called a few of the numbers to ask if the pet was ever found. Dogs tend to turn up, he has learned, but cats and other creatures (a tiny percentage of the posters involve rabbits, turtles and parakeets) usually stay lost.

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The pet owners have not been informed, however, that their creations have become part of a “unified sculpture.”

“I didn’t know that somebody went ahead and did that,” says Ben Shohan, who 2 1/2 years ago put up 50 posters around his Beverly-La Brea neighborhood in hopes of finding his lost bulldog. Four days later, a Good Samaritan returned his beloved Girlie unharmed. She is still alive and kicking.

Shohan finds it amusing that his crude poster appeared on the walls of a SoHo gallery. “If he’s making money off of that, I want part of it,” he says.

Brunetti says he isn’t. “I don’t think that this collection is something that somebody is going to want to own. It’s more or less an installation, a conceptual art piece.”

The gallery has offered for sale 50 signed and numbered books of posters, stapled together, for $10 each and 75 T-shirts for $25--paltry sums within the fast-and-loose dollar-waving SoHo art world. And while the individual posters were not for sale, the entire collection of 70 could be had for $3,800. When the show closed earlier this month, there had been no takers.

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Brunetti’s collection came to the attention of O.K. Harris Gallery owner Ivan Karp through a mention in a Details magazine interview. In the ‘60s, Karp had served as director of the Leo Castelli gallery, where he showcased such out-of-the-mainstream artists as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Neuman says the gallery has similar plans for Brunetti.

“It’s very much related to what happened with Andy Warhol,” he says. “Warhol was essentially earning his living in ads and commercial arts and made the transition to fine art. Basically, Erik has the talent, he’s one of the leading pioneers of a certain kind of T-shirt design in this generation. We are confident that he’ll produce some meaningful work.”

Brunetti captured the public’s attention five years ago when he took the classic oval Ford Motor Co. logo and changed the lettering to read Fuct, the name of his clothing label. “It was a joke, pretty much,” he says, with an infectious titter. “Everything kind of starts out as a joke.”

Jokes aside, Brunetti’s deft co-opting of popular icons has resulted in sales of tens of thousands of T-shirts and other fashion accessories each year, making his a prominent anti-status label of Generation X. His latest fashion assault involves lighthearted riffs on the prince of darkness. A typical T-shirt design bears a facsimile of one of those “Hello, My Name Is . . . “ stickers to which Brunetti adds “Satan” in kiddie handwriting to the white space. It’s one of his bestsellers.

For his next foray into the world of fine art, Brunetti mentions that he also collects fortune cookie fortunes. “I’m going to do a piece with them soon,” he promises. But the maverick designer and budding conceptual artist doesn’t see a relationship between the two endeavors. “I don’t think there’s any connection,” he says. “This is just kind of me doing my art for art’s sake, not for Fuct’s sake.”