On literally sending a cat to heaven
I (probably) should not have written that
This is a story about a Dutch artist, his dead cat, the editor who tried to convinced me that you can spin anything in any direction, and what happens when spinning makes you dizzy.
“Have you seen this? You should write about it.” That was the email my editor sent me. She was talking about that Dutch artist who made a helicopter of his dead cat by attaching propellers to its outstretched taxidermied limbs. The cat had been hit by a car. The artist made conceptual pieces about useless contraptions. The cat loved to hunt birds. So duh — a remote-controlled helicopter cat.
“Ummm, I don’t knowwwwwwwwww,” I replied.
“Oh come on,” she insisted, “Just spin it as a loving memorial to a beloved pet.”
A challenge? Okay. I agreed to write the piece.
While I understand some of the outrage surrounding the video, I’m not terribly upset by it. (I hope to donate my remains to Body Worlds.) I might have a penchant for bizarre taxidermy. I might have a penchant for absurdist art. I might have a penchant for approaching things with benign nihilism. And I might have a penchant for folks who express themselves through unconventional avenues. Would I make a helicopter cat? No — but I would also never get a cat. (Allergic.)
I did my best with the post. Look, I’m an artist — I’ve immortalized my lovers in prints of prone women with tentacles oozing from their vaginas, consuming a skeleton of a man like a cuttlefish devouring a crustacean. Some of us just have really weird ways of displaying love, okay? Bart Jansen is just another weirdo and when his cat — named Orville — died, he gave him propellers for paws and sent him off to heaven.
“While Orville may have met a tragic end, he now lives on in Jansen’s art, which is quite possibly the greatest form of commemoration an artist can provide for his muse. Jansen says that Orville was always fond of watching birds … and now he can fly with them, soaring high among the clouds.”
Our readers met the post with criticism. “DISCUSTING [sic],” they wrote, some of them claiming it was the most disgusting thing they’d ever seen, a post that “disrespected all cats,” along with a critique of Dutch art — the same folks who produced Girl with a Pearl Earring—and how we don’t “need that in the U.S.” There was even a comment from a cat that I can authenticate was written by an actual cat because I had to throw it into Google to translate it from Cheezburger into English. I had one fan in a commenter calling themself “pro cat helicopter,” who bravely argued in favor of Mr. Jansen’s art and ruminated on the way we treat death with sugarcoated mystique.
I’m not going to link to the post, but I won’t stop you from searching for it. I had only just started writing freelance for the site, and I had a lot to learn about niche audiences. Fortunately, none of their ire was directed at me, personally, and the post has since faded into Internet amnesia and a joke that occasionally resurfaces at the office.
I recently covered that viral video of Tara the hero cat saving her human friend from a vicious dog attack. Now a lot more mindful of my readers’ nuances, I delivered the post with tact and grace, and managed to ride its viral momentum and give the site a nice little traffic boost. I probably should not have written about helicopter cat, but I did. Would I do it again?
When pigs fly.
(Don’t get any ideas.)
