A Horse of Many Colors, 00:46, 2011

Made in collaboration with Pigeon the dog. Camera: Floris Schonfeld

THE HORSE OF MANY COLORS: PROBLEMS AND LOGIC

In the film, The Wizard of Oz, the Horse walks out of the scene, and then reappears again, as himself, only a different color; thus, his namesake. 

1. The first problem: how?         

Answer: They used multiple white horses for this shoot and dyed the hair of each one with a different color with food coloring.

What is the white horse?  

romance elegance grace strength form beauty radiance love fantasy 

(who in their right mind would dye this horse?) 

Does white radiate all color?

Theoretically, black absorbs and white reflects all color.  White is the color of many colors.  It is also the color of absence. (It is: a whiteout, the color of a storm, a flash of light).  

2. One could argue that a horse that is blue, as in Oz, is no longer a horse, as horses are not ever blue. If it is no longer a real horse, then it cannot be a real horse that changes colors, unless we are living in a fantasy.

Oz is a fantasy, 

  the horse is real.

(When it comes to fantasy, I tend to feel tethered to reality, like a hot-air balloon filling with hot air just before take off.  It pushes against the sky and pulls mightily on the rope attached to the peg sunk deep into the earth.  A certain volume of air is displaced around the balloon but the balloon is always (even after take-off) a barrier, however thin, between whatever is out there and what is not.  That volume of air, displaced, takes on new forms as the balloon fills and blows about and bangs on the sky; it’s something I’ll never be able to touch or even see). 

Scenario: A human and a dog dress up as horses .  They are owner and pet, female human owner, male dog pet.  The dog is significantly shorter than the human (being that he is on four legs and average medium-dog-size, this is logical).  The human, woman, is also of average size. The horse costumes are made of one-sided, white painted, plywood cutouts of horses, sized proportionately to whichever creature will wear it.  They live in a beautiful wooded environment, free of any other modern civilization: “nature.”  They have two sets of actions.  First, the big horse and little horse stand in the wooded area facing one another.  At times, a human-woman hand reaches for the dog mouth (from behind the horse costumes) to give him a treat for standing still and looking at her.  They also run across a field of tall grasses, the small horse trails behind the bigger one. 

Question: Is a horse made out of plywood and strapped to a human or a dog as much a horse as a real horse dyed blue?  What makes a horse?  

3. A plywood horse takes on the personality of the creature donning the costume, through sound and movement.  Also though, the creature donning the costume takes on the personality of the plywood horse, through form.  

The scale creates a mama and baby horse. This is true even if neither is really true. 

4. If you wear a costume, how much of yourself slips into it, how much slips out?  

The person and the dog are not quite concealed by the horses: human legs emerge from below the horse’s belly, a dog’s neck and face turn behind the horse’s head. 

There is a line in magic between wonderment and deception.   

The owner of the dog, the woman, has an elder brother.  When they were children, the brother liked to make magic.  He used his wit and charm to lure his sister in.  He stole things, made them “disappear”; he knew things about her that only her journal knew, and he revealed her private thoughts as messages to strangers.  He also shuffled cards and had a black wand with white tips.  He also had a cape.  He seemed to like that in magic, one person knew the how of the trick, while the other did not.  If you know this, then you know everything.  That was the brother’s role.

The woman now, years later with her dog, finds a renewed interest in magic.  It is in the unraveling of the how all the while experiencing and opening up to the wonder. She hates being tricked and hates the feeling that someone else might be made to feel tricked.  It is like feeling stolen.  It is like feeling watched or followed or lied to and it doesn’t have anything to do with magic. She thinks.  

In logic, almost any truth can be deduced from almost any start; there is a path.  The path is marked openly for all to see.  And you really can’t skip steps.  If you collapse the path once you’ve made it to your final truth, and A leads to B, it may seem a mysterious result.  

5.  A horse that is multiple species is the same as a horse that is multiple colors, but maybe, actually, much more.

White is the color of purity. And ghosts. Also, plywood is completely flat; white makes it even flatter.  What are flat white horses doing in a rich lush landscape? It is a romantic joke.  

A horse of multiple species might be a horse that is also a person and also a dog.  You have to believe, one might say.  But it’s not the case.  Belief, as a concept in magic, is actually the wrong pursuit.  Belief will de-rail you.  Belief is too big too tackle.  Who cares about belief?  It is about what is. This is a discussion of a horse that is a woman and a horse that is a dog, and a woman who is a woman, a dog who is a dog, and a couple-a horses who are a couple-a horses.  Those things are given.  Those things are known.