US War Dogs I

SF-P 25-01
Unique
Signed
Sergio Frutos
, 2025
Acrylic on canvas
130 x 130 x 2 cm

SF-P 25-01
Unique
Signed


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About this artwork:

Dogs have a very long history in warfare, beginning in ancient times. From being trained in combat, to their use as scouts, sentries, messengers, mercy dogs, and trackers, their uses have been varied, and some continue to exist in modern military usage.

With the introduction of chemical warfare in World War I, soldiers had to protect themselves and their animals in order to survive and fight. Horses, mules, dogs, and pigeons all required protection from the effects of chemical warfare.

Early in World War II, as the Quartermaster Corps began training dogs for its new War Dog Program, colloquially known as the Army’s ’K-9 Corps’,¹ more than thirty breeds were accepted. But later, with more experience, the list was narrowed to five: German Shepherds, Belgian Sheep Dogs, Doberman Pinschers, Farm Collies (short coat) and Giant Schnauzers. Rejected breeds included Great Danes, difficult to train because of their size, and hunting dogs because animal scents occupied their attention. Alaskan Malamutes and Huskies were still trained for Arctic duty as sled dogs.²

This work brings us an unease feeling, double sided: on one hand, the strangeness that such a militaristic anthropomorphization evokes —assigning and embedding these animals into human categories as ‘soldiers’ and even ‘heros’—, and on the other, highlights the operation of contemporary biopower, understood as the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes.³

This operation of biopower would express the human agency trumping other animals, categories are sometimes inverted, they are flimsy and reversible: the dogs’ status changed from heroes —set for moments above human soldiers— to mere machinery, pressed below even animals, in order to excuse official United States policy to abandon the dogs in Vietnam when the United States withdrew.
Soldiers’ love for their canine partners heightened the teams’ effectiveness, but it also sharpened the soldiers’ sense of loss, contradiction, and betrayal in the face of the dogs’ abandonment, helping to inspire a legal change in U.S. policy regarding military dogs in 2000.⁴

Although animals are often forced to participate in human wars, their presence also signals human vulnerability and dependence. even in the horrible circumstances of war, powerful sympathies nonetheless flourish between humans and animals.⁵

Dogs have been used to teach us who is and isn’t human. Our obligation and responsibility to the gift that dogs bring is to undo the oppressive story of Man, which institutes untold amounts of suffering and oppression across species, and to tell new stories in its place.⁶

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About the project: STRANGER TIMES

The spectacle is the uninterrupted conversation which the present order maintains about itself, its laudatory monologue.

It is the self­ portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red, 1970.

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Stranger Times develops from research on archival photographs, mainly from II World War and Cold War, about bizarre chemical and biological war developments and examines the human enormous capacity of normalizing and banalizing the barbarism.¹ How much can we pretend that everything is ok when the world falls apart around us? To what extent are we exempt of responsibility?

We are in a theater where the familiar becomes strange, ‘verfremdet’ as in Bretch.²

It represents that uneasy tendency perhaps most poignantly, as it harasses the sanctity of the family, the society and the bourgeoisie, suggesting that any nostalgia we might have for their old, solid versions, should be abandoned, as according to two German and one Brooklyn's classics, "all that's solid, melts into air",³ and sentimental attachments are neither helping to stop this process, nor to emancipate.

Stranger Times tells us about the strangeness, the perplexity before the modern era and its absurdities, and the normalization and trivialization of these absurdities and their terrible consequences. Everyday life goes on while the world collapses around us, and we get used, banalize, adapt to the disaster or even gather to watch it as a spectacle. These paintings represent a not too distant past, or a future closer than we might think.