Decoy c. 1939

Curator: What a curious little creature! The watercolor lends a softness to its form. Editor: This is Oscar Bluhme's "Decoy," created around 1939. Notice how the drawing merges with the painting, highlighting a kind of crafted realism. Curator: The immediate impact is one of quiet stillness. It's suspended, almost weightless. Is it the rendering of the bird itself or the empty background that contributes most to this feeling? Editor: Well, consider the title. A "decoy" implies mimicry, a constructed imitation designed to lure. The painted surface itself becomes a crucial layer in this act of deception, suggesting a very specific relationship between making and use. The decoy exists to bring bodies in for capital gain. Curator: That shifts the symbolic weight considerably! It's no longer a simple avian study but a comment on exploitation and vulnerability. I see that beak, and think about language, communication... Editor: Precisely! The elongated beak, realistically rendered, is then further mediated by paint, labor, commerce, creating a complex image of the interaction between man and nature during the early half of the 20th century. It's all about a chain of cause and effect within material practices. Curator: Do you think it is intentionally unsettling? There's something inherently unsettling about things created to manipulate instincts and urges. Even in its visual simplicity, this decoy embodies our contradictory relationship to the natural world: admiration mixed with the will to control. It echoes folk beliefs, where animal forms often bridge our world with hidden ones. Editor: Perhaps unsettling only upon further examination. On first glance it just seems a rendering, until we start probing its function as part of material production and networks of exchange. Curator: So it’s a reminder that things are seldom just as they appear. Editor: Exactly! And that art doesn’t simply depict; it also *does*.