Back in the late ’80s, after the wrap-up of both Bambis, Natalya Bondarchuk relays that the animal doubles of the human actors were donated to the child survivors of the Chernobyl meltdown. In my head, I draw a misshapen map of the USSR; motion lines trace the relocation sites of irradiated children and the forever homes of the animal stars. But what of tonight’s nuclear battlefield? Is there a functional live webcam out there in the Zone of Alienation where I can tune into a shaking spider secreting a skewed lattice of sunlit gossamer strands—its bright irregular warp indicating persistent mutations in her body? Might I spy, with jaundiced, remote eye, the spider eating her own web? After a trauma-feed, she’s full (again) on her own distortions.

This is a translation and transcription of Marcel Broodthaers’s 1970 audio work Interview with a Cat. 1 *** Marcel Broodthaers: Is that one a good painting? … Does it correspond to what you expect from that very recent transformation which goes from conceptual art to this new version of a kind of figuration, as one might say? Cat: Miaow. MB: Do you think so? Cat: Miiaaow … mm … miaow … miaow. MB: And yet this color is very clearly redolent of…