On the Luxury of Self-Righteousness

From the hyperbolic, apparently world-wide, email misleading people about Guilermo Vargas Habacuc's "starving dog" piece to the response by certain members of PETA, In Defense of Animals, and The Animal Liberation Front to the exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute by Adel Abdessemed (titled "Don't Trust Me") that was closed after a coordinated, sometimes threatening campaign to stop it, there seems to be momentum building, under the guise of "protecting animals," to declare artistic explorations of how humans treat animals so off limits that it is, quite frankly, approaching fascism.

The controversy erupted because Abdessemed's exhibition included one installation which included "six video monitors of images recorded by the artist of the slaughter of farm animals at the point of their deaths. These events occurred in a rural community in Mexico where the animals were raised, purchased, and professionally slaughtered." [image above from SFAI's website.]

Artnews blog and others covered the Abdessemed controversy early last month, but now The Art Newspaper has published a thought-provoking (if at times somewhat difficult to follow) commentary by president of the San Francisco Art Institute Chris Bratton:

The response to “Don’t Trust Me” points to an animal rights movement that applies a code—as philosopher Charles Taylor calls it—without moral boundaries, a utopianism so insistent and frenzied that it disregards all constraints on action. Here we move out of the world of censorship to the world of security: condemn your opponents as the authors of crimes. Post photos of them along with home and email addresses. Further cue your constituents with language meant to incite outrage and “direct action”. Caricatures that render them so Other that they no longer even appear as human.

Is it any wonder, then, that the languages of torture, mutilation and murder followed so relentlessly after? This was luridly and violently elaborated in threatening emails, phone calls and letters, all echoing themes of surveillance, control, and violent punishment, addressed to numerous board, staff, faculty, and their families.

Even the most evidently self-authored emails that reached the school had a striking consistency all their own. One referred to “genital mutilation in Darfur”, another to “the exploitation of children in the Third World”, “sex tourism” and many to “pornography”, all as somehow related to the exhibition. One local critic said in reference to the exhibition that responses “to inflammatory materials presented as art are local, not global”. These associative chains tell us otherwise, that in the end this is very much about a world, but one that is seen as absolutely elsewhere, where other people and cultures are understood as savage and sexualised.

The universalising claims of animal rights groups like IDA and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals further obscure the highly specific cultural assumptions that underpin this controversy.

Now there are those on both sides in this controversy who exhibited what I'd consider the worst kind of political spin. Many among those supporting SFAI labeled, with out distinctions, the activist organizations as "extremists." Many supporting the cancellation of the exhibition, presumably without seeing it, labeled the video "snuff films." Neither side has cornered the market on objectivity here in my opinion, but the result of the battle was that the exhibition was closed and the rest of us were unable to see the work and make up our minds ourselves because others had decided for us that we shouldn't. That, as a free man, I cannot let go unchallenged.

I have a really simple solution for people who are offended by artwork that explores how animals are slaughtered: don't go see it. Unlike the Vargas piece that was contrived, because it included a live dog in an installation, the Abdessemed work recorded a practice that does indeed happen around the world on a daily basis. In other words, he was merely presenting a truth. Perhaps it's a painful truth for some. Perhaps it's so upsetting that after witnessing the work certain people would change their lifestyles, become vegetarian, send contributions to PETA, or whatever. But there is no question whatsoever in my mind that the mindless violence threatened by those who didn't like the idea of the exhibition is a far greater crime (against humanity, against nature, against reason, against free speech) than the presentation of this work. There was nothing about the protest that would bring the animals back to life, so it clearly wasn't in their defense the activists were working.

Indeed, having traveled to countries where witnessing the slaughter of animals is not only a daily family occurrence, but an act of actual survival, I find the arrogance of those pampered protesters who would close down an exhibition (to what? keep themselves from having nightmares? permit them to continue to imagine these acts are not commonplace? go about their merry self-righteous way without having actually helped anyone in any concrete way) much more offensive than the unpleasant way in which our food dies. At least that reality of life has the integrity of honesty about it. How many of the protesters threatening violence against SFAI staff went off to eat meat or walked away in leather shoes or benefited in uncountable ways from a lifestyle and economic system built on the fact that humans are animals who eat and use other animals because they can. Should the tide of evolution shift to where cows could easily exploit us, I'm quite sure they would.

Of course, there is no end to the corners of such debates that one can flesh out. The potential tangents are mindboggling (because, in short, this topic is about nothing less than the circle of life and death, survival of the fittest, and the search for a higher meaning). Still it behooves any human, regardless of how passionate they are about certain practices, to engage in the debate with respect for human life and freedom of speech. Otherwise, we're less than animals. We're barbarians.