February
1999
Editorial:
Palate or Palette: Is it Art?
By Martin Rowe
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According
to artist Sue Coe, there were two reasons why slaughterhouse managers
allowed her to sit and record the scenes of animal slaughter in their
establishments. First, she was a woman, and therefore would somehow fade
into the background amidst the macho massacre. Second, she was an artist
and not a photographer. Somehow, it was decided that these two features
in combination would render her and her rendering of rendering invisible.
How wrong they were. The work that Coe produced over a number of years
was collected into the book Dead Meat (Four Walls, Eight Windows,
1996). It remains, for me, the most devastating indictment of the conditions
for both human and non-human animals in slaughterhouses precisely because
of its artistic qualities: its muted tones combined with vivid spot coloration
capture the physical and psychic agony of killed and killers; the stylization
and use of text on the paintings powerfully critique the power structures
of the agricultural–industrial complex; and the beautifully executed
charcoal sketches illuminate the pathos of the mechanized life of the
slaughterhouse. If any evidence were needed that art can be as powerful
a documenter of life (and death) as photography, it is here in Coe’s
work.
This issue of Satya is dedicated to a selection of artists working
in the fields of art, performance theater, music, and spoken word. These
artists have brought their concerns regarding the environment and animals
into their art, and their skills as artists to the issues of planetary
devastation and other-than-human life. It might be asked why artists such
as Damien Hirst or Jannis Kounnelis or Hermann Nitsch are not featured
in this issue. Hirst, the enfant terrible of British art, has used
cows and pigs in his art, and has even had his supplies freshly killed
for the purpose. Austrian Nitsch was the orchestrator of a six-day festival
in August last year during which participants slaughtered three bulls
and six pigs. Rather more tamely perhaps, Kounnelis—who has used
live animals in his art since the 1960s—staged an exhibition in SoHo
last year where five starlings were caged as part of a rather banal reminiscence
of how canaries used to warn humans of the presence of dangerous gas in
mines.
It is not immediately clear what Hirst’s art involving dead animals
is meant to represent. When Hirst was asked what his piece entitled “Some
Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything”—in
which two cows were sliced up and suspended in 12 tanks of formaldehyde—meant,
his only reply was that it was “worth a lot of money.” While
the New York Sanitation Department took a dim view of Hirst’s displays
of dismembered pigs, David Hockney found it all delightful. Commenting
on “Some Comfort...,” he said: “It’s like a fairground
isn’t it? This is like the attraction of 3-D photography.” Nitsch,
who described his six-day theater as being a celebration of Being, wanted
to recapture the sacred dimension of the Dionysiac cultus of blood
frenzy and ingestion of animal power and link it to a modern day “re-enactment”
of the Christian Crucifixion and Eucharist. Defending his slaughter of
the animals, Nitsch announced that his art was no different from what
happened in a slaughterhouse.
As for Kounnelis, after protests and when the exhibit was over, the birds
were released to a bird rehabilitator.
It would be one thing if these artists’ well-remunerated attempts
pour épater le bourgeois offered much insight into the often-tortured
dynamic between human and non-human life. It would be another thing if
Nitsch had accompanied Sue Coe to a slaughterhouse to see if what he was
doing was exactly what they do in a slaughterhouse and whether his festival
of love and peace was properly representative of the commercial act of
killing. I understand that the shock of the new is fundamental to art—indeed,
art needs to keep shocking us so that we may better understand the human
condition. But what irks me about these artists is that their observations
are so uninteresting: they aren’t new and only shock to the extent
that one doesn’t run across cows’ remains in galleries very
often or (in Nitsch’s case) trample on animals’ intestines every
day. While Nitsch could point out our common collusion in animal slaughter—even
down to the use of gelatin (or crushed cow bone) in photographs—as
an excuse for what he did, it remains a poor excuse for art. Art should
challenge and transmogrify; it should provoke, yes; but it should also
evoke. Grossing people out, I would venture, is hardly the stuff of an
artistic manifesto.
The artists in this issue are all in their way activists. Outrageously,
they actually want to do something with the insights their art offers
them, and they are using their considerable skills to bring about change.
If this makes them too tame or lamentably outré or insufferably
de trop for the gilded children of the international art scene,
then they are willing to take the risk on the off-chance that our world
may be the better for their efforts.
Martin Rowe
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