Opinion: Updated: I don’t know much about slaughtering animals, but I know what I like
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This post was updated at 11:48 am Thursday. See below:
From that great city to the north comes news that some art is so shocking even San Francisco hipsters will censor it. An exhibition by the French artist Adel Abdessemed at the spectacularly located S.F. Art Institute has been shut down following an outcry and threats from pro-animal activists. Kenneth Baker’s review in the Chronicle describes the show and notes that complaints also were lodged by folks who in other circumstances might be the ones looking to épater le bourgeois:
The animal rights protesters were inflamed by Abdessemed’s six very brief video loops, played on separate monitors, each showing an animal - a horse, a pig, a goat, an ox, a deer and a sheep - being killed, apparently without bloodshed, by a quick hammer blow to the head. Abdessemed shot the videos himself in rural Mexico, merely documenting passages in the town’s customary food production. But text accompanying the videos’ presentation at SFAI left Abdessemed’s role ambiguous.* A viewer had to wonder whether his hand wielded the hammer rather than the camera, whether he shot the video or merely commissioned it, and whether he commissioned the animals’ execution. The shock of the protest lies not only in its vehemence but also in the fact that it involves the rare spectacle of artists, including many SFAI faculty members, advocating censorship.
You could argue that censorship isn’t the proper word here, since the objection raised by Eagle Rock’s own Diana Thater and apparently others was to the killing of the animals, not necessarily to the art itself. But Thater herself gives that game away by denouncing the show as a ‘sick exhibit’ that ‘represents the very worst impulses of the human imagination,’ fails to ‘raise people’s consciousness’ and ‘will encourage them to accept animal abuse.’ Those are objections to expression of ideas, not to the acts themselves. (Whether the strict argument against killing the animals holds up is also open to question, since by general agreement these were all feed animals that were going to be done in whether there was a hoity-toity conceptual artist present or not.) *
Anyway, this is just a roundabout way of teasing my long-ago piece ‘Artists for censorship.’ Sez me, artists are no more or less censorious than anybody else. Writers and musicians have always believed some ideas needed to be suppressed. The urge to censor is particularly strong when the objectionable ideas show up in a medium other than your own (surprise, surprise). And there may even be some value in the impulse to ‘take seriously the idea that there may actually be dangerous ideas, and dangerous artistic vehicles for communicating them.’
* According to an SFAI representative, the ambiguity Baker refers to is at most a red herring: the artist merely documented an existing procedure. ‘These pictures were taken by him in an abattoir and not staged,’ she says, ‘and he did not participate in slaughtering the animals.’ If true, this would eliminate the argument over the welfare of the animals (though you might be able to craft a case that the individual animal has a death-with-dignity right that would protect it from non-consensual documentation of the killing), and leave us only with the argument over expression. It may be helpful at this time to reiterate that the show was closed due to threats of violence against the institute, not due to the objections we’ve been discussing.