Witness to Slaughter

Sue Coe’s art is stark, polemical, and gruesome—and beautiful in spite of itself.

 

 

Me Drawing in a Slaughterhouse, from Sue Coe’s new book, Cruel: Bearing Witness to Animal Exploitation

 

You’ve used your art to
examine and illuminate very difficult issues—AIDS treatment in the third
world is another. And you put yourself into the situations you address. How
do you prepare? The majority of humans in this world are forced to witness
without power. When I enter a place where there is killing, I am powerless to
change anything in that moment. People only want to witness when they feel
they have the power to change something, or else they do not want to play. It
is a very Western view. At the very heart of oppression is the desire for
power and control. Animals and poor people are the unwanted and powerless. I
drew people with full-blown AIDS in the early days of the pandemic, because
one of my friends was a doctor on the front lines. It was a time when nearly
everyone died. I was scared, not of contracting HIV, but of watching any
human being dying. Dying is privatized—along with everything else—yet I
witnessed people’s courage and strength and all those who helped them on this
journey. A few years ago, in a Texas prison, I drew women who were HIV
positive. The prison was so frightening: It was all white, and the lights
were the brightest, reflecting off the white walls, and the uniforms were all
white; there was nowhere to rest the eyes, no shadows of quiet—the noise of the orders over the loudspeaker. The women had to walk in single file
against a wall and be counted over and over again. It was terrible state
cruelty inflicted on human beings, who were “guilty” of being poor and
uneducated, some mentally ill, and physically sick. The women said the worst
part of prison was that there is never any rest; they sleep in beds with a
low partition between them, and young women, new to the prison system, would
be screaming all night from drugs or mental-health disorders. I don’t know
how to prepare for any of it, to step in another’s shoes; whatever I feel is
magnified a thousand times by a person or animal in that situation. I cling
to the idea that maybe the art will help change it.

How do you stomach being in
the midst of a killing floor? Does making the images help you cope? Or do you
become numb after a while? The images are about me retraumatizing you, the viewer. Trauma is like having acid thrown onto your brain:
Like an etching plate, it eats into it, and you are compelled to keep
imprinting it onto other people, until they feel it too. It’s not my stomach
I worry about; it’s my mind, or wherever my soul is located, because it gets
broken every time animals suffer. When I make art, I make more witnesses, and
when there are enough witnesses, the horror stops. Insanity comes from
isolation, feeling you are alone in seeing what most do not. Many
animal-protection activists suffer immensely, because they have opened a door
of consciousness that enables them to see a reality that very few want to
see. Tactically, rather than stressing the moment of personal transformation,
and its subsequent isolation, the animal-rights debate must enter public
policy, enter the realm of political debate—this is happening, with many
bills being introduced. The animal-rights movement is global and it is
growing.

 

Perhaps. But for now, I can
see from your work that butchery has become more efficient but not more
humane. Is this ever possible? Should it be? This is a serious question and
one that is debated constantly. No, it is never possible to make slaughter
more humane. The process of breeding animals only to murder them at a very
young age for no reason other than to make money is cruel and immoral.
Slaughter can be made more efficient, and animal scientists can debate
whether or not decompression or gassing involves less suffering to the animal
than electrocution or “exsanguination,” with or without stun. But these are
bizarre and delusional mental gymnastics. The meat industry does not care
about animals. It cares about making the most profit in the fastest way. Once
you, the person who cares about animals, enter their world in an attempt to
negotiate gradations of suffering, then you have got seriously lost and
fucked up. There is legislation that is important as it pertains to food and
animal protection—downed animals must be euthanized immediately and not dragged into
slaughterhouses in chains or left to die by the side of the road; tail
docking must be made illegal; cameras need to be in all slaughterhouses—but
debating with the meat industry about cage sizes and slaughtering methodology
is indirectly enabling the industry to sell the idea of happy meat to a more
middle-class customer.

Happier meat is more
expensive meat. It is expanding their business, not reducing it. It has
always been this way in any social-justice movement: people’s compassion and
good intentions are used as a weapon against them by the dominant class. It
can be legitimately argued that discussion of these issues brings to the
attention of consumers that their food had a mother who was torn away from
them, food who felt pain in a tiny cage, food whose leg was torn out when
they were dragged from that cage, food who suffocated to death in a net or on
a hook—but given limited time and resources, promotion of a plant-based diet
over humane animal slaughter saves more animals.

Do we actually need to eat
meat to stay alive? None of us needs animal products to be healthy and well fed. That is a
total and complete lie. The meat industry states, as though they have a
crystal ball, that by 2050 meat production will have doubled. My crystal ball, which is more
valid than theirs, because it’s not smeared with blood money, says that by
the year 2050 the mass of humanity will be vegan.

“The highest quality I can aim for is: ‘This drawing kills
the animal-exploitation industry.’ ”

 

 

 Finning

In your experience, how does
working in a slaughterhouse impact the workers? Are they numb off the killing
floors? The staff I have met on the kill floor are usually fully aware of how
the animals suffer. They see this up close more than anyone. They either
despise the job, and leave at the earliest opportunity (the majority); or
justify the work as providing “food”; or they are numbed and feel powerless
in their own lives and enjoy inflicting more pain on the helpless animal. It
is the same process with farmed animals. The farmer justifies the tail
docking, the rape of cows, the sow-gestation crates, the debeaking of hens,
the chaining of replacement heifers with well-memorized science babble and
talking points pushed at them by industry publications, and they can get away
with blatant cruelty, because animals are just property. The irony is that
those slaughterhouse workers and farmers are themselves the property of the
global meat industry, which funded them for all the equipment of factory
farming. Humans are becoming the factory farmed, trained to look away and
just consume, never question, live in fear and debt, and die quietly and
efficiently, be that docile animal body in the capitalist labor process. Yet
quite a few of the animals are fighting back. They are not going quietly.

As an artist, do you feel
you’ve achieved the quality of work that you’ve wanted to achieve? As a
female, I am socialized to be depreciating and humble and nonthreatening, but
I’m afraid that programming did not work too well. My work speaks for itself.
If I have doubts, I would never reveal them, as I exist in a very hostile
censorious environment. Making direct social-political art, devoid of irony and money, with no postmodernist grease
to oil the art-world wheels, takes strength and persistence. I hope the killers of animals choke on my work, spit it out, regret they ever saw it,
regret me—that is my idea of quality in art. Art does not become art until the
viewer makes it so; they decide. Woody Guthrie carved “This machine kills
fascists” into his guitar; the highest quality I can aim for is: “This
drawing kills the animal-exploitation industry.”

Is your art entirely in the
service of the message? Or do you allow yourself certain aesthetic pleasures?
A few years ago, oil painting seduced me. It was a confusing time. I went
over to the dark side and discovered color. Hours would go by, and I would
gaze at glazes of a palette loaded with squeezable colors and realized I was
happy; this was fun! Art had become fun! The clouds in the sky, the lighting
effects, became very important—and so many choices with the colors, all must
be tried. Of course I thought I could control it, be sparing with the color,
only paint on the side, but then it became every day. Artists understand what
I am talking about. Yet the ghosts started to speak to me, whispers at first,
and they appeared as ghosts always do, in black-and-white, garbed in a
certain graphic elegance. They all had those eyes, of all the animals I have
seen suffer, which say, “Why is this happening to me? What did I do wrong?”
It is the injustice—that is what their eyes say. My pleasure is that the
ghosts are still in contact, never that far away.