Are Animal Snuff Films Art?
The Walter and McBean Galleries in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco are currently exhibiting an installation by Adel Abdessemed called "Don’t Trust Me," which they apparently believe warrant support of the San Francisco Art Institute.
From the press release:
Don’t Trust Me portrays six animals—a sheep, a horse, an ox, a pig, a goat, and a doe—being struck and killed by a hammer. Each killing occurs so quickly that it’s difficult to determine definitively what has happened. Do these incidents represent slaughter or sacrifice? What are their social, cultural, moral, and political implications? Or are such questions now verging on irrelevance, as if something else altogether were taking place (or about to), something wholly other, unforeseen, unexpected?
If you can stomach it, read the rest of absurd press release–particularly the end:
SFAI’s exhibitions and public programs—a component of which is the Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series—are supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Peter Norton Family Foundation, and the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. Additional funding for the Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series has been provided by Bob and Betty Klausner. Additional support for Adel Abdessemed’s exhibition, as well as for his Visiting Artists and Scholars lecture, has been provided by the Cultural Services of the French Consulate in San Francisco.
If you have any contacts at the above, please make use of them and express your disgust, outrage, and sadness.
You can call the gallery at 415-749-4563 and leave an articulate message of protest (and few people I know are able to do that without getting enraged, so perhaps a different medium is better), or you can e-mail them at exhibitions@sfai.edu. Of course, ask that the exhibit be removed immediately and that the galleries refrain from supporting such barbaric work in the future.
I have nothing else to say, other than this is one of those moments when I am ashamed to call myself an artist and a human being. If the videos were of our institutional uses of animals, there might be a lesson to be learned. The only lesson I learn here is just how low some people will plunge to garner attention, and just how ridiculous some PR people can be in their attempts to spin the depraved into the honorable.
Animal snuff media disturb me as much as human snuff media do and as much as slaughterhouses do. In a society/nation where we torture and slaughter 10 billion animals for food annually, what do we expect? This is our “wonderful” culture, and the extreme violence and death of animals for trivial pleasures and preferences, from gustatory to sadistic, is completely in line with it.
As such, the only significant difference between snuff media and slaughterhouses is that the former we see in the open while the latter is hidden from us. Other than that, it’s all the same: others’ violence incurred for our pleasure. Go vegan, or celebrate snuff films.
To add to my previous comment, I find it wildly bizarre that our culture celebrates this kind of display (which, if the display was put on by a high school senior, s/he would likely be recommended for psychiatric evaluation) while hiding our eyes from slaughterhouses, which are just as violent as snuff films/photos but happen to billions annually. If this is “good stuff” (or “good snuff”), why not just apply for a job at a “free range”, “organic”, “grass-fed” slaughterhouse?
It appears that the exhibition has been suspended due to negative responses, of course no mention of the fact that unlike paintings – videos of killing other animals actually IS killing other animals:
Gallery Publications
Related Information
Contact: Public Relations
415 749 4507
The Current Exhibition Has Been Temporarily Suspended
Adel Abdessemed’s exhibition Don’t Trust Me, which opened in the Walter and McBean Galleries on Wednesday, 19 March, has received numerous public responses concerning the nature of some of its content. In view of this massive response and because we wish to acknowledge many of the concerns expressed, we are temporarily suspending the exhibition.
Please join Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs Hou Hanru (the exhibition’s curator), Dean of Academic Affairs Okwui Enwezor, and SFAI Professors John Rapko and Tony Labat in a public discussion of the exhibition at 12noon on Monday, March 31, in the Lecture Hall on SFAI’s 800 Chestnut Street campus.
SFAI would like to make it very clear that the Abdessemed exhibition is an instance of a long-standing and serious commitment, on SFAI’s part, to reflection on and free and open discussion of contemporary art. It is a typical feature of our educational mission to encourage our students and the wider public critically to think about and assess the world they inhabit. The video images in Abdessemed’s exhibition are images of events that took place—and regularly take place—in the real world. Their being depicted in video by Abdessemed is part of a long representational tradition, in Western art and beyond. It goes without saying that the motives underlying that representational tradition have often been to criticize and to question the practices of the larger culture of which that tradition is a part. It is of course up to each beholder of Abdessemed’s work to decide for him- or herself whether, where, and how his work fits into that tradition.
SFAI readily acknowledges that, unlike other representational forms (e.g., painting or photography), the medium of video can imbue such images with a particularly powerful, “real-time” quality—a quality that some people may find disturbing. Because we take such potential discomfort seriously, we posted a disclaimer warning at the front of our galleries in which we indicated the nature of the subject matter of the exhibition.