CritterBlog

Killing Animals With Hammers – Some Call It Art

How would you react if I showed you a brief video depicting a sheep, a horse, an ox, a pig, a goat and a doe being slaughtered in Mexico, each by a blow to the head with a hammer? There is such a video. No, it is not the latest undercover operation by The Humane Society. It is not on YouTube, and the Pentagon is not doing an investigation of it, as far as I know.

This is a video, entitled “Don’t Trust Me,” by Adel Abdessemed, an Algerian-born artist who left his country to live in self-imposed exile because, he says, “When there is no peace and quiet at home, you have to go somewhere else, otherwise it is the death of your soul. The essential thing is to act, to fight, and to create in order to transform the world.” He became uncomfortable acting, fighting, creating and transforming in New York after 9/11, and now lives and works in Paris.

It is not clear to me how filming the slaughter of animals is transformational. Of course, that is why the art writers are on the job. Here is an excerpt from an exhibition description at Le MAGASIN Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble, France:

“The instrument of sacrifice, the hammer, comes from the symbolism of the forgotten power of a working class that has faded along with the ideology that claimed to serve it. The choice of animals quotes the traditional calendar of the last bastion of communism, China, where the immense profits from its unprecedented economic development help shore up liberalism while the populations that produce them are subjected to various forms of violence.”

And here I thought it was the sheep, the horse, the ox, the pig, the goat, and the doe that were subjected to violence.

The video was shown on March 19, 2008, at the San Francisco Art Institute. The showing was vaunted as the artist’s West Coast debut. Art for art’s sake? One viewer called it “cruelty for cruelty’s sake.”