CritterBlog

Animal Slaughter Videos Shut Down

April 3, 2008 – 3:11 am by R. Gilbert

On March 19, 2008, “Don’t Trust Me,” a series of video clips by Algerian-born videographer Adel Abdessemed, showing a pig, goat, goat, deer, ox, horse and sheep being beaten to death, opened in an exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). The school received over 8,000 emails critical of the decision to show the videos. In response, the exhibit was temporarily closed the following Wednesday. Over the weekend the decision was made to close it permanently.

“We’ve gotten dozens of threatening phone calls that targeted specific staff people with death threats, threats of violence and threats of sexual assaults,” SFAI President Chris Bratton claimed in a news release.

In response to the controversy, San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker wrote:

I see Abdessemed working at the morbid end of creative ambition’s descent into “the gap between art and life,” as the young Robert Rauschenberg famously called it when claiming it as his milieu. With “Don’t Trust Me,” Abdessemed seemingly moved to up the ante by minimizing the gap between art and death. [Emphasis added.]

Doesn’t Mr. Baker see the contradiction in his interpretation? Participating in the death of these animals is not art. It is destructive act, not a creative one.

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Further Information:
Killing Animals With Hammers – Some Call It Art (CritterBlog, March 23, 2008)
View: Show’s cancellation a rare case of artists advocating censorship by Kenneth Baker (SF Gate; April 1, 2008)
Threats of violence close art show (UPI, March 31, 2008)