PIG 05049 : Christien Meindertsma : just another homocentrist human anesthetizing an anal retentive bystander mentality in speciesism
Compare how this young woman and her journalistic partner thematize taking the life of a nonhuman : http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/mar/27/from-one-pig-185-products, using mainly the argumentation of how useful that killing is.
A homocentrist argumentation. The mental frameset remind me of the accounts slaughterhouse workers gave in interviews Gail A. Eisnitz made in 1997 http://meat.org.uk/slaught.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaughterhouse … .
There is nothing different or special when either a woman or a man talk about their aggressive homocentrist attitudes, or when they anesthetize them as Meindertsma does.
Meindertsma and Buford seem to think that it is art to accompany the nonhuman animal in whose killing Buford takes part and Meindertsma acts as a bystander, collecting all the details of de-individualisation
There is no difference to these objectifications than when any farmer or slaughterer do them. Just because an account of institutionalized murder is given in “arts form” – and because it’s curated as arts, we are not dealing with morally neutral grounds here.
What is arts about it, is that we can see how the innocence, that our good old humanistic values wanted to attribute to the normal human individual, are yet again being sold out by projects such as these: No normal human individual is NOT capable of doing the most horrendous atrocities at the same time while rationalizing their deeds as reasonable, sensible and smart. And history told us that already way too many times anyway.
Now to think that questioning and eradicating homocentrism wouldn’t be the next big task we as humans have to address, if we don’t all want to fall prey to the sickly normal minds of the average human, would be unrealistic.
To get the best answers about the trustworthiness of any speciesist reasoning about animals, is to simply turn the paper and look: yeah human values, human ideals, and how do we humans deal with each other and stand towards each other? It doesn’t work either. Speciesism kills, and all other discimonatory -isms do their parts of destroying the dignities of individual lives as much as they can too.
By focusing on the point of view of the ‘human group’ (and their ‘interests’ that they won’t let to be ignored) on the false and pathological reasons of why “we humans” have “a legitimate interest” in “using animals”, we shift the focus away from two things:
A. we shift our view from the human conflicts that prove there is nothing such thing as ‘the human’ (one big single) interest
and B.) we overlook that nonhuman animals and the environment can be understood as an opposed value, one that homocentrism seeks to destroy, negate, annihilate. Our view is turned away from that possible perspective too.
The view the speciesist people hold, typically tries to make us think that we are dealing with a redundant life.
And we are not.
This swine they objectified is to me my family, soulwise, earthistorywise.
Burnt Cross – ‘look into their eyes’
One reply on “fucking naive”
This woman also misses the point, when she tries to convince anyone that there is a “usefulness” hidden behind killing this nonhuman animal, that she tries to perversely even so tear out of the anonymity of the horrors of the breeding, farming and slaughterhouse machinery, do display a redundancy of the individual life. Veganism is spearheading in the other direction, it does not seek to deindividualize life, but respects the individual. At least ethical veganism does that.
Also she tries to show with this “work” most extremely, but also with her “work” involving the wool industry and individual sheep, in full moral detachment, how “useful” killing the nonhuman animal who she maintains to call “PIG 05049” is. There is no ambiguity in her work, assuming there was just shows how much we got used to any types of animal objectification.
This blog, sees an ambiguity, yet notes:
“Finally, it should be noted that the book was supported by an organization called IMAGRO – Strategy and creativity for the agricultural and food industries – and includes the following message from them: ‘We hope this book will serve as a contribution to our original mission: reduce the gap between producer and consumer. We do this not out of sentimental reasons, but on the basis of our core values. This led us to support Christien Meindertsma in regard to her art project.'” http://an-intellectual-carrot.blogspot.de/2009/05/pig-05049.html
Ethically this is non-arts, because if this was art, then any form of killing that could be seen as useful and that would be described as such by the murderer and by the bystanders, could be classified as arts, if the artist just wants that to be so.
This artist draws her distinction in terms of whether you are dealing with a nonhuman animal or humans in an arbitrary yet inexplicit way; from an animal rights point of view it’s as wrong to objectify a nonhuman animal as it is to objectify a human.
The ill advised argumentation that you practically can’t live vegan today, doesn’t change anything about the nature of evilness that is being supported here under the way-too-often used disguise and polish of an “artistic freedom”.
And the argument that meat has been consumed in the past hundreds of years (and for millenia) can’t be held against the goals veganism heralds, to eliminate the usage of nonhumans as chattel.
Artistic freedom has boundaries, and we set them.