By Pramod K Nayar When Sue Coe, a celebrated artist known for her activist-art against animal cruelty in works like Factory Pharm (2001), set out to capture the horrors of Covid-19, she did so with a realism that can only be termed traumatic. What Coe does is to align human suffering from the virus with the history […]
By Pramod K Nayar
When Sue Coe, a celebrated artist known for her activist-art against animal cruelty in works like Factory Pharm (2001), set out to capture the horrors of Covid-19, she did so with a realism that can only be termed traumatic. What Coe does is to align human suffering from the virus with the history of animal suffering at the hands of humans, and, therefore, presents a universalisation of suffering beings, both human and nonhuman.
Before the Virus
Factory Pharm is a nightmarish representation of a machine that pulps animals into a mashed ‘thing’. The animals are taken via conveyor belts, enmeshed between cogs and wheels, indicating a supply chain of animals. To the left is an animal pen — from where they are brought into the machinery. Huge pincers are positioned in such a way that any animal that tries to escape will be immediately captured. The mechanisation of abattoirs is Coe’s target here.
What makes Coe’s work horrific is not the mechanisation alone, but the fact that the factory consumes its own animals in a closed circulation system, because the animals in the pen — waiting for their own slaughter — are fed the slurry that is the animals pulped in another section of the factory. In other words, the animals are pulped, fed to the animals who are themselves then pulped to feed others in an endless loop.
Reminiscent of Goya’s horrorscapes, Coe’s work indicts a system that makes animals the subject and object of capital (it is not a coincidence that the critic Nicola Shukin titles her book on biocapital, Animal Capital). Machinery feeds animals, and feeds on animals. It is an automated digestive system that humans have invented to live off the nonhuman other, suggests Coe.
In The Large Hog Hoist, Coe again depicted violence against animals. In Animal Thanksgiving, she painted animals at supper, to the backdrop of a human who had been hanged (a mirror painting would be Autopsy, in which the animals are dissecting a human). In other visionary paintings like ‘Auschwitz begins when someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks they are only animals’, Coe makes the philosophical point made by posthumanists like Cary Wolfe: that when humans began slaughtering animals, they also prepared themselves to slaughter fellow humans. Coe also sketched and painted the horrors of Abu Ghraib. In The Birth of Fascism, she drew Donald Trump. Her Blud (Ebola) showed a hospital ward of sufferers in an eerie prolepsis of 2020-21.
The Corona Paintings
Coe’s Dr Maga depicted the plague doctor of early modern times: complete with beaked mask, cane and cloak. Dr Maga walks in a sea of heads, all with their faces obscured by the masks that became a part of the physiognomy in 2020. There is a drawing of the corona virus, and creatures that look like bats flying in the sky — a clear reference to the alleged origin of the virus (the Chinese who ate infected bats).
There are other animals in the backdrop. As Coe stated in an interview, the xenophobia which drove the excoriation of Chinese wet markets and their dietary practices erased the fact that New York City alone has over 60 wet markets and ‘Blaming the Chinese disguises our own complicity in consuming animal products’.
In Social Distancing (May 2020), Coe drew a human and a pig conjoined, hung upside down, like animals in an abattoir. The human appears to be carrying an implement that is stuck in the pig’s throat/neck. The conjoined body is slit open, showing a common vertebral column. Blood drips down, and it is impossible to ascertain whether this comes from the human or the animal. A team of helmeted and masked people are arranged in a row as backdrop. At the foot, a human caught with an expression of horror — the rictus of death — lies dead. A conveyor belt — recalling her earlier Factory Pharm — runs across the foot of the image too. Depicting a posthuman scene — the human cannot be separated from the animal, since we co-evolve with them — Coe paints a picture of common suffering. There is no distancing because we are not distanced from animals, since we consume them.
In Carnivorous Coronavirus, 2020, Coe painted in the top half of the canvas a slaughterhouse: the animal meat is being hewn. Another dangles on a hook, awaiting its turn. Three bears watch from behind a chain link fence/cage, eyes wide open in terror — expecting this to be their fate too. In the lower half, a patient lies on a hospital bed, hooked up to an ECG and other equipment. A physician, masked, approaches and/or watches him. The patient is skeletal, all bones and skin.
Separating the two figures — the animal and the human — is a banner. The lettering in the first line reads: Carnivorous
The second line reads, anagramatically: Coronavirus
Between the two lines is what looks like barbed wire, coiled but appearing as though they are conduits between the two words. We are linked, in the same violent, suffering fashion, to the animals — both dying horribly.
Horrific Linkage
Coe implies, by placing the two words in that fashion, that the virus and the pandemic are the consequence of human consumption patterns: we consume animals, and are consumed in turn. Coe thus aligns slaughterhouses, hospitals, the food chain in a horrific linkage. As the virus slaughtered mankind across the world, Coe positions this within the genocide of animals.
The virus, which cut across, crossed over, merged human with the nonhuman became a part of the assemblage. Living (human) and non-living (virus) became inseparable, as borders, of nations, body politic and bodies, were violated with impunity: A small retribution for the human-as-virus which exterminated millions of animals over the centuries. The most dangerous virus of all, it would seem, is the human.
This is how the world became posthuman — ‘post’ not as in ‘after’ but as in beyond the human. Coe suggests that our lives are entangled with that of the animals. As are our deaths.
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