On Nonhuman Slavery

The following is an excerpt from an interview with Peter Singer published in Antennae, issue 19. Questions by Giovanni Aloi

Giovanni Aloi: In 2007, you gave a talk at the Getty Centre on the subject of animal representation in art. What brought you to consider the subject of animals in art? In this talk you extensively dwelled on a painting by Oudry of Clara the rhinoceros questioning the artist’s level of empathy with the animal portrayed. What is your take on the treatment of animals in contemporary art by artists like Abdle Abdessemed or Huang Yo Ping?

Singer: The Getty Museum invited me to give a lecture that coincided with an exhibition they were having of Oudry and his contemporaries. I saw this as an opportunity for my views about the ethics of how we treat animals to reach a wider audience (the same reason that led me to agree to answer your questions), and most of my talk sought to set the context for Oudry’s paintings by describing Western attitudes to animals. I also explained what was wrong with those attitudes. But I am no expert on animals in art, and I am not familiar enough with the work of the artists you mention to comment on it.

Aloi: In the 2007 talk, the ideas of empathy/sympathy for animals, as reflected by the choice of subject and composition, was extensively discussed over a number of examples. Do you find that the essential differences between the examples displaying a less empathic approach and those suggesting a more empathic one essentially differ in degrees of objectification?

Singer: Yes, that is certainly one way of putting what is happening in those different examples.

Aloi: In 2000, Marco Evaristti, an artist who has made controversy his main artistic skill, produced Helena. The installation stirred animal rights campaigners and public like nothing previously; it also got Evaristti charged with animal cruelty multiple times, in multiple countries. Helena was inspired by the famous Milgram Experiment from 1963, where the willingness of participants to obey an authority figure resulted in them performing acts that conflicted with their personal ethical stands. According to Evaristti, the installation, comprised of ten Moulinex Optiblend 2000 liquidisers, each containing water and a gold fish, essentially constitutes a social experiment.

In front of Helena, we simultaneously, by implication, become a passive voyeuristic individual, a potential killer or an inevitable moralist; which of the three we already are, or we are about to become whilst exposed to the work, is sometimes an unpredictable factor. Which ethical issues are here at stake in consideration of the fact that the animal featured in the work is a goldfish?

Singer: The issue at stake is the pointless killing of goldfish. Can that be justified? Most people find it disturbing, but of course these same people, or most of them, eat fish and meat when they have no need to do so, and this practice requires killing animals. In the case of fish, all commercially caught fish die more slowly and painfully than the goldfish killed in the blenders. So people who are disturbed by the idea of liquidizing the goldfish should really question their own eating practices. And it is hard to see why Evaristti is guilty of cruelty but every commercial fisherman or amateur angler is not.

On the other hand, when live animals are used in harmful ways, there is always the risk that the artist simply reinforces our prejudices by using sentient beings as objects for art in ways that ignore their interests. That is why I prefer the use of methods of enlightening the public that do not involve harm to animals.

Aloi: As Steve Baker asked in his essay featured in the collection Killing Animals (2006): “Can contemporary art productively address the killing of animals?”

Singer: Perhaps it can. But I am not aware of any contemporary work of art that has really done very much to change our attitudes to animals. The really effective examples are now very old – what has there been that can compare with William Hogarth’s Four Stages of Cruelty? Perhaps films like Bambi, Babe and now Rise of the Planet of the Apes have taken over the role of art in influencing the broader public about the way we treat animals.

Aloi: In the Getty lecture, you explored the work of artists Sue Coe, Federico Uribe and Barbara Dover as examples of practitioners whose work proposes an alternative to the animal representations of the past, and in doing so you highlighted that at the core of this art lies a more or less overt propagandistic vein. Aside from denouncing our treatment of animals in contemporary society and consequently raising awareness of some specific issues, what other purpose do you believe these artworks serve?

Singer: They raise questions about the purpose and role of art in a situation in which a great wrong is being done to billions of animals – and most of those who view the art are participating in that great wrong. We should recognize that the treatment of animals is only one of several great moral wrongs going on in the world today. Another is the way in which most people in rich nations do nothing to aid those in extreme poverty. As a result of that indifference, according to Unicef, the United Nations fund for children, more than 8 million children under 5 die every year from avoidable poverty-related causes. Then there is climate change, where again the lifestyle of people in affluent nations is the main culprit, but the poor in developing countries will be the majority of the victims.

In the midst of these grave moral crises, can art be anything other than a means of raising our awareness of our moral failings? Can we really justify engaging in art for art’s sake while every day billions of animals suffer unnecessarily, thousands of children die unnecessarily, and the energy used by patrons of art, and indeed by the air-conditioned art galleries in which we view art, contribute to changes in rainfall patterns and rises in sea levels that are already forcing people to become refugees, and will increasingly do so in future? In these circumstances, isn’t the art world guilty of gross self indulgence?

Aloi: In 2000, Chicago based artist Eduardo Kac created GFP Bunny. The project consisted of a routinely produced albino laboratory rabbit to which the florescent genes of jellyfish were added through biotechnological processes. The work generated extremely heated response and opened the way to a new artistic field called transgenic art, in which art and science are reunited in the space of the laboratory. What is your take on this emerging genre?

Singer: There are much worse things we do to animals, but I think that, like zoos, this genre of art treats live animals as objects for our amusement, so I find it objectionable.

- Excerpted from an interview with Peter Singer published in Antennae, issue 19.