Stephen Eisenman: I’m Stephen Eisenman. I’m a professor of Art History at Northwestern University. I’m also an activist and environmentalist. I’m the founder of a non-profit environmental group called Anthropocene Alliance; we help people who are hurt by flooding and climate change in the United States, so I combine scholarship with activism.
Art History and Art Criticism today, and the institutions of art and of museums, are in a very difficult moment right now because the historical period is so fraught. We face challenges, economic, political and especially environmental, and the very question of whether civilization itself, human civilization, can survive more than a generation or two is an open one right now. And so for art critics and art historians and the public to look at works of art and simply to find them as entertainment or ways to escape the moment… well, art has its role in that, and that’s valuable, and the idea of a work of art which is purely an aesthetic object that offers pleasure and insight, that’s great. But the issues that are facing us are so momentous that artists, critics and historians have to take responsibility there. So museums’ functions, the artists’ functions, have to change, otherwise we may not be here for much longer.
The pure work of art
I would like it that one could just look at a work of art and not think about anything to do with politics. Works of art should be pure and, myself, I own works of art and I love works of art and I take great pleasure in works of art, but somehow I can’t keep out of my head everything that surrounds and frames the work of art. And when I do that it means I have to talk about those things simply in order to see the work of art at all. So when people say to me: What about the pure work of art? Aren’t you somehow sullying the work of art by bringing in all this stuff about politics, the environment, about animal rights? I kind of agree with them; I wish I didn’t have to do that and one day, when the world has changed, and we’ve conquered somehow carnism, and we’ve cleansed the environment of fossil fuels and we’re managing somehow to hold on by our nails to our existence, then we’ll be able to look at works of art completely freely and completely purely. And that my goal, my desire for that, and that of everybody else, will be realized. But until that time, we kind of have to talk about all these other things simply to see the work of art at all.
The Abu Ghraib Effect. Twelve years later
When I wrote The Abu Ghraib Effect, I was writing at the time when George W. Bush was president and the violations of human rights that had occurred in American prisons, black sites, Guantanamo Bay, was manifest. Fortunately, the revelations of those photographs caused certain changes in the political climate and I thought there might be a cessation of that kind of activity, but I was wrong. Violations of human rights continued to occur even under the Obama Administration with the use of drone attacks on unarmed civilians, in many cases, and now with the election of President Trump in the United States, with the rise of right-wing fascists or proto-fascist presidents in Eastern Europe in particular, in Hungary, and in Poland and elsewhere, the rise of the neo-right in England with Farage and Prime Minister Johnson… all of this is becoming still worse. So the responsibility of, again, of artists and critics and audiences is to think about how imagery is used… If you think about, for example, the campaign for Brexit. At the centre of it was an enormous bus that had posters of migrants fleeing Southern Europe and fleeing Africa and the Middle East. This was an image of a horde, a mass, of people made into… treated as if they were vermin. And this is the kind of imagery that goes back to Nazi Germany and fascist Italy and fascist Spain, so where we are right now is in a very dangerous place and the responsibility, just to repeat that, of artists and critics is all the greater. I’m sorry that the negative prognostications in Abu Ghraib Effect in fact have come true.
From human rights to sentient rights
To me, human rights and animal rights, or human rights and animal liberation, are the same thing. Islam has said that a measure of human civilisation is the way we treat animals. It could also be said that one way to think about human rights, and the way to protect human rights, is also to protect animal rights. The rise of human rights ideas in the eighteenth century was coincident with the rise of the notion that animals are sentient, feeling beings and, similarly, the loss of protections of humans often goes hand in hand with the destruction of animal rights, so I think the two things have to be seen as part of the same enterprise. Animals may not have the capacity to act politically in the way that humans do; they shouldn’t be given the right, for example, to vote — they wouldn’t be interested in that — but in all the ways that count; that is, their feelings, their emotions, their love of their own kin, of their family, of their children, of their babies, their susceptibility to pain, in all those essential ways they are like humans. And so the idea that we can continue to treat them as mere chattel, as slaves, objects to be bought and sold, is really unconscionable and I think the moral sentiments of humans have to be challenged. Happily, it is beginning to happen, partly because of the changes in human social structure; we live much more closely with animals as companions now than we used to. We have fewer children; animals function much more as our children than human children do. Families are much more dispersed and often animals are the only solid, stable relationships that people have over long periods of time, and this is causing people to treat animals as members of the family.
A moral and ecological obligation
Animal liberation will require major changes in social life. Right now, animal consumption, the animal agriculture, produces about 15 to 20% of global carbon emissions and that’s simply unsustainable. We can encourage people individually to go vegan. I am and all of you should be too, but that isn’t enough. It means that large corporations that thrive on animal agriculture have to be stopped, and that means that governments will have to take action, and that necessarily means that large industries will have to be taken over or undermined, if you will, by governments. The name for that kind of reform is socialism; it means governmental intervention into the economy; it means that the needs of the many have to take precedence over the desires of the few, and the needs of the many means that a system of agriculture that uses up vast amounts of water and resources in order to produce grain to feed animals, to feed us, has to stop. I think in general that moral reform follows economic reform. A moral reckoning will often happen only after the economics of it become evident, and I think that’s happening now. The economics of animal agriculture are seen as unsupportable and we’re also seeing, therefore, the rise of large numbers of animal rights movements. Spain has a very powerful animal liberation and animal rights movement and there have been large protests in Madrid and in other cities in past years. The movement to eliminate the cruelty of bullfighting and other blood sports is very powerful across Spain and I would imagine within 10 or 15 years that’ll be a practice that has completely ended, and hopefully animal agriculture will also be brought to heel.
Art, critical thought and animal emancipation
For me, animal rights and human rights didn’t come about just through empathy, but they came through critical thought. I began to really think about how animals have been treated in the past, historically, and I simply couldn’t continue to live the way I had before. It was about that time, in the early 2000s, that I met Sue Coe, a very great artist, a political artist, an artist who represents animals, and I was deeply moved by her work and I got to know her and she challenged me and so I had to make changes in my life — for one thing becoming a vegan — and then also integrating some of the questions about animals into my critical and art-historical practice. And as I looked I saw that the questions that I was raising about relationships between humans and animals and human rights had, not surprisingly, been asked by smart people long before me and artists that had been dealing with this question since Assyrian antiquity and the lion hunt images at Ashurbanipal, in Babylon, which are in the British Museum. It shows the cruelty of hunter and of kings toward the lions there; the empathy that is shown to the suffering in those reliefs is astonishing. And, of course, you have to realise that people of a certain kind, in a certain way, have always been the same and when they experience the life of another being, a sentient being, an animal, they recognise that there is a mind there. So I began to think about the history of human-animal relationships and I found that it was a central part of the art-historical tradition that had been much overlooked, just as the representation of women and non-white people had for many years because of our blind sexism or racism been overlooked in the art-historical tradition. So I wanted to spend more time doing that and so I’ve done that for the last 15 or 20 years.
Sue Coe
Sue Coe is one of the great contemporary artists and her art deals with political issues and animal rights issues. She became famous in the 1970s for a work that depicted a gang rape, a notorious gang rape that happened in Rhode Island in the United States. Her work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art at that time and many other places. She’s a contemporary of Leon Golub, a neo-expressionist at the time, and then she turned her work mostly to focus on the plight of animals, and particularly on animal agriculture. I met her 20 years ago and we became reacquainted about 10 or 12 years ago, when she came to my university, and we became close friends. At a certain point, she was doing an exhibition and asked me if I wanted to contribute, and I said I would be delighted to do so and that began the start of a long collaboration, which we’ve been doing now continuously for 10 years. So it’s a great honour to work with her and to collaborate with her on a common effort at human and animal liberation.
Zooicide
Sue Coe and I collaborated on a book called Zooicide and the name derives, obviously, from the word zoo, killing of zoos as ending of zoos, and suicide. Lots of animals who are in zoos commit suicide; they don’t put a gun to their head but they stop eating, they stop reproducing, they produce peculiar behaviours, self-destructive behaviours, and clearly the conditions of captivity are completely antithetical to the lives of many animals. I think that zoos ought to be eliminated; they are places of cruelty — they’re like human prisons. Their educational value is almost nil; you go to a zoo and most of the people there are small children and the educational value is limited to the simplest messages you find on the walls, or the sides of cages or bars of one kind or another. So, we wanted to expose that to think about what the future would be. The future would be: no zoos, except maybe for animals that have been orphaned; they might be parks where animals who are common — pigeons or racoons or possums or some deer or squirrels who might be harmed can be living in a place, living out their lives if they are incapable of living outside. But the idea that people should come in and gawk at them seems absurd to me any more than humans should be kept in cages. You know, in the eighteenth-century people who were in mental hospitals… people who were not mentally ill could come visit them and gawk at them and they’d come in and they’d look at all the crazy people, and it was an entertainment. And prisons for a while were that way and abattoirs were that way and then, in the late 19th century in Chicago, you could go to the Union Stock Yards and you could get a tour and see all the animals being slaughtered and it would be great entertainment. Well the Union Stock Yard is long closed and the idea of somebody going to see a slaughter in an abattoir is unimaginable because we know that it would be too horrific. And I think that people should feel the same way about zoos and hopefully that’ll come about, along with the larger liberation, the larger movement, toward veganism and a plant-based diet.
