Sue Coe: “Modern Man Followed by the Ghosts of his Meat” (1990)
The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) designates animal liberationism as the number one domestic terrorism threat. “Ag-gag” bills describe a class of anti-whistleblower laws that make it illegal to expose how farmed animals are raised and slaughtered. Implemented in Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Missouri, North Carolina and North Dakota, and backed by harsh prison sentences, these laws ensure that animal agriculture ’s enclosures remain off limits to anyone who would photograph or film them. The vague language of the AETA further penalizes activities that lead to or advocate for the disruption of animal enterprises. In her work on Peru’s “culinary boom,” itself dependent upon guinea pig farming, María Elena García describes the concealment of violence to animals as a process of “invisibilizing” (“The Taste of Conquest: Colonialism, Cosmopolitics and the Dark Side of Peru’s Gastronomic Boom,” 2013). We applaud Edward Snowden for blowing the whistle on the National Security Agency’s global surveillance programs but what about undercover footage revealing the lived experience of farmed animals? The industry’s vast, violent system occasionally bursts into public view, haunting us like the animal ghosts of Sue Coe’s artwork in The Ghosts of our Meat (2014), wherein legions of bloodied and maimed incarcerated animals revisit their human exploiters.
One such haunting…