Tag Archives: aestheticized anthropocentrism

Aus dem Vegan*Swines Reader IV (2012): Der Mythos der „humanen“ Art der Ausbeutung und Tötung von Tieren

Posted on by PalangL

Der Mythos der „humanen“ Art der Ausbeutung und Tötung von Tieren

Diese Informationen basiert auf Erfahrungswerten von Tierrettungs- bzw. schutzhöfen und den Recherchen bekannter Tierrechts- bzw. schutzorganisationen. Die Angaben beziehen sich auf die Realität in westeuropäischen und US-amerikanischen Agrarbetrieben.

Eine „humane“ Umgehensweise sollte eigentlich bedeuten, mit Respekt und Einfühlungsvermögen mit den Lebewesen umzugehen, die auf unsere Hilfe angewiesen sind. Es ist egal, ob es dabei um Menschen oder um Tiere geht. Das, was wir genau unter „humanen“, also menschlichen Werten verstehen, läßt darauf zurückschließen, auf welchem Level sich der gegenwärtige Aufgeklärtheitsstatus unserer Kultur befindet.

Würden wir die gleichen Methoden, die wir in der Aufzucht, Versorgung, und Tötung von Farmtieren praktizieren, auf unsere Haustiere anwenden, dann wäre das gesetzeswidrig und jeder normale Mensch würde so eine Behandlungsweise von Tieren als erschreckend und grausam empfinden … diesen Text als PDF lesen / downloaden (Link öffnet sich in einem neuen Fenster)

Vegan speciesism

Posted on by PalangL

Vegans and anti-speciesists who are acting as subconscious speciesists

I recently came across a campaign movie clip made by an Austrian vegan and anti-speciesist group called http://united-creatures.com/ . They said they wanted to show the live of two sibling pigs, one who lives more or less freely and more or less free from harm – as far as one could tell, and one who had to stay in the farm and he is eventually being killed there. The group United Creatures documents everything, for the purpose of making people aware and educating people about speciesism : http://united-creatures.com/thema/pig-vision/ .

They say they would not want to show gory pictures that would have a shock effect on the viewer. Still, It’s just what they are doing, and the entire project is set up so that you have some animal rights activists who are to a large extent passively, and one could say voyeuristically, only following a situation to document it for “educational purposes” … instead of buying the other animal out too.

A life becomes the subject of being a means to an end, for the purposes of informing the public about what goes on behind the walls of farms and slaughterhouses. Society already knows what goes on behind these walls. The community of animal advocates is resistant towards this fact and doesn’t seem to recognize how speciesism works.

Either that, or the AR community (with it’s big leading organizations who frame the dialectic) wants to keep imagining that we are all still living back in the 80ies where it only started yet that documentations about slaughterhouses were made more widely public.  Nonetheless even at that time speciesism had it’s own ways of communicating its defamatory language about how to best degrade nonhuman animals in our homocentric societies.

As for today, just look at the contemporary arts scene for instance … People like those from the group ‘United Creatures’ must be aware of “artists” such as the famous Austrian speciesist Herman Nitsch who makes orgies in which a selected group of people takes part in the dismemberment and slaughter process of a nonhuman animal.

Animal activists such as the group ‘United Creatures’ must have met conscious speciesism also in the mindset of hunters, butcher shops, barbecue freaks, leather fetishists, snuff videos, speciesist “jokes”, anti ar+vegan comments on the internet … and what have you. Still, activists pretend nobody knows about the atrocities that are being done to animals, so we should keep showing how animals are being murdered – for the purpose of printing yet another pamphlet.

A nonhuman animal is not a means to an end. Animal rights activist should sense that there is a threshold, and it’s bad enough that theiy themselves keep crossing a line that they should be aware of: the line of objectification that has long been wiped out by our speciesist societies.

Instead of showing over and over again how animals are being degraded and murdered, for educational or documentary purposes, animal activists should make the mechanisms of speciesism more aware I believe, and what speciesism exactly is, how is psychologically and ideologically works.

 

Arts and homocentrism: Pesi Girsch’s “Nature Morte”

Posted on by PalangL

PESI GIRSCH’S “NATURE MORTE”

Pesi Girsch aestheticises the corpses of dead animals on some of her photography.

http://members.tripod.com/pesi_girsch/stillalife.htm (accessed 23rd April 08 )

On her bio she portrays herself with a baby kitten nevertheless: http://members.tripod.com/pesi_girsch/bio.htm (accessed 23rd April 08 ), so one can assume that she sees some qualitative difference between being amongst the living or being amongst the (I assume) somehow made-to-be-dead. I guess I rightly assume that the ducks and the weasel type of animal on the dead animal photos of hers, did not die from natural causes.

One could say that it gives the dead animal a dignity to be draped into becoming a display for a photo taken by a human for them animals to look aesthetical while dead. But I wouldn’t agree with that. I see a type of typical encryption here, which turns art into a tool for viewing the real with the specific attempt to find an objective standpoint, instead of arts as a way to only relate to the real in a subjective way, which would put an emphasis on a more free and autonomous thinking.

Why does the arranged corpse of an individual animal has to become an object of a photo?

Why are the dead animals displayed in a sterile, soft and clean – a seemingly peaceful or mute – context on Peri Girsch’s photos, when the real death of the animals had – and this is my assumption – been taking place in a wholly different context that preceded this type of setting.

What matters to me is the perspective of the animals, and I automatically imagine that they didn’t want to die through the hands of humans (the photos leave it factually unclarified how the animals came to death). The set up encryption subtly suggests that I need not care about these individual animals as a viewer. That they only matter now that they have been given a meaning in an anthropocentric context.

Both is depressing: the imagination of the death and seeing the animals displayed in this way of peaceful, aestheticized “bizarreness” on the photos. Worst of all is to imagine that the lives, i.e. the form of existence of beings other than humans, doesn’t matter as lives to the photographer. Pesi Girsch arranges the condition of being dead in these animals in a way that is demeaning to their selfness and to their otherness from us.

More that I wrote about speciesism and art can be found at these locations : http://www.farangis.de/blog/category/animalistic-issue , http://www.simorgh.de/objects/tag/arts-and-speciesism/