Sue Coe: The Ghosts of Our Meat: Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA

Sue Coe occupies an unusual position in the art world. Her paintings, drawings and prints are well known, widely exhibited and critically admired. And because she keeps the prices of her prints low, she has a wider base of collector support than most other contemporary artists of her stature. But because her work is profoundly engaged with moral, ethical and political issues, it is often overlooked by major collectors and curators keen to embrace artistic fashions with the greatest speculative potential. Artworks that address racism, the AIDS crisis, class inequality, war, and the exploitation of animals are not generally seen as investments with strong potential for short and medium term growth.

           

Coe is therefore both within and without the art world as it currently exists. Since 1989, she has exhibited regularly at Galerie St. Etienne in New York, and in dozens of other exhibitions around the country. Her work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, and she is regularly reviewed in the New York Times and elsewhere. But her politically charged work has also been published in the Times, Rolling Stone, the New Yorker and Blab! She has produced designs for book covers and made posters that protest economic inequality and the abuse of animals. Unlike most contemporary artists, she aims for her art to be discussed and understood more than sold. In particular, she wishes her work to explicitly convey two ideas that have preoccupied her from the beginning of her career in the 1970s until now: (1) that economic inequality destroys lives and disfigures the globe; and (2) that the breeding and slaughter of animals—or their use in scientific research and blood sport—is a crime of epic proportion.

           

Since the early nineteenth century, elite supporters of the newly established art institutions—schools, academiesm and exhibition societies—promoted the idea that true art must be disengaged from the brute facticity of the world. Art is a matter of idealization, symbol, imagination, and the beautiful, they argued. It must respond most of all, they also insisted, to other art and not to life as it is currently lived with all its messy contradictions and cruelties. The chief matter of art, twentieth-century critics such as Clive Bell argued, was form and color. And at its extreme with the influential dogmas of Clement Greeneberg, painting and drawing should be abstract and concerned only with “flatness and the delimitation of flatness.” But even critics and audiences who supported the avant-garde – artists who bridged the space between art and life—often found it difficult to approve artworks that were forthright in their political content. What was favored instead—and this remains the case today—were artworks that operated by means of irony, indirection, and inference. “If you want a message,” the old slogan went, “go read a newspaper.”

           

It is clear today however that such procrusteanism not just limits the art of the present, it disfigures the art of the past. Peter Bruegel, Jacques Callot, Francisco Goya, Gustave Courbet, George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Pablo Picasso among many others crafted highly pointed works of art concerned with the political and social conflicts of their day. Indeed, each of these artists influenced Coe. Moreover, many artworks from the more distant part—masterworks of the Renaissance and Baroque—that today seem dispassionate and ideal, were in fact highly partisan and particular in their political focus.

           

If there has ever been an historical time that demands political art it is ours. The dual crisis that shapes our day—economic and ecological—is unprecedented. The Great Recession has highlighted the chasm of inequality between rich and poor, and the crisis of global warming has revealed that our usual solution—rapid stimulation of consumption—is unsustainable because it will simply increase the production and use of fossil fuels, exacerbating the planet’s warming.

           

The Ghosts of Our Meat reveals that this dual crisis is simultaneously a third crisis—a moral one. In the effort to generate vast quantities of cheap meat and gigantic profits, the chief capitalist powers, including Communist China, are pursuing a policy of profit over people, animals, and the earth itself. Capital does not serve human or animal life—the latter serve capital. Smithfield Foods of Tar Heel, North Carolina (its sale to Shuanghui International Holdings was recently approved by a U.S. government security panel) grossly exploits its laborers. Turnover exceeds 100% per year, and line workers typically make between $9.00 and $13.00 per hour. But the 32,000 hogs killed there every day fare much worse. As Coe illustrates in work after work in this exhibition, including Cut and Run (1989), Meat Flies (1991), and Gassing Hogs (2010), the slaughter of animals constitutes a horror the scale of which can only be compared to the Holocaust, a comparison made explicit in Intensive Hog Farm Built on the Site of Lety Concentration Camp (2010).

           

Coe’s works are not beautiful in the conventional sense, though the artist’s skill with brush, pencil, ink, burin, crayon, and chisel is manifest everywhere in this exhibition. Nor are they technically innovative; rather they employ the tested language of Realism as found in Goya, Courbet, Van Gogh, Otto Dix and others. But they examine as no other artist’s works the preeminent moral crisis of our time—the killing and consumption of other sentient creatures and the resulting moral and ecological devastation.

 

Stephen F. Eisenman

Professor of Art History

Northwestern University