Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

farming, the animals have
disappeared from our sight. Is this
a good or a bad thing for the
animals? Is this a good or bad
thing for us? Is that a stupid
question? Might a better question
be, whether or not raising animals
in sheds is a necessary thing to do?
And, if so, what condition(s) make it
necessary? While we may choose
to raise farm animals in this way,
must we choose to do so?
Is to pasture raise a cow a
(nostalgic) picture of farming, or is
it a farming practice? The Ohio
Dairy Association describes the
pasturing of cows as an
“alternative farm management
technique.” Alternative to what?
Might we think about that? How
might we talk about it? What, if
anything, might we do about it?
Where do we find ourselves? And
what is the nature of the culture we
produce here now? I am an artist,
not a farmer. The substance of my
practice is to work from the
tangible facts of my world toward
a shaping of my experience of/in
it.
Mercil dismantled The Virtual Pasture and
"dispersed" his flock in December 2011. The artist's
upcoming film Covenant extends the installation's
central question into the human encounter with
farm animals. The release description reads:
Covenant (42:35 minutes) is a film
about farm animals and us that
narrates the fact and the way
these animals become food. In it,
farmers reflect upon the nature
and economy of keeping livestock,
while calling our attention to the
rewards, anxieties and challenges
of the human/farm animal bond.
Antagonism and desire, retold
If we had no appetite, we would
be free from coercion, but
because we are from the start
given over to what is outside us,
submitting to the terms which give
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form to our existence, we are in this
respect – and irreversibly –
vulnerable to exploitation. (Butler,
2002, 9)
Guthman applies a concept of "aesthetic illusion"
(Fine and Leopold, cited in Guthman, 236) to
brand name. The concept addresses the
interpretive gap between a commodity's
"(physical) use value" and its exchangeable
"imputed use value" (236). The gap permits the
introduction of rent, a disparity between
attainable prices and actual production costs. A
consumer culture that fetishizes the organic
imaginary enables the production of signs,
“voluntary labels”, as a tactic for creating rents.
Such signs, though, are “highly ambiguous”,
subject to reinterpretation and redeployment.
Their openness to unintended, socially reinscribed,
values and desires suggests Foucault’s
concept of proliferative power. Guthman points
to the classed, raced and regionalized
economic disparities that produce rent and that
rents re-produce. Butler, in her chapter “Stubborn
Attachment, Bodily Subjection: Rereading Hegel
on the Unhappy Consciousness” (1997, 31 -62),
interrogates the reiterative and proliferative
exchanges of power that produce disparity. Butler
re-narrates Hegel’s “Lordship and Bondage”
figures, the lord and the bondsman. Here, I insert
into a retelling of Butler's rewriting a parenthetical
inscription relating to a stony field. I assume in this
uncertified act of re-inscribing an artifice to which
Butler might object. But I do this to posit another
frame, wrapping around two figures, a person
(named Lady Stonyfield) and a cow (named
Cow), in a stony relational field (named
Commodity).
The lord (Lady Stonyfield) and the
bondsman (Cow) are figures in a stony field
(Commodity). These two appear at first to be
opposed and completely different. But the Two
each co-figure the Other in a singular yet not
static mutual interdependence. The lord (Lady
Stonyfield) depends on the bondsman's (Cow’s)
body and products of labor (milk) for the material
conditions (yogurt) of his (her) daily life (breakfast).
Through this dependence, the lord (lady)
produces the bondsman's (Cow’s) body, which he
(she) subsumes into his (her) own body. The lord
(lady) thus consumes the bondsman's (Cow’s)
labor and products of labor (milk and more
cows). For this show of power ($360 million in sales
in 2010) to work, the lord (Lady Stonyfield) must
selectively ‘forget’ his (her) involvement in
effecting the bondsman's (Cow’s) body and