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art world” as “guilty of gross self-indulgence.” In my own view, what is lacking here is the kind of intellectual generosity found in a work such as Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good where, writing in 1970, she articulates an approach that “does not contrast art and morals, but shows them to be two aspects of a single struggle.” She explicitly criticizes those who see art “as a quasi-play activity, gratuitous, ‘for its own sake’ … a sort of byproduct of our failure to be entirely rational. Such a view of art is of course intolerable.” And she insists that “aesthetic situations are not so much analogies of morals as cases of morals. Virtue … in the artist … is a selfless attention to nature.”[i] That kind of outlook is more evident elsewhere in this issue. John Simons, for example, writing from the perspective of literature, argues that “the important thing is for scholars … to find ways of using their discipline to promote awareness of the animal advocacy position.” Here there is no implicit ethical hierarchy of disciplines but rather a sense that each discipline can shed distinctive and valuable light on the issues. As Simons puts it in one of his later answers, “I take the view that anything that stimulates people to think more carefully and, therefore one hopes, more kindly about animals is a good thing.” Consciously or not, there is a definite echo here of Murdoch’s view that attentiveness is itself a manifestation of ethical responsibility. Similar ideas emerge in Carol Gigliotti’s excellent interview with Tom and Nancy Regan. Tom Regan is quite explicit that there is “no scholarly discipline whose practitioners cannot make a contribution” to the advancement of animal advocacy. He continues: “But central – central – to this ‘small’ project of changing how people see the world is what students in the arts can contribute.” This is an example of philosophy not merely acknowledging but embracing the arts, in what the Regans call the “mantra” of their Culture & Animals Foundation: “We’d rather be inside the theater performing than outside the theater protesting.” Yvette Watt’s discussion of a wide range of contemporary artworks in her essay “Artists, Animals and Ethics” acknowledges the difficulties of adopting such an open approach, while nevertheless recognizing that certain works with no clear advocacy agenda may nevertheless offer “compelling” representations of animal life and death. She also shows, through the example of responses to the immensely important artist and activist Angela Singer’s work, that even artwork shaped by a direct commitment to animal rights will not necessarily communicate its message effectively to viewers. As Singer herself 6 acknowledges: “Do many of them get the animal rights message? Some do, some don’t.”[ii] Art doesn’t have all the answers, and artists (as they are generally very willing to admit) don’t even always reliably know how to frame the relevant questions. But as Tom Regan insists, and as this whole issue of Antennae attests: “The wrong way to open students’ minds is to close off informed debate.” Without overstating its claims, contemporary art distinctively frames one necessary part of that debate about animal advocacy and changing attitudes to animal life. Sue Coe gets this about right in observing, towards the end of her interview: “It’s never one thing that creates change, it’s multiple exposures to different facets that create a different heart.” References [i] Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 39-40. [ii] Angela Singer, unpublished interview with Steve Baker, April 2010. Steve Baker is a member of the editorial boards of Society and Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies, and of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. He was a founding member of the Animal Studies Group, whose co-authored 2006 book Killing Animals was acknowledged in Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet as ‘an important new book’. His research on attitudes to animals in 20th and 21st-century art, philosophy and popular culture draws on his interviews and correspondence with contemporary artists in several countries, and his chapter in Killing Animals has been described by animal historian Harriet Ritvo as handling with ‘deft awareness’ the ‘politically charged and often intentionally offensive artwork’ that it analyzed. His forthcoming book, provisionally titled ARTIST | ANIMAL, proposes that the integrity of contemporary artists’ engagement with questions of animal life is not fashioned out of and is not best understood through the language of a regulatory or proscriptive ethics.
5 Leading Thinkers on Animals Exclusive Interviews 7
Page 1 and 2: Antennae Issue 19 - Winter 2011 ISS
Page 3 and 4: EDITORIAL ANTENNAE ISSUE 19 O ne of
Page 5: B y its title alone, Antennae’s c
Page 9 and 10: P eter Singer is considered to be o
Page 11 and 12: objectively as we can, and understa
Page 13 and 14: Marco Evaristti Helena, mixed media
Page 15 and 16: john simons Interviewed by Rod Benn
Page 17 and 18: John Simons Animal Rights and the P
Page 19 and 20: Ethel C. Pedley Dot and the Kangaro
Page 21 and 22: R oger Scruton is an English philos
Page 23 and 24: there have been arguments made for
Page 25 and 26: N on-moral beings The account of mo
Page 27 and 28: their own equivalent of the social
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Page 31 and 32: Livestock, and the eating of meat I
Page 33 and 34: consider the fate of the animals wh
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y the “so-called doctrines of ani
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animals, the methods which are used
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society. It is imperative that the
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Damien Hirst The physical Impossibi
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More recent examples of animal deat
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These comments made by Jones and Mc
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ambiguity.”[31] While it is not c
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distinctions of mind-body/male-fema
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“I f slaughterhouses had glass wa
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Jonathan Horowitz Billboards, insta
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of the floor was also respectively
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Jonathan Horowitz If Slaughterhouse
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Bollen, Christopher. “Jonathan Ho
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Fig. 1, Gorillas and humans view ea
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all classes of people, and the prom
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capture and their implications shou
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Fig. 4 Captured Indian elephants. P
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Fig. 6. Zoo employees load a large
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Fig. 8. View of the National Collec
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[12] Henry Osborn, From the Greeks
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Camilla Calamandrei Still from The
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Camilla Calamandrei NYPD officer re
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Camilla Calamandrei Still from The
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international trade in illegal weap
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sue coe A new portfolio Interviewed
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from 112 lbs annually to 108lbs, bu
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education. As one activist has said
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Sue Coe Image List Finning, 2011 Th
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Elisabeth de Fontenay Le Silence de
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animal towards man,” between paga
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Antennae.org.uk Issue twenty will b
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