Trouble In The Forest

Good art is usually divisive – it causes arguments, provokes feeling, makes us think about the things that matter. It can cause tears, laughter, violence or even protest – and sometimes a combination of all of these things, as the curator of an exhibition at Edinburgh’s Forest Café entitled The Unholy Trinity discovered recently, when the work on show was embraced by some and vandalised by others.

The controversy surrounding The Unholy Trinity was perhaps predictable. One of the exhibiting artists, Jamie Fitzpatrick, uses taxidermy with a twist – he sews together bits of different animals to create creatures that look like they escaped from a zoo where there was a toxic waste spillage. A bird with what looks like rabbit’s legs hangs from the wall; a squirrel sitting on a shelf has a human hand for a tail. “You must have taken acid mixed with toilet cleaner to think this up,” reads a comment left in the visitor’s book.

But not all visitors reacted with such wit. The Forest is after all a vegetarian café, and some of the clientele clearly could not see beyond the fact that these were once living creatures, now manipulated into weird mutants and hung like ornaments on a wall – so they vandalised them.

Yet the vandals missed the point: Fitzpatrick’s work does not advocate the abuse of animals or the infliction of suffering. “Jamie has an incredible knowledge and respect for nature”, said Omar Bhatia, whose work was also part of the Unholy Trinity exhibition.

Rather, Fitzpatrick’s work aims to, in his own words, “reconsider hybridization in the wake of technologically scientific expansion”; or in layman’s terms, to criticise the way in which genetic science has objectified animals and meddled with nature – hence the title of his exhibit, The Unnatural History Museum.

The context must have been lost on the vandals, though, who clearly decided it would be more fun to spray-paint the walls and throw Fitzpatrick’s work to the ground than read the lengthy explanation pinned to the wall accompanying it. Or perhaps they were so entranced by the visually arresting, perversely grotesque sight of the animals that they were blinded to the bigger picture: that is, that the animals are merely reflections of the freakish science that inspired them.

“Art disturbs, science reassures,” said the French painter George Braque – but Fitzpatrick’s work seeks to challenge this notion; his mutant creatures reminding us that science has a dark side too, and that, ironically enough, sometimes the worst vandals of all are not the ones wielding spray-cans in galleries, but the ones manipulating genes in laboratories.

This article also appears at: http://www.theskinny.co.uk/article/98760-trouble-in-the-forest

Fluffy lambs, meat and hypocrisy

Over the course of 2009, more than 15m sheep were slaughtered for human consumption in the UK – that's a quarter of a sheep per person, per year on average. Yet the life and death of one sole lamb in a small Kent village has caused so much of frenzy that it culminated in a headteacher resigning from her post.

The controversy began when Andrea Charman, the headteacher in question, decided to educate the children of her 250-pupil primary school about "all aspects of farming life and everything that implies" – including sending the animal to the abattoir when the time was right. But after having hand-reared the lamb, for many of the children and their parents slaughter was simply not an option.

Charman stuck to her guns though, and Marcus the lamb was carted off never to return. "She just wouldn't listen to anybody," said one of the parents. "Murderer," cried another. Yet ironically, it seems that an element of the protest stemmed from the fact that Charman's depiction of farming itself was flawed – not harsh enough according to some of parents – for it was based on some postcard picture of a pre-Fordist idyll, where cages and conveyor belts have all been airbrushed from view.

"The meat industry is not a fluffy cuddly business where animals are hand-reared by loving children," proclaims an online petition calling for the removal of Charman – but building a temporary factory farm within the confines of a small primary school would surely have been out of the question too. It's better, we can only presume, to keep children in total ignorance – let them wolf down their lamb stew at lunchtime guilt-free and in peace, while the slaughter machine grinds on somewhere in the distance; out of sight, out of mind.

The fact is that 15m sheep just like Marcus are killed every single year; yet not a tear is shed, for each of these creatures is anonymous from birth to death – a statistic, a shrink-wrapped product, a means to an end. Any grain of conscience we might have about consuming the tender flesh of a baby lamb can be quickly doused with mint sauce, like a flame with water.

But it's not so easy when you've known the creature on your plate. To eat a dog or a cat would be balked at for this reason – we construct a divide: domestic animals are our "friends", farm animals are our "food". When one crosses the line into the other, we enter into a state of moral and ethical meltdown – as the case of Marcus has illustrated with precision.

Unfortunately for Andrea Charman though, her attempt to somewhat bridge this divide has left her branded a disgrace and a murderer. We'd rather not be reminded of our hypocrisy, much less school our children in it – but the lesson has already been learned, because as Charman heads for the door, children from across the UK have long since reached their conclusions. Posting on the CBBC website, Princess, 13, from London managed to sum up the general feeling in one short sentence: "If this lamb had been brought up as a pet and not an ordinary animal", she wrote "it is bang out of order to kill it". Or in the words of Orwell, "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others".

This article appeared originally at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2010/feb/13/fluffy-animals-meat-headteacher