This critical review starts with a brief discussion of intersectionality before considering some issues in Visual Activism. Intersectionality is a theoretical focus on understanding the shared ideologies underpinning different forms of social justice, in order to provide clarity on common changes that are necessary. Visual activism is a form of art that is concerned with both clarifying how social inequalities impact the groups being treated unjustly, and demanding change.
Intersectionality
In Unit One I briefly wrote about Critical Animal Studies, which takes an intersectional approach to injustice (e.g. Nocella et al. 2014). Although my focus for the current work relates to injustice toward other animals, I am strongly committed to the idea that all injustices are connected through identification of ‘the other’ followed by a sense of difference from ‘the other’, and of superiority toward this ‘other’. In my view all injustices also have in common a rationalisation of superiority which is then used as a reason for exploitation, particularly within a neoliberal capitalist economic system. It is difficult to understand how any liberatory approach to social justice can ignore this insectionality: doing so, to me, makes the focus incomplete/problematic. I accept, of course, that any group may want to emphasise a specific injustice, often because of their personal experience of that injustice (I am doing so myself by focusing on animal liberation). However, in my view work on a specific injustice should always recognise the insectionality of all injustices and commitment to act on any and all injustice wherever possible – without this recognition those of us who fight for justice are in danger of ourselves exploiting, and being unjust, to others.
This work builds on my previous work from the 1980s involved feminist studies. I started my career in Higher Education as a lecturer in Gender Studies and education. In the 1980s too I was involved in anti-racist approaches to teaching and the curriculum in schools, as well as an interest in the impacts of socio-economic positioning relating to achievement in school. My experience throughout my life as both student and teacher, has also made me very interested in the role of schooling in teaching dominant controlling discourses of superiority over other people/success and failure, and it is possible that I will combine this critique of human to human superiority discourse, with the discourse of human superiority over other animals in my site specific installation for unit three – particularly if the next exhibition of our work is planned for Wilson road – a former grammar school for boys.
Because of this background I begin with a critical reading of Ecofeminism. My searches also took me to other intersectional writings. For example, ‘Anarchism, feminism and veganism: a convergence of stuggles’ (Veron and White, 2021). Anarchism is something I know very little about, but the article states a position I totally sympathise with. The authors argue that Anarchists should be both vegan and feminist, as well as taking a post-humanist position in relation to their support for undoing human supremacy (This chapter is published in an edited collection on Anarchist Political Ecology with ‘undoing human supremacy’ in the book’s title).
In contrast to the position on intersectionality taken by Veron and White (2021) and by Nocella et al (2014), some readings on ecofeminism are curiously silent on the question of human violence to other animals. There are of course exceptions, including the work by Carol J. Adams, and the anthology by Greta Gaard, ‘Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, in which Gaard looks at animal liberation and the question of political inclusiveness:
…the ideology which authorises oppressions such as those based on race, class, gender, sexuality, physical abilities, and species, is the same ideology which sanctions the oppression of nature.
Gaard, 2010. p. 34.
However, because I think a Marxist critique of capitalism is so important for animal injustices, I will start with a critique of ‘Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern’ (1997, 2017) by Ariel Salleh.
Ariel Salleh is a founding member of the Global University for Sustainability, and has lectured on social ecology in universities around the globe. Additonally she is known for her activism relating to anti-nuclear politics, biodiversity protection, and support for Asia-Pacific women’s eco-sufficient community alternatives.
As I understand it Salleh’s core argument is that while a Marxist argument against capitalism and neoliberalism as an exploitative, competitive and ulitmately unsustainable economic model underpins all movements toward social justice and is vital in a fight against inequality; at the same time Marxist focus on exploitation of the worker for capitalist profit marginalises the labour of women. It also largely ignores the capitalist exploitation of ‘Nature’ and the human supremacist project more generally. I agree both with the importance of Marxism for critique of capitalism generally, and with Salleh’s critique of it.
While Salleh provides a strong critique of the human supremacist position regarding ‘other’ nature, it is troubling to find that she largely skates over the ‘other’ animal as part of this ‘other nature’. A search of her book (c. 220 pages long), using the term ‘animal’, finds other animals mentioned on 23 pages only. She first mentions ‘animals’ on page 29 when she mentions that ‘an international conference, ‘Minding Animals’, is now held regularly, and an ethics of veganism has been formulated by ecofeminists in the United States. This suggests that she herself is vegan. On page 50, she writes:
Femine suffering is universal because wrong done to women and its ongoing denial fuel the psychosexual abuse of all Others – races, children animals, plants, rocks, water and air. Ecofeminists make no particular claim for themselves, but a claim in general. An emancipation of the relational sensibility of women and its reclamation by men will release Earth energies
p. 49-50
Here Salleh fails to mention that the violence to others is not only psychosexual – it is primarily physical and murderous toward other animals.
Salleh also quotes Ted Benton’s opposition to the hierarchical placing of humans over other animals. However most of her references to ‘animals’ come in a long list of oppressions, rather than a specific argument relating to the fundamental need to liberate animals from human oppression as a first step toward ending violence generally in our society. I also was troubled by the lack of recognition that female liberation will not automatically lead to the liberation of other animals, or acknowledgement that women are absolutely implicated in the violence toward other animals, no matter their ‘relational sensibility’. For ecofeminism to be truly liberating for both women and other animals, it needs to take on this fact. Women are not only ‘treated like other animals’ but they themselves are complicit in treating other animals with cruelty (Salleh writes that women are treated like other animals without comment. This is a fairly common complaint from oppressed groups – as if humans being treated like an animal (ie like a thing) is unacceptable, while treating an animal like an animal is acceptable). Women traditionally have been the ones to cook other animals for their family. In the past, and in many communities today, it was women who killed and plucked, the hen for the stew. Violence in the home is not only male violence against women (or women and children); it is female violence toward other animals in the heart of the family and home – the kitchen. For most, this it a violence that informs all our cultural celebrations, our nourishment, and our nurturing of each other. Failure to recognise this in a book about women and their relationship to nature, is for me a fundamental, and even violent, omission. It is this ommision that I find unacceptable in several texts on ecofeminism: it is not acceptable to me to argue that women are ‘closer to nature’ if the other animal is excluded from ‘other nature’. For me, there is little evidence that women, more than men, have a relational sensibility toward other animals.
In contrast, Veron and White, while arguing for a politics of anarchism, recognise that anarchism without feminism and veganism, is undesirable: the subtitle of their chapter in the book, ‘Anarchist Political Ecology – Undoing Human Supremacy’, is ‘A convergence of struggles‘. (Interestingly Ophelia Veron and Richard White are both lectures at Sheffield Hallam university, as are Stephanie Hartle and Darcy White – both of whom wrote the book ‘Visual Activism’ which I discuss in the next section).
Veron and White open their article by explaining that because anarchism refuses to ‘rarefy and privilege any one source of dominator power’ it should in theory be ‘highly open to intersectionality’ (p.1). They go on to argue that anarchists are committed to critically reflect on how questions of emancipation, freedom and autonomy transgress boundaries of human society and that this suggests they are bound to concerns about non-human and more-than-human worlds. They quote Bookchin (2015: 39) who suggests that ‘perhaps the most fundamental message that social ecology advances is that the very idea of dominating nature stems from the domination of human by human.’ (I am not quite convinced by this notion. I wonder in fact if it isn’t the other way around – domination of human by human stems from the human domination of other nature. Or perhaps we should ok see them as progressing side by side). Veron and White argue however that despite this foci, two powerful manifestations of oppression – patriarchy and anthroparchy have been largely ignored by an intersectional anarchist praxis. Even worse, advocates of anarcha-feminism or veganararchism have been met with overt hostility from the anarchist movement. Their paper is an invitation to address this failure to address the intersectionality of social injustice. In the remaining chapter Veron and White ask, is it possible for an anarchist to maintain a deep commitment to fighting patriarchy and paternalist forms of social domination while actively supporting anthroparchy? Is it possible to be feminist and/or anti speciesist forms of social domination while actively supporting statist and capitalist exploitation and domination. I would answer ‘NO’. And No it is not possible to fight ANY form of social domination while acting in ways that are oppressive of another group. Any such behaviour is inconsistent and must detract from our support for any social justice issue: it infringes on a care based ethic toward all forms of life. As Reclus articulated in 1901 – any vision of care and justice in the world rests on ecological premises.
Visual Activism
My visual making practice is based on ideas of autonomy, freedom and social justice, and of critiquing dominant discourses of power and control. At the same time implicit in my work is a suggestion for change. I have described my work as ‘political art’ in the past. Last weekend I attended the conference at Camberwell on ‘The Politics of Art and Social Change’ . I was very hopeful about this conference but felt that evidence for insectional politics in the conference were limited. I had not expected the conference to be so focused on racism and oppression of gay, trans and queer people (in fairness, the conference was organised by ‘Autograph’ who began, I understand, with a focus on supporting migrants). This is not to say I want in any way to critique these priorities – just that I felt the parts of the conference I attended (Friday and Saturday morning) were not about the politics of art in a general sense, as the title of the conference suggested, but about sharing experiences of racism, and homophobia and ways of addressing these through coming together to celebrate identity. (The Chair, who introduced the conference had some excellent questions about art for social change, that I would have liked to hear discussed and which I list at the end).
On Friday morning before the conference started I went to the library to take out a book I had ordered: Visual Activism in the 21st century, edited by Hartle and White. As I sat waiting for the start, two women sitting directly behind me leaned forward and spoke in unison, ‘That is our book’. I already felt that ‘Visual Activism’ may be a more appropriate term than ‘Political Art’ and so the synchronicity of meeting the authors buoyed up my hope that I had found my artistic home. The remaining text here is a summary of a couple of ideas from this book that I have been thinking about for a while.
Hartle and White write:
…in the context of the apparent emptying out of the artistic and political realm by neoliberalism – it seems there is a need felt by many for a new form of art that nurtures and fosters our possibilities for change.
leven, Steinbock and de Valck (2000), quoted by Hartle and White, p. 6.
Hartle and White begin their discussion by writing about ‘visuality’. They describe this as the right to see the truth – the right to look. For me this is an exciting connection with my work – before coming across this book I had already decided to call my site specific installation at the Bargehouse, ‘I Learned Not To Look’ – not looking, or looking away, or looking but not seeing, are all related to my interest in critical discourse analysis. If Visual activism is about making visible those problematic aspects of culture that control and exploit, then I consider my work visual activism. Hartle and White (p.2) draw on Sliwinska (2020:5) to describe visual activism as ‘at the intersection of visual culture , artistic practice, social action and movements.’
I was particularly struck, given my interest in Critical Discourse Analysis, by a reference (p. 6), to the artist Burgin in conversation with Van Gelder. Burgin talks about ongoing tensions and constraints that the artist meets when they attempt to enter the realm of sociocultural critique (as I attempt). Burgin locates the problem in:
… the progressive colonisation of the terrain of languages, beliefs and values by mainstream media contents and forms – imposing an industrial uniformity upon what may be imagined and said, and engendering compliant synchronised subjects of a “democratic” political process in which the vote changes nothing.
Burgin and Van Gelder in conversation, 2010, p. 3 quoted in Hartle and White, p.6.
While I have come across writers and particularly novelists who explore this colonisation (it is why, for example I am so interested in science fiction, like Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World, or E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops) this is the first time I have come across an artist who defines so clearly his attempts to decolonise language, beliefs and values though his art. It is precisely this colonisation and narrowing of what is allowed and not allowed to be said or thought, or looked at, that I have wanted to explore in visual art. Previously I thought about this in relation to human to human behaviour, but now human to non human. Decolonising art relates not only to decolonising human injustice to other humans, but to non-humans: to decolonising what we can think and say in a neoliberal global online world, where we are controlled by social media. This links, I think, to my notion that drawing can be a method of critical discourse analysis.
Secondly, Hartle and White raise the question of aesthetics in visual activism. I think the problem of aesthetics can be related to Kester’s suggestion (raised on my Artist Statement page) that we move to a different view of art from individual and sensory, to dialogic. An individual and sensory view of art will be concerned with the art aesthetic. Kester’s suggestion of moving to a dialogic art resonates with the argument of Hartle and White, p. 9 that art and visual culture can give way to new forms of social encounter that subvert existing patterns of thinking and (in)action. Claire Bishop (2006) has argued, based on Ranciere, for a balance between aesthetics and politics, arguing that the aesthetic does not need to be sacrificed at the alter of social change. I’m not so sure about this. Ranciere (2013) argues that art and aesthetics lost their political capacities with the advent of modernism. He identifies three regimes of art (a ‘regime’ refers to what is possible to be considered as art in any given epoch) – the ethical, the representative and the aesthetic. I can see it is perfectly acceptable for the representative to be beautiful and see no problem with a balance between these two. However, I feel rather stuck on the question of whether the ethical, which I think must always be the focus for visual activism, can or should also strive for beauty. This is a question I struggled with explicitly in my installation – for example, in the second video, ‘Inside these walls’, I asked myself whether it was ethical to highlight the beauty of the pattern on the walls, when what happened within them is violent and not beautiful in any way. That is, what happened to the cows is violent and not beautiful – the cows themselves are peaceful and beautiful. I think that possibly Clare Bishop is right and a balance should be sought – but it’s a difficult and potentially problematic balance.
The third point I would like to raise in the introduction of ‘Visual Activism’ is another issue I have thought about at length. It relates to the openness or ambiguity of a work. I quite see that ambiguity is one way that audience attention is captured – as with any narrative – we want to know what is going on and why. This relates, to Barthes notion of readerly or writerly. I always enjoy writerly novels where I need to put some effort into understanding them. Generally didactic or dogmatic messages are resisted. Hartle and White (p. 9) raise the fact that Charlesworth (2019), proposed a return to an aesthetic of ambiguity:
what underpins that drift of art toward an uninflected, side taking politics is a bigger failure of cultural thinking regarding how artworks might possess their own logic, their own sense , their own capacity to affect us in ways that can’t easily be directed or determined.
Charlesworth, 2019, quoted in Hartle and White, p. 9
Interestingly Hartle and White do not comment on this or take a position relating to this. I think Charlesworth makes an important point. We need to respect the intelligence of our audience to interpret a work in their own way. As he seems to say, there is a sense in which the work we make has its own life and purpose – we need to allow it to say what it wants to say – our work also has a voice that is not only the maker’s voice – it goes out into the world with some autonomy. However, if the work is, in Ranciere’s terms, a work stemming from the ethical regime, it cannot be neutral. Ethics is based on non-harm, and the artist making the work needs to clarify their ethical position and this will not be neutral or ambiguous. ie we cannot say in relation to animal cruelty that it may be right or may be wrong, we take the stance that violence is wrong. Given this, I would argue that the artist should be clear about their ethics and ensure that what they make does not conflict with their ethics. If the work is ABOUT their ethics (as mine is) then those ethics should not be confusing or ambiguous. Beyond these basics, I do not see why the artwork cannot ALSO contain ambiguous features – for example in my Bargehouse installation the presence of the girl and the knitted cow could be interpreted in a number of ways, but I would hope their presence does not detract from the ethical message. Overall I disagree with Charlesworth – the title of the article is ‘Keep Politics Out of Art’ – it is simplistic to assume that politics can be kept out of art – art IS fundamentally political, including who buys art, where art is shown, how much money art sells for, who goes to see ‘art’, what art depicts, the materials used to make art, and so on.
I will finish with the excellent questions asked in the introduction to the conference (organised by Autograph), that I really wish we had the opportunity to discuss (where ‘other animals’ or ‘non human’ or ‘Anthropocentric’ is added – this is my addition and was not present in the original. It may be that these questions were addressed in the afternoon when I could not be present – but in the afternoons people chose different workshops, and their titles made this seem unlikely:
- How best to advocate for the rights of marginalised and vulnerable people (other animals) within cultural spaces, communities and the wider systemic level.
- How to challenge entrenched power dynamics, hierarchies and privileges that typically structure institutions?
- Can art be a space to address these power imbalances and hierarchies?
- What kind of change can art and cultural projects lead to, and what kinds of transformations can these enact at personal and structural levels?
- How to safely facilitate this work, especially with people (and animals) who are vulnerable?
- What kinds of exchange occur in this work between participants and artist-practitioners. How can these be more equal or transparent?
- What kind of intersections, collaborations, partnerships can effect change within the cultural, social and political landscape we occupy?
- Is this landscape one in which right can ever be fully respected – given the increasing violations of human (and non human) right across society but also given the colonial, Eurocentric (and Anthropocentric) history of human rights discourse itself.
- Can rights act as an effective way to address marginalisation?
- How can practices and knowledges within marginalised communities and lived experiences that are often excluded be placed at the centre of this work?
- Do we need other practices or values in arts and engagement work in order to make transformative change in the world?
It seems to me that all these questions relate to my main research question and all are questions that I am seeking answers too in relation to the marginalisation and violence toward other animals, especially farmed animals, in our culture.
References
Adams, C. J. (1990, 2013). The sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory. London: Bloomsbury.
Bishop, C. (2006). The Social Turn: Collaboration and its’ Discontents. Artforum International, 44(6), 178-85.
Bookchin, M. (2015). The next revolution: Popular assemblies and the promise of direct democracy. Verso Books.
Charlesworth, J. J. (2019) Keep Politics Out of Art. The Spectator, 9 March. 46.
Gaard, G. (2010) Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Hartle, S. and White, D. (2022) Visual Activism in the 21st Century: art, protest and resistance in an uncertain world. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
Nocella, A., Sorenson, J., Socha, K., Matsuoka, A (2014) Defining Critical Animal Studies: an intersectional social justice approach for Liberation. Counterpoints. Vol 448. pp 19-36
Ranciere, J. (2013) Aisthesis: scenes from the aesthetic regime of art. London: Verso.
Reclus, E. (1901) A propos du végétarisme. La réforme alimentaire, 5(3): 37-45.
Salleh, A. (2nd Edition) (2017). Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern. London: Zed Books.
Veron, 0. and White R. J. Anarchism, Feminism and Veganism: A Convergence of Struggles’. In S. Springer, J. Mateer, M. Locret-Collet and M. Acker (ed) Anarchist Political Ecology – Undoing Human Supremacy. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
Drawing As Critique 