The Case of Kensington Cat, or, Why Pick on animals?

Matthew Brower

The infliction of suffering, death, or mutilation on an animal body is one of the stock tropes of provocation in contemporary shock art; starving dogs, blended goldfish, stuffed kittens, exploding cows, cat-skin rugs, and pickled farm animals have all been used as artistic provocations.1 In many cases, such artistic interventions have created international moral panics in which animal activists assail the perceived degeneracy of the contemporary art world. These assaults, which typically assert the need for moral prior restraint on the practice of art, cause art world participants to defend the artist, and the space of freedom for artistic practice, regardless of their sense of the value of the work in question. The repetitive form of these conflicts suggests that there are underlying social structures affecting the debates. We might begin to get purchase on these structures by asking why artists pick on animals.1

I take up a failed case of artistic provocation, the torture and killing of ‘Kensington’ the cat by a Toronto art student, to examine the structure of the provocation that animal bodies can produce in art. Importantly, the failure in this case is not a failure of provocation but of art. The tape may have begun as an attempt to make art but it was never displayed as art and was considered by the student to be unresolved.3 Analysing this case allows an engagement with the structural issues of animal representation without needing to consider the aesthetic value of work in ways that might confuse the analysis. The controversy around the trial of the student and the three related controversies provide an important site for examining how the provocation provided by animal bodies in art turns on both the link between the representation of animals and affect and on the different moral structures of naming at work in contemporary art and animal activism. It also allows us to explore the role that the visual representation of animals plays in the development and articulation of animal politics.

In the spring of 2001, three men, including an Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADu) student, living in the Kensington market area of Toronto were involved in making a seventeen-minute video in which a cat was tortured and slain.4 The cat was posthumously named Kensington by animal rights activists outraged by the existence of the tape. In 2002, the student and a co-defendant were tried for animal cruelty.5 During the trial, animal activists and media commentators were appalled by the claim made in the art student’s defence that the video was intended as art and therefore justified or mitigated.6

The initial trial judge accepted the claim to art as mitigation and remarked ‘there are worse ways that this cat
could have died’, in handing out less than the maximum sentence. This holding was overturned by the court of appeal who argued that to ‘rationalize his [the art student’s] actions as some form of artistic endeavour or artistic commentary gone amuck, that interpretation is inconsistent with the contents of the videotape. Whatever the respondent’s intentions or motives at the outset, this became torture for torture’s sake.’7 The short maximum sentence available to the court prompted activists and the media to lobby for harsher sentences for animal cruelty.

During the lead up and the trial activists and the media also questioned the display of artwork by the student at the OCADu student gallery and demanded that the university disavow the student’s work. The critics were incensed that OCADu and the curators of Art System (the OCADu student gallery) would not categorically and immediately declare that the video could not be art and would not  categorically foreclose the possibility that dead animals could be art. The institution quickly distanced itself from the student but the curators refused to take responsibility for determining the limits of art.8 The controversy reemerged in 2004 with the selection of the film Casuistry by TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival. Activists protested the selection and presentation of the film arguing that it glorified the cat killers.

The public response to the case was marked by a desire to draw a sharp distinction between art and abuse. This response is typified by Suzanne Lahaie in her open letter to TIFF where she suggested that ‘art stops with cruelty’.9 The public response was also marked by broader criticisms of art. In an earlier discussion of the art student Lahaie argued that making the tape should preclude him from any further acts of representation. This was the core of the critique of the art gallery: that it refused to disavow the art student and his aesthetic productions on moral grounds.

In the overall controversy there was a blurring of criticism of the tape and the film with a broader assault on artists and art. For example, a Toronto SUN columnist linked the existence of the work to the art world’s effeminacy.10 This sentiment was expressed more directly by various online commentators, one of whom described anyone involved with the film as an ‘artsy faggot’. While there was much similar unfocussed invective, some of the commentary raised significant issues.

The anti-art response to the controversy was perhaps most directly articulated by City TV media personality, Ed the Sock, ‘I hate artists. There’s no more pretentious preening, self-absorbed people on this planet than those who think they’re tuned in to a higher power than the rest of us. I hate how they think they somehow have licence to engage in any form of disgusting behavior and call it art.’11 Ed compared the makers of the cat video to ‘the jackass who pees in a bottle and drops in a crucifix. In any other circumstance, these people would be locked up for observation. But slap the word ‘art’ on it, and they are no longer the sick freaks […] we’re the blind heathens who can’t see art.’12 Ed’s commentary raises the issue of artistic provocation and links the criticism of the tape and film to broader criticisms of art and to the culture wars of the 1980s. In other words, Ed raises the question of shock art and its relation to contemporary aesthetics.

In a more art historically sophisticated way, Toronto Globe and Mail pop-culture columnist Lynn Crosbie explored similar terrain when she linked the case to the work of Duchamp and the legacy of the ready-made.13 Thierry de Duve locates in Duchamp’s provocations the emergence of the idea of art in general.14 This is the shift that Ed the Sock is gesturing towards when he criticised the ability of artist’s to designate a gesture, potentially any gesture, as art: the understanding of art as intentionality.

With the abandonment of traditional aesthetic criteria the value of art comes to be judged in terms of its historical (conceptual/social/relational) significance. In this paradigm, art is thought to be related to its historical and cultural moment and not to an engagement with traditional or eternal value. In this understanding of art, aesthetic rupture (ugliness) functions as a sign of newness and artistic value. This can and has lead to a fetishising of the new as a sign of art that is ahead of its time.15

It is a short move from a moment in which the hostility of the public can be taken as a sign of aesthetic innovation (that Duchamp’s Fountain performs) to the development of shock art in which the existence of moral criticism of a work functions as validation of its engagement with a ‘real’ social issue.16 In the discourse of shock art controversy conveys significance and artistic value. The simplest mechanism by which it does so is that a successful provocation requires everyone in the art world to have an opinion about it and thus
its maker gains currency within an art world in which name recognition is a key marker of cultural status.17

While this analysis explains the value of provocation for the artists it does not offer an account of the strenuous nature of the protests. To understand the activist position it is necessary to look at the role of animal representation in contemporary culture. It must be stressed that the conflict between art and animal activism is not simply an issue of ethics versus aesthetics. Instead I argue that the core issue is conflicting interpretations of the function and structure of visual representation. Most significantly, within animal rights discourse aesthetics is ethics.

Visual representation has been central to animal rights from its beginnings. In Animal Rights Hilda Kean argues that ‘the changes that would take place in the treatment of animals relied not merely on philosophical, religious or political stances but the way in which animals were literally and metaphorically seen. The very act of seeing became crucial in the formation of the modern person.’18 Thus, the appearance of animals in society functioned as a marker of civilisation. As Jonathan Burt writes ‘humane behaviour is not simply a matter of deeds but is also a mark of being seen to behave humanely. By extension, the mark of a more civilized society […] is the way in which a society displays its humanity. The appearance and treatment of the animal body become a barometer for the moral health of the nation.’19 The link between morality and the appearance of animals was one of the drivers behind the nineteenth-century reorganisation of society in terms of the marginalisation of animals. Abattoirs and laboratories moved to the outskirts of cities and closed themselves off from the public.20 In other words, animal cruelty went under cover. In response to this seclusion of problematic human-animal relations, animal activists have taken as one of their primary goals the exposure and documentation of the continued cruelty to animals that takes place behind this separation.21

Thus, activist imagery is structured by morality in its production. As James Jasper and Jane Paulson note: ‘the
visual images used in animal rights discourse have a simple but effective structure based on good and evil’.22 They also demonstrate that the images have a moral structure in the affective response that they produce in some of their viewers. Images framed in this structure produce affective responses that lead viewers to political action.23 Visual representation of animals plays a key role not simply in defining the boundary of
animal politics but in its development and articulation.

The segregation and separation of animal from daily life has also led to their replacement by images. Contemporary society largely relates to animals through mediation.24 In contemporary culture the visual representation of animals is a culturally loaded and unresolved arena in which cuteness and idyllic fantasy often mask systemic cruelty. John Berger argues that these images have led to a waning of interest, understanding, and engagement with animals except through the narrow frameworks of anthropomorphism, sentimentality, and nostalgia.25 It is against this backdrop of cultural distance from the animal that Steve Baker attempts to think through the moral and ethical implications of the use of animals in contemporary art. 26

Baker’s argument is helpful for clarifying the issues at stake in the debates. Baker acknowledges the ethical issues raised by the use of animals in art but wants to defend art from the imposition of moral constraints: ‘As the animal in the gallery space is seldom (if ever) there of its own choosing, it is hardly surprising that the ethical issues raised by its treatment by the artist have now come to the fore.’ (p.42) While he acknowledges the ethical stakes, Baker criticises ‘the easy view that something shocking or cruel is not art’. (p.43) In contrast to what he sees as the general erasure of animals by sentimentality, Baker postulates the idea of botched taxidermy as a motif in contemporary art that forces an engagement with both the materiality and otherness of the animal: ‘It is through their dealings with the animal as material that artists have managed to render animals abrasively visible, and utterly distinct from the fantasy creatures of 102 Dalmatians […] Popular culture sees only itself in the eyes of the animal.’ (p.43) In response to the marginalisation of animals, Baker argues against moral constraint in their representations: ‘There need be few such boundaries in art’s dealings with the animal, though it can be uncomfortable to acknowledge this […] prohibiting the art is by no means certain to improve matters.’ (p.47)

To contextualise Baker’s position it is important to consider the history of dead animal bodies in art. Dead
animals are central to the history of animal representation. Prior to the development of instantaneous photography almost all representations of animals were based on dead animals. It should also be stressed that the meaning of the representation of the dead animal is not stable and depends on social context. For example, Audubon’s systematic slaughter of birds to create scientific records asserting dominance over nature produced a series of images that now circulate as icons of wild nature. His images motivated the foundation of protective societies that have clearly benefited animals.

At the heart of the conflicts between contemporary art and animal activism is the question of the meaning of animal suffering. At issue is the question of whether the representation of animal suffering can ever mean anything but that an animal is suffering. And whether the proper response to the depiction of animal suffering is to reflect on the place and role of animals in society or whether the image must necessarily place a burden on us to act to alleviate that suffering.27 While the temptation is to say that the proper response is to do both, in practice, in the moment, these positions conflict in the response they demand to the image of animal suffering. Instead, I suggest that the conflicts between art and activism over animal representation form what Jean-François Lyotard has described as a differend, a situation in which competing claims to Justice have no common framework with which to adjudicate their claims that does not do violence to one or the other of the positions.28 This is why Baker suggests, in his discussion of the ethical implications of Eduardo Kac’s work, that ‘there is no consensus on what constitutes ethical behavior towards animals in contemporary art. More radically than this, however, it may suggest that ethical questions cannot even be adequately framed in this context because both “ethics and aesthetics are branches of philosophy”, and the “bias and prejudice” of the Western philosophical canon has been nowhere more evident than in its pronouncements on animals.’29

1. As a deliberate ethical strategy the essay refers to art practices but does not name them or their practitioners.
2. While the tape was initially intended to as an extension of two earlier video pieces (submitted for credit) that violently and provocatively explored the context of animal death in contemporary culture, the student felt the piece was unresolved and was not a finished work. Jane Gadd, ‘Cat Torturer Ashamed’, Globe and Mail, 29 March 2002, A16.
3. Rosie Dimanno, ‘Unspeakable horror of the cat torturers’, Toronto Star, 15 April 2002.
4. The third participant was indentified later and tried separately.
5. Philip Lee-Shanok, ‘Cat killer sought macabre jobs, hearing told’, Toronto Sun, 3 April 2002.
6. Christie Blatchford, ‘Cat torture was not art: judges’, National Post, 14 June 2003, A1.
7. Amanda Spectrum, ‘Animals in Art: Where do you draw the line between cutting edge and cruel?’, Spectrum, Ryerson University. Online at: http://geocities.ws/casuistry2004/animalsinart.html Accessed 17 June 2011.
8. Suzanne Lahaie, ‘An Open Letter to the Toronto International Film Festival’, September 8, 2004.
9. Gary Dunford, ‘Can cat torture be art?’, Toronto Sun, 2 September 2004.
10. Ed the Sock is a cigar-smoking, gruff-voiced puppet who offers a curmudgeonly take on the world. He hosted Ed’s Night Party (later known as Ed and Red’s Night Party) on City TV from 1995–2008.
11. Ed the Sock, ‘monologue’, Ed’s Night Party, City TV, 23 July 2001.
12. Lynne Crosby, ‘Not art at the cutting edge, just cruel’, Globe and Mail, 15 March 2003, R4.
13. Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
14. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, New York: Knopf, 1991.
15. Anthony Julius, Transgressions: the Offences of Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
16. A more sophisticated mechanism occurs when the controversy is large enough that it becomes impossible to describe the art of the era without referencing the work. We might see the ongoing legacy of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in this light.
17. Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800, London: Reaktion Books, 1998, p. 27.
18. Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film, London: Reaktion, 2002, p. 36.
19. Jonathan Burt, ‘The Illumination of the Animal Kingdom: The Role of Light and Electricity in Animal Representation’, Society and Animals, 9.3, (2001), 203–28 and Jonathan Burt, ‘Conflicts around slaughter in modernity’, in Killing Animals, ed. by The Animal Studies Group, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006, pp.120–44.
20. Zoe Broughton, ‘Seeing is Believing’, The Ecologist, 31.2, (2001), pp. 31–3.
21. James Jasper and Jane Paulson, ‘Recruiting Strangers and Friends: Moral Shocks and Social Networks in Animal Rights and Anti-Nuclear Protests’, Social Problems, 42, 1995, 493–512.
22. Matthew Brower, ‘A Rupture in the Field of Representation: Animals, Photography and Affect’, Photography and Culture, 2.3 (2002), 317–326.

23. See for example Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal, London: Reaktion, 2000; Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001; Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film; Representing Animals, ed. by N. Rothfels, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002; Cynthia Chris, Watching Wildlife, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006; and Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. by C. Wolfe, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
24. John Berger, ‘Why look at animals?’, in About Looking, New York: Vantage, 1980, pp.1–28.
25. Steve Baker, ‘Animal Rights and Wrongs’, Tate: The Art Magazine, 26, 2001; 42–7 (accessed online at: www.ekac.org/haunted.htm). Further references are given in parentheses after quotations in the text. Baker returns to the question of animal death in contemporary art in later work but brackets off the kind of deliberately provocative work under discussion here from his analysis. Steve Baker, ‘Animal Death in Contemporary Art’, in Killing Animals, pp. 69–98, p. 70. Baker’s position on the value of making animals ‘abrasively visible’ is controversial with scholars who believe that animal studies must necessarily be oriented towards animal activism. See John Simons, ‘Review: The Postmodern Animal’, Anthrozoos, 15.2 (2002), 182–4. For Baker’s response see Baker, ‘Animal Death in Contemporary Art’.
26. The issue here is similar to the argument made by Theodor Adorno in ‘Commitment’, New Left Review, 87–8, (September – December 1974), 75–89.
27. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.
28. Baker, ‘Animal Rights and Wrongs’, p. 47. Baker is quoting Kac.