Animals in Art

Where do you draw the line between cutting edge and cruel?

by Amanda Factor, Spectrum, Ryerson Polytechnic University

The targeting of animal rights activists and one activist's crusade
Art System and threats and rumours
Jesse Powers' videos
Fundamental hypocrisy
Other Art System shows featuring animals
After the trial
The activist's song

Suzanne Lahaie, co-founder of the non-violent animal rights group Freedom for Animals, has learned through experience that when you target big business and the government with campaigns and protests, you become the target. She has been searched and nearly arrested by the police, grabbed and verbally threatened by security guards. She is aware that her group's monthly meetings are regularly infiltrated by government officials and police officers who "want to know their faces". Last November, graphic posters with messages like "Eat cat - the other white meat" began showing up in her mailbox and on telephone poles around her Kensington Market apartment. She is convinced she is being followed, her phones are tapped and her apartment bugged.

Sitting in her apartment crawling with the many cats she is fostering as part of her Kensington Market stray rescue program, Lahaie turns on a white noise machine to drown out her voice, which she lowers to just above a whisper. She fears for her safety but won't give up her crusade to end cruelty to all animals. Nowadays, she spends most of her time and engergy on a recent criminal case widely publicized in the media - the case of Ontario College of Art and Design student Jesse Powers, who allegedly videotaped the torture and killing of a cat in the name of artistic expression.

"He should be banned from anywhere there's a connection to OCAD."

Her quiet voice takes on an edge and her eyes flash as she recounts her involvement in the case. She phoned the police at 14 Division and they asked her to help them identify the people in the video. "That cat went through absolute hell. The police at 14 Division told me that they've gotten calls from all over the world from people who are so angered."

What angers Lahaie is the defence offered by Powers - that the video was intended as a protest against animal cruelty. She sees Powers and the two boys allegedly responsible for the cat's demise, Anthony Wennekers and a third boy known only as "Matt" not as artists but as individuals in need of long term psychological counselling. "They're just repeating what probably happened to them. Throwing them in jail is not going to do any good. It will just cause their anger to escalate."

Besides recommending medical help for Powers before he should be allowed to walk the streets, Lahaie feels his privileges to display his art should be taken away from him. "I think all his art should be removed from him. He should banned from anywhere there's a connection to OCAD. There should be no forgiveness for this."

It is the Thursday before the opening night of Art System's new Starting Now show, and the Spadina Avenue gallery is undergoing some renovations. Co-director Jubal Brown peacefully smokes a cigarette in his office, with the door closed to shut out the banging and hammering. Five months after the Jesse Powers case made headlines, the OCAD-funded gallery is continuing to turn its attention to what it does best - exhibiting cutting-edge art by young artists.

The controversy surrounding the gallery during the summer has died down. Art System has shown other videos and paintings by Powers, and this, he stresses, is the only connection the gallery has to him. Nevertheless, after Powers was charged on May 30, the gallery was the target of threats and vandalism. A brick wrapped in a National Post article about the case was hurled through their front window. Messages saying that they should be scalped were left on their answering machine.

Brown says the fuss over the gallery doesn't bother him, in fact, he laughs at anyone who believes what he dismisses as ill-informed hype. "He hasn't been sentenced or convicted. I don't think people should form a lynch mob because of rumours." He was particularly incensed at e-mails sent out by local artist Cathy GordonMarsh, urging fellow members of the arts community to boycott the gallery after Brown and his co-worker Daniel Borins showed their support for Powers by attending his bail hearing.

The accusations GordonMarsh made in her e-mails, that Powers had hours of videotape of the torture and killing of animals, were "outrageous lies" according to Brown. "He's an animal rights activist. He probably had PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) videos in his collection and they were trying to use that against him." Powers has also worked as a taxidermist for the Royal Ontario Museum and made videos of the skinning and stuffing of dead exotic animals like foxes and orangutans. He also made videos of chickens being slaughtered while employed at a poultry processing plant. Says Brown, "If you're going to start arresting people for that, start right here on Spadina with the fur coats and the dead chickens hanging in the windows."

"We don't say 'This is the shocking show. We're going to create a scandal.'"

Brown, a vegetarian with two cats, speaks of what he calls a "fundamental hypocrisy" among many of Powers' critics. "It's like one cat is killed and people are up in arms, but hundreds of chickens get killed along here every day," he says, jabbing his thumb towards the window overlooking Spadina Avenue. "That doesn't make killing cats okay, but it's just something people overlook because they like eggs and Kentucky Fried Chicken."

Art System has shown art featuring animals before, including photographs of a dead rat with its belly cut open and its viscera exposed. That incident raised controversy among people who thought the rat was killed by the photographer. But, says Brown, the rat was bought already dead as snake food at a pet store. At the Spring Equinox show, a kitten was suspended in a basket over an arc of television sets. Later, because of what Brown calls the "broken telephone" system of rumours, an animal rights web site reported that the animal was placed in a cage on top of a burner.

"We don't say 'This is the shocking show. We're going to create a scandal.' We just try to make interesting shows," says Brown. "Last month we had a big sculpture of a stuffed teddy bear and there were levers and when stood on them the bear would punch you or hug you, put up its fist. I heard that someone wrote in to Now magazine and said 'I've heard Art System has given up showing animal cruelty art and are now showing cute stuffed teddy bears. Like our mandate was to show cruelty to animal artwork last month but now it's teddy bears."

Brown agrees that if Powers really wanted to expose animal cruelty, using existing situations might have gotten his point across more effectively. Nevertheless, he says that whether he is charged or not, he will still be allowed to display his artwork at the gallery. "Maybe he didn't address it in a very positive way but he's just a twenty year old kid. He's poor, he's got no resources, he's just trying to do the best he can. Maybe that's really terrible but people just have to do what they can."

As it turns out, Suzanne Lahaie is somewhat of an artist herself. A Freedom for Animals pamphlet about veganism features her drawings. She taught herself to play the keyboard, flute, violin and guitar. She keeps paper by her bed and in her bathroom because she always has songs going through her head.

One night, at four o'clock in the morning, Lahaie was inspired to write a song about the cat whose picture she had seen in the newspaper. In twenty minutes, she had written "My Name is Kensington". At the Vegetarian Food Fair this past September, she handed out copies. Lahaie recalls one woman who, after reading the words, had tears in her eyes. "I want to put very intense, spiritual Native music to this. I want people to be able to feel it. Sure I wrote it but forget about that. Look at this cat. This cat's speaking. That's why I'm giving out copies, because I don't want this cat to be forgotten. There's nothing left of this cat."