Archives

Monb[id]iot Give it up, hero George, and learn how to cook. By Frank Armstrong     In an article published in the last edition of Village George Monbiot exhibits a surprising naiveté towards veganism for a writer who is generally authoritative, and clearly a big Village favourite. He recalls how he had “tried it for 18 months and almost faded away”; although he concedes that he “may have managed the diet badly”. The first point to make here about veganism is that it is not purely a ‘diet’. A vegan can consume tray loads of junk food or arguably the healthiest diet available: a whole-food, plant-based regimen. It is a social movement grounded in a philosophical position that rejects the use of other animals by human animals and promotes equality of consideration for all sentient beings. Its origins are recent: in 1944 Donal Watson broke from mainstream vegetarianism to found the Vegan Society, and there is no Das Kapital for adherents to follow. Unlike most other political ideologies it does not merely seek to regulate inter-human relationships but extends into complex human relationships with the natural world including how we produce food and other materials. Reflective vegans such as Roger Yates of the Irish-based Vegan Information Project acknowledge that not every position has been worked through. Indeed the utilitarian philosophical pronouncements of one of its leading voices Peter Singer are regarded with horror by many in the movement. The commoditisation of animals into chattel is anathema to veganism, but there are many involved who regard the complete overthrow of capitalism as a necessary prerequisite for its flourishing. Ironically, it is in Silicon Valley, a hotbed of capitalism, that many of the alternatives to meat, dairy and eggs are being developed. George Monbiot previously seems to have allowed his own failure to nourish himself adequately to sway his views on the issues involved. Of course if humans were obligate carnivores like cats it would be hard to make arguments in favour of veganism. But Monbiot and the rest of us evolved from herbivorous primates, and those on well-planned vegan diets positively thrive: a host of epidemiological studies, most famously the China Study, have shown higher life expectancy and lower morbidity for those on plant-based diets. The position of the American Dietetic Association is that: “appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes”. Of course there are economic and environmental imperatives for veganism. In ‘Animal Liberation’, Peter Singer claims: “[T]hose who claim to care about the well-being of human beings and the preservation of our environment should become vegetarians for that reason alone. They would thereby increase the amount of grain available to feed people elsewhere, reduce pollution, save water and energy, and cease contributing to the clearing of forests”. The livestock sector accounts for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2 equivalent. The livestock and fishing sectors don’t pay their external costs – especially environmental and health costs – and are usually heavily subsidised. But in the end Monbiot accepted the arguments of Simon Fairlie articulated in his book with the curious title ‘Meat: A Benign Extravagance’ (2010). Fairlie accepts that the current dominant method of producing meat, by feeding cattle grain and soya, is unsustainable but argues for giving food waste to pigs (some of which was banned after BSE and Foot and Mouth). In Fairlie’s schema pig meat should become more widely available since pigs ‘convert’ feed very economically into flesh. Ruminant animals meanwhile should be restricted to feeding on grass, straw and surplus grains. His prescriptions amount to a reversion to pre-industrial agriculture with far lower consumption of meat than at present. But even Fairlie’s approach is wholly inadequate and inappropriate for a global population that has risen from 1 billion in 1800 to over 7 billion – over half of whom now live in cities – today (with this set to rise to 70% by 2050). Raising animals for small-scale slaughter in cities would present a significant disease risk. To produce meat for the masses there must be industrial scale. So Fairlie’s ideas are dependent on mass re-ruralisation. It is important to concede that there is a threshold up to which meat production is sustainable. Vaclav Smil has calculated that by abandoning the feeding of grain to animals the world could comfortably accommodate an output of 190 million tonnes of meat – two-thirds of current supply – if crop residues could be turned into animal feed, and pasture were used more efficiently. In Smil’s view universal vegetarianism is not necessary or desirable even though animals are just better at digesting some things than humans, notably grass and food waste. On Smil’s model everyone in the world could eat meat, if they wanted to, so long as individual consumption was kept at around 15-30 kg a year: roughly what the average Japanese person eats. But average meat consumption in Ireland is 87.9 kg a year[1]; to get to Smil’s sustainable levels would involve cutting down by at least two thirds the amount of meat currently consumed there (15 kg a year works out at just 41 grammes a day). Meat-eating is addictive. This is observed in the Middle East where meat from locally raised animals, especially mutton from sheep, is highly prized, but according to Tony Allen (1994) “the pressure generated by this demand is greater than any market or other sanctions which might control it”. This process is observed around the globe. It is in part due to meat conferring high social status but also, it seems, because when we consume it habitually we alter the bacterial composition of our guts. According to a paper by Norris, Molina and Gerwirz, (2013) the human gut is: “a highly innervated organ possessing its

By Rod Stoneman. Ethics seem very distant for most discussion of Irish art which has been depoliticised, like much contemporary art internationally. In returning any kind of ethical debate to the domain of the visual arts we can usefully examine multi-screen films – film and audio-visual installations which have extended and replenished notions  of fine art. Tracing its origins to expanded cinema and video art in the 1970s, moving-image installation is now ubiquitous in public museums and private galleries. This is at a time when experimental art has all but disappeared from public-service television. For example Channel 4 in the 1980s and 1990s showcased a range of visually-based work in series like ‘Dazzling Image’, ‘Midnight Underground’, ‘Ghost in the Machine’. In the two decades since, as television channels have proliferated, choice has actually narrowed. Moving-image installations are visible in diverse art environments from gallery spaces to site-specific work in urban or industrial pop-ups. Multi-screen configurations are not easily arranged in cinemas or viably watched on television sets, let alone computers. The small portable digital screens may issue a blizzard of information and imagery every day, but their size and scale is not a viable format for most multi-screen films. The combination of images cuts across linear montage and introduces a synchronised horizontal dynamic that changes the linear and vertical succession of a standard film or video screen. At its best the configuration of simultaneous imagery on multiple screens offers an opportunity to glimpse a dimension of the world anew. The wider interaction of sounds and images in some recent examples has unexpected resonance as a naïve invocation of politics. Pretty in Pink Richard Mosse’s multi-screen work ‘The Enclave’ was Ireland’s entry to the Venice Biennale in 2013 and won the £30,000 Deutsche Borse photography prize in May this year. It uses discarded infrared film to re-colour the Democratic Republic of the Cong, particularly its relentless civil war. The way the scenes are coloured on several screens metaphorically colours the country, its villages, landscapes and inhabitants in a way which startles, but also exoticises, aesthetises and perhaps even anaesthetises,  our sense of the distant world it depicts. It is a detached representation of disturbing content without context. It conjures the pitiless Congolese human conflict but without depth of political or historical analysis, or understanding. Consonant with most mainstream media coverage this installation offers a visually spectacular rendition of ‘ the dark continent’ – in which ‘Africans are killing one another again’. The absence of articulation is marked, there is no space for direct speech, explanation or understanding from those who inhabit that reality. Mosse’s piece unintentionally evokes questions about the basis of involvement and degree of participation by protagonists in the way they are represented. This is in contrast to a recent short film by Dearbhla Glynn, ‘The Value of Women in The Congo’, that inhabits a different place outside the art world: it is used for advocacy and shown in the context of human rights and the operations of NGOs. It is an uncompromising, clear-headed and disturbing examination of the effects of the sexual violence perpetrated with impunity against women and girls in war-torn Eastern Congo. The film explores the experience of the victims as well as of the perpetrators who have inflicted  their pervasive, cruel and appalling crimes – footsoldiers, warlords and high-ranking commandants alike. Like Joshua Oppenheimer’s ‘The Act of Killing’ (which recreates the atrocities of CIA-supported 1960s death-squads in Indonesia) and Eyal Silvan’s ‘The Specialist’ (which uses footage of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem) the banality of evil is exposed but, unlike those documentary films, it is drawn from the present day. Walsh’s short film assembles an arresting and brutal version of how war ravages the land and its people, leaving few victors – least of all women, whose value is often annihilated. Through interviews that talk of their experiences, the film puts together the beginning of an account of the continuing calamity with and through those involved. Richard Mosse’s work brings a forgotten and distant carnage into white-walled galleries in a continent which can be said to already be at risk of ‘compassion fatigue’. Understanding its context and effects is not a question of the artist’s intentions, but rather of the implicit way that the work is received and interpreted by the particular audiences that encounter it in the gallery. ‘The Value of Women in the Congo’ films the same civil war but studiously within the documentary genre. The meaning and effects generated for those that come across the installation are inevitably influenced by its art context. There was a debate several decades ago which connected some of these same issues with a set of paintings, parachuting politics into the gallery. Gerhard Richter’s 1988 15 painting series, collectively entitled ‘October 18, 1977’, depicted four members of the Red Army Faction in black-and-white newspaper and police photos. Contrasting readings of the paintings and attitudes towards the RAF from the hagiographic to the condemnatory fought it out in the art space. Richter refused to be drawn towards resolving the contrary interpretations. The implications of these strategies are clear: while Richter and Mosse both introduce overtly political issues into an art context there is no discourse, visual or verbal, to contest the assumptions perpetuated by the dominant media that surround these images outside the white walls of a gallery. The doxa of common sense has already established that an urban guerrilla group is run by psychopathic terrorists and that in darkest Africa gruesome carnage comes as no surprise. There is a lack of argumentation that could intercept unconscious assumptions and engage the images productively. Such contention would set specific defined meanings in motion to bring contradiction to the fore. A distant antecedent in literature would be Joseph Conrad’s classic ‘Heart of Darkness’ (written in 1898 and based on Conrad’s own journey to the Congo in 1890). It is an extraordinary and resonant short novel, and was redeployed in 1979 as the underlying narrative of Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam