: Opinion: The Virus is Us #IndiaNEWS #News By Pramod K Nayar When Sue Coe, a celebrated artist known for her activist-art against animal cruelty in works like Factory Pharm (2001), set out to capture

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Opinion: The Virus is Us #IndiaNEWS #News
By Pramod K Nayar
When Sue Coe, a celebrated artist known for her activist-art against animal cruelty in works like Factory Pharm (2001), set out to capture the horrors of Covid-19, she did so with a realism that can only be termed traumatic. What Coe does is to align human suffering from the virus with the history of animal suffering at the hands of humans, and, therefore, presents a universalisation of suffering beings, both human and nonhuman.
Before the Virus
Factory Pharm is a nightmarish representation of a machine that pulps animals into a mashed ‘thing’. The animals are taken via conveyor belts, enmeshed between cogs and wheels, indicating a supply chain of animals. To the left is an animal pen — from where they are brought into the machinery. Huge pincers are positioned in such a way that any animal that tries to escape will be immediately captured. The mechanisation of abattoirs is Coe’s target here.
What makes Coe’s work horrific is not the mechanisation alone, but the fact that the factory consumes its own animals in a closed circulation system, because the animals in the pen — waiting for their own slaughter — are fed the slurry that is the animals pulped in another section of the factory. In other words, the animals are pulped, fed to the animals who are themselves then pulped to feed others in an endless loop.
Reminiscent of Goya’s horrorscapes, Coe’s work indicts a system that makes animals the subject and object of capital (it is not a coincidence that the critic Nicola Shukin titles her book on biocapital, Animal Capital). Machinery feeds animals, and feeds on animals.   It is an automated digestive system that humans have invented to live off the nonhuman other, suggests Coe.
In The Large Hog Hoist, Coe again depicted violence against animals. In Animal Thanksgiving, she painted animals at supper, to the backdrop of a human who had been hanged (a mirror painting would be Autopsy, in which the animals are dissecting a human). In other visionary paintings like ‘Auschwitz begins when someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks they are only animals’, Coe makes the philosophical point made by posthumanists like Cary Wolfe: that when humans began slaughtering animals, they also prepared themselves to slaughter fellow humans. Coe also sketched and painted the horrors of Abu Ghraib. In The Birth of Fascism, she drew Donald Trump. Her Blud (Ebola) showed a hospital ward of sufferers in an eerie prolepsis of 2020-21.
The Corona Paintings
Coe’s Dr Maga depicted the plague doctor of early modern times: complete with beaked mask, cane and cloak.

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