From the moment I run into her in the gender-neutral bathroom at MoMA PS1, I know exactly how I’d put Sue Coe in a novel. Picture your best friend’s eccentric auntie: hair in two long dark braids under a black beret, slim black duds, and sandals designed for walking. Here is a woman who charges her crystals in saltwater and confides that she smoked too much pot in her youth as if she isn’t still lighting up most nights. This character comes off like she’s living in her own little world of frankincense and vintage jazz until the second she looks you in the eye and delivers some blistering insight that will completely alter the course of your life. (And all that time you thought she wasn’t paying attention. Silly you.)
I was already vegan when I found Coe’s work. But in real life, yes: through her art, she could have been that person for me. Martha Sherrill was spot on in a 1994 profile in the Washington Post: “Sue Coe has blue eyes and a snaggle-toothed smile and a sweet kind of underground charm. She’s not a hypocrite, just a good old-fashioned Marxist-Leninist who’s worried about becoming a hypocrite.” Coe is the original-godmother of animal-rights artivism. After growing up in Liverpool right next door to a hog “processing plant”—“a cruel-looking building with no windows, run by a cruel man”—Coe spent her twenties politely asking for entry to slaughterhouses all over the UK and US so she could sketch and make notes. Her body of work foregrounds the pain and indignity of animals raised for food, as well as the humans paid too little to kill them. Last fall I curled up in an armchair at the Fleet Library with her first book, Dead Meat, feeling equal parts nauseated and inspired by the sketches and paintings of schoolboys kicking a decapitated pig’s head as if it were a soccer ball, a cow so riddled with cancer it’s eaten away one eye and much of her face, and an elderly man, the “skinner,” who is missing most of his fingers. So, on a Saturday morning in early June, I hop on a Greyhound bus specifically to see her new exhibition, Sue Coe: Graphic Resistance, and to hear her speak about it. I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks.
But I can’t tell her that. Not in the restroom, anyway.
Go Vegan and Nobody Gets Hurt / Copyright © 2010 Sue Coe / Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, New York.
I’m here an hour early, so I head upstairs to the exhibition. Most of the paintings and prints on the wall are animal-rights themed, but other work is anti-capitalist, and the largest piece by far, “Woman Walks into Bar—Is Raped by 4 Men on the Pool Table—While 20 Watch,” was painted after said crime occurred in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1983. The museum labels compare Coe’s work to that of George Grosz, Kathe Kollwitz, and Chaim Soutine. Her early newspaper illustrations, mostly for the New York Times, are on display in one glass case—“Operation Desert Sham,” a piece on police brutality titled “Blue Plague”—and recent zoo sketches in another. Men make grunting sounds, thump their chests, bang on the glass. The gorilla ignores them. She’s commemorated the death of Marius, the young giraffe shot by his Danish zookeepers (in front of a bunch of schoolchildren, no less) because his genes were judged to be “superfluous.” There are also stark black-and-white woodcuts from her 2017 book, The Animals’ Vegan Manifesto.
The artist reappears at my right elbow. “After the talk we’ll be selling these prints to benefit Skylands Sanctuary in New Jersey,” Sue tells me. Twenty dollars each. I can’t believe it.
Just before one o’clock, my friend Jennifer slides into the empty seat beside me in the front row, and Sue Coe sits down for her gallery talk with the curator, Peter Eleey, an affable white man in his forties. Eleey asks her about the very beginning of her career, and Coe says she moved to the US because “there was no feminist movement in England at that time.” Soon after arrival, she waited an entire day at the New York Times offices hoping for work. “I was promised a job,” she says. “Twelve hours later, I was still there. Night fell…”
“It sounds like getting booked,” Eleey quips.
Coe eventually got that assignment, but there was a catch: she had to illustrate a recipe for duck soup that would appear in the Sunday edition. “So, I drew the French Revolution,” she says. “A duck being led to the guillotine.” Her early years in New York City were predictably down-at-heel; she lived in one of those boarding-house hotels, drawing on the floor and using the windowsill for her refrigerator. Coe is very critical of her early work, pointing out the irony of using sharks, wolves, and dogs to symbolize corporate greed and acquiescence. She would never do that now.
Eleey asks Coe about her intended audience. “I think about sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-year-old kids in Texas and Missouri who are radicalizing and going vegan,” she replies. “That’s who I want to protect. I want to listen to them.” The only other humans whose opinions matter are her subjects in the slaughterhouses. “They’ll see I’m drawing them, and they’ll hold a position. That’s generosity. If they don’t like [a drawing], no one will ever see it.”
Then she says something that astonishes me: “If I can’t make you vegan, you need to tell me how I failed.” I hope she doesn’t truly believe this, because by that yardstick we’re all failures. Undoing thousands of years of cultural conditioning is much too much responsibility for a single work of art, no matter how powerful. You can only hope you reach the viewers and readers who are almost ready to understand.
Which leads us to the most obvious question: “Are you vegan?”
“No, but I could be,” Eleey replies. “I don’t eat much meat.”
“That’s not a good answer.” The audience laughs. (We’re virtually all animal-rights folks; of course, we are.) Coe asserts that veganism is the most effective way to combat climate change, and Eleey agrees. “But my point was—”
“You didn’t have a point.” Coe is so earnest that her interruption doesn’t come off as rude. (As Sherrill writes, “It’s impossible not to like Coe, but you also don’t want to start disagreeing with her. Particularly after you’ve seen her work.”) “You’re an intelligent and sensitive person, and you know what you have to do,” she tells her curator. “There’s something in you that is responding to my art.”
Most people’s faces don’t reveal as much as mine does. I know that, but I can’t help reading the blankly polite look on Eleey’s face as a lack of response. This man has spent countless hours studying and contextualizing Coe’s work. He chose to feature her at one of the most prestigious art museums in the world. How big a failure must Coe believe herself to be, if her own curator isn’t convinced?
“The animal-rights work is the easiest to dismiss,” Eleey says. He’s not saying he’s dismissing it, but there’s a whiff of fraudulence to his role in this exhibition all the same. That’s the art establishment for you: virtually never anywhere near as innovative or forward-thinking as it perceives and promotes itself. Of the fifteen artists with long-term installations at MoMA PS1, only three are female, and the only two artists of color are from Latin America. And to add insult to irony, we can smell the stink of bacon from the museum café. “How do we stop it?” Coe asks. “We stop consuming it.” But whoever ordered the hipster-gourmet BLT across the corridor isn’t ready for it to be that simple.
From there the interview unspools into full-on animal-rights rhetoric, frank and impassioned. Lagoons of shit. Economic racism. From now on, Coe won’t let her curator get a word in.
Eleey eventually thanks us all for coming, and the audience crowds the prints table. It looks like Coe will be able to send a nice big check to Skylands. After another turn about the exhibition, Jennifer and I go to a vegan sushi chain for an early dinner, carefully laying the prints we’ve purchased on the seats beside us. Mine depicts a variety of animals—rhino, giraffe, elephant, dog, badger, and three human children—gathered around a large glowing hourglass that’s almost run out. At the top, in white letters on a black background: e-m-p-a-t-h-y.
When I look at this print—at any of Coe’s work, really—I think of something one of my characters said once: that life’s too short for subtlety. In this reality of methane emissions and bulldozed habitats and steadily rising sea levels, that line has never felt more true. We are all of us failing at “making a difference,” but some of us are failing less than others; and by that standard, Sue Coe is an unambiguous success.
X From Dead Meat: “My quest—to be a witness to understanding collusion—has become like a mirror facing a mirror. I require witnesses. Reality has to be shared for it to be understood.” Sue Coe, Dead Meat (New York: Running Press, 1996), 72.