Protest Chicken Slaughter “Art” Project in Lawrence, Kansas

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By Karen Davis, PhD, President, United Poultry Concerns

Protest Chicken Slaughter “Art” Project in Lawrence, Kansas.  Post your objections on the Spencer Museum of Art’s Facebook Page:  https://www.facebook.com/spencerart

Dear Friends,

Here is the promotional description of this slimy chicken “art” project that’s due to start in March. We need to stop it. Please post your opposition and urge cancellation of “The Story of Chickens” at https://www.facebook.com/spencerart. (You do not need to join or like the page to write your objections.)  Feel free to circulate this alert and get others to join you in saying No to slaughter as “art.” Thank you!

Promotional Description

“The Story of Chickens: A Revolution” by artist Amber Hansen will debut in March 2012 with a ceremonial ribbon cutting for a chicken coop on wheels, and the installation of 5 chickens. During the event, community members will be invited to share personal stories about their relationships with animals and to discuss the project.

The coop will be a nomadic sculpture that will relocate every 4 days. It will be created with the technical assistance of Cotter Mitchel and will be designed to be both functional and beautiful. A public message board in the form of a chalkboard will be mounted on it, to update and inform viewers about the birds and the project.

The chickens will inhabit the coop for one month. During this time many members of the community will become engaged through storytelling, proximity, and caring for the birds. The project aims to create a daily interaction with animals on a communal level. Volunteers and community members alike will become guardians of the chickens and they will have the opportunity to build a relationship with the birds.

At the end of the month, the chickens will be removed from the coop and butchered under the guidance of Hank Will. The public will be invited, and encouraged to witness this phase of the life cycle that is often hidden from our perception. Such slaughter takes place on a mass scale every day, but each generation becomes further removed from this reality.

Participants will then be invited to a potluck that will take place the next day, when the birds will be prepared for consumption by 715 restaurant head chef Michael Beard. The meal will take place at the Percolator Art Gallery, an alternative community-run space in downtown Lawrence.

By building a relationship with the birds, the project will transform the contemporary view of chickens as merely “livestock” to the beautiful and unique  creatures they are, while promoting alternative and healthy processes of caring for them. It will also make visible local groups who are already making efforts to do so.

The public will be notified of the coop’s location via the Lawrence Journal World, so that they can watch its location as it moves throughout town.

Hansen: “Interacting with animals allows us a more complete understanding of humanity; it reminds us of our relationship with the natural world, and our responsibility in caring for it.”

About the “Artist”

Amber Hansen is currently the Artist in Residence at The University of Kansas living in Hashinger Hall. Amber has been involved in numerous community-based projects and has experience painting murals, film-making, caring for farm animals. It is from your childhood experience, being surrounded by animals, that this project was inspired.

Cotter Mitchel: Born, last century, and raised in Lawrence, Kansas. Mitchell began his “Art Support” career in 1984 at the Spencer Museum of Art as an Exhibition Technician. Since 1989 Mitchell has managed the Common Shop for the Art & Design Departments, assisting students and faculty with all aspects of fabrication in varied mediums. Mitchell freelance works with local and international artists, and galleries including the fabrication of public sculptures, packing, shipping and display of art objects.

Hank Will : Hank Will-Will’s career in agriculture began while working toward his Ph.D. in plant biochemistry and molecular biology from The University of Chicago. After leaving Chicago, Hank put his rural Harrisburg, South Dakota, farm to work. He grew and direct marketed several thousand free-range broilers annually from that location. His substantial laying flock supplied the Banquet and other local food charities with hundreds of dozens of donated eggs year round and he has also donated hundreds of pounds of free-range turkey to the Banquet and Sioux Falls Food Pantry. He is currently the editor of GRIT Magazine.

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UPC posted the following comment on the Spencer Museum’s Facebook Page:

United Poultry Concerns opposes Amber Hansen’s proposed “The Story of Chickens: A Revolution.” A traveling carnival of animals through Lawrence, culminating in the communal bloodletting execution of the five birds, most likely in front of each other, seems like a desperate attempt on the part of the gallery and the “artist” to be “original.” But it isn’t. It’s stale, cruel, and impoverished.

In addition, the birds so used are most likely the very genetically-engineered, industrially produced hatchery chickens locavores claim to oppose as part of their opposition to “factory farming” of which this is in fact not an alternative but an example. Cloying rhetoric notwithstanding, there is nothing kind or respectful about turning a helpless bird into a degraded spectacle, and contrary to claims that throat-cutting is “humane,” it is not. Throat-cutting is extremely painful to the victim, made worse when the victim is immobilized in a killing cone that prevents him or her from struggling, while conveniently hiding the evidence of suffering (apart from the hoarse cries of the birds) from view.

Cuddling these chickens and gaining their trust, then turning on them with a knife, while this may be a standard farming practice, is neither humane nor necessary, and it certainly isn’t art. It’s plain old gratuitous cruelty seeking a legitimized outlet. The project is completely misconceived. It is not revolutionary in any worthwhile sense. We urge its immediate cancellation.

Sincerely,

Karen Davis, PhD, President
United Poultry Concerns
Machipongo, VA 23405
757-678-7875
karen@upc-online.org

See More: http://www.upc-online.org

art is an expression of beauty
gentle and soft
in its reflections
souls are borne aloft
there is no beauty
in blood so sadly spilled
in the name of art
no living being
should ever
be killed

Karen Lyons Kalmenson