This slaughter machine worked, visitors or no visitors. It was like a horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all invisible and ignored, buried out of sight and memory. One could not stand and watch very long without becoming a philosopher, without beginning to deal with symbols and similes, and without hearing the pig cry of the universe.
THE 1906 NOVEL BY UPTON SINCLAIR The jungle details the brutal working conditions in Chicago’s stockyards. Written as part of a broader campaign for social reform, it examines the slaughterhouse as a real space of exploitation. But in this passage, the ground of killing slips for a moment towards something else: the noises of the animals become metaphorical, a sort of cosmic mewing. At Aria Dean’s Slaughterhouse, USA!, a moving image installation that premiered last February at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, there are no pigs present to protest their plight and no workers either. This digital rendering of an empty slaughterhouse lacks the insane granularity that dominates Sinclair’s book, detached from any documentary practice. Instead, Dean captures what Sinclair only alludes to: the immense power of the slaughterhouse as a space of figurative possibility. In this mind-bending work, exhibited in a city that for decades was the center of America’s meat-packing industry, the slaughterhouse becomes a paradigm for confronting the heterological exterior of liberal humanism.
Slaughterhouse, USA! was made using the Unreal Engine, a 3D computer graphics game engine that Dean deploys in a befitting way. The point of view he adopts would usually be called first person, but in this case that formulation rings extremely false. No human – no living being for that matter – could be the agent of this gaze. At times, the virtual camera appears to mimic the movements of a body, only to mechanically pan, spectrally float, or spin rapidly through the air, fluidly combining different viewing modalities into one decidedly simulated view. The space it crosses is no less synthetic. Dean challenges Euclidean geometry by using computer animation to create an architecture of impossible death that comes eerily close to photorealism. The lack of assembly only increases the disorienting sense of spatial incoherence, with elements of different building styles seamlessly combining in a single trajectory: functionally indeterminate glass and steel structures are followed by corridors à la Richard Serra, which in turn turn into sparkling tracks. automated hooks. In the middle of the loop of about eleven minutes, there is a significant interruption of this journey, when the virtual camera moves in a small pen and the frame is overtaken by blurs and reflections of black and gold. The crisp interior of the slaughterhouse gives way to an interlude resembling the entoptic psychedelia of closed-eye vision. As it passes, a new and different space appears, seen at first from the side, as if the head is resting on blood-glittering ground. The entity whose perspective we share then robotically straightens and continues – resurrected, undead. What does not live cannot be killed.
In a short text from 1929, Georges Bataille describes the slaughterhouse, a modern invention, as “cursed and quarantined like a plague-stricken ship”. Those “who have an unhealthy need for cleanliness” endorse this score, willingly exiled in a “flabby world where nothing dreadful remains”. They feel affirmed in their noble propriety by driving out the base carnality of animal slaughter. Battle, on the other hand, was pulled towards his baseness. In this he was not alone: a fascination with the slaughterhouse bleeds through the fringes of surrealism, in the photographs of Eli Lotar of the Parisian slaughterhouse La Villette and Georges Franju The blood of beasts (The Blood of Beasts, 1949), a poetic film that establishes subtle links between the slaughterhouse and the Shoah. Although she refuses to imagine gushing entrails and contracting carcasses as Franju does, Dean works in this line, approaching the slaughterhouse as an exemplary site of industrial modernity, where the instability of the human/inhuman distinction manifests. Nowhere in his video is a surreal pinch more palpable than when meat hooks swing in unison over the slow, wordless rendition of “I Think We’re Alone Now” which is part of the labile score. by Evan Zierk. Recalling Franju’s ironic use of Charles Trenet’s whimsical song “The sea», this moment evokes a mass ornament à la Busby Berkeley, to reverse the logic: while Berkeley arranged the bodies according to rational diagrams reminiscent of the assembly line, here all flesh has disappeared. We are now alone with machines animated by a supernatural vitality. The virtual camera slides through a set of metallic ‘legs’, all moving to the beat of languageless music.
Dean challenges Euclidean geometry by using computer animation to create an impossible architecture of death.
Slaughterhouse, USA! appropriates a formulation that invokes American typicality (“Anytown, USA”) and recasts it as a routine death scene. Is the exclamation mark added by Dean conjuring up sardonic humor or is it a serious warning? The shifting tone of the video keeps both possibilities in play. This title teams up with the baseless CGI imagery to elevate the slaughterhouse out of concrete particularity and into the realm of allegory – specifically, into national allegory. racial capitalism. Dean, writer and artist, has expressed interest in how Bataille’s “grassroots descriptions resonate strongly with descriptions of blackness emerging from recent developments in Afropessimist theory”. Just as Bataille’s exiles in the flaccid world are constituted in their cleanliness by the bloody exterior which they disavow, so, according to theorists like Frank B. Wilderson III, the category of “the human” is constituted by the exclusion of Darkness. In his 2020 book AfropessimismWilderson makes a bold statement:Blacks are not human subjects but rather structurally inert props.” He insists that no other subordinate holds this position; it is the abject place of darkness alone. Yet, in a 2003 article, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Where Does the Slave Go in Civil Society?” Wilderson makes a rare foray into analogy. Here, he argues that blackness destabilizes the traditional categories of Marxist analysis; if we consider the Fordist organization of the slaughterhouse, for example, the black subject cannot be understood simply as a worker exploited among the workers. Instead, Blackness provokes what he calls “the cow question”: “We have to ask, what about the cows? The cows are not exploited, they are accumulated and, if necessary, killed. The desiring machine of capital and white supremacy manifests in society two dreams, intertwined but, I would say, distinct: the dream of working-class exploitation and the dream of black accumulation and death. In the slaughterhouse, a space that Dean recreates with dreamlike intensity, the two dreams meet in a nightmarish condensation. His slaughterhouse is not only the slaughterhouse of the surrealists; a space of fungibility and disposable, it also echoes the management of black life – and black death – in the United States.
The worker protagonist of The jungle, Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, suffers and toils, killing pigs day after day. Still, he’s grateful for something: “I’m glad I’m not a pig!” he exclaims, happy to be on the side of the butchers. Not Dean. Slaughterhouse, USA! rejects the anthropomorphic perspective, dispenses with language and endows machines with liveliness. It is made by video game algorithms, away from any hand touch. All this to say that he is formally moving away from humanism, leaving behind the realm that Wilderson deems antithetical to darkness. The presence of glass architecture in its opening minutes recalls the misguided optimism of Paul McCartney’s famous statement: “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.” In fact, everyone knows very well what happens inside the slaughterhouse, literally, metaphorically. Everyone sees their horrors, whether they like it or not, reproduced ad infinitum on the internet. Images of pain circulate widely, and the killings continue nonetheless. Perhaps that’s why Dean leaves his slaughterhouse hauntingly empty: there’s no need to reenact carnage we’re already intimately familiar with. Death is what feeds the country. Listen to the pig cry of the universe and you will hear the ignored crime of whiteness.
Erika Balsom is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London.
