Artist in Person

We open on a classic Western scene, cowboys and cattle roaming the range against a Rocky Mountain backdrop. What comes after is less romantic. Meat tracks the transformation of animals into consumer commodities, from the feedlot where rations are calculated by computer, to the packing plant where specialized assembly-line workers quickly, monotonously kill, skin, and disembowel, to the office where jocular salesmen wheel and deal in parts and poundage and union reps negotiate their contracts. (While workers process six hundred head an hour, management worries that they have “too much free time.”) The slaughterhouse images are graphic, but their effect is less shocking than quietly surreal: a merry-go-round of severed, flayed heads; shrouded sides of beef gliding by like ghosts, seemingly under their own power; a Judas goat leading a flock of lambs to their doom. Where viewers might expect an outraged expose, Wiseman offers instead a clear-eyed contemplation of a weirdly efficient business.
—Juliet Clark