1

Art in the age of Abu Ghraib

Since their public exposure in 2004, there has been a sizable response by Western

artists to the images of torture in the US-operated prison Abu Ghraib. In contrast to the

relatively mute reaction from the western public – possibly suffering from spectacle

overload from images of war, famine, ecological disaster and economic turmoil – Abu

Ghraib as a visual event has received more attention by artists than the war in Iraq

because it involved visual culture as ideological legitimation of violence.1 This response

can be grouped into three approaches: artists like Paul McCarthy, Steve Powers,

Forkscrew Graphics and Legofesto locate Abu Ghraib photographs as a mass media event

and intervene by deploying the immediacy of pop culture aesthetics; artists that employ

traditional aesthetics as means of removing themselves from the spectacle such as Gerald

Laing, Richard Serra, Fernando Botero and Susan Crile; and artists like Jenny Holzer and

Thomas Hirschhorn whose non-representational works sit on the threshold of legibility

and demand time and patience from the audience. What all three approaches have in

common is an assumption that Abu Ghraib photographs represent an aesthetic excess,

which is hard to understand, even harder to capture yet deeply symptomatic of wider

‘networks of visual events’2 in the age of military-industrial spectacles. Using Ranciere’s

understanding of ‘politics of aesthetics’, this essay will examine the approach to

photographs from Abu Ghraib by artists using popular culture aesthetics.

The usage of popular culture by artists is significant given the degree to which the

photographs of torture from Abu Ghraib have been absorbed into popular culture. An

example is the website ’Doing a Lynndie’, where members of the public to appropriate
 2

the photograph featuring US guard featuring Lynndie England smiling and pointing to the

genitals of a naked and bound prisoner, and post them online.3 The website includes a top

ten list of ‘doing a Lynndie’ appropriations, such as a photograph from a surgery in

Sydney featuring a surgeon pointing to un unconscious patient on the operating table.

‘Doing a Lynndie’ demonstrates how subject matter gets displaced in contemporary

visual culture, where aestheticised torture is normalized as legitimate subject for comedy,

and as an acceptable topic of public discourse. In the new order of visual culture, the

overabundances of images – or conversely the overabundance of meaning attributed to

images – decouple images from the horrific subject matter. Thus removed, they become

little more than visual material for sadistic acts of parody that only extend the

psychological humiliation implicit in staging and recording the originals. To fully

understand the cultural apathy and desensitization to torture that is implicit in this

process, we just need to picture a website like ‘Doing a Lynndie’ which would invite

comic re-enactments of photographs of lynching’s in the US.

The growing public acceptance of representations of torture is also evident in a

number of television shows that regularly feature scenes of torture, such as 24 and a new

subgenre of horror film that has emerged in the last few years called torture-porn. The

term was coined disparagingly to describe the graphic depictions of torture, sadism,

mutilation and nudity that regularly feature in films such as Saw (2004) and its numerous

sequels, Wolf Creek (2005), The Devil’s Rejects (2005), Grindhouse (2007) and Captivity

(2007).4 Originating in 1970s Italian splatter B-grade movies, mondo mockumentaries,

slasher movies of the 1980s, and Japanese horror, torture-porn has achieved global

popularity in introducing post 9/11 and post Abu Ghraib mainstream cinema audiences to
 3

graphic spectacles of violence.5 Quentin Tarantino’s protégé Eli Roth’s film Hostel

(2005) was the first to be labeled as torture-porn, and one of the films to reference images

from Abu Ghraib. It features a story of American backpackers on a sex holiday through

Europe who get lured to a hostel in Slovakia – on the promise of more sex – and fall

victims of a mob enterprise where rich people pay to torture and kill. Hostel’s universe is

a collection of stereotypes: Europe as a sex and drugs theme-park; post-Soviet Eastern

Europe as a site of orientalist primitivism, promiscuity and corruption; rich westerners as

corporate killers. Graphic violence is depicted as a normalized and bureaucratized

commercial enterprise that substitutes the sex industry. Hostel includes depictions of

methods used by Saddam Hussein’s regime, Al Qaeda videos, and U.S. torture tactics in

the Guantanamo Bay prison and Abu Ghraib. While there is nothing particularly new in

horror films representing torture, the graphic violence of torture-porn in the wake of Abu

Ghraib, working through a ‘culture of sacrifice’ and economy of violence’6, both of

which are compliant with the dominant conservative ideology is problematic.

The pervasiveness of horror film aesthetics in representing Abu Ghraib is also

evident in discussions of Standard Operating Procedure (2008), a documentary film

dealing with the abuse of prisoners. The Artforum review criticized Standard Operating

Procedure for substituting analysis and specificity of meaning for titillation through

familiar horror film tropes, both in representing the prison as the cross between haunted

Gothic castle and a set from movie Silence Of The Lambs, and in interrupting

testimonials with horror-inspired re-enactments of torture. The review concludes that this

allows the audience to establish a distance towards the subject matter through familiarity

with the aesthetic, arguing that:

 4

When social documentaries realize their potential for shocking cognition, we

regard them simultaneously as more than a movie and, insofar as they refuse us

easy pleasures of iconographic absorbtion, something less.7

This line of argument is summarises the ambiguity that is at the core of any documentary

approach employing ‘iconographic absorbtion of images’: in being so effective through

familiarity they are simultaneously less and more effective. Using familiar popular

imagery is certainly the easiest and most effective way to simulate first-hand experience.

In everyday life people regularly refer to popular culture examples to explain events and

phenomena. This is also evident in the testimonies in Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007), a

HBO documentary examination of bureaucratization of torture under US official policy.

Even though the film is much less expressionistic that Standard Operating Procedure,

the former US prison guards interviewed repeatedly refer to Abu Ghraib through film

references such as Mad Max, Apocalypse Now and The Shining. This constant referencing

of popular culture to explain what took place in Abu Ghraib is significant both on the

way it develops as trope within documentaries’ interpretative vision, and the way in

which establishes popular culture as an aesthetic backdrop for post-documentary

approaches to Abu Ghraib.

Any art attempting to deal with the Abu Ghraib photographs is faced with

significant difficulties, least of all because of the ambiguous status of the photographs

with respect to art and documentary photography. A crucial aspect of Abu Ghraib

photographs as documentary evidence is that they represent a breach of photojournalist

principles on several counts:

 5

These photographs tell us that the codes of objectivity, professional ethics, and

journalistic accountability we have long relied on to ensure the accuracy of the

news-at least in rough-draft form-are now relics. In their place is a swirling mass

of information, written as well as visual, journalistic as well as vernacular,

competing to be taken as fact.8

Abu Ghraib photographs bypassed the traditional channels of visual communication as

private messages, or ‘visual talk’, which reached the public outside of the military-media

alliance in the US. The circumstances of their production and circulation ‘have

undermined longstanding belief in photographs position as witness’.9 A number of

commentators suggest that recording the torture of prisoners was not only an inherent

part of the act, it also established the right of soldiers and the public to look at the bodies

of the victims.10

Regardless of whether they have been seen as amateur photography, as documents

of barbarity or as iconic images of our times, these photographs have always been

interpreted as indicative of something else, something external to their frame of

representation.11 The multiple framing of the Abu Ghraib photos and the implication that

they may be revealing of some inner truth about the war have lead Boris Groys to argue

that they are icons of the contemporary collective imagination ‘impregnated in our

consciousness much more deeply that any work of any contemporary artist.’12 Yet,

Stephen Eisenman’s study of the Abu Ghraib photographs highlights the unexceptional

character of the images in the history of European and American representation and their

rootedness in a tradition that harks back to Hellenic times:

 6

The photographs made by soldiers, MPs and civilians at Abu Ghraib – which by

their deployment of sexualized scenarios depict torture as if it were something

erotic, or at least potentially pleasurable for the victims – are not exceptional

images in the history of Western visual culture, they are the rule.13

For Eisenman, it is the absorption of representations of ‘introverted oppression, eroticized

chastisement and rationalized torture’ into the canons of Western art and mass culture

that produces desensitization and apathy:

…it is precisely the long Western history of the representation of torture that has

helped inscribe an oppressive ideology of master and slave on our bodies and

brains enabling (especially at times of fear) a moral forgetfulness or even

paralysis to set in – an ‘Abu Ghraib effect’.14

The status of Abu Ghraib photographs seemingly traverses the boundaries of

photographic journalism and documentation, their depiction of torture is simultaneously

post-documentary and iconic, horrifying and aesthetically underwhelming, and their

aesthetic genealogy is both central to the visual traditions of western art and a critique of

those traditions by their very existence. As a consequence, it appears that any kind of

artistic practice seeking to respond to the photographs immediately raises the question of

self-reflexivity, of establishing some kind of visible critical distance to the images of

torture. While this is not problematic as a critical gesture, it raises the question of visual

or aesthetic language that is available to such practices. This language, it could be argued,

resides in the complex nexus between political activism, documentary practices and

artistic intervention into the public domain, which at times can seem at odds with the
 7

purpose of remembrance of human rights violations at Abu Ghraib inherent in these

practices.

In this context of high political stakes, an ‘aestheticised’ approach to Abu Ghraib

appears as less effective than non-representational art. An example are US artist Clinton

Fein’s photographic re-enactments of Abu Ghraib torture that stage scenes of humiliation

in saturated colours and dramatic lighting: a man tied to a bed with woman’s underpants

pulled over his head in Basic Restraining (2007), another man smeared in blood and

excrement stands with legs crossed and arms outstretched next to a guard (the artist) in

Trophy (2007), a human pyramid of nude prisoners with bags over their heads in Rank

and Defile (2007). Fein believes that the low grainy quality of the original images had the

effect of muting the horror, and that only high-resolution images can convey the full

horror of the acts.15 Yet, the aesthetic seductiveness of Fein’s images, and their status as

fictional representations displace the horror of the subject matter. Coco Fusco makes this

point in relation to Andres Serrano’s photographs in the New York Times Magazine from

12 June 2005, which also recreate the torture at Abu Ghraib.16 Serrano’s abstract,

carefully staged and professionally photographed images bear very little resemblance to

the original photographs: they are less realistic, less direct and less confronting. One

features a profile shot of a man from the shoulders up with a white cloth over his face,

with water poured on his face from a military-issue water canteen. The plain background

is lit dramatically as a contrast to the darkness of water canteen. This is a carefully

cropped image that provides no evidence to the man’s identity, or that of his torturer. The

second photograph is a close-up of a man’s hands tied behind his back. Once again, we

are given few visual clues to the scene. The figure is dressed in black shirt and black
 8

denim, the handcuffs are also black and made out of plastic. The sharp contrast between

the man’s skin and his clothes and restraint is offset against a red background and a single

trace of blood running down his left hand. In both cases, the symbolism of violence is

absorbed into the carefully arranged and professionally lit scenes.

While this may be understood as Serrano’s attempt to use aesthetics to open the

images to critical dialogue with the audience, their context, which was an article

considering the possible legitimacy of torture, and their role as aesthetic substitutes for

actual images of torture displace reader’ ethical reservations against torture. Serrano’s

and Fein’s photographs demonstrate that for art responding to Abu Ghraib, operating

within this landscape of high aesthetic and ethico-political stakes17, where documentary

images and their mass media counterparts command higher visceral and affective punch

than art, it becomes a question of not opposing the visual modes of the military-

commercial complex but disrupting their dissemination, disrupting what Ranciere calls

the ‘distribution of the sensible’.18

For Ranciere, the distribution of the sensible refers to the organization of not only

what is seen but also to

… a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech

and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a

form of experience.19

It seems that art dealing with Abu Ghraib always needs to be inscribed within a

recognizable aesthetic language that clearly connects it to a larger set of moral and

political issues. If Abu Ghraib photographs are a form of aesthetic whose production and

distribution set the political stakes and terms of discussion for all artistic engagements,
 9

then artists seeking to make an intervention need to disrupt ‘the relationship between the

visible, the sayable and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a

vehicle’, creating a double effect: ‘the readability of a political signification and a

sensible or perceptual shock caused…by that which resists signification.20 This raises an

important question on not using ‘the terms of a message’ in order to disrupt its meaning.

In the context of Abu Ghraib photos, the terms of the message are found in the language

of popular culture that has determined the relation between the visible and invisible.

Therefore art needs to disrupt and explode the very grounds on which ‘distribution of the

sensible’ takes place.

In the case of Paul McCarthy, this disruption is based on the premise that all art is

subject to political manipulation, except for art which speaks the language of that

manipulation. Pop culture mimicry and parody have been elements of Paul McCarthy’s

work since the mid 1970s. His performances have repeatedly sought to exaggerate the

aesthetics of popular culture and thus show its dark underbelly of sex, violence and the

grotesque. MCarthy has explored these themes more recently through the figure of the

soldier as ‘the official representative of the state’ who lives in a place removed from the

outside world where ‘men live with men and have their own rules’.21 At the center of his

“Western Project” is a constructed wooden fort entitled ‘F-Fort’ (2005). A reference to

the both macro and micro siege mentality that pervades the post 9/11US, the construction

recalls border protection politics and gated communities. ‘F-Fort’ has been used in

several of McCarthy’s installations and performances as an aestheticised parody of

American aggressive nationalist history and mythology.

 10

In 2005 McCarthy made a video performance ‘F-Fort Party’ set in the

construction, in which five German actors were asked to ‘illustrate the cliché of the

American soldiers in a fort without any particular mission: the representation of a

representation’.22 McCarthy provided only the framework without a script or any

direction, allowing his actors to perform without interruption. The resulting video is a

combination of a parody of popular army clichés – goose-stepping, drinking, bad jokes –

and a representation of the homoerotic rituals of bonding in the army, such as the torture

at Abu Ghraib.

McCarthy’s performance draws attention to two important and closely related

elements in the reception of the Abu Ghraib Photographs. First, the work recalls the

Donald Rumsfeld articulation of ideology today as the combination of the know and the

unknown:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are

known unknowns. This is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know.

But there are unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t

know.23

McCarthy’s performance articulates the fourth category in Rumsfeld’s thesis identified

by Zizek as ‘unknown knowns’, referring to the unwritten beliefs codes and rules

working silently against the background of public values. These include the practices of

institutionalisd and bureacratised torture as the obscene supplement to liberal democracy;

violent practice that is publicly condemned as going against the values of democracy, yet

practice which nevertheless gives political meaning to democracy:

 11

…in being submitted to humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were in effect

initiated into American culture, they got the taste of its obscene underside which

forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity,

democracy and freedom.24

Second, McCarthy draws attention to the mimicry implicit in the photographs. If

McCarthy’s work is a representation of a representation, then this is a representation that

sustains reality. In today’s visual culture where aestheticised torture is ubiquitous, the

‘natural’ behavior of his soldiers, which results in a homoerotic orgy is a sharp contrast to

the ‘few bad apples’ defense of the behavior of guards at Abu Ghraib. As Stephanie

Rosenthal writes in her catalogue essay for F-Fort:

McCarthy shows us the over-sexualised, degenerate, fascist human, much as it

showed itself…at Abu Ghraib.25

McCarthy’s soldiers are acting naturally, resorting to behavior that is intrinsic to the

military complex, where rituals of humiliation serve as acts of inclusion into a

community. With Abu Ghraib, as suggested earlier, the prisoners were initiated into

western democracy as the excluded ‘other’. MCcarthy thus complicates the reception of

the images from Abu Ghraib by short-circuiting the relation of its representation and

aesthetic language.

Forkscrew Graphics has also used this strategy of dislocating the aesthetic

language of torture to complicate its reception in their deturnement of iPod posters into

iRaq. The poster features the silhouette of the ‘iconic’ Abu Ghraib image: the hooded

prisoner standing on a box with outstretched hands connected to electric wires. Here, the

electric wires become the recognizable white iPod cables. At the base of the poster is a
 12

statement ‘10000 Iraqis killed. 773 US soldiers dead’, recalling the matter-of-fact

language used by Apple advertisement. Combining an icon of contemporary popular

culture with an icon of torture, they draw together the consumption implicit in violence

and corporate advertising. Forkscrew Graphics posters intervene in the public circulation

of spectacles by questioning the very terms of the public discussion. As their website

statement claims, iRaq is about ’refusing to let the sluts in the military-industrial complex

and the sluts in the halls of advertising power set the terms of the debate’.26 iRaq is thus

culture-jamming intended to frustrate expectations through its coupling of the ‘visible

and its signification’. The poster creates an ambivalence in which the procedures used to

create the terms of the message undo the link between perception of violence and violent

actions.

The proximity of violence to consumption is also inherent to Legofesto’s

recreation of prison torture by using Lego blocks. Much like Zbigniew Libera’s Lego

Concentration Camp, Legofesto raises the possibility of identifying with the perpetrators.

To paraphrase Ernst van Alpen, Legofesto’s usage of toys to represent torture places us in

the position of the victimizers, suggesting the possibility of building our own prison and

drawing attention to the public identification with the acts perpetrated.27 Legofesto

suggests a child’s perspective on torture: playful, ahistorical and apolitical.

A work that also alludes to the audience’s complicity in the acts of torture is Steve

Powers’ ‘Waterboarding Thrill Ride’ set in New York’s Coney Island. The work is

designed to look like a typical theme park feature. On the external wall is a wall painting

of popular children’s character SpongeBob Squarepants on his back, tied down and

cheerfully exclaiming ‘it don’t gitmo better’ – referring to the Gitmoisation of US

 13

military prisons – while next to him is SquidWard tentacles making an aggressive gesture

with one of his tentacles. Behind this wall is a room with two mechanical mannequins,

one on its back, tied down on a table and dressed in familiar Guantanamo Bay prisoner

orange jumpsuit and with a cloth over its face, while the other dressed in dark clothes

holding a watering pot over the prisoner’s face. One dollar coin inserted into a slot on the

wall buys one ‘ride’, which lasts for 15 seconds, whereby one mannequin convulses

violently while the other pours water over the face. Jarring music plays, inspired by the

tunes played to prisoners during torture. On the back wall lights go on to reveal a

message ‘don’t worry It’s only a dream’.

The significance of Powers’ work is in its ability to draw the audience into

participating in the act of torture. Allured by its reference to entertainment and children’s

popular cartoon characters, the audience literally pays to watch waterboarding. In his

interviews, Powers notes distress of some viewers who felt they were tricked by the non-

threatening setting. Yet, this is a simulated experience, where torture becomes a theme-

ride entertainment that is over quickly and without harm.

In the work of artists such as Powers and McCarthy there is evidence of an

attempt to represent the act of torture through the vocabulary of the spectacle, which is

short-circuited to destroy the distance of the audience. In drawing attention to the

proximity between the language of popular culture and institutionalized torture, these

artists are questioning our complicity as consumers of such spectacles, and the ability of

torture to become tied to conceptions of aesthetic values and social cohesion in the

present. In doing so, they are creating what Ranciere calls a ‘perceptual shock’ that

dislocates the distribution of meaning in the normalized representational aesthetics of

 14

torture.28 This strategy is based on taking the language of aestheticised torture more

seriously than it takes itself, and providing a perspective on the hyper-circulated

industrial-military visual culture of today. In doing so, these works challenge the received

opinion that the military-commercial complex drowns us in a torrent of images of torture,

rendering us apathetic and insensitive. Rather, as Ranciere puts it, these works assert that

the

system of information does not operate through an excess of images, but by

selecting the speaking and reasoning being who are capable of deciphering the

flow of information about anonymous multitudes. The politics specific to its

images consists in teaching us that not just anyone is capable of seeing and

speaking.’29

As Ranciere concludes, this is perhaps the lesson confirmed by any claim to criticize the

mass media flood of images of torture.

1
Coco Fusco, “Response,” October 123 (2008): 53
2
Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Invisible Empire: Visual Culture, Embodied Spectacle, and Abu Ghraib,”

Radical History Review (2006): 22

3
Doing a Lynndie http://badgas.co.uk/lynndie/ (accessed 1 December, 2009).
4
David Edelstin et al. “Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex: Torture Porn” New York Magazine

(2006), http://nymag.com/movies/features/15622/ (accessed 10 July, 2009).

5
Another example are recent French films such as Martyrs (2008) by Pascal Laughier, Inside (2007) by

Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury and Switchblade Romance (2003) by Alexandre Aja, dubbed as

‘new French extremity’ because of their treatment of violence and torture on-screen. For a discussion

of ‘new French extremity’, see James Quandt, “Flesh & Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French

Cinema,” Artforum (2004):126-133.

6
Christopher Sharrett, “The horror film in neoconservative culture,” Journal of Popular Film and

Television (1993): 100-111.

7
Paul Arthur, “The Horror,” Artforum (2008): 111.
8
Andy Grundberg, “Point and Shoot,” The American Scholar (2005): 108.
9
Erina Duganne, “Photography After the Fact” in Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic In

Pain, ed. Mark Reinhardt, Holly Edwards and Erina Duganne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2007), 57-74, 73.

10
See Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” The New York Times (2004); and Dora Apel,

“Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the images of Abu Ghraib,” Art Journal (2005): 88-100.
11
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable (London: Verso, 2009), 78.
12
Boris Groys, “The Politics of Equal Aesthetic Rights,” Radical Philosophy (2007): 31.
13
Stephen E. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 44.
14
Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect, 99.
15
“Clinton Fein,” www.clintonfein.com (accessed July 11, 2009).
16
Fusco, Response’, 56.
17
Thomas Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame,” The South Atlantic Quarterly (2004): 447
18
Jacques Ranciere The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004), 63.
19
Ranciere The Politics of Aesthetics, 13
20
Ranciere The Politics of Aesthetics, 63
21
Stephanie Rosenthal, “Lala Land Parody Paradise,” in Paul McCarthy: Lala Land Parody Paradise,

ed. Stephanie Rosenthal, (Munchen: Hatje Kantz Verlag, 2005), 130-147, 136.
22
Rosenthal, ‘Lala Land’, 138.
23
Slavoj Zizek, “What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know He knows About Abu Ghraib,”

http://lacan.com/zizekrumsfeld.htm (accessed December 1, 2009).

24
Slavoj Zizek The Parallax View (Massachusetts: MIT, 2007), 370.
25
Zizek, The Parallax View, 146.
26
“Forkscrew Graphics,” http://forkscrew.com/main.html (accessed December 1, 2009).
27
Ernst Van Alpen, Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2005), 191.

28
Ranciere The Politics of Aesthetics, 63.
29
Jacques Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator (London: Verso, 2009), 96.