"Comparing blood to paint, violence to art, is dangerous, even repellent. But in one sense, the blood on this floor is exactly like the paint drippings of Jackson Pollock, who captured the visible traces of action, the visual memory of gestures. In Pollock's painting, the gestures fixed on canvas were often graceful, melodic even, with paint obeying the law of gravity with a gentle quiescence. If this is blood, we can only imagine what the gestures were."I think the writer is confusing ends and means [ed.] with byproducts. The torturers were not bent on painting the prision with blood, they were interested gaining information by way of [ed.] inflicting pain. The evidentiary value of these photographs is enormous. But I don't think that these photographs can help us to empathize with the prisoners, or understand the torturers, in any significant way. In fact, I think these photographs are illustrations of the gulf that exists between the viewer and the prisoners. In their torment and pathos, the prisoners were utterly alone.
Walter Benjamin has a good analogy of painting and drawing to photography. He compares the draftsman to a medicine man or faith healer, who act based their own holistic understanding. The photographer he compares to a surgeon, who reaches into the patient (in the photographer's case, reality) and cuts out a small piece.
Malcolm Morley, Painter's Floor, 1999, 95 in. square, oil on linen with diamond chips. This painting is a copy of an overhead photo of Jackson Pollock's floor.* I'm not going to post the photo from the prison because I don't want to look at it every time I log onto Astromen. There's a copy of it with the article.
Link to the Washinton Post article, via ArtsJournal.
Link to a description of The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard
13 comments:
"The torturers were not bent on painting the prision with blood, they were interested in inflicting pain."
umm NO pete. the "torturers" were intent on getting information. Pain being the byproduct.
I doubt the distinction matters very much to the guy being raped with a flashlight...
It gets fuzzy. Sure, getting information was the official reason for doing these things. But a lot of these pictures were taken because the torturers were enjoying themselves. Remember the thumbs up picture? I'd definitely leave the quotes off of torturers, though.
In any event, we'll let it lie saying that getting information was the end, inflicting pain was the means (saying it was a byproduct makes it seem inconsequential or unintentional), and the blood splatter painting was a byproduct.
Actually, I should probably edit the post to reflect this insight.
The Tourture Myth.
Also check out The Power of Nightmares for a blow by blow of how torture more or less created militant political Islam.
Nice going guys! :-(
I was thinking about the images I have seen of "torture" in Iraq. "Remember the thumbs up picture?" and I think of mistreatment. If I saw some images of cut off fingers laying on the ground. Then I would use the word torture. Putting me in a leash with some dyke holding the leash for some photos aint going to make me tell you where the bomb I planted was.
(I'm going to keep goading you, Bob, 'cause this is fun.)
Point: The Abu Ghraib scandal was Al Queda's biggest windfall since the CIA armed and trained them in the '80s.
o i think the nonstop droping of bombs on iraq, has waaaaay more impact (no pun) on a would be AlQueda.
Just looking for clarification. So you support the application of modern torture techniques on POW's and political enemies, but not the dropping of defragmentation bombs on civilian populations? Are we just splitting hairs here? To what end does the torture work in your opinion? What useful strategic information has been gleaned from these practices?
I also highly recommend "The Power of Nightmares."
"The bombs are in that (truck, backpack, etc.)"
"You sold us the guns mr. officer in 1982"
"Bin Laden is on vacation in the mountains of Pakistan, everyone knows that . . ."
Pretty straight forward.
I have known you long enough that everything you say is suspect. I have my doubts that you strictly adhere to an ideology formed on combatting the existance of a super-organized world network bent on destroying your FREEDOM(tm).
Some more rhetorical questions:
Why didn't they find the super terrorist multi level caves with munitions and hot tubs? Because they did not exist.
Why did Rumsfeld escalate the interrogations in Guantanamo and Abu Gharaib? Because he was not getting the information that he beforehand was convinced existed.
I declare this a dead-horse.
Anyway, the post is intended to be about the images of war, a la Goya, not the ethics of war, per se. This class of images accentuates many of the finer issues of representation and reproduction.
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