Blog Post Four: Torture and Jack

Fernando Botero, Abu Ghraib 59, 2005. Image © Fernando Botero, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York.

The first thing I notice when I look at this painting isn’t the lingerie, the bruising, not the hands raised in defeat, in a plea for life, or the hoods covering the faceless men, or the pool of blood they suffer on, but the first thing I notice is the steady, arrogant stream of piss, the one that flows from the left, the least of their worries.

 This is wrong, it’s all wrong.  24 was mentioned in class.  This is different.  Jack Bauer is the ideal concerning the representation of torture; he does the unthinkable out of necessity and patronage, not to achieve personal satisfaction and a good laugh.  Would we really look at Jack the same way if he was hovering over his victim, one hand holding an electrical clamp attached to his victim’s nipple, the other sporting a Kodak digital, grinning from ear-to-ear?  Jack is a ghost, an impossibility.  People like him don’t exist, emotionally devoid, perfect, machine, untouchable. 

It would be easier to support torture—solely for the purpose of information—if situations of national security were at hand and the person bringing up the reigns was Jack, but that isn’t, it seems, the case. 

This painting is miserable, tough to look at, but it still doesn’t compare to seeing the real image, the real photographs of Americans amusing themselves at the expense of their prisoners, in unmistakable, unimaginable ways. 

"Yet Botero, by tackling this imagery in a focused and extended series, has demonstrated not only that such things can be represented in art but also that a figurative, cartoonish idiom may be the most powerful means of representing modern atrocity."  

I disagree with this idea that a “cartoonish idiom may be the most powerful means of representing modern atrocity.”  There is nothing more powerful than seeing the real thing, in its raw, natural state. It is what draws people to such sites as rotten.com, or the Faces of Death video series, if these depictions can be called attractions.  They’re so repulsive, the word attraction seems inappropriate, misplaced.  So, yes, Botero’s paintings are a very powerful representation of modern atrocity, but nothing compares to the influence of the real thing, unneutered.