Abu Ghraib in art history perspective

摘要

A professor of art history at Northwestern, Stephen Eisenman, writes a short, condensed book on the Abu Ghraib which illuminates some of the disturbing power of the images. But he is also concerned with the fact that they are absorbed into the dominant ideology: “What if the US public and the amateur photographers at Abu Ghraib share a kind of moral blindness—let us call it the ‘Abu Ghraib effect”—that allows them to ignore, or even to justify, however partially or provisionally, the facts of degradation and brutality manifest in the pictures?” (9) He points at the persistence of a “pathos formula” of passionate suffering in Western classical art ranging from ancient Greece and imperial Rome to work by Raphael, Michelangelo, and Bernini: “the motif of tortured people and tormented animals who appear to sanction their own abuse…” (16) Thus the Abu Ghraib torture photos serve to affirm that the military victors are omnipotent and the prisoners are abject and inhuman, which in turn justifies the power relation, the violence exacted on the defenseless.