Abstract
Columbian artist Fernando Botero deploys the frame of a painting as a strategic tool for shifting the ways in which a viewer perceives and interprets a work of art-in particular the tortured body on canvas. Through a discourse of the gaze—albeit the feminist gaze or the postcolonial gaze—Botero performs a power struggle between the torturer and the prisoner’s body reframing the ways in which the figure becomes the subject of political objectification. Likened to a form of surveillance, the works in the series Abu Ghraib offer a window through which to contemplate punishment, abuse, torture and hate. Moreover, the paintings reveal the political effects of racism in the twenty-first century.
In European countries dating back to the late eighteenth century, torture as a kind of public festival for punishment was slowly coming to an end. Replacing public displays of torture, the penal system was shifting into an administrative model for the practice of law. In his influential critique of the politics that frame punishment in the West, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault both historicizes the function of prisons as well as contemplates the social and behavioral effects that such confinement has on the body. An important example of political theory, Foucault’s contributions to the penal system, paired with Judith Butler’s theory of precariousness provides a model for racial surveillance and a renegotiation for the representability, sensationalization and performativity of images of abuse and torture depicted in the images of Abu Ghraib prison, both in the media and Fernando Botero’s paintings.
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Notes
- 1.
The depiction of homoeroticism, and subsequently homosexuality, is illegal in Islamic law, and it is forbidden for men to be nude in front of one another. Moreover, to present nude male bodies in homosexual acts and positions, in both the photographs and the paintings, reveals extreme sexual dehumanization as well as a kind of exploitative sexual torture. “The scene of torture that includes coerced homosexual acts, and seeks to decimate personhood thought that coercion, presumes that for both torturer and tortured, homosexuality represents the destruction of one’s being. Forcing homosexual acts would thus seem to mean violently imposing that destruction” (Butler 2010‚ p. 90).
- 2.
Ibid., p. 7.
- 3.
“The Abu Ghraib prisoners are not his usual pneumatic inflatables. They are immense, but monumental; muscular and solid. It is as if Mr. Botero has turned for inspiration from Henri Rousseau and peasant art to the figures of the Laocoön and the Sistine Chapel ceiling. His prisoners are shown in a kind of majestic isolation in precise volumes of space. Defined by planes of gray, green, and terra cotta, and by cage-like iron grids, these spaces evoke the Spanish Inquisition, images of Christian martyrs, and the calm geometry of early Renaissance paintings. In the show’s catalog the critic David Ebony suggests that these works are in the tradition of Picasso’s “Guernica,” Philip Guston’s images of Richard M. Nixon, and Leon Golub’s towering “Mercenaries” series” (Smith 2006, E5).
- 4.
The word frame—throughout the chapter—draws from models of the Butlerian frame; “…visual and conceptual frames are ways of building and destroying populations as objects of knowledge and targets of war, and that such frames are the means through which social norms are relayed and made effective” (Butler 2010, p. xix).
- 5.
The notion that torture can be revealed through the absence of sound speaks to the ways in which Botero transforms the body into a performative agent on canvas; “[n]owhere is the sadistic potential of a language built on agency so visible as in torture. While torture contains language, specific human words and sounds, it is itself a language, an objectification, an acting out. Real pain, agonizing pain, is inflicted on a person; but torture, which contains specific acts of inflicting pain, is also itself a demonstration and magnification of the felt-experience of pain” (Scarry 1985, p. 27).
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Meloche, J. (2018). “Perceptions of Prisoners: Re/Constructing Meaning Inside the Frame of War”. In: Flynn, S., Mackay, A. (eds) Surveillance, Race, Culture . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77938-6_11
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