In modern era, a breakage was experienced, the power itself became the problematic of the artist, from David’s Marat to Goya’s frescos and Picasso’s Guercina, the artists were rising up against the tradition of antiquity, distracting the marriage of art and power.In his Surrealist Manifesto, 1929, Andre Breton was declaring that ‘shooting at a peaceful community is a surrealist art action, referring to the political content of art.Situationist art movement was born in 1960s when everyday life has been under the dominance of mass media and art has lost its power of representation. In Debray’s words, “the movement was a search for schemes of a social revision, as rejecting the understanding of ordinary, normal things, such as a car, a shoe or a sociology diploma as extraordinary, or even superior things, being presented as the keys of a elitist existence.” [1] In Raoul Vageigem’s words, ‘the people who talk about revolution and class struggle without taking into consideration of everday life, do not recognize the positiveness in refusal of opression, beyond destructive power, these people wander with a corpse in their mouths.,
The relationship between art and power which was strong at the begining of the twentieth century in the authoritian regimes of Germany, Italy and Soviet Unions and weakened at the sixties has been awakened in today’s empire. A dutch proffessor, Bob de Graaf, who is searching the relationship between art and terror, states that besides taking into account the socio-economic factors which play a role on the problem of terror, its important to see terror’s relation to art.[2] He goes on claiming that the groups like Red Army Faction were initiated as art collectives. He associates the violent acts of sixties with the art movements. According to Graaf, terrorists just like artists act with the motive of expressing themselves, manipulated by the mass media, of ‘being famous for fifteen minutes’.
According to Wikipedia source, it is almost impossible to decide on a definite meaning of the word ‘terror’ which is emotionally and politically overloaded and has its roots in a Latin verb meaning ‘to scare’. A recent research has shown that the word has hundred and nine different meanings referring to violent acts. The meanings change according to the point of view, for some, the one who is a terrorist can be, for some others, a freedom fighter. Professor Bruce Hoffman emphasizes in his book, ‘Inside Terrorism’ that the meaning of the word ‘terror’ always includes a judging of morality. It is used to force a moral sanction on the other, for example, someone who empatisizes with the victims of a violent act, calls the commiter terrorist. Relying on Hoffman’s explanation, ‘the war against terrorism’ which is an idiom frequently used by the power has no meaning.
If the ambiguity of the word terror is left aside, considering the acts of violence in the frame of a Warholian understanding, basing them on seeking of fame and linking them to the Situastionist movement which is born as a response to the world of spectacle, can only be explained as cunningness of the mediocre mind. As stated by Slovaj Zizek in his article ‘Welcome to the Desert of Real’, ‘the fear of West from terrorism which has reached to the magnitude of paranoia, shattered effect of the bombs, can be interpreted taking into account the border line which seperates the digitalized first world from the the desert of real in the third world.’The fact which creates the obsessive thinking that West is under a continous threat of an uncanny perpetrator is West’s awareness of itself as an artificial, secluded universe. [3] Also, it is the fact that West is escaping from its moral responsibility. As Zizek says, the mind which reduces the acts of violence to a wish for visibility, is actually points out to the split between the first word and the third world. This split based on the socio- economical conditions, occurs through ‘the contrast between western way long, hedonistic life and a life of a third world citizien who devotes him or herself to a transcendent ideal.’ [4]
Situastionist movement was a revolt against the barbarity veiled by the mass media, advertisement culture and ‘the capital which shows itself as an image.’ [5] In today’s world, as Boris Groys states in his essay, ‘The Fate of Art in the age of Terror’, ‘the contemporary fighters’ just like the contemporary artists are using the medium of photography or video and acting like an artist.[6] First of all, Usame bin Ladin has been considered as a video artist. The cause of the situation Groys is drawing attention to, can be seeked in a certain problem of Western art based on pop art. As aesthetics weakens, the difference between aesthetization of politics and politization of aesthetics gets blurred.
In one issue of Soviet Novy Lef magazine, a discussion between Rodchenko and Kushner about the ideology of photography takes place. Rodchenko says that a few comrades from the magazine has warned him bacause of his experimental and formalist approach to photography. According to them, what is important is what is photographed, not how it is photographed. Opposing to this, Rodchenko claims that revolution is possible neither by using the techniques of art from the old regime and techniques of Western art, nor by taking photos of workers instead of generals. According to Rodchenko, photographing a male worker as Christ and the female as Virgin Mary does not mean revolution. On the contrary, stressing the propagandistic power of photography, Kushner claims that revolution is exactly that. The editorial board of Novy Left criticize Kushner since he takes photography merely as recording, diminishing the problem to the representation of new realities. In this way, through photography, the old, authoritarian and fetishist psychology just like a contagious sickness will infect the new system. The editoriol board criticize Rodchenko for seeing revolution only as a search for new aesthetics.
The discussion in the Novy Lef magazine was inconclusive. According to Viktor Burgin, in fact the core of the discussion is lying in the nature of gaze. In his texts dated 1905 about the theory of sexuality, Freud mentions that looking as an independent instinct, develops both actively and passively. To look and to be looked is a give and take. In the social world of grown-ups, looking is shared like a work, the man is mostly the one who looks as the woman is looked at. A gaze is constructed on objectifying the other. According to Freud, the gaze is inherently otoerotic, the one who is objectified becomes a part of the gazing one, the object is the body of the subject. In this sense, there is no gaze seperate from the power relationships. Photography, in Victor Burgin’s words just like a fetish, is a product of a frozen gaze which is borderless in its being instantaneous. When we look at a photograph, we know that the negative reality represented is not an illusion, however, our eyes are caught by the composition or the beauty of the print. To look longer at a photograph causes disappointment, the image which gives pleasure at the first look after a while, like a veil, covers what we like to see. The image refuses our gaze, now, it is the look of the one behind the camera. The relation between looking and power as a refusal of an another culture, can be observed in Abu Ghraip prison photographs.
Boris Groys points out the aesthetical resemblance between the Abu Ghraip torture photos and the seventies art. According to him, these photos can easily be token for images of an Viennese actionist.With its violent images and sansational acts, the Viennese actionism of the sixties intended to make the oppressed brutality of the society visible. In other words, like Walter Benjamin says in his ‘Theses on the History of Philosophy’, which he wrote as he was fleeing from Nazis, it was a stand against the tradition that causes the cultural products which are not seperate form the brutality around to pass from one generation to the another.[7] One of the distinguished artists of Viennese actionism, Otto Mühl, stated in his 1968 dated action, ‘Art and Revolution’, that in today’s world, the consumption culture is bribing the artist so that the revolutionary art is rehabilitated and turned into an art for the power. But art rehabilitated is not art. Genuine art is the one which is political and is apt to new ways of communication.[8]
Abu Ghraib prison photographs which are shot in the style of innocent memory photography as if they want to be shown on Facebook, don’t seem like have declaring a new way of communication. On the contrary, these images are formed by imperialist motive of mockery, they are the documents of internalized submission, inhumane understanding. Even though we learn from the statements of soldiers that it is not true, The aesthetics of memory photography seems as if it is delibaretly chosen in order to normalize a cultural sickness. Eisenmann, who studies the photographs though Pathos Formula, a mystical theme to define body as it is described by German historian, Aby Walburg. According to Pathos formula, the body becomes a thing from which the victim is conciously alienated for the sake of pleasure and transcendence of the torturer, a theme common in primitive societies. Eisenmann claims that these photographs are paradoxically located at the center of Western tradition of art. Abu Ghraip photos, “do not only show the ones who gain victory as strong but also as the Almighty, and the ones who lost not only as weak but also as miserable, even as an animal rather than a human being. They are simply products of a sick gaze.” [9]
When the photographs were published, the commentary of George Bush was that the crimes of American soldiers had nothing to do with the American values such as democracy and freedom. In corresponding to this, Slovaj Zizek, in his article called ‘From the Political Evil to the Radical Evil” directs a question to Bush; ‘how can you explain the bare contrast between old way of torture in Saddam regime which happens in secrecy and the way of American forces…[10] According to Zizek, in Saddam’s regime, the torture was about giving psychical pain, whereas, the American soldiers primarily focus on psychological humiliation. The most important characteristic of American way of torture is the exhibition of humiliation, the pose of the torturers by the naked bodies of the victims, with a silly grim on their faces. Correspondingly, the writers of ‘The Porning of America’, Sarraccio and Scott, say that the photographs which carry elements from comedy, porn and horror movies, were not shot to record the torture but they were the torture themselves.[11]
Zizek affirms that when he saw the photograph depicting a captive in an awkward and theatrical pose, on a chair covered with a black veil, attached to electric cables, he thought that it was a performance from Lower Manhattan. As it can easily be noticed by someone who is used to American style of life, Zizek continues, these photographs are products of American pop culture, whose roots depend on the rituals of torture and humilition. These rituals are to be gone through in order to be accepted to a close society like the army or the secret gatherings in colleges. Zizek’s description, reminds one of an Oliver Stone movie, W., in which Bush was going thrugh various humiliations to be part of the secret group ‘Death and the Skull.’ Zizek writes that the case of Abu Ghraib is not only a mere American arrogance towards a third world member. According to him, this case proves that the Iraqi people have integrated to the obscene constitution underneath the so called American values, democracy and freedom. Zizek ends his words by saying that Bush was lying, the Abu Ghraib torture photographs are in fact the very self of American culture. As the American media spreading the paranoia of terrorism, persistently wrote that the photos would be evoking the feeling of revenge in Iraq, the response of Iraqi people was silence. A torturer was calling the prison as Wild, Wild West. These occurances confirm Zizek’s explanation.
According to Groys, the photos which are obscene underlying text of the Empire’s ideology, are a new strategy of advertisement. Considering the fact that the photos were turned into postcards, toys, into a variety of products and designs, shortly after they have been circulated and disregarding the elements of violence they have been accepted by the Western world of spectacle, Groys’ words gain meaning. Thinking that there is no difference between a good or bad advertisement, the contemporary powers are after the most brutal images to sustain their power. Groys states that this situation is a weird one just like Nazi Germany would be advertising with Auschwitz photographs.
The fact that Abu Ghraib photographs gained a place in the collective memory much more than any contemporary art work, and that their impact on the visual culture is unquestionably tremendeous, displays the incapability of contemporary art. Today’s terror images are regarded as the return of the reality by many theorists, which implies the end of visual culture critics. Abu Ghraib photos are reflection of a totalitarian contemporary mind which is in denial of its own radical evil,which is motivated not by the universal ethical values but by its sicknessness. These photographs are at the same time, the negotiation of the statement that ‘everything is political’, since as Foucoult remarks, when everything is political, there is a possiblity of dreaming new political schemes and bringing them into reality.
Çağla Cömert
Birikim Socialist Theory and Culture Magazine, January, 2010
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[1] Debord Guy, Gösteri Toplumu(The Society of the Spectacle),translation: Ayşen Ekmekçi,Okşan Taşkent. (Ayrıntı Yayınları, İstanbul,1996),31.
[2] Terrorism as Artform, 2007 http://www.leidenuniv.nl/en/researcharchive/index.php3-c=365.htm. (giriş: 9,29,2009)
[3] Slavoj Zizek, Kırılgan Temas, translation: Tuncay Birkan. (Metis Seçkileri,İstanbul, 2002), 295.
[4] Slavoj Zizek, Kırılgan Temas, 298.
[5] Guy Debord, Gösteri Toplumu, translation: Ayşen Ekmekçi, Okşan Taşkent. (Ayrıntı, İstanbul,1996),48.
[6] Boris Groys, ‘The Fate of Art in the Age of Terror’ www.unitednationsplaza.org/readingroom/Groys_ArtAndTerror.pdf. ( giriş: 10,6,2009)
[7] Stephen F. Eisenmann, Ebu Graib Etkisi, çeviri: Işıl Özbek.( Versus Yayınları, İstanbul, 2007), 41.
[8] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Muehl. (Giriş: 5,Eylül,2009).
[9] Eisenmann, Ebu Graib Etkisi,13.
[10] Slovaj Zizek, ‘From Political to Radical Evil’, http://www.lacan.com/zizlovevigilantes.html (giriş:14.01.2010)
[11] Carmine Sarraccio, Kevin M. Scott, ‘The Porning of America’, (Beacon Press, Boston, 2008), 145.