what can a painting do? absorption and aesthetic form in botero's abu ghraib

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MLN, Volume 129, Number 2, March 2014 (Hispanic Issue), pp. 412-432(Article)

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What Can a Painting Do?: Absorption and Aesthetic Form in Fernando Boteros Abu Ghraib as a Response to Affect Theory and the

Moral Utopia of Human Rights

Eugenio Di Stefano

The shape is the object.

Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (151)

This article proposes to discuss the aesthetic and political value of a 2005 collection of more than fifty paintings by the Colombian artist Fernando Botero depicting the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. Introduc-ing the book Abu Ghraib (2006), David Ebony writes, Certainly, Botero, in his Abu Ghraib series suggests that anyone with a sense of humanity must realize that fighting terrorist attacks with further acts of cruelty and terror is not the right solution (18). Like other critics who have discussed the images, Ebony understands these paintings as strategically situated within a human rights discourse about the incriminating Abu Ghraib photos that announced a pattern of criminal behavior in open defiance and contempt of international humanitarian conventions (Sontag). Yet, while it is undoubtedly true that Boteros series portrays the torture that occurred in this Iraqi prison, the question that this essay would like to pose is whether the paintings are reaffirming an aesthetics of human rights or rather pointing to another project that goes beyond it. In the aftermath of the world event (Danto) of Abu

MLN 129 (2014): 412432 2014 by Johns Hopkins University Press

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Ghraib, the appearance of Boteros Abu Ghraib series raises several important questions not only about human rights but also about the photographs: Is there something that Boteros paintings capture that is absent in the photos? What else could these aesthetic depictions say about human rights violations at Abu Ghraib that the photos had not already stated? Does this collectionand its commitment to aesthetic formsuggest perhaps another interpretation that does not fit within the moral utopia of human rights (Moyn 214)?

This essay considers these questions from within the field of Latin American cultural studies; more precisely, this essay argues that Boteros collection represents a break with the logic of human rights that dominates contemporary Latin Americanist criticism and theory. Since the 1970s, many Latin Americanists have sought to eliminate the division between art and life on behalf of human rights. Two of the primary forms in which this elimination has been envisioned are the Latin American testimonio and the Chilean neo-avant-garde. What is more, scholarship has treated works such as Elizabeth Burgoss Me llamo Rigoberta Mench y as me naci la conciencia (1982) and Lotty Rosenfelds Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (1979) as not only a means to draw attention to state-sponsored abuses, but also, and more importantly for the argument of this essay, as a mechanism through which we as readers or viewers come to share the experiencethe experience of pain in particularof those who have suffered these abuses. In fact, for critics, the division between art and life is overcome by imagining affective responses as qualities that pierce the viewer in the name of human rights. This essay, however, argues that the commitment to aesthetic form, and to what Michael Fried has called absorption, in Boteros Abu Ghraib signifies a fissure, rather than, as Ebony would have it, a continuation of this emphasis on human rights in discourses about art in Latin America. As such, this essay asserts that Boteros series shifts viewers away from contemporary aesthetico-ethical projects that mobilize affect on behalf of human rights and in so doing, the collection makes available another reading of utopia that moves beyond the discourse of human rights.1

1I have written about the limitations of human rights elsewhere. See my essay From Revolution to Human Rights in Mario Benedettis Pedro y el Capitn. Some of these limitations will be discussed in the last section of this essay. Scholars such as Williams, Gundermann and iek have also critiqued aspects of human rights discourse.

Alberto MonteagudoUnderlineQu captura Ovejero que est ausente en las noticias y el discurso nacional?

Alberto MonteagudoUnderliney la forma narrativa con que se cuenta la historia

Alberto MonteagudoSticky NoteEmpieza a hablar de la narrativa "en este caso la pintura de Botero" en contraste con los testimonios de inmigrantes.Se ha elegido esta novela por este motivo, esta diferencia.


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414 EugEnio Di StEfano

Boteros Abu Ghraib in Context

From the position of art history, and pictorial depictions of violence in particular, Boteros paintings of the Abu Ghraib prisoners as they are beaten, sexually abused, blindfolded, hooded, bound with ropes and attacked by dogs, does not present a radical break with any school or style. Even within a Hispanic tradition, the collection clearly fol-lows a long genealogy of works representing atrocities, ranging from Francisco Goyas The Third of May (1814) and Pablo Picassos Guernica (1937) to Jos Clemente Orozcos Man of Fire (1939) and David Alfaro Siqueiross The Torment of Cuauhtmoc (1950). Nor does Abu Ghraib represent a departure from Boteros own oeuvre, which includes one series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as another examining the violence in Colombia during the 1980s, including depictions of the cocaine kingpin, Pablo Escobar. Documenting violence and human rights violations, then, has been as present in Boteros work as his boteromorphs, his puffed-up, exaggerated figures.2 In this way, if Boteros Abu Ghraib is regarded as significant, this is not because it represents a thematic break with either a universal or Latin American pictorial tradition or his own career of depicting atrocities. In fact, to frame the Abu Ghraib series as simply a question of subject matter, or even within the trajectory of an individual artist, is to miss a striking difference between the pictorial tradition of violence and Boteros collection.

This difference, in part, has less to do with Boteros own wish to represent Abu Ghraib than with living in a world where technological advances in other media render painting increasingly less relevant as a form for depicting these events. Undeniably, this phenomenon is not new. The emergence of photography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveals, among other things, that painting as a medium to record events becomes less reliable than photographys indexicality. In contrast to, for example, an eighteenth-century landscape painting depicting unexplored lands, painting today is no longer conceived as a primary form to document, much less to make truth claims beyond the subjective realm.3 This irrelevance of painting in relation to documentation has only grown in recent years with the advent of

2For more details on Boteros oeuvre, see Sillevis. For an interesting essay arguing against the idea of Botero as a politically engaged artist, see Bartniz.

3A point that the narrator of Csar Airas novel Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero gets exactly right when he notes that the job of the landscape painter would be replaced by a photographer in the twentieth century. For a brilliant essay on the question of indexicality in photography, see Michaels.

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the Internet and digital cameras.4 The dominance of photography is all the more noticeable with the release of the Abu Ghraib photos. As the critic Arthur C. Danto keenly notes, these photos constitute a world event, given the speed with which the images traveled around the globe, creating strong affective responses for many who saw them. A return to Picassos Guernica serves to highlight the radical shift from painting to photography in recent years. Despite the existence of photos of the Spanish Civil War, few knew of the atrocities that had occurred in this small town in northern Spain until Picassos paint-ing; the horrors depicted by the photos of Abu Ghraib, on the other hand, have achieved almost immediate universal recognition. In other words, while Guernica as an event emerged in spite of photography, Abu Ghraib was born because of it.5

But this world event is as much about technology as it is about a human rights ideology that has spread across the globe. Since the 1970s, human rights has become the primary lens through which we not only see abuses, but also understand violence. We will return to this point later, but for now suffice it to say that in comparison to the photos, Boteros paintings of Abu Ghraib, at best, can be understood as providing a gentle reminder of these human rights abuses. More likely, however, Boteros collection testifies to the growing irrelevance of painting as a medium to inform, much less to impact, our rela-tionship to human rights in any substantive way. As such, insofar as Boteros Abu Ghraib is regarded as a break, this break is not found in the paintings ability, unlike the photos, to document a pattern of criminal behavior in open defiance and contempt of international humanitarian conventions (Sontag). Rather, the break is found in the collections very refusal to do what the photos already do.

Aesthetic Form in a Human Rights World

We can begin to see something like this refusal in Boteros own account of how he first conceptualized the Abu Ghraib series. In this narrative,

4It is undoubtedly true that the ontology of digital photography is different than that of analogue photography. Nevertheless, photography still continues to maintain a level of factuality that is absent in paintings; and this sense of factuality still guides most peoples relationship to photography, despite the emergence of digital photogra-phy. Manipulation, on the other hand, has been as central to the history of analogue photography as it has to digital photography.

5This does not mean that the Army did not know about the abuses that were occur-ring in Abu Ghraib. Indeed, the Taguba report, a fifty-three-page document that was completed in late February 2004 and subsequently leaked, had already documented much of what had taken place.


Botero stresses that he was inspired not by the photos but by reading several articles, including Seymour Hershs New Yorker essay, the first major essay that reported on the violations (Juan Carlos Botero 16); Boteros mention of Hershs essay highlights the fantasy not only to create an image from one that was not there, but also to produce a distance from the photos that were found everywhere. We also see this distancing in the collections complete absence of references to iconic photos such as the hooded man, Sabrina Harmans smile or even Lynndie England holding a leash.6 In fact, the perpetrators, who are present in most of the iconic photos, smiling and posing, are almost nonexistent in the paintings. Instead, the paintings illustrate prisoners who are agonizingly by themselves, suffering in dark corridors, con-fined to their cells and their own immediate pain. Moreover, the rich tones of the figures who are painted in deep, saturated yellows and reds intensify the presence of these rotund bodies in pain. As several critics have suggested, Boteros Abu Ghraib brings to mind Baroque representations of Christian martyrdom.7 Yet, this gesture toward the Baroque in Boteros Abu Ghraib has less to do with a theme or style than with a certain exaggeration of aesthetic form that is vital to the Baroque; that is, the commitment to the amplified figurative represen-tation marks a shift away from the grainy realism of the photos. The idea here is that Boteros series attempts neither to create another version of the photos, nor to reproduce the pain that the photos make evident. Instead, the idea is that Abu Ghraib sets out to create a space in which Abu Ghraib can exist without the photos. That is, the distance between the photos and these representations functions to assert a space for aesthetic form.

A closer look at the composition of these paintings reaffirms this investment in aesthetic form in relation to the photos. In Boteros Abu Ghraib, one is immediately struck not only by the absence of perpe-trators, but also by the prisoners who never look outward toward the beholder. Unlike, for example, the iconic photo of Harmans smile, Boteros figures are either looking off to the side, blindfolded, or have their bare backs openly facing us. These figures deliberately turn away from us, denying not only our presence, but also whatever reaction we may be experiencing. This disregard for the beholder is doubled by other techniques that are internal to the paintings, techniques

6For an intriguing discussion on the abuses that occurred in Abu Ghraib prison and their relationship to the photos, see Errol Morriss documentary Standard Operating Procedure and his book Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography.

7See, for example, Emory and Danto.

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that not only point inward toward the lives of these representational subjects, but also produce a sort of spatial fissure between these figures and the beholder. For example, in Abu Ghraib 56 we see two prison-ers that are hooded and turned away from the beholder, facing each other, one looking upward toward the sky, perhaps praying, while the other prisoner is forced to look downward, as a blue glove from a military police pushes him forward. Prison bars, noticeably, are placed between the prisoners and the beholder, which, as the critic and artist Juan Carlos Botero notes, creates a sort of distance, a visual barrier between the viewer and the brutality of the scene (20). Abu Ghraib 65 presents another version of this distance between the beholder and the figures in the paintings by adding a perspectival movement toward a vanishing point. Here, a hooded prisoner stands in a long corridor, hands tied behind his back and ankles shackled; his naked body is turned away from us, turned toward the end of the corridor where a barred window lets in some light. The painting directs us first to his body and then farther toward the end of the corridor, away from our position as viewers, away from whatever experience we may feel.

What these prisonerswho are utterly absorbed in their own real-ityreveal, and what these visual barriers reconfirm, is less a physical or emotional distance than a conceptual distance that functions to reinforce a space for the work of art. Indeed, these figures, who turn figuratively from the photos and literally from the beholders, serve to better delineate and define the aesthetic proper. As such, we might say that Boteros Abu Ghraib finds its theoretical equivalent in what Michael Fried has called absorption. In his 1980 book Absorption and Theatricality, Fried examines a period of French painting that centers on the work of Diderot, and how this shift away from the beholder came to be a primary concern for painters of this period. Fried describes absorption as paintings that treated the beholder as if he were not there (5). For Fried, absorption, of course, does not signify that the artist does not paint, in part, with the beholder in mind, but rather, it provides the most effective account of art as a supreme fiction, demanding an absolutely perspicuous mode of pictorial unity (103). Here, the supreme fiction and unity of art reflect a commitment not to a certain genre or style, but rather to marking an autonomous aesthetic space that lives outside the beholder and his experience. That is, absorption offers the clearest theoretical conception of the creation of aesthetic form. In this way, the importance of the absorbed figures in Boteros Abu Ghraib is found not only in its refusal of the iconic photos, which have triggered strong affective responses in


beholders, but also in the reassertion of its status as art that renders the beholder and his experiencepolitical or otherwiseirrelevant.8 Which leaves open the question whether Boteros Abu Ghraib is less invested in presenting a political testimony that denounces a pattern of criminal behavior in open defiance and contempt of international humanitarian conventions (Sontag) than in asserting a space of aesthetic form that may in fact come at the expense of these politics.

As the title of Frieds book makes clear, absorption intersects with the idea of theatricality, a type of painting that not only openly acknowl-edges, but also demands the absolute presence of the beholder and his lived position. Theatricality, according to Fried, becomes central to minimalist work beginning in the 1960s, but it also becomes central, as I want to suggest here, to works depicting torture in a more recent moment. In fact, unlike Boteros absorptive project, many recent paintings depicting torture are theatrical, including Leon Golubs Interrogation II (1981), which illustrates two mercenaries smiling at the beholder, while they torture a person sitting in a chair. Boteros collection is also quite different from other artistic projects that relate to Abu Ghraib, such as Gerald Laings American Gothic (2004), that uses the backdrop of Grant Woods painting, and replaces the farmers with American MPs Lynndie England and Charles Graner. With their thumbs up, both look directly and triumphantly at the beholder. Gra-ner smirks and England smiles, while right below lies a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners. These recent theatrical works make the beholder structurally essential to the composition, for they not only look at, but also attempt to interpellate the viewer. Or again to return to the critic Juan Carlos Botero, these theatrical works demand that: there is no space between us and the victim, since we share the same visual reality. That is to say that we are not only direct witnesses to this barbarity, we are also included within it, whether we like it or not, and thus we participate in the horror (20).9 Juan Carlos Boteros observation is important since it highlights a crucial theoretical point. The idea here is not the simple connection that the beholder maintains with the horror, but rather that the beholder ceases to be a beholder and,

8It should be noted that the Abu Ghraib photos were shown in New Yorks Interna-tional Center of Photography in September 2004 and also in the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. This point reveals that while the gallery exhibition of the photos, in a sense, blurs the lines between art and life, the paintings seek instead to insist on the aesthetic world.

9Juan Carlos Boteros claim is made about several pieces in Boteros Abu Ghraib. Al-though I disagree with this reading of Boteros paintings, I have cited him here because his claim perfectly embodies the political gesture of theatrical art.

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instead, is transformed into a direct witness who participate[s] in the event whether we like it or not (20); that is, the beholder is transformed into a subject that must be morally included in the event.

This new status of the beholder as a direct witness also alerts us to another important idea about theatrical paintings: the desire to alter the status of the work of art. Indeed, according to Juan Carlos Botero, what the direct witness sees is no longer described as art but as hor-ror (20). Fried, in a related context, notes that this commitment to the primacy of experience is, at the same time, the negation of art (Objecthood 153), since structurally there is no longer a distinction between art and the beholder. Rather than art, there is a situationone that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder (153). In short, these theatrical works on torture and Abu Ghraib seek to eliminate their status as art in order to immerse the witness in the politics of the event. But if these anti-absorptive works reveal that the status of art comes at the expense of the beholders experience, Abu Ghraibs investment in aesthetic form signals the complete rejection of the idea of the beholder who whether we like it or not [ . . . ] participate[s] in this horror (Juan Carlos Botero 20). And, as we will see below, this commitment to aesthetic form represents not only a distance from the photos and the theatrical paintings, but also, and more importantly for this essay, a break with a Latin American human rights project that has sought both to eliminate aesthetic unity and to force the beholder to participate (20) in the discourse of human rights. Or to state this differently, Latin American scholarship has insisted on imagining a world in which the beholder is a direct witness who must envision all injustices through the lens of human rights.

Human Rights in Latin America

We started this essay by noting that for Ebony, the importance of Boteros Abu Ghraib is located in its ability not only to document but also to make us morally aware of these human rights violations: Botero, in his Abu Ghraib series suggests that anyone with a sense of humanity must realize that fighting terrorist attacks with further acts of cruelty and terror is not the right solution (18). Francine Masiello has extended this human rights project beyond the context of the United States, arguing that the paintings also draw awareness to violations in Boteros own Latin America. In particular, she contends that the collection speaks to the torture and disappearances that have taken place during the years of state-sponsored terrorism in countries

Alberto MonteagudoHighlightImportante


such as Mexico, Argentina and Chile. For Masiello, Boteros paintings represent a comprehensible and earnest offshoot of [this] ethical expression (14), and thus work within a larger framework of Latin American cultural production that has dedicated itself to remembering the countless human rights violations that occurred during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in these and other Latin American countries. Yet, as we will see, Boteros absorptive project problematizes this form of a human rights ethical expression that is central to a predominant form of Latin American theory and criticism.

While Boteros Abu Ghraib insists on a distance between aesthetic form and the beholder that is, a space between art and lifeLatin American human rights scholarship has sought not only to eliminate this space, but also to imagine this elimination as crucial to critical projects mobilized on behalf of human rights. Human rights cultural projects take on various genres and forms, including documentaries, fiction films, monuments, plays and novels.10 Furthermore, much of this work has centered on documenting the states inability to protect its citizens and raising awareness regarding these violations. Nevertheless, it is the critical work focusing on new forms (Beverley, Margin 30) of articulation such as the Latin American testimonio and the Chilean neo-avant-garde movement that has received much theoretical atten-tion.11 To be sure, these new forms are equally committed to drawing awareness and protesting state-sponsored terror. Nevertheless, their theoretical importance centers less on the subject matter of the work, since the representation of these violations is readily available in more conventional forms, such as documentaries, novels and plays. In fact, in many ways, their theoretical intervention is understood as a break with the idea of representation as such. For example, for Nelly Rich-ard, who champions the work of the Chilean neo-avant-gardework that, unlike Frieds idea of aesthetic unity (103), seeks to blur the line between art and lifeconventional realist representation in paint-ings, literature (including the testimonio), and film function within the logic of [p]ractical reason, direct language, and useful knowl-

10There are many works of fiction that deal with human rights violations in Latin America. See Agosns collection for a good overview.

11The Chilean neo-avant-garde or La escena de avanzada is formed in the late 1970s; within this larger project, CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte) is formed which is com-prised of five members: Artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo, sociologist Fernando Balcells, writer Diamela Eltit and poet Ral Zurita. For more details on the avanzada movement, see Richards Mrgenes e instituciones, Camnitzer and Neustadt. For more details on the connection between the testimonio and the neo-avant-garde, see my forthcoming article in Revista de Estudios Hispnicos.

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edge, and for this reason they are leading partners with powerful bureaucracies and technocracies of meaning (Residues 5).12 More to the point, what is wrong with representation is that it is symptomatic of an epistemic mode that endorses a logic in which questions of truth, belief, meaning, intention and interpretation are intimately connected to modernization and capitalist production. For Richard, then, even though a testimony or a human rights monument may draw awareness to these abuses, the medium in which it is expressed nevertheless promotes, albeit implicitly, the logic of authoritarianism in the dictatorship and neoliberal consensus in postdictatorship (18).

The attacks on aesthetic unity and representation are also para-mount to political accounts of the testimonio as a form that promotes international human rights and solidarity (Beverley, Margin 37). George Ydice, who champions the testimonial narrative and who undoubtedly disagrees with Richards account of realism and the testimonial form in particular, nevertheless situates the testimonio, like Richard, in opposition to representation: the speaker does not speak for or represent a community but rather performs an act of identity-formation (42). Similarly, John Beverley sees the testimonio as an anti-literary endeavor that breaks with literature and the liter-ary, both of which have been intrinsically tied to bourgeois writing since the Renaissance(Margin 35). Like Richard, Beverley connects conventional representation and art to a reactionary politics. Fur-thermore, for all these critics, what is integral is not simply an attack on representation or art, but also the fact that their critique has less to do with the content these forms represent than with the question of whether they do or do not represent. That is, texts that endorse human rights are imagined less as representing human rights than as drawing us within the world in which these violations occur. Unlike Boteros absorptive project, the testimonio and Richards description of the neo-avant-garde actively seek to eliminate the divide between the aesthetic world and the political world. In brief, they attempt transform art into a real-life event that one must experience.

12In an interview with Idelber Avelar, Richard has argued that conventional art, like paintings, belongs to the subjective realm and is ultimately selfish. The avanzada, on the other hand, is envisioned as a reaction to the cult value of painting and other conventional forms by stressing the indeterminate nature of the object that seeks to break out of the self-referential and elitist nature of art (Escena 261).




After Interpretation or people feel it . . . they feel it

As we stated above, Boteros Abu Ghraib, and the absorbed figures in particular, reveal a commitment not only to the aesthetic proper, but also to the irrelevance of the beholder and his or her experience. As such, we can see that absorption within painting (since at least Diderot) allegorizes a certain relationship that art maintains with the beholder. On the one hand, against Juan Carlos Boteros claim that whether we like it or not [ . . . ] we participate in the horror (20), absorption insists on space for the beholder to interpret the object as artworkthat is, insists on a space from which interpretation can take placerather than as a sense of horror that one must experi-ence. On the other, absorption transcends the beholder since, unlike the testimonio or the neo-avant-garde, the meaning of the object is not constitutive of the beholders presence or experience. That is, the meaning of the painting is found within the frame, and not within the beholder or a situationone that, virtually by definition includes the beholder (Objecthood 153). In this way, if the commitment to absorption is a commitment to aesthetic interpretation, the gesture of turning art into horror is also a gesture to eliminate a space of interpretation and replace it with a sense of ones experience. This negation of art (Fried, Objecthood 153) thus underscores that we are experiencing rather than interpreting an aesthetic object. Or said dif-ferently, and to return to the Latin American context, the testimonio and the Chilean neo-avant-garde not only attack aesthetic unity, but also imagine that politics begins once the divide between art and life is overcome. Latin American criticism and theory insists that art be reinscribed as a situationas a situation of pain in particularthat is felt rather than communicated or understood. That is, human rights criticism is crucially affective in scope.

In the last decade, there has been much attention paid to the so-called affective turn in theory and criticism. In an excellent essay attacking the theoretical foundation of affect theory, Ruth Leys defines affect as independent of, and in an important sense prior to ideologythat is, prior to intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefsbecause [affects] are nonsignifying, autonomic processes that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and mean-ing (437). This turn toward noncognitive, corporeal processes or states(437) is flourishing today both inside and outside of Hispanic studies.13 Nevertheless, this commitment to affect theory, in many ways,

13See, for example, Moraa and Snchez Prados recent collection on affect.

Alberto MonteagudoRectangleParticipamos en el horror

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looks like a continuation of the attack on representation that began in the 1970s. In her recent essay on affect, for example, Jo Labanyi calls upon scholars to try to find ways of thinking beyond, or outside of, representation (223). The Latin Americanist affect theorist Jon Beasley-Murray also considers affect to be outside of representation: What matters is how things present themselves to us, not what they may represent (205). Affect theory makes evident that the readers relationship to the text has less to do with intentions, meanings, or beliefs than with how objects affect the beholder regardless of the whether they are in fact representations. Leys describes this project as moving attention away from considerations of meaning or ideology or indeed representation to the subjects subpersonal material-affective responses, where, it is claimed, political and other influences do their real work(451). Since affect is grounded in preindividual entities that unite all of us (Beasley-Murray 205), it is unsurprising that it is also paramount to recent theoretical accounts of what is human when speaking about human rights. According to this logic, affect functions as a material ground zero from where a human rights politics begins in Latin America; a sort of bare life that connects us all.14

Or said differently, from the vantage point of affect theory, insofar as representation, meanings and beliefs are understood as secondary, the subjects subpersonal material-affective responses (Leys 451) is an essential claim when theorizing resistance and contesting power. For example, Richard praises the neo-avant-garde artist Diamela Eltits El padre mo (1989) for moving past representation, the referent and meaning by producing a convulsion of senses in the beholder (Residues 77); that is, in contrast to more conventional forms, El padre mo establishes an affective bond with the beholder while disrupting the cognitive ability to understand. Similarly, testimonial scholarship locates its political relevance not in producing truth or representa-tion, but rather in transmitting a truth effect (Beverley, Margin 33) or offers an encounter with the Real (qtd. in Beverley, Real 70). Some scholars claim that the testimonio is a form of representa-tion; nevertheless, it is the authenticity of the subalterns experience rather than the representation of the subalterns experience that brings the testimonio one step closer to triggering what Beverley calls an ethical and political response in the beholder (Margin 31).15

14For a good example of how Agambens idea of bare life is connected to human rights, see Avelars Unpacking the Human in Human Rights: Bare Life in the Age of Endless War and Butlers Frames of War: When Lives Are Grievable?

15See Cols as well as Larsen for excellent critiques of anti-representational accounts of the testimonio.

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In a similar fashion to El padre mo, the testimonio is more concerned with making the beholder experience the situation of the subaltern than with the beholder interpreting the text. The importance in both the testimonio and the neo-avant-garde is not found in the beholders beliefs about the meaning of the text, since, as we saw above, beliefs, truth and intentions, for these critics, are intrinsic to an epistemic mode connected to the market. Instead, beliefsbeliefs about what the text meansstand in the way of how the text makes us feel. That is, the ethical importance of these new forms is related not to the beholders interpretation and understanding of the literary work, but rather to his affective response as such. Which is just to say that what makes these new forms politically important reflects a theoretical turn away from the meaning of the text and a turn toward how the horror (Juan Carlos Botero 20) affects the viewer. Or said differ-ently still, like the recent paintings on torture and Abu Ghraib, the testimonio and the neo-avant-garde, as they are described here, are theatrical in logic insofar as they insist not only on the presence of the beholder, but also on the elimination of a space to understand them as representation.

To the extent that affect has become integral to the way Latin Americanists approach politics and ethical responses to atrocities, it should come as no surprise that it is also essential to a host of critics who have written about Boteros collection as part of a human rights project. We can return, for example, to Masiello, who declares that the political power of Boteros Abu Ghraib lies in the fact that, [w]e feel the substance. We are here in a sensate world that demands us to be awakened. [The paintings] [w]ork with the senses, then, as a way toward political awakening (17). In much the same way as Masiello, Thomas Laqueur articulates this political awakening vis--vis affect: Images of suffering and violence constitute a claim [ . . . ] to be regarded, to be noticed, to be seen as images of someone to whom one has ethical obligations (8). And Botero himself has argued that what distinguishes his paintings from the photos is the concentra-tion of energy, of emotion that goes into a painting . . . people feel it . . . they feel it (Laqueur 8). What all these claims insist on is not representation per se, but rather the materiality of objects (e.g. feel the substance, concentration of energy) as a way of demand[ing] or constitut[ing] a claim in the beholder. More specifically, what is being highlighted in these accounts is that an ethical obligation (Laqueur 8) is triggered more by what the materiality makes the viewer feel than by the aesthetic world that Boteros Abu Ghraib portrays.


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In brief, aesthetic representation, according to this logic, must be overcome in order to feel the real political force of Boteros series.

But where human rights work wants to negate art and representa-tion, what this essay has sought to show is the Abu Ghraib collections complete refusal to be anything but art and representation. Indeed, in the face of contemporary Latin American human rights projects, Boteros collection rests on its clear absorptive commitment to aes-thetic form and interpretation. That is, the insistence on absorption represents a break from a type of theatrical project found not only in more recent paintings on torture, but also, and more importantly for this essay, in the testimonio and the Chilean neo-avant-garde that radically invoke the beholder, demanding an ethical obligation (Laqueur 8) or ethical response (Beverley, Margin 31) from him or her. Said differently, Boteros Abu Ghraib is significant not because it constitutes a claim (Laqueur 8), but rather because, in an important way, it demands nothing from us. And it is precisely here that Boteros paintings present the most dramatic departure from recent Latin American human rights art and criticism. While Boteros paintings attempt to treat the viewers reactionand even the viewer himselfas a matter of indifference, Latin American theory and criticism have set out not only to invoke, but also to make the viewer complicit with this human rights world, a world in which, as Juan Carlos Botero reminds us, we must participate (20). In this sense, Boteros paintings are breaking with the theatricality human rights demands of art as well as with contemporary human rights logic. If what counts for Latin American critics is how things present themselves to us (Beasley-Murray 205), the collection instead signals a type of project that transcends our presence; that is, for the series to do its political work, we, and our experience, must be considered irrelevant. I want to be clear that the idea here is not to negate the subject matter: Boteros paintings clearly depict torture and abuses. Nevertheless, what this essay is highlighting is how the integrity of pictorial unity (Fried 103) and the irrelevance of the beholder signal an important break with a tendency that has dominated human rights aesthetic projects: namely, the primacy of the beholder and his experience. What I argue in the next section is that Boteros insistence on the aestheticvis--vis contemporary Latin American cultural outputnot only represents a certain move away from predominant human rights theoretical work in Latin America, but also points to a political project that goes beyond this human rights world; a project that shifts from the complicity of

Alberto MonteagudoRectangleEl texto de Ovejero no demanda nada de nosotros.

Alberto MonteagudoHighlightEsto ocurre tambin en la novela, porque aburre.


human rights to interpretation, beliefs and an anti-capitalist reading of Boteros Abu Ghraib.

The Last Utopia of Human Rights

If it is true that the photos as a world event draw awareness to human rights violations, it is equally true that the ideology of human rights is the primary lens through which we see not only the photos, but also the world. In short, we now live in a world in which the moral utopia (Moyn 214) of human rights has transformed itself into the primary ideology through which we articulate our politics. In a recent book, Samuel Moyn argues that human rights are the last utopia (4). What he means is that human rights has outlasted all other political ideologies, including communism, that address questions of justice and freedom. For Moyn, the aim of human rights is primarily to protect the rights of the individual against the state. Undoubtedly, this objective is a radical departure from Cold War politics, which centers on an ideological disagreement between communism and liberalism, as a question of which creates the best form of justice. In this sense, the 1970s marks a watershed moment for human rights, since this Cold War disagreement begins to come apart; when what counts is no longer whether we believe communism or liberalism is right or wrong, but rather whether our beliefs are respected or not, regardless of what they are; where beliefs, in short, are treated as a function of who we are and what we feel. What becomes central in this moral utopia (214) is not the meaning of our beliefs, but rather that these beliefs are innately ours. In this way, bereft of their political antagonism, beliefs are now conceived primarily as affective signs of human life that, like speech, race and language, should be valued and respected.

Perhaps the best example of this disarticulation of beliefs in Latin America is established in the very exercise of recuperating the memo-ries of human rights abuses in testimonios, novels and films, rather than understanding the geopolitical events that brought about the events.16 From the perspective of a progressive politics, when remembering the period of the 1970s and 1980s, as Masiello clearly attempts to do with her reading of Boteros Abu Ghraib, what becomes paramount are

16 Beginning in the 1970s, Latin America witnesses the emergence of human rights networks. For an insightful essay on the emergence of this network in Latin America, see Sikkink.

Alberto MonteagudoHighlightEn la novela no se habla de eventos geopolticos ni espacios en este sentido.


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questions about the abuses and violations brought about by the State and not the political beliefs that brought about the conflicts in the first place, namely, the ideological disagreement between liberalism and communism. During the 1960s and early 1970s, communism was envisioned chiefly as a project to eradicate class inequality and the system that sustained it. What this means is that while the Left in the 1960s and 1970s wanted to eliminate the capitalist state that produced inequality, the Left in power today wants to remember the past as a moment in which life, citizenship, and human rights were violated.17 The idea here is important because it reveals that the investment in memory today revolves around remembering these human rights abuses and not an anti-capitalist project that had little to do with protecting individuals from state abuses.

The absence of an anti-capitalist Left and its replacement with a human rights Left is felt everywhere, as the neoliberal policies of the last thirty years have only increased the level of economic inequality throughout Latin America. Indeed, despite the rise of the Left in the last decade, Latin America continues to have the highest levels of inequality anywhere in the world. In a certain sense, this shouldnt be a surprise because the Left, since coming to power, has done very little to alter the neoliberal policies that were first put in place by the Right. To be sure, while it is true that in the last two decades, human rights justice regarding punishing perpetrators has improved, and while it is also true that the Left does a better job of treating the poor as fel-low citizens and representing them within the national imaginary, the objective of the Left in the 1960s and 1970s was not to respect or even do a better job of representing the poor, but rather to eliminate the conditions that created the poor; that is, to eliminate the system that produced poverty. Today, the Lefts commitment to the poor under human rights involves not eradicating poverty, but treating poverty primarily as a part of a discriminatory practice that limits democracy; the problem with poverty, according to this logic, is that it unfairly prohibits full participation in the benefits of living in a liberal society.

At the same time, the main attack leveled at the Right by the Left today is that it continues its unjust practices against not only victims of past human rights abuses, but also the poor, women, indigenous peoples, etc. That is, the principal accomplishment of the Left, and the

17I have written about this transformation from revolutionary subjects to human rights citizens elsewhere. See my article From Shopping Malls to Memory Museums: Reconciling the Recent Past in the Uruguayan Neoliberal State.



success of the so-called leftist turn, is understood principally through the lens of tolerance, respect and the growing diversity and stability of Latin American democracy.18 What is lost, of course, in this vision, is that the Left and the Right now endorse the same system that continues to produce economic inequality. What is lost, in other words, is that while the Left seeks to unite us under the banner of human rights it does so by ignoring the economic gap that continues to divide the rich and poor. From this position, human rights as a dominant form of leftist politics has become the key technology through which the Left masks its complete capitulation to neoliberal orthodoxy in Latin America. Far from producing an alternative to capitalism, the Left today now endorses the capitalist system and the capitalist state that they, in their most radical form, once sought to destroy. Or to make the claim more forcefully still, the Left todaythrough their emphasis on human rights as the last utopia (Moyn 4) has successfully, and perhaps paradoxically, concluded the emancipatory project that the military dictatorship first set out destroy in the 1970s.

Aesthetics, as we have already seen, are also imagined as a means to emphasize the commitment to affect indicative of human rights. Within the predominant form of Latin American criticism and theory today, the theoretical concern revolves around how the text affects us rather than what the text means. In her seminal book Tiempo pasado, Beatriz Sarlo argues a similar point about the testimonio, a form whose first-person narrative makes it exceedingly difficult to imagine a way of critiquing the narrators experience. While Sarlo believes that this is an experience that is limited to the testimonio, as we saw above, the work of the neo-avant-garde is also centrally about producing an expe-rience over creating interpretation. Indeed, the way we approach art today is no longer centered on disagreementI believe that Boteros Abu Ghraib is a critique of human rights, you disagreebut rather on a question of how we respond to the text through our different experiences and affective responsesI experience pain, you do not. Here, there is no disagreement, we are just experiencing different emotions; and, of course, experiencing these different emotions is chiefly viewed through our interests and our identities rather than our beliefs about what the text means, which are imagined as right or wrong, regardless of who we are and what we feel. The utopia of human rights, in other words, insists on turning antagonistic beliefs

18See Castaedas book, which lays the foundation for this project in the early 1990s.




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about the meaning of the text into experiences that inform our vari-ous subject positions.

Insofar as human rights affect is the dominant discourse todaythat is, insofar as what counts is that the victims experience is our ownit does so by imagining that beliefs about the meaning of a text are secondary to feeling the pain of the other. This evacuation of beliefs by the critics discussed in this essay not only situates Boteros paintings exclusively within the discourse of human rights, but also envisions past anti-capitalist projects in Latin America as if they were Abu Ghraib. This ideologythat is, the moral utopia of human rights and affectnot only keeps us from talking about the world in differ-ent ways, but also keeps us thinking up new technologies to imagine human rights as the only project for the Left that counts. Today, the mobilization of affect on behalf of human rights is perhaps the most persuasive discursive strategy within cultural criticism through which the Left comes not only to forget its commitment to class equality, but also, and importantly, to endorse neoliberalism today.

Nevertheless, if we read the human rights project in this way, that is, that representations of violence in Latin America are meant to make the beholder complicit in human rights rather than open to inter-pretation, then Boteros paintings, in their insistence on absorption and aesthetic form, can be considered as a crucial intervention within Latin American art and criticism. My point is not that this aesthetic world prevents us from sympathizing with the figures or even identify-ing with the pain of those who were tortured. Nor does it prevent us from understanding that feelings are fundamental to the paintings. Rather, the paintings insistence on interpretation rather than experi-ence highlights that Boteros series, as artwork, is not reducible to the beholders experience of it. In brief, insofar as the paintings make evident that the experience of the object cannot be the experience of the subject, they assert not only a space for interpretation, but also a theoretical possibility of thinking outside the world of human rights.

In this way, in a contemporary moment where antagonistic political and aesthetic beliefs are seen increasingly as less relevant, Boteros Abu Ghraib insists on a structural position where beliefs are consid-ered paramount. The argument of this essay has not been to suggest that Botero intentionally rejects human rights; nor is the point that he intentionally rejects the market (despite the fact that he refuses to sell any of the pieces in the Abu Ghraib series. We are, in fact, talk-ing about an artist whose commercial fame outside of Latin America can only be matched by that of Isabel Allendes). Rather, the idea

Alberto MonteagudoHighlightmobilizacin del affect como estrategia persuasiva:

Alberto MonteagudoHighlightestrategia: la representacin de la violencia significa hacer al lector complice en el problema de los derechos humanos en vez de abrirlos a la interpretacin.



is that the aesthetic (i.e. creating a space for the aesthetic proper) rather than experience (i.e. eliminating a space between the art and the beholder) provides a theoretical position from which the viewer can move away from human rights immediacy and complicity. That is, in the face of human rights theatricalityemblematic of the tes-timonio and neo-avant-gardeBoteros Abu Ghraib asserts a position where beliefs, interpretation and representation are still understood as crucial. In this way, Boteros series, perhaps unexpectedly, reveals the importance of the aesthetic today, as a space where human rights ideology is not simply made visible, but also, and more importantly, contested as a project that endorses present-day neoliberal policies. In short, Boteros Abu Ghraib provides an opening that allows us to think beyond the limits of the last utopia of human rights and the supremacy of neoliberalism today.

University of Nebraska, Omaha

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what can a painting do? absorption and aesthetic form in botero's abu ghraib

Documents

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logic of human rights

aesthetics of human