Abu Ghraib Effect

Description

The line between punishment and torture can be thin, but the entire world agreed it was crossed at Abu Ghraib. Or did it? George W. Bush emerged from the scandal relatively unscathed, winning a second term months later, only a few low-ranking soldiers involved in the crimes were prosecuted, and the issue went almost entirely unmentioned during themid-termelections in 2006. Where was the public outcry? Why was the American public largely unmoved by the images of torture and humiliation? Stephen F. Eisenman posits an unsettling explanation, which is rooted in the character of the Abu Ghraib photographs themselves.

Stephen F. Eisenman is Professor in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. His other books include The Temptation of Saint Redon (1992), Gauguin's Skirt (1997) and Nineteenth-Century Art, A Critical History, now in its third edition. He lives in Highland Park, Illinois.

Illuminating and timely ... Eisenman's concepts and questions constitute a challenging discourse on politics and art. Art in America Stephen Eisenman's provocative discussion of the omnipresence of the imagery of aggression, domination, and subjugation in Western art is as disturbing as it is timely. Coming as it does in the wake of the exposure of American torture of detainees, it reminds us that what we call "culture" is as marked by the evidence of cruelty and brutality as is the history of warfare itself. His book is an exemplary demonstration of the inseparability of the aesthetic and the political. -- Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Professor of Art History, University of California Santa Barbara a potent book ... This brilliantly argued volume should be read by all art historians. The Art Book Illuminating and timely ... Eisenman's concepts and questions constitute a challenging discourse on politics and art. Art in America Presented in a slim, stylish volume of 142-pages with sixty-six black and white images, The Abu Ghraib Effect ... traverses revolutionary terrain in its unravelling of the function of artistic metaphor in the justification of imperialist power. Media-Culture Review Writing about events that never, ever should have happened is no small challenge, even for the citizens of a US culture that now flirts with "representing the unrepresentable" and disputes any evidential role for photography. Nonetheless, Stephen Eisenman has taken up this daunting challenge with an unflinching analysis that will long endure - as will our stark memories of the horrors unleashed by the administration of George W. Bush. -- Professor David Craven, author of Art & Revolution in Latin America, 1910-1990