Torture Reviews and Commentary

Rules of Engagement
By Marcia E. Vetrocq
Art in America
July/August, 2008

A very different reckoning of photography’s role in delivering the truth is offered by Clinton Fein, who repurposed photographic appropriation to make a series of works based on the pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib that came to public attention in April 2004. A South African-born, San Francisco-based First Amendment activist, Fein hired models to reenact the notorious compositions (detainees piled in a human pyramid, forced to simulate fellatio, handcuffed to beds and bars in extreme positions), illuminated the tableaux vivants with penumbral and strangely intimate lighting, and displayed the enlarged pictures as high-quality chromogenic prints mounted on panel. (The originals and the reenactments can be com- pared at www.clintonfein.com.)

Fein’s counterfeits are not intended to reprise tired debates about originality and authorship. Unlike Sherrie Levine, who rephotographed Walker Evans’s Depression-era images, or Thomas Ruff, whose enlargements of Internet images preserve and accentuate the flaws of screen grabs, Fein seized upon despicable amateur images, which unexpectedly had acquired public notoriety and probative value, and re-presented them in enhanced, painterly terms. His invocation of old- master painting, far from summoning up Christian martyrdom as do the Abu Ghraib canvases of Fernando Botero, delivers us to the dark threshold of inhumanity conjured by Goya.

A free speech watchdog, Fein also observed that when the soldiers’ snapshots were picked up on the Web and disseminated by establishment news sources, online and in print, the genitals of the nude prisoners were blurred (as genitals are when the news media reproduce garden-variety pornographic images). That concession to good taste, Fein contends, served to downplay the sexual sadism and degradation inherent in the forms of abuse devised for the occasion, qualities he sought to restore to the situations when he pictured them. He further notes that the original Abu Ghraib pictures were themselves staged, with body pyramids topped off and thumbs-up signs flashed with an awareness the camera’s presence and appetite. Curious about the moral proximity between witnessing and instigating, Fein set out to see if he might understand (he says that he did) something of the “mindset” of the abuser by assuming the role of photographer in the reenactment. In the end, and once again in contrast with Botero’s canvases, Fein’s photographs are about the torturers – the photographers among us – and not the victims.

Clinton Fein's Tools and the Master's House of Torture
By Zoe Trodd
Harvard University
January 13, 2007

It was 1968. On February 2 the New York Times printed a photograph by Eddie Adams on its front page, four columns wide. The image showed General Loan, a South Vietnamese general, executing a Vietcong suspect in civilian clothes. It was strikingly beautiful, the background in soft focus, the foreground displaying Loan’s flexed forearm and his devil-horn tufts of hair. Americans were also struck by its simplicity: this was war boiled down to two men and an execution, no complex maneuvers or military jargon. Harry McPherson, a speech-writer for President Johnson, saw the image and observed: “You got a sense of the awfulness, the endlessness, of the war and, though it sounds naive, the unethical quality of a war in which a prisoner is shot at point-blank range. I put aside the confidential cables. I was more persuaded by the tube and by the newspapers. I was fed up with the optimism that seemed to flow without stopping from Saigon.” This photograph, a frozen moment, seemed to stop the endless flow. And its impact was remarkable: after the image was reprinted across the world, public opinion polls showed the greatest single shift ever recorded by Gallup. Between February and March, doves jumped from 25 to 40 per cent, and hawks dwindled from 60 to 40 per cent.

Fast-forward four years, to 1972. Nick Ut’s image of Kim Phuc fleeing her village after an accidental napalm bombing appeared in every American newspaper on June 9, a day after Ut shot the image. Like Adams’ image, Ut’s was beautiful, with a full contrast of blacks and whites and a soft focus smoky backdrop. It had elements of Greek tragedy: the face of the young boy on the left of the image is shaped like the mask of Greek tragic drama. And it resonated with familiar Christian iconography as well, for Phuc is stretched out as though crucified.

The image didn’t stop American pilots dropping napalm on Iraqi troops during the 2003 advance on Baghdad. But it did shift public opinion on the Vietnam War.

Fast-forward again, to 2004. In April, 60 Minutes II released digital photographs taken by U.S. prison guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The images were printed on April 30 by the New Yorker. But this time the images quickly faded from the national scene. Unlike the Vietnam images, they were easily swept aside. This difference in impact wasn’t due to a difference in intent: Eddie Adams regretted destroying Loan’s reputation with his 1968 photograph, explaining in an interview that the image was never meant to do what it did. Adams’ image just took on a life of its own within the antiwar movement, beyond the photographer’s intention. The Abu Ghraib images, however, failed to find that new life and be taken up as protest material. Squinting at the images in newspapers and online, it was hard not to wonder if this low impact was partly due to their low quality; they were perhaps too grainy, too badly lit, too drained of color, too flattened, too muted. A far cry from the great images of the Vietnam war, these images were simply forgettable.

One last fast-forward, this time to 2007. In January Clinton Fein offered his own versions of the Abu Ghraib images: large-scale, hyper-detailed, dramatically-lit and uncensored recreations of the torture scenes that rival the visual explosions of the Vietnam War. There are, of course, numerous ways to respond to Fein’s exhibition. The viewer could feel like it revictimizes the prisoners within a pornography of violence, or that it forces a painful identification with the guards (those white faces staring back like a mirror-image for visitors), or that it offers a mourning ritual and a rummaging through the dark drawers of history’s closet-a history that America forgot so quickly in 2004. Perhaps the exhibition does all these things. But it is also an act of patriotic dissent. After all, as Fein once said to me: “dissent is the most powerful tool America has, and ensuring its protection is the most patriotic thing an American can do.” And in re-photographing the Abu Ghraib images, Fein entered a tradition of dissent that extends way beyond the Vietnam images-a tradition that, from Tom Paine to Tupac, has asked America to be America.

Like Fein and the Vietnam photographers, artists within the protest tradition have combined aesthetics and ideologies. Offering a poetics of engagement, the protest tradition has made form central to political protest. “For me this is better propaganda than it would be if it were not aesthetically enjoyable,” said Glenway Wescott of Walker Evans’ photographs in 1938, going on to further explain the importance of form to protest-“It is because I enjoy looking that I go on looking until the pity and the shame are impressed upon me, unforgettably.” Looking at Fein’s photographs, this is exactly what comes to mind: I enjoy looking and so I go on looking until the pity and the shame are impressed upon me, unforgettably.

Fein is even more deeply rooted with in the protest tradition through his use of appropriation. Audre Lorde once declared that “the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house.” But there is a long tradition of doing exactly that: for centuries, American artists have appropriated images, ideas, and language for their protest. The abolitionists used technical diagrams of slave ships to protest slavery. James Allen recontextualized photographs that were originally taken to celebrate lynchings for his exhibition Without Sanctuary (2000). Anti-lynching protest writers stole the rhetoric and imagery of Christianity from lynch mobs: creating figures of black Christs, writers like W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes met white supremacists in their own performance space. And Ida B. Wells fashioned her anti-lynching protest pamphlets from material generated by lynchers themselves: she quoted white newspapers at length, explaining that “out of their own mouths shall the murderers be condemned.”

Transforming the Abu Ghraib images for his own shockingly beautiful purposes, Fein makes his art a similarly appropriate process.

Another aspect of Fein’s art that roots him in the protest tradition is his use of shock value. For example, Abel Meeropol, who wrote the lyrics for Billie Holiday’s lynching anthem “Strange Fruit” (1939), once observed that Holiday’s voice could “jolt the audience out of its complacency anywhere.” Equally, the poet John Balaban explained in a recent interview that his early poems about Vietnam were meant to “shock and sicken” his American audience, and the novelist Tim O’Brien notes that the shock-value in his work “awakens the reader, and shatters the abstract language of war.” O’Brien adds: “So many images of war don’t endure for the reader-it’s the effect of a TV clip followed by a Cheerios ad. But my fiction asks readers not to shirk or look away.” And John Steinbeck once claimed to have done his “damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags,” with The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The breast-feeding tableau in Steinbeck’s novel is intended to shock, as are the meat-packing scenes in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), James Agee’s descriptions of masturbation in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), and the suicide scene in Rebecca Harding Davis’s novella Life in the Iron Mills (1861). Critiquing our culture of fear, and the Bush administration’s “Shock and Awe” military policy, Fein’s art is similarly calculated to shock-to inspire outrage, agitation, and a desire to reach for change.

Beyond his politics of form, use of appropriated material, and employment of shock value, Fein is located within the protest tradition still further. His exhibition uses the device of the embedded artist to suggest artistic empathy. Fein appears in the exhibition himself as a prison guard, looming from the walls just Walker Evans’ shadow loomed over dustbowl migrants from behind the camera in 1930s Alabama. The decision to include himself within “Torture” summons a vision of the empathetically engaged artist, reminding us that protest artists have often worked with empathy as well as shock value-have suggested sharing another’s suffering in order to help end it. Some imagined themselves as their subjects, often painfully so: the early twentieth-century photographer Lewis Hine said he needed “spiritual antiseptic” to survive, and Upton Sinclair described the “tears and anguish” that went into his novel The Jungle. Others asked the reader to become the subject: James Agee noted that he wrote repetitiously because he wanted the reader of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to experience for themselves the boredom of tenant farmers’ work.

Yet Fein’s work goes beyond this empathetic engagement. He features as a prison guard in this exhibition, and so emphasizes the dark side of engaged art-a troubling relationship between artist and subject. This dark side lurks throughout the protest tradition. For example, when Eddie Adams photographed General Loan in 1968, Loan treated the execution as a performance. He led the prisoner towards journalists, as though, without these witnesses present, he might not have bothered to pull the trigger. Watching and witnessing here provoked and defined an execution, and this complicated the morality of looking. Equally sinister is the fact that lynchings were a lucrative business for photographers, who would regularly document them. Some were even delayed until a photographer arrived, and mob, audience, and police officials regularly posed with the corpses. Many images were sent as postcards through the mail to participants’ friends and relatives, often with the sender’s face marked and a note to the effect of: “This is the barbeque we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son, Joe.”

Like Loan’s execution and America’s lynchings, the acts recorded in the original Abu Ghraib images look like performances for the camera’s eye, as though the greatest shame of all was to have the moment documented for an audience, for posterity. And by including himself within the exhibition, Fein engages head-on this question of the photographer’s presence at scenes of violence. Perhaps the artist is as sinister a figure as the original prison guard. Perhaps Fein enjoyed making violence as beautiful as this, and now asks us to enjoy it-asks us to take as much pleasure in these scenes as the original prison guards, with their grins and gestures. Perhaps Fein’s camera, which demanded of his models full nudity and physical exhaustion, is as aggressive as the prison guard’s club.

Making his camera a weapon of torture, Fein again echoes a tradition in the protest tradition: that of imagining words as weapons, pens as swords, cameras as guns. Richard Wright imagined “using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club.” Amiri Baraka depicted words as daggers, fists, and poison gas in his poem “Black Art” (1966). James Agee called the camera a gun, Jacob Riis said he photographed the poor like a “war correspondent,” and for years Woody Guthrie had a sign on his guitar that read, “This Machine Kills Fascists.” In 1970, the Black Panther Party member Emory Douglas told artists to “take up their paints and brushes in one hand and their gun in the other,” adding: “all of the Fascist American empire must be blown up in our pictures.” Part of this tradition, Fein’s appropriation of the master’s tools transforms those tools into weapons that violently dismantle the master’s house, shock us into questioning the role of the photographer as a witness, and ask us to question our own role as new witnesses to these scenes.

One final aspect of Fein’s exhibition that locates him with the protest tradition is his strategy, quite simply, of remembering. In 2007 he remembers the early part of the Iraq War by re-photographing its images. It is an act reminiscent of the late twentieth-century photographers who found and re-photographed Walker Evans’ Alabama sharecroppers from the 1930s, and it is in the tradition of all protest artists who revise protest texts and images from an earlier time. To cite just one example, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was used as a model by Edward Bellamy and Upton Sinclair, as a negative spur by James Baldwin and Carl Wittman, and was eventually transformed by Bill T. Jones in a 1990s ballet. It is as though Stowe’s novel needed corrective dialogue with other protest artists to make it whole.

In re-photographing Abu Ghraib, then, Fein enters a long tradition of intellectual bricolage. He salvages pieces of America’s past, and makes them new and whole. It is as though he takes the rubble of history and builds a theater space for a new performance-becoming a new Angel of History. As Tony Kushner observed in a recent interview, alluding to Walter Benjamin’s famous “Angel of History”: “you have to be constantly looking back at the rubble of history. The most dangerous thing is to become set upon some notion of the future that isn’t rooted in the bleakest, most terrifying idea of what’s piled up behind you.” Fein stares directly into the rubble, sees what is piled up behind us, decides that art can be made from what America has left, and invites a move from cultural haunting to social action-as though looking back might move America forward.

Zoe Trodd is a member of the Tutorial Board in History and Literature. Harvard University.

Art in America Review: Clinton Fein at Toomey Tourell
By Peter Selz
December 2007

Clinton Fein currently exhibits horrifying high-resolution C-prints depicting (through carefully staged reenactments) the torture of prisoners by the American military at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. For some time Fein’s political images have been immersed in controversy and dissent. A native of South Africa, he left that country, with its harsh climate of censorship during apartheid, for the U.S., hoping to find truly free expression. Becoming aware of deep flaws in the application of the First Amendment of the Constitution, he filed suit against Attorney General Janet Reno in 1997, seeking declarative and injunctive relief from the provisions of the Communications Decency Act. The suit made its way to the Supreme Court, and Fein won the case. He insists on the fundamental right to annoy and created a Web site in pursuit of that end, maintaining that indecency is one of the most effective tools to counter public apathy.

In a 2004 exhibition at Toomey Tourell he exhibited a striking image, Who Would Jesus Torture?, depicting George W. Bush on the Cross, an American flag wrapped around a phallic missile emerging from his loincloth. Derisive images, also digitally manipulated, of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and company, as well as of Pfc. Lynndie England, poster girl for the Abu Ghraib outrages, are also included in this picture. The printing company Fein had hired to produce the digital image ultimately refused to release it and threatened to sue the artist for defamation. In the end, Fein managed to come up with an alternate printer willing to produce the image in time for his exhibition.

The recent show, titled “Torture,” consisted of staged and manipulated photographic images. Fein felt that the low resolution of the pictures taken by the GIs participating in the Abu Ghraib abuses – the images that later appeared in the press – had the effect of muting and veiling the actual horror of the scenes depicted. Only sharp, high-resolution images, he concluded, could convey the full impact of the humiliating atrocities and show what the corrupt leaders of a supposedly civilized nation routinely endorsed.

The Columbian artist Fernando Botero was so deeply shocked by the spectacle of Abu Ghraib that, instead of his ebullient images, he produced a suite of over 100 provocative paintings and drawings [see A.i.A., Jan. ’07]. Other artists — Richard Serra, Gerald Laing, Jenny Holzer and Paul McCarthy among them – have taken the disgrace of Abu Ghraib as subject matter for their art. But it was Fein’s notion that a full reenactment of the terrifying poses into which prisoners were forced was in order. After all, the original photographs were themselves staged, intended as trophy images, much like those by-now familiar photographs of lynchings in the American South, images crowded with the smiling faces of all who had come to see. So Fein re-created, for instance, the picture of Pfc. England holding a naked prisoner by a leash while pointing to his genitals. Another re-created photo shows a naked detainee made to masturbate another prisoner. Sadomasochistic sexuality, which is implied in the original snapshots, is stressed in Fein’s prints. The artist is well aware of America’s fascination with sex and violence, attested to by much of the current fare in movies and TV.

The hooded prisoner with the electric wires tied to his hands has become the unofficial logo of the present war in Iraq. For the 2004 election, Serra made a poster of this image, and it has also been restaged by Fein. So has the picture of the human pyramid of naked men, an image to which the artist has given the title Rank and Defile (2007). In addition to the photographs that simulated the original snapshots, there were also two entirely fictional C-prints in the show. Crucifiction 1 and 2 (2007), for example, are the artist’s imagined views of what it is like to collapse under extreme physical abuse.

Torture of detainees or their rendition to countries with even more abusive torture regimens has become semi-legal under the Bush administration. Fein reminds us, however, that these practices can never be anything less than intolerable. Otherwise, the real war is already lost.

By Peter Selz
Art in America