Overview

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.

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9781861896469

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Reviews

There is much in this book to commend. It provides, for instance, a model of engaged, critical scholarship, one that makes art history relevant to today''s political concerns. Eisenman''s political commitments, moreover, are evident without ever feeling preachy or overly didactic. Dedicated to holding art history accountable for its racist representations, he debunks, in easy flowing prose, the myth that high culture somehow exists outside the desublimatory impulses that guide much of popular culture-video games, movies, pornography, etc. And in demonstrating that art''s history is not as humanist or angelic as it is often presented, he effectively shows how throughout history artists and art historians have been more than willing to service the powerful. Yet the book is not all pessimism and finger-pointing. It appears that Eisenman''s true concern is to construct a history that counters the celebration of violence as conquest and that refuses to make suffering beautiful. This counterhistory, I think rightly, is presented as the antidote to the Abu Ghraib effect. Thus, artists such as William Hogarth, Francisco Goya, Pablo Picasso, Leon Golub (Kthe Kollwitz might also have been mentioned) model instances of resistance and play significant roles as examples of artists whose political commitments guide their production, situating their work for Eisenman outside of the pathos formula. -- Terri Weissman CAA Reviews (12/17/2007)

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

Author Information

Stephen F. Eisenman is Professor of Art History at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. His books include The Temptation of Saint Redon (1992), Gauguin's Skirt (1997), Nineteenth-Century Art, A Critical History, now in its third edition and The Abu Ghraib Effect (Reaktion Books, 2007). He lives in Highland Park, Illinois.

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