PATHOS AT ABU GHRAIB.

THE ABU GHRAIB EFFECT

BY STEPHEN F. EISENMAN

LONDON: REAKTION BOOKS, 2007

128 PP./$19.95 (HB)

Where are the painters of modern life whose imagery has even a fraction of the disruptive impact of film footage of the September 11th attacks or the digital snapshots from Abu Ghraib jail? They are thin on the ground, according to some. For such naysayers as the dissident collective Retort, contemporary art, whatever its political orientation, is too integrated into the spectacular commodity economy to pose any serious threat to anyone [see Afterimage Vol. 34, no. 4 for an interview with Retort]. It is a pessimistic assumption, but does not preclude a useful political role for those art historians who are able to draw on specialist knowledge to analyze the current conjuncture.

One example is Stephen F. Eisenman, professor of art history at Northwestern University in Ganston, Illinois. He is the main contributor (with Thomas E. Crow, Brian Lukacher, Linda Nochlin, David L. Phillips, and Frances K. Pohl) to Nineteenth Century Art: A Critical History (1994), a stimulating rewriting that incorporates many of the insights of the New Art History, including a sensitivity to racism and Eurocentrism. Eisenman's postcolonial leanings inform another book with one of the best titles of recent years--Gauguin's Skirt (1997). He now turns his formidable skills as a debunking scholar to the infamous digital photographs taken in Abu Ghraib prison.

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The United States Army's Criminal Investigation Command examined close to 2,000 still images and ninety-three video files, mainly of "suspected detainee abuse," all of which can now be viewed online at Salon.com. However, The Abu Ghraib Effect, Eisenman's latest endeavor, is not a comprehensive survey of all the evidence. Rather, the book's focus is on the relatively small number of images that were first presented to the American public by the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes II and the New Yorker in April 2004, and which subsequently traversed the world's media with great rapidity.

For Retort (whose members include the distinguished art historian T.J. Clarke), the most famous images from Abu Ghraib have had an extraordinary effect, efficiently exposing the gap between grim reality and the fancy democratic rhetoric that continues to legitimize the so-called war on terror. Eisenman might agree about their significance, but he certainly disagrees about their influence. He notes the absence of debate around them in the Presidential campaign of 2004 that ended in President George W. Bush's reelection and is generally struck by the relative indifference of the American public toward these pictures of "abuse."

Eisenman begins by posing a series of questions, including:

What if the sexualized scenarios, so frequently visible in the Abu

Ghraib photographs, rather than rendering the images of abuse and

torture more horrific, made them appear less so? ... What if the

[U.S.] public and the amateur photographers at Abu Ghraib share a

kind of moral blindness--let us call it the "Abu Ghraib effect"--that

allows them to ignore, or even to justify, however partially or

provisionally, the facts of degradation and brutality manifest in the

pictures?

His book-length answer is that the photographs failed to arouse mass outrage in the U.S. because they are nothing out of the ordinary. Others, too, have identified links between the Abu Ghraib photographs and aspects of American culture, such as, the lynching parties of an earlier era, everyday prison life, fraternity pranks, or hardcore pornography. Eisenman looks elsewhere. His key topic is what art historian Aby Warburg termed the "Hellenistic pathos formula"--that is, representations of "introverted oppression, eroticized chastisement or rationalized torture." He identifies this formula in many examples, ranging from the Pergamon Altar (c. 180-150 BC) to 24, the contemporary television series about Jack Bauer and his Counter-Terrorism Unit. The "pathos formula," he argues, is usually associated with the classical tradition and was more or less marginalized in modernism but is alive and well in mass culture hence, the widespread indifference, rather than indignation, when the photographs from Abu Ghraib began to circulate in the U.S.

The Abu Ghraib Effect is exemplary engaged scholarship, intended especially for those who are actively opposing the war on terror. But books, like photographs, can have unpredictable careers once they are in the public domain. "US military tells Jack Bauer: Cut out the torture scenes ... or else!" was the title of a recent news item in the Independent (February 13, 2007). At one point in the article, the journalist mimics a fuming general: "Forget about Abu Ghraib, forget about Guantanamo Bay, forget even that the White House has authorised interrogation techniques that some classify as torture, that damned Jack Bauer is giving us a bad name." Has Eisenman's book already fallen into the wrong hands?

DAVID EVANS is a research fellow in photography at the Arts Institute at Bournemouth, England.