Visual Peace

Images, Spectatorship, and the Politics of Violence

Frank Möller

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349437498, 9781137020390
• eBook ISBN: 9781137020406
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book introduces a new research agenda for visual peace research, providing a political analysis of the relationship between visual representations and the politics of violence nationally and internationally. Using a range of genres, from photography to painting, it elaborates on how people can become agents of their own image.

Part I

Impressions: Stretching the Limits of Representation

A sunny day in Mexico

I should not be here. I have no right to be here. I cannot find solace in the fact that I am not the only one here. On the other side of the scene that I am observing, there is a group of people peeping over the wall that separates the scene from the surrounding landscape which is characterized by green hills, trees, and bushes. Further away, up the hill, there are two more clusters of people. I cannot recognize them; they are too far away. I suspect that owing to the wall behind which the scene unfolds it may be difficult for them to see anything. I do not know who these people are. Perhaps they feel the same discomfort that I am feeling. The people peeping over the wall seem to observe calmly what is happening. They neither jubilate nor celebrate. One of them positioned in the middle of this cluster of people seems to protect his ears with his hands. Perhaps the sound emanating from the scene is louder where he is than where I am. From where I stand, I see the blue sky in the background. It is a sunny day. That does not seem right, given the tragedy that is unfolding in front of my eyes. The sun projects the shadows of the people involved in the scene on the ground, which seems to consist of sand or some form of pale soil. I am not an expert on soil condition, so I cannot be precise here. My description of the trees and bushes must also be vague because I do not possess any botanical or arbocultural knowledge either, and, in any case, I am more concerned about the scene unfolding before me than in the vegetation surrounding it. I feel that I have to respond to what is happening in front of my eyes, but I do not know how to respond. I know that I cannot not respond; the option not to respond does not exist. I could close my eyes, trying to avoid getting involved in the scene by looking at it. I could try to stop happening what is happening. No, it is too late. But I cannot just look at what is happening. Perhaps my presence is the condition for what is going on here; perhaps it would not happen if I were not here. Or would it? And what is it exactly that is happening in front of my eyes, causing me so much displeasure?

A human being, positioned to the left of me, is killed in front of my eyes, assassinated by a firing squad composed of at least six uniformed men. One of them is detached from the others. The position of his feet is funny, anatomically hardly possible. The smoke emanating from the rifles makes it impossible for me to see the point where the bullets entered the victim’s body, but there can be no doubt that he is deadly wounded: the distance between him and his executioners is too small; they cannot possibly have missed him. Indeed, his head and body are thrown back from the impact of the bullets. There is another uniformed person, standing behind the firing squad, to my right. Surprisingly, he is not observing the scene. His rifle points in the opposite direction targeting the sky, and he is looking at the ground. Actually, he seems to be looking at my shadow on the ground in front of him which reveals my presence at the scene. Perhaps he hesitates to participate in the execution? I do not think so. He also wears a uniform, but it seems to be slightly different from the uniforms his colleagues are wearing. Likewise, his hat and his shoes do not seem to be identical with his colleagues’ hats and shoes. I am no expert on military attire, though. Thus, I do not know what these differences reveal with regard to the military ranks these people occupy. Now I notice two other people standing on the left of the individual who has just been shot, one of them partly obscured by the person in the middle. There can be no doubt that they will be the next to be shot. One of them is wearing the same attire as the person just shot. The gentleman in the middle, however, seems to represent a different social standing. He is standing not only in the middle but also slightly in front of the other two, thus indicating some form of superior social position or an attempt to protect the other two, bound to failure obviously. Indeed, the three men are holding hands; they seem to be a team. While the other two are bare-headed, the man in the middle wears a sombrero. Perhaps it is his execution the person to my right is waiting for? Who knows? I decide that I do not want to see how this scene continues. I do not close my eyes, but I close the book the flaps of which I have just scrutinized. ¹

The paintings reproduced on the book’s flaps are Edouard Manet’s visualizations of the execution of emperor Maximilian of Mexico and his generals Miguel Miramón and Tomás Mejía in Querétaro on 19 June 1867. Above, I described one of Manet’s paintings, now in the collection of Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany. I am interested in this particular painting because Manet revoked the usual separation of the viewer from the scene depicted by placing the viewer’s shadow in the scene. Thus, I am interested in the extent to which the viewer is involved in this painting and, by implication, in the scene depicted. Now, this seems to be absurd. The scene depicted took place a long time ago; Maximilian, Miramón, and Mejía died a long time ago, and the painting’s viewers can certainly not be blamed for their deaths. However, by placing the viewer’s shadow in front of what John Elderfield identifies as a non-commissioned officer (NCO), Manet not only ‘seems to be privileging the NCO over the single soldier’ who stands, slightly detached from the rest of the squad, closest to the three victims; Manet also involves viewers directly in the execution scene. ² By so doing, he motivates them to reflect not only upon their subject positions in connection with this particular scene but also upon their overall role as viewers, spectators, and onlookers. To phrase my research interest slightly differently: What does visual culture do to transform passive spectators into active observers who self-critically reflect upon their subject positions in relation to the conditions depicted in a given image? In Chapter 2, I will suggest calling such active observers ‘participant witnesses’. I will also call into question the alleged passivity of spectators, people who watch and do nothing else, but for the moment let us stick to the simplified distinction between passive spectators and active observers/participant witnesses. My interest in this book, thus, is in spectatorship – being a spectator, becoming a spectator – and in the interplay between images and spectators. Spectators are one of the largest possible target groups in academic research because the option not to be a spectator does not exist: One does not choose to be a spectator.

My main research question, I think, is an important one – quite regardless of whether a given image is a painting, a photograph, a video, or another visual artefact. Thus, although I am discussing mainly photographic images in this book, I would argue that what I am going to say in what follows is relevant also to non-photographic images. We are living in a world that is increasingly dominated by visual culture, and visual culture cannot be limited to photography. Photography, however, constitutes a huge portion of visual culture, and an ever increasing number of people participate in visual culture as producers of photographic images. But from this, it does not follow that other genres of visual culture were irrelevant. Let me return to Manet: In another version of Manet’s painting, known as the Boston painting, the viewer’s involvement is more indirect: the NCO seems to observe not the execution scene but the viewer, although his eyes cannot be seen. In the Mannheim painting, Manet does not isolate the execution from the social setting within which it occurred: groups of people are shown to observe the execution; the viewer is not alone. Representing these groups might have been Manet’s response to reports in the newspapers of groups of poor Indians gathering on the hillside. The miniaturization of the observers on the hillside reflects the overall lack of importance attached to indigenous and local people in colonial discourse and practice. Perhaps it reflects Manet’s critical attitude to the colonial disregard of local people, but their depiction as anonymous clusters of people corresponds with the colonial practice of reducing individual people to ‘figures in the crowd’. ³

Nowadays, of course, such figures in the crowd would be equipped with digital cameras. They – or at least some of them – would probably take photographs of the scene and disseminate them among real friends and virtual ‘friends’, some of them almost in real-time by using camera phones. Perhaps even the members of the execution squad would take pictures. ⁴ François Aubert, Maximilian’s court photographer, was not allowed to photograph the execution. Afterwards, he took several photographs, including pictures of the site of the execution, the execution squad, the corpse of Maximilian in his coffin, and the shirt the emperor wore when shot. Some of these photographs may have been familiar to Manet as they were distributed in France at the time; Aubert’s photography was commercial and represented by photography dealers. ⁵ Manet’s paintings were shown publicly in France only in 1905, years after the death of the artist – at a point in time when not only their political but also their aesthetic relevance had declined considerably. However, the photographs, in contrast to the paintings, to some extent operated in what Michael Shapiro calls ‘display spaces that function outside of ... governmental controls’ despite attempts to restrict their circulation noted by Elderfield. ⁶ Apart from these photographs, Manet was dependent on reports in the press, but these reports were unreliable and censored: the execution of Maximilian considerably inconvenienced Napoleon the Third, who had helped install Maximilian, whose position of governor of Lombardy-Venetia had become redundant after the French invasion of Italy in 1859, as emperor of Mexico only to abandon him when assistance was most needed. The unreliability of the available reports would have made it difficult for Manet to paint a historical painting even if he had wanted to do so. However, he was not mainly interested in the painterly reconstruction of historical facts. And although his Boston, London, and Mannheim paintings are titled, respectively, ‘Execution of the Emperor Maximilian’, ‘The Execution of Maximilian’, and ‘The Execution of Emperor Maximilian’, what we actually see is not the execution of the emperor. ⁷ Indeed, as Elderfield writes with regard to the Boston painting, ‘we should notice the impossibility of firm identification that this painting asserts’. Therefore we might suspect that what Manet was ultimately interested in was not the execution of Maximilian. Rather, what he seems to have been aiming at is ‘a statement that extends the thread of recognition and understanding beyond what previously was seen and known, therefore complicating not simplifying’. ⁸ This, I think, is what makes his paintings important; this is what makes them political. ⁹ This is why it is irrelevant in the present context whether Manet depicted the execution adequately – that is to say, as it happened – or not. Because his work is political, I am interested in it. What follows, therefore, is an investigation of the aesthetics, the histories, and theories of images in light of the politics of images.

Fast-forward and change of location: from Paris/Querétaro to New York/Abu Ghraib; from the colonial past to the ‘colonial present’. ¹⁰ Parallel with the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Manet and the Execution of Maximilian (5 November 2006–29 January 2007), which the book discussed above accompanies, on 40 West 57th Street in New York City the Marlborough Gallery showed Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib (18 October–21 November 2006): paintings by the Colombian artist Fernando Botero inspired by torture at Abu Ghraib prison, twenty miles west of Baghdad, Iraq. It has been said that Botero, by adhering to his trademark – figures ‘exaggerated principally in terms of their volumetric relationships to their surroundings’ – managed to assign to the prison inmates ‘a psychological and moral weightiness that commands, if it does not overwhelm, their confined spaces’. ¹¹ There are indeed at least two reasons to pay close attention to these paintings rather than focusing exclusively on the notorious photographs. First, the photographs no doubt had an important agenda-setting function, shaping to some extent, and for some time, the political discourse in the United States and elsewhere. However, while they ‘helped force open the door to broader questions of how the Bush administration has treated prisoners in the War on Terror’, they also helped ‘block that door’ ¹² by shaping the discourse in a particular way. They helped narrow the question of torture in the ‘War on Terror’ to the chapter of torture at Abu Ghraib and even further to the sub-chapter of the misbehaviour of selected individuals (‘bad apples’) at the bottom of the chain of command no doubt committing atrocious acts. The focus on operators’ errors is not surprising as the search for errors of individual people is an established strategy in hierarchically organized institutions with which to avoid thorough investigations of the institution’s established operating procedures which may have caused the individuals’ behaviour in the first place. ¹³

Secondly, the discourse inspired by the photographs from Abu Ghraib was essentially self-centred. The ‘true focus of our curiosity here is ... not on the suffering Iraqis, who are unknown to us and can barely be distinguished one from another in these poorly defined and airbrushed images, but on ourselves’. ¹⁴ The ‘politics that are mobilized in response [to the images] are primarily self-referential, rather than other-regarding’. ¹⁵ The same can be said with regard to the overall Western discourse revolving around torture at Abu Ghraib: the focus was mainly on the supposed ordinariness of the men and women involved in the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib, on seemingly conventional men and women ‘point[ing], laugh[ing], snap[ping] pictures, and strik[ing] poses’. ¹⁶ Even today it is argued that ‘[we] must own up to what [the Abu Ghraib photographs] tell us about who we are’. ¹⁷ Of course, but do ‘we’ not also have to own up to what these photographs tell us about the people ‘we’ tortured? In Botero’s paintings – in contrast to the photographs – the jailors are conspicuous mainly by their absence from representation. This may be so because Botero is said to have relied mainly on such written reports as Seymour Hersh’s article published in The New Yorker in May 2004 and not on the photographs, but it also seems that Botero intentionally represented the jailors differently from the way they represented themselves in the photographs. For example, although Hersh wrote about ‘grinning’ and ‘smiling’ soldiers ‘giving the thumbs-up behind a cluster of perhaps seven naked Iraqis’, ¹⁸ the jailors in Botero’s paintings neither smile nor grin. In the few paintings where their faces can fully be seen, they show grim d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index