Andy Warhol at Abu Ghraib

By Nadia Awad

Susan Buck-Morss, a radical philosopher and cultural historian, gave a lecture recently entitled "Global Imagination Against Global Power." The lecture discussed the political connotations of images on global culture.

Communication has become the new global currency as images are diffuse, fluid, and subject to intermittent reification and devaluation. As Prof. Buck-Morss correctly states, the image generates meaning without demanding contextual support, though it privileges a particular point in space. This paradox becomes a problematic one when Buck-Morss insists upon the 'democratic potential' of images. Could the Internet become the weapon of choice for the subaltern in the 21st century? Or does the audience's vantage point - a distinct space and time, to be sure - subsume the significance of the other actors - the subject, the photographer, the editor?

I thought about these issues when I learned The Warhol was creating a special exhibit on the images from Abu Ghraib. The show is entitled "Inconvenient Evidence: Iraqi Prison Photographs from Abu Ghraib."

Although not mentioned on the site, the exhibit consists of seventeen images printed from the Internet, not actual photos, of the Abu Ghraib prison. It is significant to note that the photographs were first taken as souvenirs by a group of extremely sadistic American soldiers; The Warhol, ostensibly with irony, commodifies these horrific images in the same way. During a historical moment that links 9/11 and Iraq directly (albeit poorly), the act of printing the photographs off the Internet on public display in New York implies a kind of revelry in those images, whose political ramifications have only vaguely been felt.

When the photographs first came out in the States, major American media outlets used judicious language to describe the atrocity that was Abu Ghraib. Stories discussed 'prisoner abuse' or 'human rights violations.' Only weeks after the public was desensitized by these images were more specific details reported, instances of sexual assault, torture, and so forth.

Even when these details were released, the media was quick to note only 'a small number of soldiers' partook in these activities. But given the mainstream American media's disturbing complicity with the Bush administration's hysteria regarding weapons of mass destruction, it is difficult to imagine any qualifying statement regarding Iraq has credibility.

There is no mention of context in this display; the images exclusively depict Iraqi men, huddled on the ground naked, faces covered in black masks, or on a podium, with thin electric wires dangling from their wrists. The notorious picture of Lt. Lyndie England giving a thumbs-up to the camera near the contorted body of a naked Iraqi man is absent. The absence of the American soldier is significant. In fact, any indication of agency is absent, which is made all the more troubling when the viewer realizes that these images, like child pornography, function as living documents of physical and sexual torture. Their existence only reinforces the humiliation of the act itself.

Indeed, the Iraqis depicted in these photographs are victims of a terrible crime. They are tangible symbols of an Iraq destroyed, degraded; they are evidence of a war that began for no purpose other than to satiate the Islamophobic bloodlust that is prevalent in contemporary American discourse.

For those that think this is too harsh or extreme, one must consider The Warhol's decision not to depict other atrocities in this war. As Buck-Morss states of nineteenth-century photographs of 'primitive societies,' the Abu Ghraib images render the War in Iraq 'a stage placed on exhibit to give evidence to Western superiority.' Or, in this case, a crude brand of American dominance.

Bomb victims, babies born in uranium-rich areas, beheadings, dead soldiers - all would have been provocative subjects. However, such images do not have the theatrical quality that the Abu Ghraib photographs demonstrate.

The expressions of terror are not masked by black hoods; there are no strange bodily rehearsals of torture, degradation. In such photographs, the ending of the 'play' is not left to the imagination. And then there is that annoying question of who the actors are.

The Warhol's exhibit provides an 'inconvenient evidence' of another sort.

The War in Iraq is a living historical moment and, yet, many of the images coming from this particular place are diffuse, contextless, agentless, or nonexistent. Using Buck-Morss's definition of image, what kind of vision of the world do such images enable? What kind of museum will house the Abu Ghraib photographs? A museum dedicated to inscribing images of our tragic present with the banality and meaninglessness of a 1950s Campbell's soup can, perhaps?

Nadia Awad is an American studying Film at Toronto's York University.