The Art of Cruelty Page 7
In an attempt to cover up al-Jamadi’s murder at Abu Ghraib, CIA personnel packed him in a body bag filled with ice to slow his decomposition, which is how he came to be known as “the Ice Man.” His iced corpse was then immortalized in snapshots taken by Specialists Charles Graner and Sabrina Harman, who posed for each other next to his battered body. The most famous of these snapshots shows Harman giving a green-gloved thumb’s up in front of Jamadi’s face, one of whose eyes appears to have been nearly bludgeoned out of its socket. Valentine de Saint-Point would have been proud.
For the many others for whom a female reclamation of sadism provides no reason to rejoice, the photographs from Abu Ghraib depicting Specialist Megan Ambuhl, Private First Class Lynndie England, and Specialist Sabrina Harman engaged in brutal acts of torture and sexual abuse were devastating. Writer Barbara Ehrenreich went so far as to claim that “a certain kind of feminism, or perhaps I should say a certain kind of feminist naiveté, died in Abu Ghraib.” The feminist naiveté she is referring to is the kind that “saw men as perpetual perpetrators, women as the perpetual victims, and male sexual violence as the root of all injustice,” and presumed that women were morally superior to men due to their “lesser inclination toward cruelty and violence.” All that was before, Ehrenreich says, “we had seen female sexual sadism in action.”
The existence of something that could be called female sexual sadism did not and does not come as a surprise to me. (Nor would it have come as a surprise to the Marquis de Sade, whose Philosophy in the Bedroom puts forth the rather strange argument that “female cruelty [is] always more active than male, by reason of the excessive sensibility of women’s organs.” For more on this account, see Angela Carter’s brilliant act of disobedience and resistance, The Sadeian Woman.) Nor would I think any more or any less of my purported sex should such sexual sadism be a part of it. We are, after all, human beings (are we not?). Nonetheless, it is a mistake to read the role played by women in the photographs from Abu Ghraib primarily as evidence of such a phenomenon. My response to the pictures had more in common with that of Angela Davis, who saw in them a reiteration of the tragic but familiar historical fact that “people in power, regardless of gender or race, have equal opportunity to inflict racist and sexist violence on others.” Alas, and also: but of course.
I did fear, however, that those who might have thinkingly or unthinkingly relegated kindness and compassion to the feminine realm (as Ehrenreich admits to doing, as Western thought has generally done, at least since the Victorian period—and, I admit, as I have also found myself doing from time to time) would now have cause to shrug and say—with varying degrees of cynicism, sadness, or wickedness—Look, even the girls are doing it—it must really be the rotten core of human nature! Welcome to the dark side, one and all!
Should the rest of the photographs from Abu Ghraib ever be released, the presence of women throughout will likely give us a fuller—albeit more distressing—sense of the various roles they played at the prison. Not only are there likely to be more abuses committed by female soldiers, but also there are allegedly photographs depicting the rape of both female and male Iraqis by American soldiers, along with the sexualized abuse of children, some allegedly as young as ten years old. (As recently as May 2009, the Pentagon fiercely denied that such photos exist, or that such acts occurred; General Antonio Mario Taguba, the official responsible for conducting a full investigation of the abuses committed by Americans at the prison, has gone on record as saying that he has seen such photos, and that such acts did occur.)
Taken together, these two sets of photos may serve as a forceful reminder of something that an isolated meditation on Lynndie England and her leashed detainee may lead us to forget: that whether the perpetrators be male or female, the strategies used remain rooted in an all-too-familiar, age-old mash-up of misogynistic and homophobic violence, racist dehumanization, and militarized conquest—an operation that has not exactly had, and still does not have, something called “female sexual sadism” as its driving force.
Davis argues that the photos of women soldiers at Abu Ghraib call for a form of feminist analysis that “challenges prevailing assumptions that the only possible relationship between women and violence requires women to be the victims.” Certainly the long history of relations between white women and black men and women in this country—from slavery through the Civil Rights era, at least—has already presented an immediate and formidable challenge to such an assumption. This form of feminist analysis is utterly crucial, and thankfully now quite prevalent, largely due to the efforts of feminists such as Davis, who have justly and relentlessly insisted that myriad forms of oppression be understood and confronted together (as in Davis’s 1982 classic, Women, Race, and Class).
The problem remains, however: given the patriarchal structure of most societies on earth, and given that our most ancient, archetypal examples of female behavior and expression—from Antigone to Medea to Judith—are, in some sense, inextricable from the social structures that birthed (and often authored) them—it remains unclear if and how these relationships can be disentangled from the circumstances from which they emerged. Likely such an exploration has elements of a fool’s errand, as do most efforts to isolate nature from nurture—as if any life has ever been lived under the aegis of one or the other, rather than in a complex brew of both.
But if the possible relationships between women and cruelty or violence seem inevitably shaped or even generated by the misogynistic and/or patriarchal social structures from which they emanate, then the same must hold true for those of men. There’s no reason, for example, why work by Paul McCarthy, Brian Evenson, Chris Burden, Michael Haneke, Martin McDonagh, Otto Muehl, and countless others cannot be, indeed should not be analyzed in this light. (Indeed, much of it has been—McCarthy’s work is famous for raking masculinity and imperialism over the coals; Evenson has explicitly named fascist patriarchy and the misogyny of the Mormon Church as among his subjects; the work of the Viennese Actionists is, in many respects, an aggressive exploration of sexual power relations and taboos, not to mention deeply linked to the various post-Nazi psychoses plaguing postwar Austria, and so on.)
In other words, if, when it comes to the subject of cruelty and women, it turns out that one cannot disentangle contingency from essence, then there is no reason why such a disentanglement should suddenly become possible when it comes to men. Unless, of course, women cannot properly be said to share in the human condition—a recurring assertion in religious and philosophical circles over the past few millennia, as well as an ongoing legal and political conundrum. (For the former, see the satirical, oft-reproduced Renaissance text, Disputatio nova contra mulieres, qua probatur eas homines non esse [“A new argument against women, in which it is demonstrated that they are not human beings”]; for the latter, see Catharine MacKinnon’s 2006 international study of women’s human rights, 500 years hence, titled Are Women Human?)
Further, despite their desire to catapult us into a cosmological sphere in which forces such as Artaud’s “living whirlwind that devours the darkness” reign supreme, many male thinkers and artists evidence an obsessiveness with gender that can be difficult, if not impossible, to ignore, even if one is trying hard to board their post-gender, transcendental train. Nietzsche and Bataille rely relentlessly on gendered terms in their attempts to access this “living whirlwind”: in Nietzsche, this plays itself out via a multitude of misogynistic asides, and endless metaphors pertaining to women, pregnancy, castration, effeminacy, maternity, impotence, rape, and so on; Bataille’s philosophy of transgressive erotism often depends on the alignment of virility and violence, frequently made manifest in the stereotypical dyad of male assailant and female victim. Compared with these two comrades-in-cruelty, Artaud’s preference for the anal, or the fecal, over the genital, comes as a welcome relief. I’ll take Artaud’s “God is shit” over Nietzsche’s “Suppose truth is a woman” any day.
I
AM not at all convinced, for the reasons named above (among others), that this question is a good one, but I’m posing it anyway: are there specific forms of cruelty—beyond a willingness to partake in the varying forms of racist and sexist violence that surround us—that women have seemed to excel at, in “representation” if not “reality”?
There is, of course, the “rape and revenge” model, used as the premise for any number of dramas, from the notorious I Spit on Your Grave (1978) to its more mainstream offshoots, from The Burning Bed (1984) to Thelma and Louise (1991). The rape-and-revenge scenario is closely related to the potentially-justifiable-self-defense-morphing-into-unforgiveable-psychosis model, most recently brought to the fore by Monster, the 2003 film based on the real-life story of female serial killer Aileen Wuornos, or the French film Baise-Moi, based on the book by Virginie Despentes. (I should note that Despentes, who codirected the film, disputes its assignation to any bad-girl ghetto: “Forget the tits and cunts, for one second. The key words here should be: gun, death, fake blood. Not ‘pussy pussy pussy.’ . . . I don’t care those two characters have cunts. They are archetypes: violent outcasts. Should not be always defined by them having cunts.”) For a more enigmatic, understated spin on a similar theme, there’s Chantal Akerman’s 1975 classic, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a film that placidly follows the daily activities, over a three-day period, of a single mother who occasionally supports herself as a prostitute. After three hours and thirty-five minutes, the film reaches an unexpected, violent conclusion when Jeanne stabs one of her male clients to death by scissoring him in the neck.
Haunting each of these scenarios is the notion of excess—the sense that while the emotions behind the violence might be understandable, the act itself—unless imminently tied to an act of self-defense necessary to preserve a life—is always in excess, out of scale, hysterical, monstrous. In 1987, Toni Morrison provided the world with one of its most indelible, most morally profound dramatizations of this saga in her novel Beloved, with its multivalent portrayal of Sethe, a mother who attempts to kill her children so that they would not have to live in slavery. In her attempt “to put [her] babies somewhere they would be safe,” Sethe ends up successfully killing only her eldest, whose throat she slits with a handsaw. This child’s ghost—called Beloved, after the sole word on her tombstone—subsequently haunts the surviving family in unpredictable and suffocating ways.
Part of Beloved’s brilliance lies in its narrative elaboration of the relationship between what Žižek has termed “subjective violence” (i.e., the readily apparent eruptions of violence in everyday life, with discernible agents and victims) and “objective violence” (i.e., the systemic or symbolic violence, often as invisible as dark matter, that underlies and mobilizes the structure of capitalism itself). In his 2008 book Violence, Žižek argues that one must always read explosions of subjective violence against this structural or objective violence, rather than remaining transfixed by the former, as we so often are. Without such perspective, acts of subjective violence (such as murder, terrorism, and war) will nearly always seem in excess, monstrous, inexplicable, and—perhaps most dangerously, according to Žižek—more horrifying than the structural violence that is their truer and more heinous cause.
Most obviously, however, and arguably most commonly, there is self-vanquishing, sometimes to the point of mutilation. “Girls are cruelest to themselves,” observes Anne Carson in “The Glass Essay,” her brilliant long poem about the ravages of female anger, loneliness, grief, and desire, giving us as poetic adage what any number of other fields give us as statistic. But girls can be very good at something else. They can be good at exposing the cruelties of others. And one disturbing subset of this talent involves the creation of scenarios that give others the option, or the opportunity, to behave cruelly.
THE HISTORIC “WACK: Art and the Feminist Revolution” exhibit, which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles on March 4, 2007—just a few days before the Captivity posters saturated the city—offered a dense forest of these overlapping forms of cruelty. There was Nancy Spero’s Torture of Women (1976), enormous paper panels pairing fragmented, documentary accounts from Amnesty International about torture experienced by women around the globe with snippets from various mythologies that depend on the dismemberment and mutilation of women. There was Annette Messager’s Les tortures volontaires (1972), eighty-six framed photographs from newspapers and magazines, all of which depict women undergoing beautification processes whose bandages, electrodes, blindfolds, incisions, compressions, pumps, tubes, and restraints resemble torture. There was Orlan, the performance artist who has undergone many such “beautification processes” as a particularly unsettling form of feminist theater, dismantling and reconstructing her face in repeated surgeries, which attempt to make her resemble icons of female beauty, such as the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo.
Perhaps most unsettling, however, were the works that provided platforms for new cruelties, or at least the potential for them. Most simple and subtle of these is Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964), in which Ono sits impassively on the stage with a pair of scissors beside her, and allows audience members to approach her, one at a time, and cut off pieces of her clothing. For the first several minutes of her 1965 performance of this piece at Carnegie Hall, most of the audience members were content with a playful single snip. But it isn’t long before an aggressive young man comes along and sets to some more serious cutting. As he works on dismantling her, Ono twitches, seemingly struggling to maintain her still posture. The pleasure the man takes in snipping through her bra straps feels childish—a small, dim cruelty. Yet the whole point of the piece is that Ono has invited this violation. She didn’t lay out a feather or a jar of cream; she laid out a pair of scissors and named the piece Cut Piece. The result is deeply unnerving. Also unnerving: how erotic the performance is. I long to see Oko’s clothes fall, to see her breasts bared. Yet I also feel a mounting sense of alarm, empathy, and injustice in watching her body be made vulnerable. I feel the urge to protect her, to chase off the smirking assholes who hog the scissors and come back for more. The surplus of contradictory emotions builds in slow motion toward the unbearable. Cut tape.
Now fast-forward ten years to 1974, to the Galleria Studio Morra in Naples, Italy, where Serbian artist Marina Abramovi´c is performing her infamous Rhythm 0, which makes Ono’s Cut Piece seem like a paragon of modesty and restraint. Rhythm 0, which Abramovi´c performed only once, has the artist stand motionless for six hours, with seventy-two objects laid out on a nearby table for the audience members to use on her body in any way they see fit; the first item on the list is “Gun.” (Other items: a needle, a scalpel, a knife, plus others whose relative benevolence has kept them out of legend: a rose, olive oil, a feather, and so on.) As with Cut Piece, the violations to Abramovi´c s body begin slowly, then pick up speed. By the end of the performance, her clothes have been cut off, her body burned, sliced, and decorated. Eventually a man holds the loaded gun to her head and tries to make her fire it, at which point some audience members intervene to stop him.
In her 1999 treatise On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry argues that “far from damaging our capacity to attend to the problems of injustice, [beauty] instead intensifies the pressure we feel to repair existing injuries.” Scarry wants to base an ethics on “the fact that something is perceived as beautiful is bound up with an urge to protect it, or act on its behalf.” In six short hours, Abramovi´c ’s Rhythm 0 razes this notion to the ground, and reveals it to be the wishful claptrap that it is. Who needs the academic formalities of the Milgram experiment to demonstrate how quickly humans can slide into harming one another when a gorgeous Serbian artist can prove it to you simply by standing naked and motionless for six hours next to a table of sundry tools? Scarry is right that we often feel the urge to protect and worship beautiful things or people. But it is dangerous folly to ignore the fact that often we also feel the urge to
injure or destroy them. With ethics, as with psychology, you cannot just lop off the negative or contradictory impulses and hope for the best.
The genius of Abramovi´c ’s early pieces lies in their ability to dramatize, using her body as a stage, what happens when these impulses collide. Or implode—see, for example, her 1975 piece Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful, in which the artist, armed with a hairbrush in one hand and a comb in another, maniacally reprimands herself with the command of her title while whacking her beautiful head and face with her grooming tools for an hour straight, to the point of drawing blood from her scalp. “At that time, I thought that art should be disturbing rather than beautiful,” Abramovi´c commented in a 1999 Art Journal interview. “But at my age now, I have started thinking that beauty is not so bad. My life is full of such contradictions.” As is her art—a fact that was recently made clear throughout her 2010 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the museum’s first retrospective ever devoted to a performance artist.