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MLN, Volume 129, Number 2, March 2014 (Hispanic Issue), pp. 412-432
(Article)
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DOI: 10.1353/mln.2014.0015

For additional information about this article

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What Can a Painting Do?:

Absorption and Aesthetic Form in
Fernando Boteros Abu Ghraib as a
Response to Affect Theory and the
Moral Utopia of Human Rights

Eugenio Di Stefano

The shape is the object.

Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (151)

This article proposes to discuss the aesthetic and political value of a

2005 collection of more than fifty paintings by the Colombian artist
Fernando Botero depicting the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. Introducing the book Abu Ghraib (2006), David Ebony writes, Certainly, Botero,
in his Abu Ghraib series suggests that anyone with a sense of humanity
must realize that fighting terrorist attacks with further acts of cruelty
and terror is not the right solution (18). Like other critics who have
discussed the images, Ebony understands these paintings as strategically
situated within a human rights discourse about the incriminating Abu
Ghraib photos that announced a pattern of criminal behavior in open
defiance and contempt of international humanitarian conventions
(Sontag). Yet, while it is undoubtedly true that Boteros series portrays
the torture that occurred in this Iraqi prison, the question that this
essay would like to pose is whether the paintings are reaffirming an
aesthetics of human rights or rather pointing to another project that
goes beyond it. In the aftermath of the world event (Danto) of Abu
MLN 129 (2014): 412432 2014 by Johns Hopkins University Press

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413

Ghraib, the appearance of Boteros Abu Ghraib series raises several

important questions not only about human rights but also about the
photographs: Is there something that Boteros paintings capture that
is absent in the photos? What else could these aesthetic depictions say
about human rights violations at Abu Ghraib that the photos had not
already stated? Does this collectionand its commitment to aesthetic
formsuggest perhaps another interpretation that does not fit within
the moral utopia of human rights (Moyn 214)?
This essay considers these questions from within the field of Latin
American cultural studies; more precisely, this essay argues that
Boteros collection represents a break with the logic of human rights
that dominates contemporary Latin Americanist criticism and theory.
Since the 1970s, many Latin Americanists have sought to eliminate
the division between art and life on behalf of human rights. Two of
the primary forms in which this elimination has been envisioned are
the Latin American testimonio and the Chilean neo-avant-garde. What
is more, scholarship has treated works such as Elizabeth Burgoss Me
llamo Rigoberta Mench y as me naci la conciencia (1982) and Lotty
Rosenfelds Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (1979) as not only a
means to draw attention to state-sponsored abuses, but also, and more
importantly for the argument of this essay, as a mechanism through
which we as readers or viewers come to share the experiencethe
experience of pain in particularof those who have suffered these
abuses. In fact, for critics, the division between art and life is overcome
by imagining affective responses as qualities that pierce the viewer
in the name of human rights. This essay, however, argues that the
commitment to aesthetic form, and to what Michael Fried has called
absorption, in Boteros Abu Ghraib signifies a fissure, rather than, as
Ebony would have it, a continuation of this emphasis on human rights
in discourses about art in Latin America. As such, this essay asserts
that Boteros series shifts viewers away from contemporary aestheticoethical projects that mobilize affect on behalf of human rights and
in so doing, the collection makes available another reading of utopia
that moves beyond the discourse of human rights.1

1
I have written about the limitations of human rights elsewhere. See my essay From
Revolution to Human Rights in Mario Benedettis Pedro y el Capitn. Some of these
limitations will be discussed in the last section of this essay. Scholars such as Williams,
Gundermann and iek have also critiqued aspects of human rights discourse.

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Eugenio Di Stefano

Boteros Abu Ghraib in Context

From the position of art history, and pictorial depictions of violence
in particular, Boteros paintings of the Abu Ghraib prisoners as they
are beaten, sexually abused, blindfolded, hooded, bound with ropes
and attacked by dogs, does not present a radical break with any school
or style. Even within a Hispanic tradition, the collection clearly follows a long genealogy of works representing atrocities, ranging from
Francisco Goyas The Third of May (1814) and Pablo Picassos Guernica
(1937) to Jos Clemente Orozcos Man of Fire (1939) and David Alfaro
Siqueiross The Torment of Cuauhtmoc (1950). Nor does Abu Ghraib
represent a departure from Boteros own oeuvre, which includes one
series on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as another examining
the violence in Colombia during the 1980s, including depictions
of the cocaine kingpin, Pablo Escobar. Documenting violence and
human rights violations, then, has been as present in Boteros work
as his boteromorphs, his puffed-up, exaggerated figures.2 In this way,
if Boteros Abu Ghraib is regarded as significant, this is not because it
represents a thematic break with either a universal or Latin American
pictorial tradition or his own career of depicting atrocities. In fact, to
frame the Abu Ghraib series as simply a question of subject matter, or
even within the trajectory of an individual artist, is to miss a striking
difference between the pictorial tradition of violence and Boteros
collection.
This difference, in part, has less to do with Boteros own wish to
represent Abu Ghraib than with living in a world where technological
advances in other media render painting increasingly less relevant as a
form for depicting these events. Undeniably, this phenomenon is not
new. The emergence of photography in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries reveals, among other things, that painting as a medium to
record events becomes less reliable than photographys indexicality.
In contrast to, for example, an eighteenth-century landscape painting
depicting unexplored lands, painting today is no longer conceived
as a primary form to document, much less to make truth claims
beyond the subjective realm.3 This irrelevance of painting in relation
to documentation has only grown in recent years with the advent of
2
For more details on Boteros oeuvre, see Sillevis. For an interesting essay arguing
against the idea of Botero as a politically engaged artist, see Bartniz.
3
A point that the narrator of Csar Airas novel Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero
gets exactly right when he notes that the job of the landscape painter would be replaced
by a photographer in the twentieth century. For a brilliant essay on the question of
indexicality in photography, see Michaels.

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415

the Internet and digital cameras.4 The dominance of photography is

all the more noticeable with the release of the Abu Ghraib photos.
As the critic Arthur C. Danto keenly notes, these photos constitute a
world event, given the speed with which the images traveled around
the globe, creating strong affective responses for many who saw them.
A return to Picassos Guernica serves to highlight the radical shift from
painting to photography in recent years. Despite the existence of
photos of the Spanish Civil War, few knew of the atrocities that had
occurred in this small town in northern Spain until Picassos painting; the horrors depicted by the photos of Abu Ghraib, on the other
hand, have achieved almost immediate universal recognition. In other
words, while Guernica as an event emerged in spite of photography,
Abu Ghraib was born because of it.5
But this world event is as much about technology as it is about a
human rights ideology that has spread across the globe. Since the
1970s, human rights has become the primary lens through which we
not only see abuses, but also understand violence. We will return to
this point later, but for now suffice it to say that in comparison to the
photos, Boteros paintings of Abu Ghraib, at best, can be understood
as providing a gentle reminder of these human rights abuses. More
likely, however, Boteros collection testifies to the growing irrelevance
of painting as a medium to inform, much less to impact, our relationship to human rights in any substantive way. As such, insofar as
Boteros Abu Ghraib is regarded as a break, this break is not found in
the paintings ability, unlike the photos, to document a pattern of
criminal behavior in open defiance and contempt of international
humanitarian conventions (Sontag). Rather, the break is found in
the collections very refusal to do what the photos already do.
Aesthetic Form in a Human Rights World
We can begin to see something like this refusal in Boteros own account
of how he first conceptualized the Abu Ghraib series. In this narrative,
4
It is undoubtedly true that the ontology of digital photography is different than
that of analogue photography. Nevertheless, photography still continues to maintain
a level of factuality that is absent in paintings; and this sense of factuality still guides
most peoples relationship to photography, despite the emergence of digital photography. Manipulation, on the other hand, has been as central to the history of analogue
photography as it has to digital photography.
5
This does not mean that the Army did not know about the abuses that were occurring in Abu Ghraib. Indeed, the Taguba report, a fifty-three-page document that was
completed in late February 2004 and subsequently leaked, had already documented
much of what had taken place.

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Eugenio Di Stefano

Botero stresses that he was inspired not by the photos but by reading
several articles, including Seymour Hershs New Yorker essay, the first
major essay that reported on the violations (Juan Carlos Botero 16);
Boteros mention of Hershs essay highlights the fantasy not only to
create an image from one that was not there, but also to produce a
distance from the photos that were found everywhere. We also see this
distancing in the collections complete absence of references to iconic
photos such as the hooded man, Sabrina Harmans smile or even
Lynndie England holding a leash.6 In fact, the perpetrators, who are
present in most of the iconic photos, smiling and posing, are almost
nonexistent in the paintings. Instead, the paintings illustrate prisoners
who are agonizingly by themselves, suffering in dark corridors, confined to their cells and their own immediate pain. Moreover, the rich
tones of the figures who are painted in deep, saturated yellows and
reds intensify the presence of these rotund bodies in pain. As several
critics have suggested, Boteros Abu Ghraib brings to mind Baroque
representations of Christian martyrdom.7 Yet, this gesture toward the
Baroque in Boteros Abu Ghraib has less to do with a theme or style
than with a certain exaggeration of aesthetic form that is vital to the
Baroque; that is, the commitment to the amplified figurative representation marks a shift away from the grainy realism of the photos. The
idea here is that Boteros series attempts neither to create another
version of the photos, nor to reproduce the pain that the photos
make evident. Instead, the idea is that Abu Ghraib sets out to create a
space in which Abu Ghraib can exist without the photos. That is, the
distance between the photos and these representations functions to
assert a space for aesthetic form.
A closer look at the composition of these paintings reaffirms this
investment in aesthetic form in relation to the photos. In Boteros Abu
Ghraib, one is immediately struck not only by the absence of perpetrators, but also by the prisoners who never look outward toward the
beholder. Unlike, for example, the iconic photo of Harmans smile,
Boteros figures are either looking off to the side, blindfolded, or have
their bare backs openly facing us. These figures deliberately turn away
from us, denying not only our presence, but also whatever reaction
we may be experiencing. This disregard for the beholder is doubled
by other techniques that are internal to the paintings, techniques
6
For an intriguing discussion on the abuses that occurred in Abu Ghraib prison and
their relationship to the photos, see Errol Morriss documentary Standard Operating
Procedure and his book Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography.
7
See, for example, Emory and Danto.

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that not only point inward toward the lives of these representational
subjects, but also produce a sort of spatial fissure between these figures
and the beholder. For example, in Abu Ghraib 56 we see two prisoners that are hooded and turned away from the beholder, facing each
other, one looking upward toward the sky, perhaps praying, while the
other prisoner is forced to look downward, as a blue glove from a
military police pushes him forward. Prison bars, noticeably, are placed
between the prisoners and the beholder, which, as the critic and artist
Juan Carlos Botero notes, creates a sort of distance, a visual barrier
between the viewer and the brutality of the scene (20). Abu Ghraib
65 presents another version of this distance between the beholder
and the figures in the paintings by adding a perspectival movement
toward a vanishing point. Here, a hooded prisoner stands in a long
corridor, hands tied behind his back and ankles shackled; his naked
body is turned away from us, turned toward the end of the corridor
where a barred window lets in some light. The painting directs us first
to his body and then farther toward the end of the corridor, away from
our position as viewers, away from whatever experience we may feel.
What these prisonerswho are utterly absorbed in their own realityreveal, and what these visual barriers reconfirm, is less a physical
or emotional distance than a conceptual distance that functions to
reinforce a space for the work of art. Indeed, these figures, who turn
figuratively from the photos and literally from the beholders, serve to
better delineate and define the aesthetic proper. As such, we might
say that Boteros Abu Ghraib finds its theoretical equivalent in what
Michael Fried has called absorption. In his 1980 book Absorption and
Theatricality, Fried examines a period of French painting that centers on
the work of Diderot, and how this shift away from the beholder came
to be a primary concern for painters of this period. Fried describes
absorption as paintings that treated the beholder as if he were not
there (5). For Fried, absorption, of course, does not signify that the
artist does not paint, in part, with the beholder in mind, but rather,
it provides the most effective account of art as a supreme fiction,
demanding an absolutely perspicuous mode of pictorial unity (103).
Here, the supreme fiction and unity of art reflect a commitment
not to a certain genre or style, but rather to marking an autonomous
aesthetic space that lives outside the beholder and his experience.
That is, absorption offers the clearest theoretical conception of the
creation of aesthetic form. In this way, the importance of the absorbed
figures in Boteros Abu Ghraib is found not only in its refusal of the
iconic photos, which have triggered strong affective responses in

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Eugenio Di Stefano

beholders, but also in the reassertion of its status as art that renders
the beholder and his experiencepolitical or otherwiseirrelevant.8
Which leaves open the question whether Boteros Abu Ghraib is less
invested in presenting a political testimony that denounces a pattern
of criminal behavior in open defiance and contempt of international
humanitarian conventions (Sontag) than in asserting a space of
aesthetic form that may in fact come at the expense of these politics.
As the title of Frieds book makes clear, absorption intersects with the
idea of theatricality, a type of painting that not only openly acknowledges, but also demands the absolute presence of the beholder and
his lived position. Theatricality, according to Fried, becomes central to
minimalist work beginning in the 1960s, but it also becomes central,
as I want to suggest here, to works depicting torture in a more recent
moment. In fact, unlike Boteros absorptive project, many recent
paintings depicting torture are theatrical, including Leon Golubs
Interrogation II (1981), which illustrates two mercenaries smiling at
the beholder, while they torture a person sitting in a chair. Boteros
collection is also quite different from other artistic projects that relate
to Abu Ghraib, such as Gerald Laings American Gothic (2004), that
uses the backdrop of Grant Woods painting, and replaces the farmers
with American MPs Lynndie England and Charles Graner. With their
thumbs up, both look directly and triumphantly at the beholder. Graner smirks and England smiles, while right below lies a pile of naked
Iraqi prisoners. These recent theatrical works make the beholder
structurally essential to the composition, for they not only look at, but
also attempt to interpellate the viewer. Or again to return to the critic
Juan Carlos Botero, these theatrical works demand that: there is no
space between us and the victim, since we share the same visual reality.
That is to say that we are not only direct witnesses to this barbarity,
we are also included within it, whether we like it or not, and thus we
participate in the horror (20).9 Juan Carlos Boteros observation is
important since it highlights a crucial theoretical point. The idea here
is not the simple connection that the beholder maintains with the
horror, but rather that the beholder ceases to be a beholder and,
8
It should be noted that the Abu Ghraib photos were shown in New Yorks International Center of Photography in September 2004 and also in the Andy Warhol Museum
in Pittsburgh. This point reveals that while the gallery exhibition of the photos, in a
sense, blurs the lines between art and life, the paintings seek instead to insist on the
aesthetic world.
9
Juan Carlos Boteros claim is made about several pieces in Boteros Abu Ghraib. Although I disagree with this reading of Boteros paintings, I have cited him here because
his claim perfectly embodies the political gesture of theatrical art.

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instead, is transformed into a direct witness who participate[s]

in the event whether we like it or not (20); that is, the beholder is
transformed into a subject that must be morally included in the event.
This new status of the beholder as a direct witness also alerts us to
another important idea about theatrical paintings: the desire to alter
the status of the work of art. Indeed, according to Juan Carlos Botero,
what the direct witness sees is no longer described as art but as horror (20). Fried, in a related context, notes that this commitment to
the primacy of experience is, at the same time, the negation of art
(Objecthood 153), since structurally there is no longer a distinction
between art and the beholder. Rather than art, there is a situation
one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder (153). In short,
these theatrical works on torture and Abu Ghraib seek to eliminate
their status as art in order to immerse the witness in the politics of
the event. But if these anti-absorptive works reveal that the status of
art comes at the expense of the beholders experience, Abu Ghraibs
investment in aesthetic form signals the complete rejection of the idea
of the beholder who whether we like it or not [ . . . ] participate[s]
in this horror (Juan Carlos Botero 20). And, as we will see below, this
commitment to aesthetic form represents not only a distance from the
photos and the theatrical paintings, but also, and more importantly
for this essay, a break with a Latin American human rights project that
has sought both to eliminate aesthetic unity and to force the beholder
to participate (20) in the discourse of human rights. Or to state this
differently, Latin American scholarship has insisted on imagining a
world in which the beholder is a direct witness who must envision
all injustices through the lens of human rights.
Human Rights in Latin America
We started this essay by noting that for Ebony, the importance of
Boteros Abu Ghraib is located in its ability not only to document
but also to make us morally aware of these human rights violations:
Botero, in his Abu Ghraib series suggests that anyone with a sense
of humanity must realize that fighting terrorist attacks with further
acts of cruelty and terror is not the right solution (18). Francine
Masiello has extended this human rights project beyond the context
of the United States, arguing that the paintings also draw awareness to
violations in Boteros own Latin America. In particular, she contends
that the collection speaks to the torture and disappearances that have
taken place during the years of state-sponsored terrorism in countries

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Eugenio Di Stefano

such as Mexico, Argentina and Chile. For Masiello, Boteros paintings

represent a comprehensible and earnest offshoot of [this] ethical
expression (14), and thus work within a larger framework of Latin
American cultural production that has dedicated itself to remembering
the countless human rights violations that occurred during the 1970s,
1980s and 1990s in these and other Latin American countries. Yet, as
we will see, Boteros absorptive project problematizes this form of a
human rights ethical expression that is central to a predominant
form of Latin American theory and criticism.
While Boteros Abu Ghraib insists on a distance between aesthetic
form and the beholder that is, a space between art and lifeLatin
American human rights scholarship has sought not only to eliminate
this space, but also to imagine this elimination as crucial to critical
projects mobilized on behalf of human rights. Human rights cultural
projects take on various genres and forms, including documentaries,
fiction films, monuments, plays and novels.10 Furthermore, much of this
work has centered on documenting the states inability to protect its
citizens and raising awareness regarding these violations. Nevertheless,
it is the critical work focusing on new forms (Beverley, Margin 30)
of articulation such as the Latin American testimonio and the Chilean
neo-avant-garde movement that has received much theoretical attention.11 To be sure, these new forms are equally committed to drawing
awareness and protesting state-sponsored terror. Nevertheless, their
theoretical importance centers less on the subject matter of the work,
since the representation of these violations is readily available in more
conventional forms, such as documentaries, novels and plays. In fact,
in many ways, their theoretical intervention is understood as a break
with the idea of representation as such. For example, for Nelly Richard, who champions the work of the Chilean neo-avant-gardework
that, unlike Frieds idea of aesthetic unity (103), seeks to blur the
line between art and lifeconventional realist representation in paintings, literature (including the testimonio), and film function within
the logic of [p]ractical reason, direct language, and useful knowl10
There are many works of fiction that deal with human rights violations in Latin
America. See Agosns collection for a good overview.
11
The Chilean neo-avant-garde or La escena de avanzada is formed in the late 1970s;
within this larger project, CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte) is formed which is comprised of five members: Artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo, sociologist Fernando
Balcells, writer Diamela Eltit and poet Ral Zurita. For more details on the avanzada
movement, see Richards Mrgenes e instituciones, Camnitzer and Neustadt. For more
details on the connection between the testimonio and the neo-avant-garde, see my
forthcoming article in Revista de Estudios Hispnicos.

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edge, and for this reason they are leading partners with powerful
bureaucracies and technocracies of meaning (Residues 5).12 More to
the point, what is wrong with representation is that it is symptomatic
of an epistemic mode that endorses a logic in which questions of
truth, belief, meaning, intention and interpretation are intimately
connected to modernization and capitalist production. For Richard,
then, even though a testimony or a human rights monument may
draw awareness to these abuses, the medium in which it is expressed
nevertheless promotes, albeit implicitly, the logic of authoritarianism
in the dictatorship and neoliberal consensus in postdictatorship (18).
The attacks on aesthetic unity and representation are also paramount to political accounts of the testimonio as a form that promotes
international human rights and solidarity (Beverley, Margin 37).
George Ydice, who champions the testimonial narrative and who
undoubtedly disagrees with Richards account of realism and the
testimonial form in particular, nevertheless situates the testimonio,
like Richard, in opposition to representation: the speaker does not
speak for or represent a community but rather performs an act of
identity-formation (42). Similarly, John Beverley sees the testimonio
as an anti-literary endeavor that breaks with literature and the literary, both of which have been intrinsically tied to bourgeois writing
since the Renaissance(Margin 35). Like Richard, Beverley connects
conventional representation and art to a reactionary politics. Furthermore, for all these critics, what is integral is not simply an attack
on representation or art, but also the fact that their critique has less
to do with the content these forms represent than with the question
of whether they do or do not represent. That is, texts that endorse
human rights are imagined less as representing human rights than as
drawing us within the world in which these violations occur. Unlike
Boteros absorptive project, the testimonio and Richards description
of the neo-avant-garde actively seek to eliminate the divide between
the aesthetic world and the political world. In brief, they attempt
transform art into a real-life event that one must experience.

12
In an interview with Idelber Avelar, Richard has argued that conventional art, like
paintings, belongs to the subjective realm and is ultimately selfish. The avanzada, on
the other hand, is envisioned as a reaction to the cult value of painting and other
conventional forms by stressing the indeterminate nature of the object that seeks to
break out of the self-referential and elitist nature of art (Escena 261).

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Eugenio Di Stefano

After Interpretation or people feel it . . . they feel it

As we stated above, Boteros Abu Ghraib, and the absorbed figures in
particular, reveal a commitment not only to the aesthetic proper, but
also to the irrelevance of the beholder and his or her experience.
As such, we can see that absorption within painting (since at least
Diderot) allegorizes a certain relationship that art maintains with the
beholder. On the one hand, against Juan Carlos Boteros claim that
whether we like it or not [ . . . ] we participate in the horror (20),
absorption insists on space for the beholder to interpret the object
as artworkthat is, insists on a space from which interpretation can
take placerather than as a sense of horror that one must experience. On the other, absorption transcends the beholder since, unlike
the testimonio or the neo-avant-garde, the meaning of the object
is not constitutive of the beholders presence or experience. That
is, the meaning of the painting is found within the frame, and not
within the beholder or a situationone that, virtually by definition
includes the beholder (Objecthood 153). In this way, if the commitment
to absorption is a commitment to aesthetic interpretation, the gesture
of turning art into horror is also a gesture to eliminate a space of
interpretation and replace it with a sense of ones experience. This
negation of art (Fried, Objecthood 153) thus underscores that we are
experiencing rather than interpreting an aesthetic object. Or said differently, and to return to the Latin American context, the testimonio
and the Chilean neo-avant-garde not only attack aesthetic unity, but
also imagine that politics begins once the divide between art and life
is overcome. Latin American criticism and theory insists that art be
reinscribed as a situationas a situation of pain in particularthat is
felt rather than communicated or understood. That is, human rights
criticism is crucially affective in scope.
In the last decade, there has been much attention paid to the
so-called affective turn in theory and criticism. In an excellent essay
attacking the theoretical foundation of affect theory, Ruth Leys
defines affect as independent of, and in an important sense prior
to ideologythat is, prior to intentions, meanings, reasons, and
beliefsbecause [affects] are nonsignifying, autonomic processes
that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and meaning (437). This turn toward noncognitive, corporeal processes or
states(437) is flourishing today both inside and outside of Hispanic
studies.13 Nevertheless, this commitment to affect theory, in many ways,
See, for example, Moraa and Snchez Prados recent collection on affect.

13

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looks like a continuation of the attack on representation that began

in the 1970s. In her recent essay on affect, for example, Jo Labanyi
calls upon scholars to try to find ways of thinking beyond, or outside
of, representation (223). The Latin Americanist affect theorist Jon
Beasley-Murray also considers affect to be outside of representation:
What matters is how things present themselves to us, not what they
may represent (205). Affect theory makes evident that the readers
relationship to the text has less to do with intentions, meanings, or
beliefs than with how objects affect the beholder regardless of the
whether they are in fact representations. Leys describes this project as
moving attention away from considerations of meaning or ideology
or indeed representation to the subjects subpersonal material-affective
responses, where, it is claimed, political and other influences do their
real work(451). Since affect is grounded in preindividual entities that
unite all of us (Beasley-Murray 205), it is unsurprising that it is also
paramount to recent theoretical accounts of what is human when
speaking about human rights. According to this logic, affect functions
as a material ground zero from where a human rights politics begins
in Latin America; a sort of bare life that connects us all.14
Or said differently, from the vantage point of affect theory, insofar
as representation, meanings and beliefs are understood as secondary,
the subjects subpersonal material-affective responses (Leys 451) is
an essential claim when theorizing resistance and contesting power.
For example, Richard praises the neo-avant-garde artist Diamela
Eltits El padre mo (1989) for moving past representation, the referent
and meaning by producing a convulsion of senses in the beholder
(Residues 77); that is, in contrast to more conventional forms, El padre
mo establishes an affective bond with the beholder while disrupting
the cognitive ability to understand. Similarly, testimonial scholarship
locates its political relevance not in producing truth or representation, but rather in transmitting a truth effect (Beverley, Margin
33) or offers an encounter with the Real (qtd. in Beverley, Real
70). Some scholars claim that the testimonio is a form of representation; nevertheless, it is the authenticity of the subalterns experience
rather than the representation of the subalterns experience that
brings the testimonio one step closer to triggering what Beverley calls
an ethical and political response in the beholder (Margin 31).15
14
For a good example of how Agambens idea of bare life is connected to human
rights, see Avelars Unpacking the Human in Human Rights: Bare Life in the Age
of Endless War and Butlers Frames of War: When Lives Are Grievable?
15
See Cols as well as Larsen for excellent critiques of anti-representational accounts
of the testimonio.

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Eugenio Di Stefano

In a similar fashion to El padre mo, the testimonio is more concerned

with making the beholder experience the situation of the subaltern
than with the beholder interpreting the text. The importance in both
the testimonio and the neo-avant-garde is not found in the beholders
beliefs about the meaning of the text, since, as we saw above, beliefs,
truth and intentions, for these critics, are intrinsic to an epistemic
mode connected to the market. Instead, beliefsbeliefs about what
the text meansstand in the way of how the text makes us feel. That
is, the ethical importance of these new forms is related not to the
beholders interpretation and understanding of the literary work, but
rather to his affective response as such. Which is just to say that what
makes these new forms politically important reflects a theoretical
turn away from the meaning of the text and a turn toward how the
horror (Juan Carlos Botero 20) affects the viewer. Or said differently still, like the recent paintings on torture and Abu Ghraib, the
testimonio and the neo-avant-garde, as they are described here, are
theatrical in logic insofar as they insist not only on the presence of
the beholder, but also on the elimination of a space to understand
them as representation.
To the extent that affect has become integral to the way Latin
Americanists approach politics and ethical responses to atrocities, it
should come as no surprise that it is also essential to a host of critics
who have written about Boteros collection as part of a human rights
project. We can return, for example, to Masiello, who declares that
the political power of Boteros Abu Ghraib lies in the fact that, [w]e
feel the substance. We are here in a sensate world that demands us to
be awakened. [The paintings] [w]ork with the senses, then, as a way
toward political awakening (17). In much the same way as Masiello,
Thomas Laqueur articulates this political awakening vis--vis affect:
Images of suffering and violence constitute a claim [ . . . ] to be
regarded, to be noticed, to be seen as images of someone to whom
one has ethical obligations (8). And Botero himself has argued that
what distinguishes his paintings from the photos is the concentration of energy, of emotion that goes into a painting . . . people feel
it . . . they feel it (Laqueur 8). What all these claims insist on is not
representation per se, but rather the materiality of objects (e.g. feel
the substance, concentration of energy) as a way of demand[ing]
or constitut[ing] a claim in the beholder. More specifically, what
is being highlighted in these accounts is that an ethical obligation
(Laqueur 8) is triggered more by what the materiality makes the viewer
feel than by the aesthetic world that Boteros Abu Ghraib portrays.

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In brief, aesthetic representation, according to this logic, must be

overcome in order to feel the real political force of Boteros series.
But where human rights work wants to negate art and representation, what this essay has sought to show is the Abu Ghraib collections
complete refusal to be anything but art and representation. Indeed,
in the face of contemporary Latin American human rights projects,
Boteros collection rests on its clear absorptive commitment to aesthetic form and interpretation. That is, the insistence on absorption
represents a break from a type of theatrical project found not only
in more recent paintings on torture, but also, and more importantly
for this essay, in the testimonio and the Chilean neo-avant-garde that
radically invoke the beholder, demanding an ethical obligation
(Laqueur 8) or ethical response (Beverley, Margin 31) from him
or her. Said differently, Boteros Abu Ghraib is significant not because it
constitutes a claim (Laqueur 8), but rather because, in an important
way, it demands nothing from us. And it is precisely here that Boteros
paintings present the most dramatic departure from recent Latin
American human rights art and criticism. While Boteros paintings
attempt to treat the viewers reactionand even the viewer himselfas
a matter of indifference, Latin American theory and criticism have set
out not only to invoke, but also to make the viewer complicit with this
human rights world, a world in which, as Juan Carlos Botero reminds
us, we must participate (20). In this sense, Boteros paintings are
breaking with the theatricality human rights demands of art as well
as with contemporary human rights logic. If what counts for Latin
American critics is how things present themselves to us (BeasleyMurray 205), the collection instead signals a type of project that
transcends our presence; that is, for the series to do its political work,
we, and our experience, must be considered irrelevant. I want to be
clear that the idea here is not to negate the subject matter: Boteros
paintings clearly depict torture and abuses. Nevertheless, what this
essay is highlighting is how the integrity of pictorial unity (Fried
103) and the irrelevance of the beholder signal an important break
with a tendency that has dominated human rights aesthetic projects:
namely, the primacy of the beholder and his experience. What I argue
in the next section is that Boteros insistence on the aestheticvis--vis
contemporary Latin American cultural outputnot only represents a
certain move away from predominant human rights theoretical work in
Latin America, but also points to a political project that goes beyond
this human rights world; a project that shifts from the complicity of

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human rights to interpretation, beliefs and an anti-capitalist reading

of Boteros Abu Ghraib.
The Last Utopia of Human Rights
If it is true that the photos as a world event draw awareness to human
rights violations, it is equally true that the ideology of human rights
is the primary lens through which we see not only the photos, but
also the world. In short, we now live in a world in which the moral
utopia (Moyn 214) of human rights has transformed itself into the
primary ideology through which we articulate our politics. In a recent
book, Samuel Moyn argues that human rights are the last utopia
(4). What he means is that human rights has outlasted all other
political ideologies, including communism, that address questions of
justice and freedom. For Moyn, the aim of human rights is primarily
to protect the rights of the individual against the state. Undoubtedly,
this objective is a radical departure from Cold War politics, which
centers on an ideological disagreement between communism and
liberalism, as a question of which creates the best form of justice. In
this sense, the 1970s marks a watershed moment for human rights,
since this Cold War disagreement begins to come apart; when what
counts is no longer whether we believe communism or liberalism is
right or wrong, but rather whether our beliefs are respected or not,
regardless of what they are; where beliefs, in short, are treated as
a function of who we are and what we feel. What becomes central
in this moral utopia (214) is not the meaning of our beliefs, but
rather that these beliefs are innately ours. In this way, bereft of their
political antagonism, beliefs are now conceived primarily as affective
signs of human life that, like speech, race and language, should be
valued and respected.
Perhaps the best example of this disarticulation of beliefs in Latin
America is established in the very exercise of recuperating the memories of human rights abuses in testimonios, novels and films, rather than
understanding the geopolitical events that brought about the events.16
From the perspective of a progressive politics, when remembering
the period of the 1970s and 1980s, as Masiello clearly attempts to do
with her reading of Boteros Abu Ghraib, what becomes paramount are
16
Beginning in the 1970s, Latin America witnesses the emergence of human rights
networks. For an insightful essay on the emergence of this network in Latin America,
see Sikkink.

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questions about the abuses and violations brought about by the State
and not the political beliefs that brought about the conflicts in the
first place, namely, the ideological disagreement between liberalism
and communism. During the 1960s and early 1970s, communism was
envisioned chiefly as a project to eradicate class inequality and the
system that sustained it. What this means is that while the Left in the
1960s and 1970s wanted to eliminate the capitalist state that produced
inequality, the Left in power today wants to remember the past as a
moment in which life, citizenship, and human rights were violated.17
The idea here is important because it reveals that the investment in
memory today revolves around remembering these human rights
abuses and not an anti-capitalist project that had little to do with
protecting individuals from state abuses.
The absence of an anti-capitalist Left and its replacement with a
human rights Left is felt everywhere, as the neoliberal policies of the
last thirty years have only increased the level of economic inequality
throughout Latin America. Indeed, despite the rise of the Left in the
last decade, Latin America continues to have the highest levels of
inequality anywhere in the world. In a certain sense, this shouldnt be
a surprise because the Left, since coming to power, has done very little
to alter the neoliberal policies that were first put in place by the Right.
To be sure, while it is true that in the last two decades, human rights
justice regarding punishing perpetrators has improved, and while it
is also true that the Left does a better job of treating the poor as fellow citizens and representing them within the national imaginary, the
objective of the Left in the 1960s and 1970s was not to respect or even
do a better job of representing the poor, but rather to eliminate the
conditions that created the poor; that is, to eliminate the system that
produced poverty. Today, the Lefts commitment to the poor under
human rights involves not eradicating poverty, but treating poverty
primarily as a part of a discriminatory practice that limits democracy;
the problem with poverty, according to this logic, is that it unfairly
prohibits full participation in the benefits of living in a liberal society.
At the same time, the main attack leveled at the Right by the Left
today is that it continues its unjust practices against not only victims
of past human rights abuses, but also the poor, women, indigenous
peoples, etc. That is, the principal accomplishment of the Left, and the

17
I have written about this transformation from revolutionary subjects to human
rights citizens elsewhere. See my article From Shopping Malls to Memory Museums:
Reconciling the Recent Past in the Uruguayan Neoliberal State.

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Eugenio Di Stefano

success of the so-called leftist turn, is understood principally through

the lens of tolerance, respect and the growing diversity and stability of
Latin American democracy.18 What is lost, of course, in this vision, is
that the Left and the Right now endorse the same system that continues
to produce economic inequality. What is lost, in other words, is that
while the Left seeks to unite us under the banner of human rights it
does so by ignoring the economic gap that continues to divide the
rich and poor. From this position, human rights as a dominant form
of leftist politics has become the key technology through which the
Left masks its complete capitulation to neoliberal orthodoxy in Latin
America. Far from producing an alternative to capitalism, the Left
today now endorses the capitalist system and the capitalist state that
they, in their most radical form, once sought to destroy. Or to make
the claim more forcefully still, the Left todaythrough their emphasis
on human rights as the last utopia (Moyn 4) has successfully, and
perhaps paradoxically, concluded the emancipatory project that the
military dictatorship first set out destroy in the 1970s.
Aesthetics, as we have already seen, are also imagined as a means
to emphasize the commitment to affect indicative of human rights.
Within the predominant form of Latin American criticism and theory
today, the theoretical concern revolves around how the text affects us
rather than what the text means. In her seminal book Tiempo pasado,
Beatriz Sarlo argues a similar point about the testimonio, a form whose
first-person narrative makes it exceedingly difficult to imagine a way
of critiquing the narrators experience. While Sarlo believes that this
is an experience that is limited to the testimonio, as we saw above, the
work of the neo-avant-garde is also centrally about producing an experience over creating interpretation. Indeed, the way we approach art
today is no longer centered on disagreementI believe that Boteros
Abu Ghraib is a critique of human rights, you disagreebut rather
on a question of how we respond to the text through our different
experiences and affective responsesI experience pain, you do not.
Here, there is no disagreement, we are just experiencing different
emotions; and, of course, experiencing these different emotions is
chiefly viewed through our interests and our identities rather than
our beliefs about what the text means, which are imagined as right
or wrong, regardless of who we are and what we feel. The utopia of
human rights, in other words, insists on turning antagonistic beliefs

See Castaedas book, which lays the foundation for this project in the early 1990s.

18

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429

about the meaning of the text into experiences that inform our various subject positions.
Insofar as human rights affect is the dominant discourse today
that is, insofar as what counts is that the victims experience is our
ownit does so by imagining that beliefs about the meaning of a
text are secondary to feeling the pain of the other. This evacuation of
beliefs by the critics discussed in this essay not only situates Boteros
paintings exclusively within the discourse of human rights, but also
envisions past anti-capitalist projects in Latin America as if they were
Abu Ghraib. This ideologythat is, the moral utopia of human rights
and affectnot only keeps us from talking about the world in different ways, but also keeps us thinking up new technologies to imagine
human rights as the only project for the Left that counts. Today, the
mobilization of affect on behalf of human rights is perhaps the most
persuasive discursive strategy within cultural criticism through which
the Left comes not only to forget its commitment to class equality,
but also, and importantly, to endorse neoliberalism today.
Nevertheless, if we read the human rights project in this way, that is,
that representations of violence in Latin America are meant to make
the beholder complicit in human rights rather than open to interpretation, then Boteros paintings, in their insistence on absorption
and aesthetic form, can be considered as a crucial intervention within
Latin American art and criticism. My point is not that this aesthetic
world prevents us from sympathizing with the figures or even identifying with the pain of those who were tortured. Nor does it prevent us
from understanding that feelings are fundamental to the paintings.
Rather, the paintings insistence on interpretation rather than experience highlights that Boteros series, as artwork, is not reducible to the
beholders experience of it. In brief, insofar as the paintings make
evident that the experience of the object cannot be the experience of
the subject, they assert not only a space for interpretation, but also a
theoretical possibility of thinking outside the world of human rights.
In this way, in a contemporary moment where antagonistic political
and aesthetic beliefs are seen increasingly as less relevant, Boteros
Abu Ghraib insists on a structural position where beliefs are considered paramount. The argument of this essay has not been to suggest
that Botero intentionally rejects human rights; nor is the point that
he intentionally rejects the market (despite the fact that he refuses
to sell any of the pieces in the Abu Ghraib series. We are, in fact, talking about an artist whose commercial fame outside of Latin America
can only be matched by that of Isabel Allendes). Rather, the idea

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Eugenio Di Stefano

is that the aesthetic (i.e. creating a space for the aesthetic proper)
rather than experience (i.e. eliminating a space between the art and
the beholder) provides a theoretical position from which the viewer
can move away from human rights immediacy and complicity. That
is, in the face of human rights theatricalityemblematic of the testimonio and neo-avant-gardeBoteros Abu Ghraib asserts a position
where beliefs, interpretation and representation are still understood
as crucial. In this way, Boteros series, perhaps unexpectedly, reveals
the importance of the aesthetic today, as a space where human rights
ideology is not simply made visible, but also, and more importantly,
contested as a project that endorses present-day neoliberal policies.
In short, Boteros Abu Ghraib provides an opening that allows us to
think beyond the limits of the last utopia of human rights and the
supremacy of neoliberalism today.
University of Nebraska, Omaha

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