What Can a Painting Do?: Absorption and Aesthetic Form in Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib as a Response to Affect Theory and the Moral Utopia of Human Rights

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 Botero’s 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 Ghraib, the appearance of Botero’s Abu Ghraib series raises several important questions not only about human rights but also about the photographs: Is there something that Botero’s 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 collection—and its commitment to aesthetic form—suggest 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 Botero’s 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 Burgos’s Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1982) and Lotty Rosenfeld’s 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 experience—the experience of pain in particular—of 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 Botero’s 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 Botero’s 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

Botero’s Abu Ghraib in Context

From the position of art history, and pictorial depictions of violence in particular, Botero’s 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 Goya’s The Third of May (1814) and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) to José Clemente Orozco’s Man of Fire (1939) and David Alfaro Siqueiros’s The...