http://visceral.net/aezthetk.organ
The Aestheticization of Torture, Diffused Through History and the Future by David Goldberg
From early July to mid-October the Herbst International Exhibition Hall displayed evidence of some of our species' most brutal cultural practices, on loan from the Criminal Medieval Museum of San Gimignano (Siena), Italy.
http://www.nato.int/ http://www.wto.org http://www.imf.org
I had heard of being "broken on/with the wheel,"
didn't know it involved weaving the shattered limbs of its victims through the spokes, lifting them into a horizontal position on the wheel's axle and, according to a seventeenth-century German chronicler, leaving these "huge screaming puppet[s]" to be "picked apart by crows." The breaking actually took place before mounting, the crushing blows from wheel's iron tire creating "a sea monster, of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh mixed up with splinters of smashed bones." Unfortunately the artistic earnestness behind the medieval engravings reproduced for the exhibition can be hard to appreciate through the fog of a postmodern vision clouded with images of concentration camps, atomic destruction, lynching photos, and the logging chain used to drag James Byrd Jr. to death in 1999. From the year 1200 to abolitionist pamphlets to CNN's website, torture has been aestheticized by the arts of writing and image-making, and hopelessly bound to the machinations and styles of religious, military, and folk-cultural repression, control and punishment. Complicating the already difficult relationship between visual representation and ideology is our species' impetus to refine and value the craftsmanship of its tools. This assembly of hand-made items had the power to draw forth a guilty admiration of an iron ring's geometric perfection, the blacksmithing skill behind an anthropomorphic cage, and the ghastly minimalism of wedges that victims were forced to ride with weighted ankles. "I like this one," said one male visitor, breaking the grim silence that tended to accumulate in the exhibition hall. His female companion did not respond, as she was absorbed in the accompanying curatorial text. It offered supplementary descriptions of how, when and on whom the devices were used: "In various places at various times - in some regions of France and Germany until the early nineteenth century - a 'bite' with a red-hot ripper was inflicted upon one breast of unmarried mothers, often whilst their creatures, splattered with maternal blood, writhed on the ground at their feet." Frequently, powerful descriptions like this also discussed how these centuries-old implements have been updated for contemporary use in the prisons and police basements of the post-colonial world: the spiked interrogation chair is now electrical, and modern head crushers are padded, so as not to leave any evidence of use. The text ostensibly took viewers out of a purely aesthetic interaction with the devices, to engage them with the taxonomy, geneology and evolution of torture. If we are expected to become aware of current human rights violations by looking at centuries-old implements of brutality, contemporary torture-related art and commentary on display, can we not become aware of future human rights violations by doing the same thing? Are there any current, highly-aestheticized means of social control and repression that will one day be collected in one place for the simultaneous purposes of admiration, indictment and historical benefit?
Some sentence fragments pulled almost at random from the chapter on torture in Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" should set the stage: "...political technology of the body..." "...multiform instrumentation..." "...a micro-physics of power..." "...a perpetual battle..." "...power is exercised rather than possessed..." "...these relations go right down into the depths of society..." "...innumerable points of confrontation, focuses of instability..." Foucault is asking us to not only look at the history of the torture devices themselves, and at the ideology that surrounds them, but to be aware of this torture-power's diffusion into society at large. Contemplating the items on display shows that the art of torture's "pre-history" was assembled and refined from disparate, informal practices in every day life. Some of the simpler torture elements like hooks, bridles, pincers, and blades are no different from items used for animal husbandry, warfare, metal working, butchering and building. Even the more elaborate apparati that turned, hoisted, stretched and ground the victim had a recognizable geneology connecting them to mill wheels, threshers, wagons, pre-industrial cranes and elevators. Similarly, if we look at one "post-history" of torture which inherited a shadow body of medical knowledge regarding the limits of human physiology and psychology, we see the specialized devices that were used to wrench open and mutilate human orifices as unmistakable prototypes of modern surgical instruments like the "Sawyer Rectal Retractor with Sklar Grip? Handle," the vast array of flower-like speculums used in gynecology, and the fantastically-shaped tools that open cavities, eyes, ears, and throats for medical inquiry. Dark iron and hard wood on display at the exhibition has been replaced with stainless steel and rubber available for purchase online. Though the intuitive connection between the two practices is disturbing, it is not meant to equate surgery itself with torture. However a Google search with the phrase "unnecessary surgery" yields over 100000 links that represent the opinions of doctors, citizens acting in the role of medical watchdogs, the survivors of botched operations, investigative journalists, and naturopaths. While surgery is frequently a sure means of extending life, the very real recognition that it can be misapplied illustrates one of Foucault's "innumerable points of confrontation," in this case between the medical establishment and the patient's human rights. Being aware of this struggle while perusing the illustrated online catalogs for medical instrument companies like Sklar Instruments, Allen Surgical, and the American Surgical Instruments Corporation introduces critical noise to a normally-clear channel reserved for commerce between suppliers and consumers. Behind the visual display of digitized line drawings, professionally-lit photographs and airbrush paintings of the instruments on these corporate websites, lurk the hysterectomies, circumcisions, tonsilectomies, caesarian sections and arthroscopic procedures. As surgical technique continues to develop towards infiltration rather than invasion of the body, shrinking its implements and relying increasingly on the reflection of energy waves, what is medically necessary risks obfuscation by what is convenient. Fortunately some future curator collecting today's "primitive" instruments for a museum show will not have to look back on and contextualize medical instrument trade shows that featured live demonstrations.
Along with the technological outgrowths of medieval torture are the harder-to-catalogue paths of cultural dispersion: Foucault's "perpetual battle." As an African-American it was hard to look at the collars, stocks, shackles and chains without contemplating the Middle Passage, slave-breaking practices in the Caribbean, and slave-disciplining systems on plantations throughout the Americas. While African Slavery in North America gathered steam in 1690, people were being broken on the wheel in the squares of Europe. A passage from the exhibition catalog states: "hundreds of depictions from the span 1450-1750 show throngs of plebeians and the well-born lost in rapt delight around a good wheeling." It is a short cultural hyperlink to Cairo, Illinois on a night in 1909, where a mass of people gathered beneath the electric lights studding the ironwork of Hustler's Arch on Commercial Avenue to witness a lynching. This scene would grace a circulated postcard reproduced in James Allen's book "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America." Like medieval torture, American lynching was a hybrid of terrorism, law enforcement and religious ideology. But because medieval torture devices and representations of their use are treated as objects of art history, while lynching photography is part of mass media, their abilities to seize our consciousness are very different. Because of a subliminal awareness of racist violence in America, a hypothetical exhibition of American slavery's capture and control devices presented with the same goals as the Herbst torture show would be less likely to elicit viewers' ironic or heartfelt admiration of neck-ring craftsmanship, the twisted genius of a treadmill dedicated to punishment, or the packing efficiency of a slave ship's hold. Not only would representing the historical torture of African Americans reveal its miscegenation with that of Europeans, but slide effortlessly into aesthetic images of "happy" servants on our food packaging, cast iron cariacatures, tapdancing automata, white entertainers in blackface, and virulent mockery in cartoons, radio and early television. The emergence and superficial dilution of African American torture-media marks the transition to our contemporary democratization of humiliation and market-driven disruption of human relationships. We overlook the menacing spirit which endlessly repeats the images and narratives of "reality television," talk shows and advertising at superhuman scales; because so many of the bodies are white and beautiful, sculpted by exercise machines, regimented diets, and harsh photographic sessions that are readily compared (if only ironically) to torture practices. It is as if dizzying narcissism has prevented us from imagining the system in its totality. This is our present, directly descended from Inquisitions and witch-hunts, their systems of fear-induction softened, turned lighter than air, and completely decentralized (unless you are a poor). In two hundred years, an exhibition anologous to the Herbst torture show won't show televisions, non-ergonomic computer keyboards, or the cars that immobilize us in traffic for hours at a time. Instead of Foucault, this future exhibition might invoke the declassfied CIA torture manual which states that the goal of the art is to induce regression, rendering the subject open to suggestion. Recommended tactics include humiliation, the disruption of regular physiological cycles, constant shifting of the "rules" of victim interaction, and the threat of pain rather than its actual administration. With that theoretical context established, some representation of our contemporary media and its attendant economic system serve as a harsh reminder of what the species is capable of, and probably still doing. In a spirit derived from our laughing at the very commercials that insult us, future people will doubtlessly admire and cringe at the facility with which we are "broken."