2009 AAANZ Conference Abstracts - The Art Association of Australia ...

4. Remember Abu Ghraib: Post-Documentary Approach
to Images of Torture
Dr Uros Cvoro
Some of the most emblematic and disturbing images of the last
decade are the 2003 photographs of torture and humiliation
of prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison. Following their
disclosure to the public, these images have not only become
the symbols of the failed military enterprise in Iraq but also
contemporary photographic documents of torture.
This paper will discuss the usage of popular culture references
by artists Clinton Fein, Paul McCarthy, Steve Powers and
Gerald Laing to question the way in which the absorbtion of
the Abu Ghraib images into popular culture creates what art
historian Stephen Eisenman refers to as the ‘Abu Ghraib effect’:
desensitised, apathetic indifference to the images of violence.
The way in which these artists manipulate popular culture
references questions popular culture as an idiom through which
images of violence are processed and co-opted.
This paper will address the approach of these artists as ‘postdocumentary’
in the context of the shifting status of the Abu
Ghraib photos: they were ‘staged’ as spectacles for a particular
audience, and recording the humiliation was part of the process;
after becoming public they became shocking documents of
suffering; and since then they have arguably been stripped of
this status as documentary because of their ‘aestheticisation’
through media circulation.
Further, this paper will also examine the representation of torture
in art in relation to the absorption of Abu Ghraib photographs in
the media images and movie representations of torture such as
the new sub-genre of horror described as ‘torture-porn’.
Dr Uros Cvoro is a Lecturer in Art History/Theory at the
Australian Catholic University, Sydney. He has presented at
conferences in Australia and internationally. He has published
articles on contemporary art, nationalism and politics. His
book on the National Museum Australia and representations of
nationalism in Australia is due to be published in 2009.
5. SIEVX: The Recalibration of Mass Media Images
Veronica Tello
On 19 October 2001 while carrying 421 refugees to Christmas
Island, a fishing boat named by the Australian Government as
SIEVX (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel X) sank in international
waters, resulting in the deaths of 353 refugees. The German
artist Dierk Schmidt set out to “re-construct” the events that
surrounded the sinking of SIEVX in his 19 part painting series
SIEVX (2001-2005). The foremost problem for Schmidt in his
attempts to re-construct SIEVX was the absence of information
regarding this tragedy: in the initial months following the
sinking of SIEVX there were disparate media reports and the
Government repressed information. In this paper I explore the
attempts made by Schmidt to piece information together, for an
event which for various reasons the “truth” seemed impossible
to ascertain: Schmidt’s SIEVX would become embroiled in
an aesthetic fused with reality and fantasy, fact and fiction,
truth and artifice. Indeed, this paper will argue that such a
visual paradigm has become essential in era defined by the
Government and mass media’s stranglehold over the production
and dissemination of images of contemporary history – to which
artists now only play a secondary, but still critical, role: this is the
necessity to recalibrate mass media images within a distinct and
alternate visual realm – in Schmidt’s case, the art historical.
Veronica Tello is an art critic, publishing in Art Monthly, Art and
Australia, Artworld, Art Collector, Artlink, RealTime and Whitehot
Magazine. She is also the recipient of a 2010 Deutsche Börse
residency at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, co-editor of Iceberg
Journal and a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne,
where she was awarded an Australian Postgraduate Award, and
is completing her thesis on contemporary artists’ responses to
refugee experiences in Australia (2001-2007).
6. Mediating the Media: The Graphic Art of Daniel
Heyman and Diane Victor
Professor Elizabeth Rankin
While media hyperbole sensationalises the most dramatic and
cataclysmic aspects of contemporary crises, the art of both
Daniel Heyman in the USA and Diane Victor in South Africa
defies this focus of reportage, although in very different ways.
Heyman has been witness to interviews with Iraqi civilians
wrongly detained and tortured at Abu Ghraib, and makes
drypoints and gouache drawings that embed their portraits in
a web of testament. The repetitive press photographs of Abu
Ghraib not only revealed the atrocities, but in their dissemination
sustained the prisoners’ humiliation. Heyman’s images resist
this: they may confirm the sufferings, yet they restore dignity and
agency to the victims in their portraits and their words.
While Heyman imparts a human face to sensationalist coverage,
Victor focuses on events that have not hit the headlines in
post-apartheid South Africa. Her drawings and prints expose
concealed corruption and acts of brutality that warranted no
more than short entries on the inner pages of newspapers. An
etching series ironically titled The Disasters of Peace probes
public and private abuses, acknowledging the atrocities that
beset a country lauded for achieving political transition without
revolution. Victor’s work has been extremely contentious,
even removed from public display, despite the freedom from
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