"BOTERO SEES THE WORLD'S TRUE HEAVIES AT ABU GHRAIB" By Erica Jong

BOTERO SEES THE WORLD'S TRUE HEAVIES AT ABU GHRAIB

By Erica Jong, Special to The Washington Post

Sunday, November 4, 2007

When we think about the Colombian artist Fernando
Botero, most of us visualize his roly-poly people
flaunting their fat, their fashionable headgear,
their cigarettes and cigarette holders, their
excess. I never thought of these as political
images until I saw Botero's Abu Ghraib series in
which hooded men dangle, upside down, and hideous
dogs claw and growl at manacled prisoners
arranged into pyramids and bleeding on each other.

Held by their hair, their hands, their manacles,
the prisoners seldom come face-to-face with their
torturers. They are beaten by hands outside the
picture frame, urinated on by men whose faces
rarely appear. A bound prisoner wears red panties
and a bra -- obviously against his will. The
torture is anonymous and masked. Even the
prisoners are masked so the torturers cannot be
identified. But Botero knows who they are. They
are the same fat people whose antics he has
previously appeared to delight in.

As a result of this astonishing series of
drawings and paintings, we know he was not
celebrating these people, only waiting for an
opportunity to show their true nature. They are
cannibals who feed off their brothers. They deal
in the anguish of human flesh.

Fernando Botero, whose Abu Ghraib pictures will
be on view at American University starting this
week, read about the torturers of Abu Ghraib in
the New Yorker, and made his own record of the
horrors. He did not invent anything that was not
described, but because he is an artist, we feel
the terror of the tortured rather than the
gloating of the torturers -- so present in the
photographs they took of themselves at play in
the blood of others.

Botero calls art "a permanent accusation," but
his Abu Ghraib series seems to me more than an
accusation. Rather, it constitutes a complete
revision of whatever we have previously thought
of Botero's work. (He refuses to sell these works
because he doesn't want to profit from the pain
of others. He plans to donate them to museums.)

What is this need people have to abuse each
other, then boast about it? What is this need to
make others powerless before them, to see them
bleed and scream and beg for mercy? Psychologists
theorize that torturers are repeating their
infantile impotence by inflicting it on others.
That seems glib to me. Empathy is a rare human
quality, but it is essential to our humanity.

But American torture is different from other
tortures because of the high opinion we have of
our country and ourselves. Torture is something
others do. We are above that. We are reasonable
people governed by a great Enlightenment document
we call The Constitution. We help, not hurt
people all over the world. It is the incongruity
of our image of ourselves versus the reality of
our behavior that stings most.

Botero's Abu Ghraib series has been shown before,
but never in Washington. It is a moment: The
people who got us into Abu Ghraib can contemplate
what went on there.

I dare them to look at these images and be unmoved.

The series's entry into the visual world has not
been easy. In the Bay Area, they were shown not
in a museum, but in a library at the University
of California at Berkeley. Still 15,000 people
saw them.

Susan Sontag wrote that the Abu Ghraib
photographs showed "the reigning admiration for
unapologetic brutality." Is this true?

I doubt it. I think that most of the people who
see these Botero images will be as horrified as I
am. Complicity in torture is invisible to most
people. They do not know what they can do to
prevent it -- hence their passivity.

Botero, inspired by Picasso's "Guernica," broke
through his passivity by making these works. Many
people have contrasted them with his supposedly
"happy" fat people. I don't think Botero's fat
people are happy at all. I think they are also
political -- the haves fattening on the invisible
have-nots.

"The whole world and myself were very shocked
that the Americans were torturing prisoners in
the same prison as the tyrant they came to
remove," Botero said to the San Francisco
Chronicle. "The United States presents itself as
a defender of human rights and of course as an
artist I was very shocked with this and angry.
The more I read, the more I was motivated. . . .
I think Seymour Hersh's article was the first one
I read. I was on a plane and I took a pencil and
paper and started drawing. Then I got to my
studio and continued with oil paintings. I
studied all the material I could. It didn't make
sense to copy, I was just trying to visualize
what was really happening there."

What will be our reaction to his visualization?
Will we continue in passivity? Will we deny that
such horrors still take place? Or will Botero's
art have the power to change us?

We might also ask what power art can have in
general. Did Goya stop cruelty in his time, or
Picasso in his? No. But the role of the artist in
raising our consciousness and bearing witness is
essential. The artist makes us open our eyes to
our own cruelty, our own passivity, our own
indifference.

For that alone, his witnessing matters.

I am looking at another recent work by Botero in
which a roly-poly woman is stuffing her face with
an apple as if she were a Christmas pig. Before
the Abu Ghraib series I would have shrugged off
this image. Now I see all Botero's work as a
record of the brutality of the haves against the
have-nots. I would be surprised if the Abu Ghraib
series of images did not completely change our
view of Botero as an artist.

Pics @ <http://www.marlboroughgallery.com/artists/botero/artwork.html>

Novelist, poet and nonfiction writer Erica Jong
wrote a catalogue essay for the Milan exhibition
of Botero's Abu Ghraib pictures and has a Botero
sculpture of Eve with a snake and an apple in her
apartment in New York. Her most recent book is
"Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life."

If you go: "Fernando Botero: Abu Ghraib" opens
Tuesday at the American University Museum at the
Katzen Arts Center, at the intersection of
Massachusetts and Nebraska avenues NW. Through
Dec. 30. Open Tuesday-Sunday 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Free.
202-885-1300.

© 2007 The Washington Post Company