Perceptions of prisoners: Re/constructing meaning inside the frame of war

Abstract

Columbian artist Fernando Botero deploys the frame of a painting as a strategic tool for shifting the ways in which a viewer perceives and interprets a work of art-in particular the tortured body on canvas. Through a discourse of the gaze—albeit the feminist gaze or the postcolonial gaze—Botero performs a power struggle between the torturer and the prisoner’s body reframing the ways in which the figure becomes the subject of political objectification. Likened to a form of surveillance, the works in the series Abu Ghraib offer a window through which to contemplate punishment, abuse, torture and hate. Moreover, the paintings reveal the political effects of racism in the twenty-first century. In European countries dating back to the late eighteenth century, torture as a kind of public festival for punishment was slowly coming to an end. Replacing public displays of torture, the penal system was shifting into an administrative model for the practice of law. In his influential critique of the politics that frame punishment in the West, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault both historicizes the function of prisons as well as contemplates the social and behavioral effects that such confinement has on the body. An important example of political theory, Foucault’s contributions to the penal system, paired with Judith Butler’s theory of precariousness provides a model for racial surveillance and a renegotiation for the representability, sensationalization and performativity of images of abuse and torture depicted in the images of Abu Ghraib prison, both in the media and Fernando Botero’s paintings.