art, Propaganda, Fernando Botero
abu Ghraib invades the New York art scene
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| Photos: Zonaeuropa.com, Revista Diners. |
By Joseph Klein
Monday, October 23, 2006
I just recently attended the New York City opening of a series of blatant political statements, masquerading as art, regarding the abuses committed by some american soldiers at the abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. This body of work was created by Fernando Botero, Latin america's best-known living artist. I am not a professional art critic but I do know the difference between genuine art and propaganda. Living in New York, I have seen plenty of both.
The incendiary Botero exhibit, which is having its U.S. debut at the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan, has previously been displayed in various European venues to rapturous admirers of his fifty or so anti-american caricatures of fat naked writhing bodies of abu Ghraib prisoners - in shackles, hanging by their ankles, stacked one on top of the other in humiliating positions, and being tormented by huge wolf-like creatures with menacing fangs digging their claws into the bloodied bodies of the prisoners or by american military tormentors with clubs and sticks.
Botero is best known for his representations of humorously corpulent figures inspired by all types of people from his native South america. His plumped up portraits caricature everyone from roly-poly peasants to fatuous military leaders and self-satisfied bourgeois with inflated egos and inflated bodies to match. These works -- which have made Botero rich and famous -- have appeared all over the world, from major art centers to even the smallest of Tuscan villages where I actually saw one of his rotund sculptures. Botero is a keen observer of his own Latin american culture, which he mocks through his inflated figures.
But now it is Botero whose money and fame have inflated his own ego. He has decided to take on a political issue that he knows nothing about -- the war in Iraq. Why this break from his familiar subjects? "This conduct by the americans was a total shock for me," Botero told the Colombian magazine Diners in an interview. "I am increasingly sensitive to injustice, which makes my blood boil, and these paintings were born from the anger provoked by this horror."
I approached Botero at the gallery opening and asked him whether he had based his abu Ghraib paintings on photographs or on any first-hand accounts of the abuses. He refused to answer me, while posing for photographs of his own as he basked in the adulations of the Manhattan elite. The truth, it turns out, is that his sources were chiefly comprised of a New Yorker article by the polemicist Seymour Hirsch and various European newspaper accounts. I was about to ask Botero another question that he certainly would not have been anxious to answer when he simply walked away from me, followed by the "guilt-ridden" patrons of the gallery who alternated their oohs-and-ahs at what they saw on the gallery walls with idle chatter about their summers in the Hamptons. I wanted to know why Botero focused his "anger" and sensitivity to "injustice" solely on american soldiers' abuses at abu Ghraib, which have been widely exposed in the press and are being prosecuted, while ignoring the beheadings and mass slaughters happening all around our poor soldiers who are stuck in the hell-hole of Iraq. Would he dared have caricatured the Islamic-fascists and their leaders -- dead and alive -- who have inspired them to commit atrocities against innocent civilians?
Botero has compared his abu Ghraib series to Picasso"s immortal Guernica, which depicted the horrors of innocent lives snuffed out during the Spanish Civil War. an op-ed article appearing last year in al-Jazeerah tried to make a similar comparison:
Like Picasso and his "Guernica" masterpiece showing the atrocities of the Luftwaffe on poor defenseless civilians in this Basque village- cradle of a unique and brave people, Botero"s "abu Ghraib" will have a story to tell... a story that will reach beyond the sadistic prison guards at abu Ghraib. "Guernica," the painting, will always be about Franco, and not the Luftwaffe (or its Condor Legion)... and "abu Ghraib," the numbered 1-50 paintings, will always be about Bush, and not the proverbial "few bad apples" serving as scapegoats.
The comparison is ludicrous, as the al-Jazeerah article itself unintentionally demonstrates. Botero"s paintings were made for emotional effect to lash out against the american government for the Iraqi war, by using the isolated incidents of abuse at abu Ghraib as symbols for america"s policies there. "Since hell is likely to freeze over before america"s leaders will offer a mea culpa for initiating this illegitimate war, the horror of this historical moment can best be chronicled by the brushstrokes of a Botero", wrote the author of the al-Jazeerah accolade.
I saw Guernica, both at the Museum of Modern art in New York City, where it was temporarily housed, and in Spain where it was sent after political freedom was restored there. Picasso painted it as a response to the suffering he keenly felt in kinship with his fellow Spaniards. Yet he also painted it as a timeless image of the universal human tragedy of war no matter who perpetrates it. Picasso was not trying to force feed us with a partisan message. When asked to explain his symbolism, Picasso remarked, "It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them."
That is the difference between art and blatant propaganda, a distinction that has apparently eluded Botero.
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