Sunday, 18 November 2007

Schizophrenia, USA

It is clear that the appalling Abu Ghraib photographs were already intensely eroticised stagings whose scenarios were derived from cheap American pornography. Love and Napalm: Export USA, indeed. Part of the reason that the Abu Ghraib images were so traumatic for a deeply conflicted American culture which combines religious moralism with hyper-sexualised commerce, and which is united only by a taste for megaviolence, is that they exposed the equation between military intervention and sexual humiliation that the official culture both depends upon and must suppress.

2 comments:

Louise McDermott said...

I was recently looking at some paintings entitled "100 Girls and 100 Octupuses", which despite their strangeness, were quite erotic.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/zak_smith.htm

I wondered to myself whether this was because many of the girls in these depictions were posed in highly erotic positions, ie could almost anything be deemed erotic if one aspect of the content were so directly and unequivocally sexual?

The answer, after looking at some of the Abu Ghraib photographs, is simply: no.

tryptych said...

As they say, "if you can think of it, there is porn of it". Unfortunately, there will always be some people who will find it erotic, no matter how disturbing in might seem