The Abu Ghraib JPEGs, museums and national responsibility

This is the second post in a series that considers how art, artists and curators respond to the question of shared responsibility for atrocities committed during the Bush years. The first post, about a George Grosz installation at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is here.

Five years ago tomorrow, the first criminal charges stemming from the Abu Ghraib scandal were filed against six soldiers. To date, the chain of responsibility for the atrocities committed by U.S. personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has included neither officers nor Bush Administration civilians.

Abu Ghraib was a particular landmark in the Bush years -- but maybe not for the precise reasons we remember. The publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs was not the first time the American people learned that our government was (at minimum) enabling the torture of alleged detainees. As Mark Danner points out in his important essay in the New York Review of Books, on Dec. 26, 2002 the Washington Post published a Dana Priest and Barton Gellman story detailing how some of the system of American-sanctioned torture worked. (Priest-Gellman source: "We don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them.") Over the next couple years, more details about government-sanctioned -- even encouraged -- torture leaked into the press.

It was not until the Abu Ghraib photos became public via CBS News and the New Yorker in April, 2004 that torture and the abuse of detainees who were under United States control crossed-over from being a story of interest to the ACLU-left to being a national focus. It would be neither fair nor accurate to call the pictures a national embarrassment: When given an opportunity to hold their leaders to account for torture seven months after the Abu Ghraib scandal became public and two years after the Washington Post first reported that the United States was involved in state-sanctioned torture, the American people re-elected President Bush.

The Abu Ghraib pictures are not a landmark in the history of Bush Administration-approved torture, but they are what the Eddie Adams 'execution' photo was to the Vietnam War: The revelation of a grossly unpleasant truth, pictures that forced Americans to consider the horrors encouraged by their leaders in the name of our country. As a recognition of the role the Adams photograph plays in our national consciousness and its import to our visual culture, the picture is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

The Abu Ghraib pictures -- there may be as many as 2,000 of them -- do not document the most egregious tortures inflicted by American personnel during the Bush years. Example: Photographs of the torture outlined by the International Committee of the Red Cross in its recent Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody, a report which concludes that the United States committed torture, apparently don't exist. Photographically, in terms of impact on national consciousness and our shared visual culture, the Abu Ghraib pictures stand in for the whole of the torture committed by our government during the Bush years.  

In recent months I've become interested in the shared national responsibility for the crimes against humanity committed by the United States during the Bush years. 'Responsibility' is a fuzzy concept, one that states often accept via truth commissions, war crimes trials, and the like. Those mechanisms of statecraft can take years, even decades, to gear up.

Art moves faster, and that's one reason that in the last 100 or so years art has become a primary way through which societies confront this question of shared responsibility. The process is in no way formalized, but it works something like this: Thoughtful, concerned artist internally synthesizes events, makes work. (Obvious example: Anselm Kiefer on post-war Germany.) Gallerist, curator, kunsthalle, museum, journalist or critic ensures that work is seen. If something like a critical or curatorial consensus determines that the work is of quality and import, the work enters an institution's permanent collection.

It's that last part, institutionalization, that's the most difficult. Dozens of experts, administrators and trustees (men and women with a particular standing in their communities) must agree on an acquisition. The passing of an artwork into an important museum's permanent collection is a key part of the process by which we decide what is worth saving as part of our shared heritage.

I don't mean to suggest that the last step of that process is in and of itself an assumption of national responsibility. No single institution is charged with providing the country its shoulders. But the whole of the process I outlined above is one of the processes by which a nation and its citizens address what was done in their shared name. Repeated many times over in many communities, it is a part of the way in which national responsibility is addressed, even assumed.

So earlier this week I called Peter Galassi, the head of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department, to ask him if the Abu Ghraib photographs were in MoMA's collection.

Part two: Here.

Related: Salon's collection of Abu Ghraib pictures.