Atrocity Aesthetics

Abstract

A Google image search for yields a landscape of human bodies, but if you are after the bulldozed hills of Nazi genocide victims or a trail of Tutsi corpses, you arc in for a disappointment. Of the resulting plethora of images, the most prevalent images are of latex or leather-clad bodies theatrically sexualized in the service of goth, death, and thrash metal bands. Ifyou are after mutilated bodies produced by warfare, ethnic cleansing, or other human degradation, you will have to look carefully. A video search produces a similar result--and the same goes for iTunes. Of course, you can find the real gore if you want to. If you want real-life corpses, all you need do is name the specific and they will appear: mutilated bodies--piles of them-bloody and mangled. In fact, you will have a hard time finding an image of that features something other than a human body. Which begs an interesting, if somewhat unexpected, question: Does an require a Our current appreciation of is anthropocentric and this is an unnecessarily narrow view that effectively blinds us to a range of atrocities--especially ones--that ought to be viewed with much more urgency. Even though they are usually termed disasters, do a search for environmental atrocity and guess what you get? Bodies, again. This time the mangled human bodies are sprinkled among a mixed bag of not-very-dramatic images of polluted landscapes and (slightly more dramatic) oil-soaked wildlife. On a recent image search, the defiled of Mexico did not appear until page five, as a spoof of the British Petroleum (BP) logo dripping oil into the ocean--and this was only after a photograph of the My Lai Massacre on page two. Also appearing on page five was Eddie Adams's infamous photo of the execution of a suspected Viet Cong guerilla on the streets of Saigon in 1968. (If you look hard enough you can find rebranding of the BP logo in which that suspected guerilla has a gas pump nozzle aimed at his head and the bright flower-like BP logo bursts from behind--echoing the fatal gunshot.) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Why is it so hard to picture an without a body? Obviously, all collateral damage is not the same. Disasters are not the same as atrocities, and of disasters seem trivial when compared to the defiled human bodies created by warfare and violent conflict. Maybe the video feed of the gushing mangled deepwater wellhead--so popular during the recent atrocity/disaster/crisis--is a little more compelling (but really only if, like Louisiana resident Sean Lanier, we see it as a bleeding wound: Until they stop this leak, it's just like getting stabbed and the knife's still in you, and they're moving it around). (1) Again, the focal point is wounded bodies. It is difficult to have an without one. Search for Gulf of Mexico and BP pictures and you will find a lot of oil-soaked animals, but you will not find Edward Burtynsky's photographs from his latest traveling show and book titled Oil (2011). Still, his images are conspicuous only in their absence. Is the relative lack of bodies in his work to blame for this? What are the consequences of the anthropocentric aesthetics of atrocity? To answer that question, we will need to make three interrelated queries. First, can we define degradation as atrocity? Second, how do the aesthetics of differ from the current anthropocentric aesthetic? And lastly, what does answering these questions add to our understanding of the aesthetics of atrocity? To address the first question with another: Must we have bodies? Can we have an perpetrated on something other than a sentient being? The short answer is yes. In Environmental Atrocities and Non-Sentient Life (2004), Claudia Card expands her Atrocity Paradigm to develop the argument that evil can be done to non-sentient beings, such as the environment. …