The Ethics of Audience Positioning in the Paintings of Leon Golub and the Prints of Sue Coe

Abstract

There is no question that the works of artists Leon Golub and Sue Coe share an overwhelming political subject matter. Golub's series of paintings Mercenaries, White Squad, and Vietnam feature over-sized soldiers, singly or in small groups, taunting each other or torturing victims who are helpless and in suppliant positions. The resemblance between one of Golub's best known paintings, Mercenaries V (Fig. 1), completed in 1984, and one of the most widely circulated photos of the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004 makes Golub's much earlier work prescient and deeply disturbing. Sue Coe's much smaller prints, particularly those in the book Dead Meat, depict the inner workings and horrendous cruelty of slaughterhouses (Figs. 3, 4, 6). The images are accompanied by text which recounts the ways Coe gained access to various slaughterhouses normally barred from public view. The question is: What are those giant mercenaries, those hunched workers and twisted animals asking of us? It is impossible not to be taken in, not to be engaged by Golub and Coe, but what happens to us as a result? What is the ethical import of their work and of the violence their work confronts?