Andre Serrano - Torture

http://andresserrano.org/series/torture


Andre Serrano's 'Torture' series is a collection of staged tableaux depicting hooded men in often degrading positions. The images are stylised representations of torture that have taken place in many situations like the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, and in Northern Ireland. The work, produced in an old iron foundry, provides a dark and ominous backdrop to the subjects, some of them posed with hessian sacks to partly cover their naked bodies. Their heads are mostly covered by paper or plastic bags depriving or limiting their vision; there is a sense of waiting in the images - time spent contemplating pain, hunger, and fear.

The images are lit in the chiaroscuro style and are dramatic. Serrano uses light to denote a Christian sensibility that references the depiction of saints in Western art. The images are highly aesthetic. This for me is problematic. There is a beauty in the images that almost crosses over into glossy advertising. The foundry backdrop with its depth of detail could easily be used for a fashion shoot and the dramatic lighting builds on this feeling. My impression is that Serrano has made work that emulates the long tradition of art painting. The images are so well crafted that it almost seems that it is possible to empathise with the victims in these situations and to be drawn in to these lifelike simulations. But they are not real. The reality can never really be understood even when viewing documentary photographs.

My own work that I made for 'Target Practice' has also used models with props in an attempt to denote torture. During the creative process I quickly moved away from trying to represent actual places and situations as this felt, for me, facile and unethical. The process led me to folding my images to 'fracture' my simulations and thereby limiting the sense of attempting to portray an impossible to understand reality.

How can people that have not experienced the degradations and tortures but, at the same time, been exposed to very vivid first-hand accounts make art about these experiences? The theoretical reading that I've done surrounding the photographic portrayal of atrocities discusses the concept of post-memory photography; that the work needs to incorporate a metaphorical barrier of some kind that denotes that the work is one step removed from attempts to portray realities that have not been directly experienced. I have alluded to the concept of post-memory in my own work by using an anonymous woodland setting for my Target Practice series. The work also uses this un-named backdrop in another sense; in that it can be understood as situated within the recent tradition of uncovering hidden LGBTQ histories, not part of the mainstream historical narrative and far removed from documentary practise.