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John Mathias: In December of 2004, a conference was hosted by the New America Foundation in conjunction with the Center on Law and Security at New York University to discuss the study of terrorism and its companion, counterterrorism. The conference, entitled "Al Qaeda 2.0," drew a variety of experts from diverse academic disciplines. One such expert was Karen Greenberg, Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security. In describing the current sensibility of living in the United States today she said: "However unpleasant the picture looks to me in any given moment, subsequent facts turn out to be even less palatable, less something we want to associate with ourselves and our culture . . . We are finding out more about the failures in Iraq, more about the widespread use of torture, more about the secrecy and deception on the home front. What we are left with is the question, ÔWasn't it better back then, before we knew?' In terms of thinking about today, the real question in our minds ought to be, ÔWhat will it look like in a year?'"
How has your identity as an American been impacted in tackling the content of the Abu Ghraib Project?
Daniel Heyman: The question is a strange one, though provocative. I have thought very little of my identity as an American, much the same way that I have thought very little about my identity as a person from New York or a graduate of Dartmouth. These are facts in my life, not identities to be questioned. On the other hand, this project has allowed me to express my "Americanism" with more purpose and thought than before. The America of my mind is a place that respects and supports human rights, that fights secrecy in government, terror in foreign policy, torture in prisons, human rights violations wherever they come into contact with us, and so my helping to uncover what has happened, and may for all we know still be happening, seems to re-affirm my being an American. I have never thought that part of being an American was an unquestioned allegiance to any particular government here, whether state or federal, but rather that governments were a partner in defining America with its people, and so that constant examination of the government by the people is part of what I take to mean "American." The facts uncovered by the torture victims are ugly, and accepting them as true is difficult.
There is something odd about the question, and I think I can only express it this way: This project, my listening to the innocent victims of the worst of state sponsored torture, is not really about me or how I feel. It is about the subject presented, and it has been my M. O. from the beginning to keep the focus on the former detainees and the horrendous acts of violence they describe in their own voices. I am not comfortable refocusing the project on myself and how I feel about being an American. Have you read Tony Kushner's "Angels in America?" At one point an African American gay character answers when asked if he loves America, "I live in America, Lewis, I don't have to love it."
JM: How do you hope your work will affect what it U.S. policy will "look like in a year?"
DH: I do not believe that visual art affects policy or action by governments at all. The best I can hope for is that the visitors to my exhibitions become more involved as citizens, seeking answers to questions about the government's real conduct in the war. For me, and for those who have seen the portraits and read the testimony in them, the war now "looks" different, colder, more heartless and Kafkaesque than one could have imagined. But I have no fantasy that my pictures have any serious effect on military, judicial, or foreign policy. I believe that artists make art for future generations, and in a way for past generations. Art is a thread that connects people with their past and their future, a kind of time capsule witness that will be opened by generations hence who will marvel and wonder at the times that we are living through.
JM: In a letter to the American people posted on a Saudi Arabian website in November 2002, Osama bin Laden says, "Let us not forget one of your major characteristics: your duality in both manners and values; your hypocrisy in manners and principles. All manners, principles and values have two scales: one for you and one for the others . . . You are the last ones to respect the resolutions and policies of International Law, yet you claim to selectively punish anyone else who does the same."
As the torture that occurred at Abu Ghraib is in clear violation of the "resolutions and policies of International Law," most notably that which was outlined at the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention Against Torture, the American government is directly confronted with Bin Laden's notion of American hypocrisy.
Do you feel that, as a civilian artist, you are able to voice American manners and values in a way that the American government cannot?
DH: Absolutely. Like any intellectually honest American, I do not need Osama bin Laden to lecture me on American hypocrisy. In fact I find that idea repugnant. Artists do not work for the state, are not elected in public forums. They are, in this sense, more like prophets, whose job it is to look at and analyze society or the human condition. They re-present these truths in the medium of their choice, be it painting or poetry or novels, so that society can benefit from the analysis. They are made valid, I suppose, when the viewers of their work respond positively--read their books, return again and again to their pictures. Of course an artist can choose an infinite number of subjects to analyze, from the human heart to the patterns of light and dark, all valid, but really, in every case, an artist tells viewers the truth about what he or she found out in the search.
I have always been interested in violence; it is one of my subjects. Violence fascinates me because I find it so incomprehensible; I cannot imagine acting violently against another person. State sponsored violence I find particularly abhorrent, because I can never imagine feeling so connected to a state that I would forget the individual humanity of the victim of violence. In these portraits of the victims of the most cruel and useless state violence, the torture of innocent wrongly arrested men and women in a foreign country that my country barely begins to understand, I try to let the victims speak directly with their own voices about their experiences. I do not present my views in the text, or edit in any way the thoughts or remembrances of the sitters. I am not working for any policy, and therefore I can look and speak more freely than any government agent, and what I choose to do is let others speak.
JM: Were you in any way conscious of this alleged idea of an American "duality in both manners and values" when meeting with former prisoners in Jordan and Turkey?
DH: Well, if you are asking whether the Iraqis confused one American for another, or if there was a conflict between what my country officially said, and what actually took place on the ground in those prisons, of course. A more interesting thought occurred over and over again while I listened to the Iraqis tell of being sodomized by broom handles, and beaten with pipes, forced into ice cold water fully dressed and returned to their un-heated cells in the middle of the night, or about being chained to bars, naked and hooded, six hours a day for six months, with dogs brought to bark at them every two hours, I thought as these innocent people told me of these horrors, "Who is benefiting from this?" The stories, in their brutality, were absurd, in that the brutality benefits no one, but causes such tremendous pain. I kept thinking of Catch-22, or Kafka or the absurd surreal literature that followed the Holocaust.
JM: What was your relationship and interaction with the former prisoners like?
DH: I was listening to interviews being conducted, for the most part, by American lawyers who represent the Iraqi victims in U.S. Federal Court. The interviews were done in a small conference room or large guest room in a hotel, with the Iraqi witness, a translator, a lawyer who ran the interview, another who took notes, and perhaps a third, and myself. At times there was another person, one of the Iraqi men who work for the lawyers in Baghdad. We all sat around a table, the witness on one side, me on the other. Next to the witness was a translator, across from him was the lawyer. I try to manipulate the seating to have a clear view of the former detainee's face straight on, or at least as straight on as possible. This allowed me to paint a frontal portrait, so that the picture is really of the witness talking directly to you, the viewer. The lawyer asked a question, it was translated, the Iraqi might answer, that was translated, sentence by sentence, and then the lawyer asked another question. All the time I was painting the portrait and writing the testimony as fast as I could, knowing that my time with each former detainee was limited to the length of the interview, and I never knew how long that would be. Sometimes I had time for only one work, sometimes up to three paintings or prints. After the interviews, the Iraqis were usually very exhausted, having just told us of the most humiliating and horrendous events of their lives. They might be interested in looking at the portraits, they might not. Each was different. Sometimes I had more direct contact over breakfast or lunch or dinner during the rest of the week. This depended entirely on each Iraqi. Once I painted someone's portrait again for him the next day so he could take it home for his family.
JM: What would you say to people out there who do not believe that torture took place at Abu Ghraib or who believe that the people being detained were terrorists?
DH: These people are like Holocaust deniers. What can one say? To the first group I would simply point to the overwhelming evidence that has come out. To those who excuse torture as a form of police interrogation, I simply say that torture is morally wrong, the way murder is wrong in an absolute way. The fact that torture is proven again and again to be an ineffective tool of interrogation adds to the argument, but simply put, torture is immoral. Are these people proposing that torture be used as a sentence, after a fair trial when someone is declared guilty of terrorism? The policy at Abu Ghraib was torture first, ask questions later, and never bring someone to a fair trial with rules of evidence. That is barbaric; we can do better, we must do better.
JM: What has been the response to your work?
DH: Please read some of the reviews on my website. In general, the work has been widely praised, people have been very moved by the stories that they have read. I just was in Iowa City speaking and visited with four classes in an exhibition of this work that is out there now. They were visibly upset, moved, angry, and one student, when I asked what the pictures made them feel or think, said simply, "These pictures are scary."
JM: How can you believe what the prisoners are saying in their depositions?
DH: These prisoners have all been vetted by the law firm, which is very serious business as they intend to go all the way to the Supreme Court. I am not a lawyer, or a legal scholar, just a person affected by the news reports I read and the photographic evidence I have seen. There is so much evidence, overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib and several other prisons. When a man tells you that he witnessed two of his sons, 9 and 11, being killed by a roadside bomb, and that one of those sons was decapitated during the explosion, and that within minutes this man was face down on the ground, his hands cuffed behind his back, the knee of a soldier in his back, and then he was put with the other men in his family into a pick-up and taken to a police station where he was stripped and beaten for several days and then dumped hooded and naked into a cell in Abu Ghraib, and you can only think of his children and how he was not able to mourn them, or bury them, or even console his wife during the first minutes after their deaths, how on earth could I not believe him? Again, the question arises, who does this benefit? This man is telling me a personal nightmare, something so black and so personal it is hard to look him in the face after listening to what he has to say. The story is tragic and moving, and either this rather old very religious man sitting across the table in a non-descript hotel room who has moved everyone present to tears is lying, or he is telling the truth. I choose to believe his story and his pain.
JM: Occasionally, in some pieces, there are inconsistencies in pronoun use and tense. For example, in Disco Mosul where the text reads, "In Mosul they would undo the dressing on my leg and pour cold water on it and it was much more painful when he got to A. G. the soldiers kept pressing his leg and put water on it." Was this an active choice by you as an artist? Was it a circumstance of the process?
DH: Good question. The translators are at fault here, most of the time. Some of the translators had trouble saying "I" when the Iraqi former detainees said in Arabic, "I was in the infirmary. My leg was broken." The translators, who were caught up in the story, often changed from "I" to "he," and as I had no way of knowing what the Arabic was, I stayed with writing what the translator said. This can be confusing but my goal is to bring back the atmosphere of being in the interview. Confusion was definitely part of the atmosphere. There were times when the words flew too fast, and I had trouble keeping up.
JM: Part of what is so interesting about the visual element of each print is the process. I understand you had to etch the text backwards. Could you elaborate on the process of the Amman Drypoint Series?
DH: I wrote about this several times on my website. Just to be clear, these are not etchings, they are drypoints, which result from scratching directly into the copper plate. To get the words to print forward I had to scratch them in backwards, obviously while the interview was going on as I explained above. I turned the plate this way and that to fit the words in, to follow the thoughts visually, to frame the sitter, to make any of a number of visual judgments and design decisions.
JM: In an article entitled "Art Born of the Need to Tell," I read that the eight copper plates you took with you to Jordan were used up in three days. Is this true, and if so, why did they go so quickly? How did the switch to watercolor affect you and your work?
DH: Yes it's true. I just worked faster than I had anticipated. I didn't really know what it would be like, or how much information would be presented in so few days. The watercolor adds color obviously, and as an artist that gave me another *tool with which to design each image, to draw viewers in and *then keep them interested in looking while
reading the text.
JM: In that same article it says, "And these Iraqis were civilians, were guilty of nothing (none was ever charged)--could he [you] convey their innocence, as well as their terrible stories?" How much of this work is dedicated to conveying the prisoner's innocence?
DH: I am not interested in conveying their innocence--that is already well established. In fact, each detainee was released by the U.S. military without ever being charged, as innocents wrongly arrested. If the United States has already declared these facts, then I don't need to focus on that in my work. My work focuses instead on letting each former detainee--each torture victim--speak for themselves of their own experiences. What you and I are doing, what happens in the press, in classes, in the Senate, on TV, day after day is other people talking about what happened to these people. I want to get my voice out of the way and simply use my art to provide a way for the Iraqis to talk for themselves directly to an outside audience.
JM: I understand that your work will go up as part of a Martin Luther King Jr. celebration exhibit. How do you see the relationship between art and civil rights?
DH: This is a question for the historians to ponder, if we are talking primarily about the effect of art on a civil rights struggle. Whether or not art is effective, whether or not placards carried in marches rise to the level of art in this discussion, all that is up for discussion. I think that art is one of the tools that people have always turned to to get around oppression, and I am thinking of music and theater as well as the visual arts, or even film.
The least one can say is that certainly art plays an important role in documenting movements for change, and at times, when well made, propaganda can be useful to a cause to motivate a populace. Think of the posters that Gran Fury and Act Up put out in the 1980s relating to the AIDS crisis. Think of the peace sign and the anti-war movements of the 1960s. What about Jacob Lawrence, for example, and his work documenting black migrations or the atomic bombs dropped in Japan? Does that count as documentation or as an actual part of a movement? Hard to tell. Can we think about the awareness of poverty in the between the war period in Germany without thinking about Kathe Kollwitz? Or even public disenchantment with capital punishment without thinking of Andy Warhol's electric chairs? Certainly the visual arts play a role.
JM: Is there a similar thread between your work in the Amman Series and the struggle
for equal rights led by Martin Luther King?
DH: Human and civil rights are all related. Violations of a person's body in the form of beatings and torture whether in a prison in a foreign land or on the streets of an American town are both wrong, absolutely wrong. The struggles of oppressed people are undeniably threaded together, whether recognized as such or not. I have started a new set of portraits of African American men in Philadelphia--you can see them here: projects_works_other_aaphillyfathers
One could even make the case that torturing of innocent Iraqis, especially Sunnis, was done specifically to intimidate the general populace, and so [was] the lynching of individual African Americans to suppress the whole black population. However, I wouldn't go too far with this argument. The circumstances are different, and each group feels that their oppression is unique to their circumstances, which in a way is very true. But more to the point of your question, which I think you mean me to take more personally. Certainly I draw inspiration from Martin Luther King as one of the greatest leaders for human rights in history. He was fearless and bold. But seeking to expose the crime of torture and end future use of torture as a tool of state oppression is not an issue of a people's liberation at all in the same way as King's work. It's all related, but it is not at all the same.
JM: What inspired you to take on this project?
DH: I was outraged that my country could torture, so there was an incentive to do something.
JM: Was there anything from your experience at Dartmouth that helped you with it?
DH: I spent several terms in France while a Dartmouth undergrad, and this opened my eyes to the world and its history. There is no question that those initial forays into another culture made me more sensitive to how other people live. Two years after graduating I received a Dartmouth James B. Reynolds Fellowship in International Study and spent two years in France listening to people tell me their memories of WWII. This again was vital to my understanding of the effects of violence and war, how war wounds last a life time, how the healing is made only when there is an honest recognition of the hurt. I also was a Tucker Fellow in Jersey City where Dartmouth used to have a program for fellows who spent a term working with the underprivileged in a variety of ways. I returned to Jersey City to teach for a year at St. Bridget's Elementary School, one of the institutions that had a long list of Dartmouth graduates who taught there after graduation. Remember this was before the Teach America programs of the Clinton Administration, and Dartmouth, especially those at the Tucker Foundation, were wonderful in getting students to work in places like Jersey City where the American dream of self-propelled social mobility ran straight into the walls of poverty and racism and all the attendant problems that came with those facts. Both the exposure to war victims in France and to the urban poor of Jersey City really opened my eyes. For that I am ever grateful to Dartmouth!
RELATED POST: 1/23/09 Bearing Witness Review
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01/23/09