TORTURE: ASIAN AND GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES | JUNE-AUG 2013
launched a campaign to draw peoples’ attention to political disappearances – an insidious form of repression, still exercised today, that involves secret detention, torture, murder and disposal of the body by agents of the State. The victim effectively vanishes. Usually, political disappearances are inflicted by governments to suppress popular opposition to exploitative economic policies. Then, in 1981, political disappearances were prevalent in Central and South America. I was influenced by Amnesty’s publicity about it. NC: Can I stop you there? What captured your imagination or caught your attention? JR: I was aghast at the savagery of it, both in physical and psychological terms. I think there’s a whole area of psychoanalysis that deals with that morbid curiosity we have with how badly we can treat each other; and the demarcation between pleasure and pain and how it influences behaviour. I’ve always been curious as to the extent to which people can mistreat each other – from my childhood trauma when I stumbled across images documenting the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition to knowledge of the atrocities of the Japanese Imperial Army towards their prisoners. And then of course what was enunciated in the pages of Amnesty International’s journals. I knew that Amnesty had to take an editorial line that struck a balance between revealing to people the true horrors of what was going on, in relation to people whose only crime was to hold a different view to the government, and revealing too much of those horrors. Amnesty needed to reveal, I think, enough to motivate people to act and express their concerns in a tangible way, but not enough to alienate people so that they just want to step back because it is too traumatic to contemplate.
VOLUME 02 NUMBER 02 & 03
NC: so is that where your work comes in? JR: Well, I think so. I face a similar issue with this work. Since I’ve recently begun work on this collage again, I’ve been re-reading a lot of the material I had collected in the past and it’s gut wrenching stuff. And yet this image delivers, on account of the detail in the paper I’m working with - the subtle colours, the tones and intricate linear detail, a very visually engaging image. There’s this tension between making something that’s seductive to the eye, and using that to enunciate real horror. I guess am faced with the same dilemma. I want people to look at this work. I want people to spend time thinking about it. So I need to strike a balance between delivering authentic content but not to the point where people just turn away, go and think of something else. NC: Are you trying to resolve that tension in some way? JR: Well I’m not sure that I’m resolving it but I’m conscious of it, and to some extent, that determines what I do. I want to buildin some content that is shocking, I think, to most people. Aesthetics is about establishing beautiful relationships. So you can create something that is aesthetically engaging but the forms that are beautifully related could be quite horrendous. For example, when cameras were first taken to war in Crimea in the mid-nineteenth century, the photographs that came back were stunningly engaging in terms of the of visual forms composed in the picture but horrific in terms of the destruction of life and property they actually depicted. They are aesthetically powerful pictures but not pleasant. That’s my brief with this work. NC: Right JR: So usually, in common, every-day speech, something aesthetically powerful
141