The Art of Torture
From the excellent Holland Cotter one learns today that Coco Fusco has a new video out, this time making interrogation the subject of performance art:
The idea for the video began when Ms. Fusco, an interdisciplinary artist who teaches at Columbia University, was preparing a performance piece in which she assumed the character of a female interrogator at Abu Ghraib. She realized that to continue the work, she needed training in interrogation techniques. Through an Internet search she found a source of instruction: the Prisoner of War Interrogation Resistance Program run by a private concern called Team Delta, based in Philadelphia.
The organizers of the program are former members of the United States Intelligence Agency and self-described specialists in the “psychology of capture.” In its original form the course was used to train elite soldiers to resist interrogation if captured, and to extract information from political prisoners. Reconceived for the private sector — police officers, private security personnel and psychological researchers are among the clientele — the program is a grueling four-day immersion in methods of physical and mental persuasion, with the participants playing both captive and captor.
The course is offered only to groups, so Ms. Fusco solicited volunteers to join her. Six women, three of them former Columbia students, accepted the invitation. (It cost about $8,000 for the group; Ms. Fusco picked up the tab.) She also arranged to have the course videotaped, with the artist Kambui Olujimi as director of photography.
In my classes, I have profitably used the video The Couple in a Cage, a performance piece in which Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña exhibit themselves as newly-discovered Amerindians from a strange island. The documentary presentation of the couple at various museums is intercut with found footage that provides a bitter commentary on anthropological practices. I’m looking forward to watching Operation Atropos. Cotter’s report above is useful because it provides me, and hopefully also my students, one way to think about how one can respond creatively to what you read in the media. The enforced passivity of the tortured body shares something with the way in which we are supposed to submit to the distasteful, distressing reports in the media. If you are wondering why that name, here’s a clue. Also, check out this exhibition called Image War: Contesting Images of Political Conflict.
