Abstract

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 2020, vol. 20, no. 1, 5–22 https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2020.1764226 Cruel Visions: Reflections on Artists and Atrocities Joanna Bourke* War hurts. When hurled into armed conflict, the artist faces the formidable task of balancing the poetics of revelation against the aesthetics of destruction. Uniquely, artists who are dispatched into the cauldron of combat from regions of the world that are largely free from war are forced to recognise that the body—their body— is no longer a subject ‘good to think’ but an object that is ‘necessary to be’. In this article, I explore some of the artistic difficulties facing officially appointed war artists seeking to visually represent atrocities such as rape. There is a sophisticated literature reflecting on the art of trauma. Artists such as Martha Rosler, Alfredo Jaar, Sophie Ristelhuber, Simon Norfolk, James Bridle, Gervasio S
anchez, and Gustavo Germano have created powerful artistic responses to trau- mas such as combat, mass killings, ‘disappearances’, and rape. Official war artists, however, are required to adopt a different aesthetic. Moralists repeatedly warn against conflating personal trauma with secondary witnessing, but I maintain that we need to take seriously the idea that the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and