The ethics of audience positioning in the paintings of Leon Golub and the prints of Sue Coe

Narrative, Oct, 2007 by Mary Slowik

There is no question that the works of artists Leon Golub and Sue Coe share an overwhelming political subject matter. Golub's series of paintings Mercenaries, White Squad, and Vietnam feature over-sized soldiers, singly or in small groups, taunting each other or torturing victims who are helpless and in suppliant positions. The resemblance between one of Golub's best known paintings, Mercenaries V (Fig. 1), completed in 1984, and one of the most widely circulated photos of the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004 makes Golub's much earlier work prescient and deeply disturbing. Sue Coe's much smaller prints, particularly those in the book Dead Meat, depict the inner workings and horrendous cruelty of slaughterhouses (Figs. 3, 4, 6). The images are accompanied by text which recounts the ways Coe gained access to various slaughterhouses normally barred from public view. The question is: What are those giant mercenaries, those hunched workers and twisted animals asking of us? It is impossible not to be taken in, not to be engaged by Golub and Coe, but what happens to us as a result? What is the ethical import of their work and of the violence their work confronts?

A fruitful approach to this cluster of questions is to consider the narrative structure of Golub s and Coe s paintings and pnnts, y narrative, I mean that Golub's and Coe's images refer to a series of suspenseful events. Coe and Golub stop the forward movement of these events at ethically significant moments and draw us into the ethical conundrums of that moment. Golub and Coe confront us with outrageous evil and ask us to reflect upon it. Their purpose is not necessarily to teach a moral lesson. The subject matter is too blatant and incontestable. No one can uphold killing in the way they are showing it. There is no question that what we see is wrong. But Golub and Coe prevent us from looking away from evil, pretending it does not exist or that it does not implicate us. The suspense of a story stopped mid-flow in visual works that are also aesthetically compelling draws us into moral reflection, despite our reluctance. Ethics in the works of Leon Golub and Sue Coe is not primarily an endpoint--what we learn after the story is over, the moral lesson we take away from the story. Rather, it is a rhetorical process, what happens as we are viewing the work and entering into the story itself.

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It is true that paintings and prints do not unfold in the way that a story unfolds page by page as we read a book. Nonetheless, I maintain that our looking and re-looking at a work of art constitutes an analogous awareness unfolding across time. And it is the rhetorical process as it is related to the subtle shifts in narrative perspective enacted by our looking and re-looking that is my interest here. Much like reading a book, contemplating a painting or a print involves a progression in our understanding on two fronts, first of what is happening compositionally as we take in the aesthetic qualities of the work. And secondly, there is a progression in our understanding of the ethical implications of the work as our interpretation and judgment shift moment to moment.

By focusing on the structures of narrative, I also locate the fundamental ethical import within the composition of the works themselves. Not that focusing on other aspects of audience response is unfruitful; indeed, valuable work can be done by inquiring into the way audiences might interpret the psychology of character and motivation in these images or into how an audience, untutored in history, might understand particular images quite differently than the original audience. (11) But Leon Golub and Sue Coe use narrative to involve us in a moral process which itself becomes a narrative in its own right. The narrative within the visual works becomes the narrative of the audience as the story within the works is played out introspectively within us as individual viewers, then as viewers realizing our relationship with other viewers and finally as viewers recognizing our relationship to the larger social and political communities to which we all belong.

I focus on Golub's work because in the 1970s and 80s he pushed abstract art hard in the direction of political statement by introducing narrative content into his work. I focus on Coe's prints because I see her as taking advantage in the 1990s of the space opened up by Golub. Her use of image in conjunction with text explores the implications of the kind of political content Golub introduced.

Golub and Coe are also worthy of examination because they approach narrative not only through a subtle use of perspective located within the work but also through an examination of the ethics of perspective itself. To look is itself a moral act. The artist who looks challenges a viewer who looks. I agree with W.J.T. Mitchell who claims: "spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding, interpretation, etc.)" (16). What I want to add to Mitchell's claim is the distinctive quality of visual narrative, the act of storytelling, with its intertwining narrative positions, that both entice and distance the viewer, that allow for identification and for self-reflection, that result in a spectatorship that is neither detached nor overwhelmed.