AT A PARTY in South London a man came up to me. He was big, with close-cropped grey hair and bright blue eyes, a network of broken veins across his face. My dad was Irish, he said, he worked on the building sites. London was built by the Irish. They all died young. No compensation. It was the asbestos, it got into their lungs. He told me about working on a demolition site as a teenager, bringing tea to a man who emerged from a tunnel the width of his body, which ran forty metres beneath the ground. He had a handkerchief over his mouth. Pulled it off, grinning, his whole face pancaked in poisonous white dust.
Everything’s seeping to the surface now: the slow or hidden violence of late capitalism, the concealed cruelties of immigration removal centres, the secret acts of racist police, all made inescapably visible by way of the scrying glass of social media. You can be an accidental connoisseur of snuff movies simply by scrolling through Twitter with a breakfast cup of tea. A young woman shot by her ex-boyfriend in a university hall of residence, the video of her final seconds played on a loop on a British newspaper website. A black man looking at his phone in a parking lot dragged from his car and beaten by three white police officers in what looks like riot gear, blow after blow after blow.
‘I think it would be indecent these days for writers to talk of anything else but violence,’ the French novelist Édouard Louis said in an interview about his new novel, History of Violence, a fictionalised account of his rape and attempted murder by a stranger he met on the street. But actually grappling with this material often carries the charge of indecency, as if bringing a horror into view is perversely worse than the act it records. I’m thinking in particular of the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, who in 1973 recreated the recent rape and murder of a woman student at the University of Iowa as a tableau performance in her apartment.
By deploying her own half-naked body, blood dripping from her thighs, she made herself both perpetrator and victim, creating a shock-zone of resistance as well as mourning. A few months later, she poured a bucket of cow blood and animal viscera she got from a butcher onto the sidewalk outside her house, hiding in an unlocked car and filming the reactions of passers-by. No one did a thing. The blood stayed there, seeping from her door, until a caretaker came out and scraped the mess into a cardboard box.
If these works were about making visible a scene of horror, the work that followed was far more concerned with how violence ebbs away. For the Silueta series, Mendieta cut female silhouettes into the earth, pressed them into grass, traced them with flowers or burned them with fire. They look like traces of some unspeakable disaster, but at the same time they register a longing for connection, of dissolving or being subsumed into nature.
I find looking at these works weirdly comforting, as if the violence they attest to has been absorbed by an order of time that dwarfs any human act, no matter how vicious. And yet each time I see the seeping red shape of a woman’s body carved into snow I am reminded of a scene from Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt, another woman who wasn’t afraid to look at indecency and record what she saw.
Eichmann’s trial testimony was marked by a constant refrain of looking away. He hadn’t seen. He had turned his face from the naked corpses in ditches. He had refused to look through a hole in one of the mobile gas vans that were the precursor to the gas chambers, though he had not been able to tune out the screaming from the people trapped inside. It was all too horrible, he kept saying. What he had seen, and what therefore must stand in for the many things he’d chosen to ignore, was a burial ditch that had been filled with soil. The bodies were no longer visible, but the blood, he said, was shooting out of the earth like a fountain. He didn’t want to look, but the blood kept spurting all the same.