Our love-hate thing with violence in art

“The Red Parts,’’ Maggie Nelson’s 2007 memoir, focused on a real act of violence: the murder of her aunt in 1969. With “The Art of Cruelty’’ she turns to the question of fictional violence. Nelson is not trying to settle questions of law or policy; in fact, she isn’t much concerned with settling anything. What she wants to do is simply think her way carefully and creatively through an area in which sloppy sloganeering and crude moralizing have shut down the more interesting discussions before they could get started.

“The Art of Cruelty’’ ranges widely, from Antonin Artaud’s “Theatre of Cruelty’’ to painter Francis Bacon, from poet Sylvia Plath to the Marquis de Sade to filmmaker John Waters. Nelson shows an appreciation for a wide spectrum of art, and while she is perhaps over-enthusiastic about contemporary performance and video art, she displays an admirable resistance to the contemporary cult of the image. “[A]fter nearly 200 years of photography, it may be that we are closer than ever to understanding that an image - be it circulated in a newspaper, on YouTube, or in an art gallery - is an exceptionally poor platform on which to place the unending, arduous, multifaceted, and circuitous process of ‘changing the world.’ ’’

The problem isn’t that images have no effect, but that their effects are so complex, unpredictable, and idiosyncratic that they are hard to control for political purposes. Moreover, concentrating on the power of the image sometimes puts the cart before the horse, both causally and morally. As she writes about photographs of prisoner abuse by US soldiers, “It isn’t the act of releasing photos that inflames anti-American sentiment; it’s the behavior captured by the photos… . If you don’t want to inflame via images of the behavior, then you have to stop the behavior.’’