Goya’s Scarcity

Clark meditates on the Spanish artist’s “unsparing vision of the degradation of humanity.” Clark not only revisits the images of humiliation, torture, and horror that engraved in this series, he asks what it means to “think Goya” today, a Goya who “imagines the worst and dwells with it.” Clark not only looks at the artist’s images but reads them, including the simple but arresting caption about seeing that Goya affixes to the engravings: “I saw it” (Yo lo vi). Clark’s Goya is the artist who not only confronts us with a horror to behold but who demands that we tarry uncomfortably with the images we behold and with the act of beholding. Clark concludes with a reflection on the notion of the political funeral of ACT UP as a form of mobilization profoundly proximate to the kind of thinking that Goya allows.