art and fear.

I originally picked up Art and Fear because of the cover art, an x-ray of the back of a skull with tiny, splotches of red paint. I never figured out who was the artist responsible for the cover art, but I did end up engrossed in Paul Virilio's short critique of aesthetics and politics. I was more attracted to his first essay, "A Pitiless Art," which explores the nature of contemporary art after Auschwitz, than "Silence on Trial," which focuses more on multimedia performances. I have mixed feelings about multimedia performances. Virilio's exploration of multimedia art focuses on hyperviolence and hypersexuality that lead to the eventual dismantling of human feeling. However, it is not my desire to critique multimedia art at length here.

What I am more interested in is Virilio's examination of the artist as the terrorist in "A Pitiless Art." He begins this essay with a direct reference to the aesthetics of Auschwitz by recounting the experiences of Jacqueline Lichenstein, a French art historian, who compares her experience at the Museum of Auschwitz to a contemporary art museum where "looking at exhibits of suitcases, prosthetics, children's toys...[she] suddenly had the impression [she] was in a museum of contemporary art." From the Situationists to abstract art, Virilio expounds that contemporary art has become the executioner. History has ushered us along a path toward dehumanization where the artist dissects humanity and is rewarded for it through recognition. The audience becomes thirsty for tragedy and identifies tragedy as beautiful. This is the same tragedy created by terror, the terror created by the artists/terrorists.

To pick up where Virlio left off, fast forward a few years...

During an interview with author Tom McCarthy, in the recent issue of Bidoun, he speaks of "a terror that is beautiful." He recalls a conversation with David Cerny who exclaims that the planes should not have exploded but dumped their fuel and just been stuck in the tower. Cerny "had a purely aesthetic take on it, and the political dimension was utterly irrelevant to him." This would be the same Cerny that painted the tank pink in Prague and replicated an image of Saddam Hussein and submerged the image in a formaldehyde tank. (Granted he did this as a parody of Damien Hirst's work, but nonetheless still political.)


Contemporary artists work in a Post-Auschwitz and Post-9/11 (un)reality. Art as influenced by post-modern society has undoubtedly added elements of terror and shock to it's repertoire. Yet, even terror and shock fade and we are not so alarmed to see contemporary art museums and galleries that remind us of holocaust museums. We are not disturbed to see artists like Zachary Drucker lie on a table and direct "viewers...through a series of breathing exercises, visions, and traumas, while participants pluck hair from the androgynous, stripped body of the artist."

The audience has been desensitized. The audience thinks we live in a society that has long been dissecting human bodies.