Ethics and Aesthetics
Art and Terror
- James Bae -
I.
What separates an act of terror from an artistic act? What guidelines fabricate a meaningful distinction between the product of a terrorist and a work of art? If the answer is ethics, then differentiation lies between good and badthe ill-defined yet fundamental knowledge of whats best for society. But how do we learn to differentiate between these two tropes if meaning only breaches reality in a purely utilitarian sense? Whats best for society isnt necessarily whats best for you. Would it frighten the world to know this is an aesthetic choice? One cant differentiate between conceptions of value without knowing they can choose. Individuality stems from this practicum. Artistic matters in this era have becomewhen dealing not with silly frothinvestigations concerning disgust, transference and reactions to a world gone awry.
II.
Then again, is it shame or necessity that shapes artistic force? Think in this manner: a Harvard-trained mathematician gets tired of life in the apoplectic late Sixties. Viewing the world as a spent shell of pointless realizations, he purposely drifts away from society. In the following decades, he disappears altogether. Eventually, he produces what he believes to be a social contract apt for the timesor at least one sufficient enough to lend credence to a self-deontic course of action. A package he sends, one of many to come, detonates the soft body of a Yale computer scientist. Along the way, a well-known geneticist and an executive of an advertisement giant also die from bombs delivered via such medial anonymity.
By the time hes caught in 1996, the mathematician-turned-Unabomber is living alone in the wilderness. Live TV cameras show his shack just before a raid by government agents. In Berkeley, a professor comes out of the shower as his wife watches these gripping images (and they are gripping) on television. The professor, a linguist, walks into the room in time to see images of the arrestperhaps, in retrospect, the end of a high-baroque era in terrorist aestheticscaptured for posterity in media res. Transfixed, asks his wife: Hey, whats Ted doing on TV?
III.
Art flatters itself, at times, as a social medium. Portraits of terrorism and art intersect at this realistic meeting point. This is inevitable as long as society provides the necessary conditions for disillusionment. Downed jetliners and genocide make apt allusion to our society, and, as some critics proffer due to the number of tragic images we are inundated by, the motivation to find interest in such images diminishes. London-based artist Matt Odells cardboard and paper constructions intricately reproduce scenes of social catastrophes that distill societys indifference to its very essence: they harbor authentic disinterest. Titled from an AP photo cutline, The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, site of Wednesdays car bombing that left at least 78 people dead and hundreds injured or missing, April 22, 1995 (1999) takes a cool, measured approach to the after-effects of realized paranoia. Nothing intrudes on the scenenot the statistical weight of the actual number of dead (179), the mourners or cries for retribution. Nor does the cleft in the center of the piece speak for a return to humanity.
Such works visionary precursors, including Gerhard Richters Baader-Meinhof series, at least reflect figuration in the form of the perpetrators, eerily distilled in their re-appropriation with a nod to romantic futility. The problematic detail of Odells imagery seems to imply a more sinister conceit. The iconography of violence is reduced to the visual objectification of mere occurrence. Blame shifts in a posteriori reference.
All forms of media make no qualms about exploiting the visage of those affected by acts of violence under the guise of empathy, and art makes no ruse of empathy by tapping into the well source of humanitys violent imagination. The latter, at least, speculates the intention to address the world in critical terms. The idea of terrorism as thematic origination is a relatively old preoccupation; one need only see battle scenes on a Hellenic frieze to understand the enduring strength of aggression in artistic expression. But the attitudes of history indicate the ideal of evil has changed, and with it, the modification of ethical realms.
In Evil in Modern Thought (2002), philosopher Susan Neiman theorized that contemporary ethics are defined by the human necessity to conceptualize manifestations of evil as higher-ordered events. Tragedies like The Holocaust and the World Trade Center attacksas well as the Oklahoma City bombingmake stronger foothold in the collective consciousness when understood as sheer data. Why else, for example, did some Americans feel that the 9/11 attacks werent as significant when the preliminary death toll plummeted from an assumed 20,000 to below 5,000? Holocaust survivorsand naysayers of the eventstill focus their debate on the number of people killed in concentration camps to this day, as if the evil nature of the event is somehow quantifiable only in terms of the number of those who perished. The authority of ethics, when mitigated through the socio-conventional means of public disinterest, eventually lessens the efficacy of meaning. Odells other works, including a piece on the Lockerbie air disaster and the war in Sarajevo, reveal this gradual ethical shift as permeating the mind of the contemporary artist. Theres something rotting.
IV.
Though art has made a general effort to address global issues, its still a far cry from the issues given serious inquiry at a curatorial level. Theres a lasting doubt that art can make a difference in culturea problem compounded by the dominant milieus disdain for the efforts of artists who cross boundaries of sociological investigation, let alone the fact that a large majority of patrons still view art in the context of wandering through La Grande Jatte. The citadel refuses to crumble, choosing instead to maintain a well-heeled sense of propriety, calcified through centuries of copious inattention. Francesco Bonami, curator general of the 50th Venice Biennale, publicly decried Spains choice of Santiago Sierra as their delegate. Sierras documentation of the marginalization of various ethnic groups has drawn high critical praiseand ample sighs of discredit as non-relevant to art in any practical sense.
Hes an artist Im not the least bit interested in. In Mexico, they detest him; they claim hes exploitative, were Bonamis words to the Spanish daily El Pais. Such attitudes stand for a greater presumption of artof how art is a tool of business for a door that swings only one way. Why think when you can watch Mariko Mori fly around with aliens and bodhisattvas?
Furthermore, global exhibitions of artthe umpteenth biennial, various college museum think shows, etc.hardly serve as flashpoints for social critique. In hindsight, there couldnt have been a better mismatch in art than Venicethe Euro Disney version of an art showcasingand Sierras Spain Pavilion. A brick wall stood in place of the Pavilion entrance, and hired security guards checked the passports of patrons, allowing only Spanish nationals to enter the premises. However, with the surplus of Murkami Vuitton bags in the general vicinity, it is no surprise the cause celebre of the pavilion had a shelflife of only a few months. Sierras gesture of border ideology, just as in the recent work of Kendell Geersperhaps the most caustic of the artist-terroristsassaults the same critical nerve that drove Cornel Wests invective, delivered in a talk in the wake of the 9/11 attacks where West provocatively stated that the status quo now knows now what if feels like to be niggerized.
Kendell Geers, Waiting for the Barbarians, 2001
Instalation view
Permanent installation in Kloster Gravenhorst, Munsterland, Germany
Courtesty Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and Galleria Continua, San Gimignan
Geers became known to the cognoscenti in 1993 when he pissed in Duchamps urinal at the Palazzo Grassi. Hes even blown a hole through a wall in a Glasgow museum. Like Sierra, hes made imagery of masturbation stand in as a lewd crack against the putative sexiness allegedly embodied by the field of contemporary art.
Recently, filling the void of the outsider artists role, Geers Waiting for the Barbarians (2001) mirrors pertinent issues found in Sierras body of work, but raises inquiry to what can only be perceived as a higher level of cultural disdain. Drawing upon the socio-historical relevance of the site at handa labyrinthine garden in a former Cisterican monastery in Germanys Teutoburger Forest, (also the symbolic site of Germanic tribes defeat of Tiberius civilized army in 9 CE), Kendell Geers created Waiting for the Barbarians in 2001. A garden is walled in by the imposition of an industrial fence, wreathed on the upper-registers with razor wire. A border tower stands in the middle of the cloister with a viewpoint high enough to view passage through the maze but the view itself harbors a cynical sensibility, bereft of relief and asserting no escape. With the active impulse to find exit pointless, the work, in a sense, implies the essential hopelessness of the majority of war-stricken nations. In a Beckettian twist, it also renders distinctions between the dalliance of play and the human need for resolve utterly moot.
Walled-in, the conclusion that construed borders limit personal freedom is in line with Thomas Hobbes pessimistic reading of the social contract as originally intendedthat such compacts serve only to limit the implicit, violent nature of humanity, appeasing us only through the self-cannibalizing right to sue one another. Razor wirean apartheid-era invention native to South Africa, Geers place of birthstands as a stanchion, brimming with anti-humane allusions. Cheap, practical and easy assembled to create divisions of martial control, the loaded meaning of the device changes Geers tableau from simple notions of demarcation to a darkly connotative emblem of social exclusivity.
The title of the work itself appears a play on fellow South African John Maxwell Coetzees 1980 novel of the same title, a dramatization of the suffering caused by a border conflict between two South African states. The installations metaphorical agenda implies paradoxical constraint, tacitly part and parcel with Hobbes pessimistic summation: the more restrictions agency is placed under, the more ones actions will resemble those of a person still in the state of nature. The codified acceptance of propriety leads to a general narrowing of values, the principle invention of which is a nationalistic agenda. The barbaric spirit Geers aptly points out starts, by necessity, on the battlegrounds of our homeland.
Matt Odell, The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, site of Wednesdays car bombing thats left at least 78 people dead and hundreds injured or missing, April 22, 1995, 1999
Cardboard
39 x 27 x 22 cm
Collection of the artist
V.
Art has, historically, been used as a medium to elicit social disgust designed to both to shock and incite, but such strategies have the tendency to backfire on themselves. Curator Okwui Enwezors attempt to raise up art as a template for global concerns in the last Dokumenta was received, not surprisingly, with cool reviews. While applauding efforts to produce a volume of academic heavyweights in books specially edited for the show, the focus of critics and detractors generally tended to overlook the unprecedented scope of Enwezors programming, favoring instead to harp on the curator and his staffs evidently muddled presentation of certain artists. With the backhanded praise Dokumenta received, it appears the essential temperament that draws critical power from a socially peripheral sensibility are far from widespread acceptance.
In that way, what is the point of acceptance of an art form that needs a decidedly outsider angle to be considered pertinent? If art that makes social commentary dwells in some easily dismissive category to begin withlet alone exacerbated by the fact that the middle-ground of acceptance is yet to be discovered or known to be realizableit doesnt appear acceptance is the true issue here. This resembles the lone relief of artistic searching, figuratively in step with the darkness of certain subject matter.
When doing away with the slick guise of shock, art is at its best when charting the monumental failure of systemic progress. What is gathered in remittance is not only the birth of tragedy, but the essential beginnings of mediocrity. Take the disenfranchised spinning of Serbian artist Milica Tomic, uttering her name in different languages as lacerations appear on her body. Such work speaks glaringly of an omissive nature when encumbered with the writ of national identity. Everything is apt for diaspora. The insinuation of a smiling Tomic ruefully lays bare the fallacy of multinationalism as it is sold to the masses: knowing identity means knowing the brutal side equipped in residence of all human nature. Put simply, biology merely determines you are born. Linguistics supply the terminology of a national methodologyan identity for which you can, quite possibly, be killed.
It is no surprise artists are leaning toward a new desire for mythopoeic intent. Recently at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Matthew Day Jacksons flag spoke archaic words eminently, in a new spirit of disdain: Dont Tread on Me. Is this the unjust demand of historical continuity or a call for arts renewal? It shimmies with a summary node of fear.