The Aesthetics of Terror (excerpt)
by Manon Slome
The use of “Aesthetics” and “Terror” in the same sentence is more than disturbing. What is meant by each term and how can they be linked?
From the start, let me emphasize that I do not equate the word terror only with the actions of “terrorists” and war with its opposition, as in “the War on Terror.” This is a war entered into under false premises in which thousands of soldiers have died; tens of thousands been horrendously wounded; and over three hundred thousand Iraqi civilians been killed, maimed and traumatized. Through government sanctioned abuse and torture of detainees, and the refusal to abide by the protections of the Geneva Convention, we have squandered our claim of spreading democracy in the world: indeed, former Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, called such a democratic conception of politics, “Quaint”. These circumstances must also be seen and understood as terror. As for the use of “Aesthetics”, I use this term in a neutral sense, as in a study of the forms and principles by which the images under investigation are used, not with a reference to the word’s popular connotations of beauty or value.
I am in search of what can be termed an aesthetic of terror much in the way that the nomenclature “Fascist architecture” immediately connotes a style of building. At this stage, we may not have the clarity of distance as in the aforementioned example, but such an aesthetic of terror is, I believe, permeating our popular culture and that of the visual arts. As Henry Giroux expressed it in a powerful book, “Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism”
Just as the necessity of fighting terror has become the central rationale for war used by the Bush administration and other governments, a visual culture of shock and awe has emerged, made ubiquitous by the Internet and 24–hour cable news shows devoted to representations of the horrific violence associated with terrorism, ranging from aestheticized images of night– time bombing raids on Iraqi cities to the countervailing imagery of grotesque killings of hostages by Iraqi fundamentalists.
Henry Giroux, Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism, Global Uncertainly and the Challenge of the New Media” Paradigm Publishers, 2006, p.21
The link between terror and aesthetics first became apparent to me in the preponderance of images I kept seeing in galleries that seemed to belong more in the pages of Time magazine or in news coverage, than in an art space — depictions of tanks and soldiers, riots in the streets, bodies strewn on the ground in the “aftermath” of conflict. As striking as many of these photographs were (some meticulously printed and presented, others “raw” with the negative edges of a contact sheet kept as part of the composition, some real footage, others staged) I questioned their function in the museum/gallery setting. Were they protests? Did they make visible (a claim I have heard) images that the newspapers would not print because of their inflammatory nature — disclosing what the government wanted to keep hidden? Or did this translation or appropriation of war imagery, images of suicide bombers, real or fictional, itself become another trope, a kind of Pop, in the sense that it was an uncritical mirroring of images already circulating in our culture, only now the soup can has become a gun?
Did they move viewers closer to an apprehension of truth, allowing us to get closer to a independent experience of terror or did they simply isolate and aestheticize the experience?
A seemingly unconnected incident heightened this questioning. I was in a department store in New York and saw a coat that was “designed” to look like the coat worn by a homeless person. A sleeve was fastened with safety pins to the body of the coat, a twisted piece of rope formed the belt, mismatched buttons were poorly stitched along the front and threads dangled everywhere. The price tag was $3,500. It was one of the more immoral objects I have seen and I was struck yet again by the principle of absorption, by how the market/fashion apparatus can transform and thus make palatable (invisible) aspects of our world that either don’t conform to the consumer visions of America or would somehow challenge the prevailing fictions. If the coat becomes an example of “urban chic” and thus removes us from noticing the “homeless” connotation any more, cannot the same be done with warfare — a question that is central in Martha Rosler’s “Bringing the War Home” series.
MARTHA ROSLER, TRON (AMPUTEE), 1967-1972
PHOTOMONTAGE, 22” X 26”
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MITCHELL-INNES + NASH
If, in a sense, our life of comfort and security can be assured by a war out there, fought by others, what price do we put on a human life, a limb, a dying child, a bombed village? “Some things money can’t buy. For everything else there is Master Card,” goes a contemporary advertisement. For the illusion/delusion of being “tough” on terror and protecting our access to oil, it seems that we are, indeed, often willing to exchange the priceless for profit.
