Terror is, in and of itself; an image making machine. John

Berger cited befittingly on the subject “The eyes are

organs of asking”1, it is the overwrought violent nature in

terror imagery, that has entangled peoples eyes in our

present days. Why such fascination? Art curator and

filmmaker Joshua Simon analyzes how “thousands died, but

billions of people endlessly watched, the attacks and the

falling towers, until those images were etched by the media

in our global psyche”.2 In that date within hours, the

unyielding terror, becomes a staple of our global culture.

Therefore, the current subject has become an incredibly

prominent theme in popular culture. This essay will

examine, the “aesthetics”3 in terror, and analyse how

terror has influenced the work of contemporary artists.

I will emphasize that I do not fully equate the word

“terror” in relation to the actions of war and

“terrorists”. Walter Benjamin’s essay – The Author as Producer –

introduces how certain modish photographers proceed in

order to make human misery an object of consumption.4 The

1 Paul Valery, as cited in John Berger introduction to Strauss , David Levi, Between the Eyes: Essay on Photography and Politics (London: Aperture Foundation 2003) p. vii

2Slome, Manon and Joshua Simon, The Aesthetics of Terror (USA: Charta 2009) p.7

3 By “aesthetics”, I mean the use of the word as the study of the formsand principles by which the images are used. Not to its popular connotations of beauty or value.

4 Benjamin, Walter, “The Author as the Producer” in New Left Review, ed. by

Okwul Enwezor (London: New Left Review 1970) pp.5-9. Acceded in digital format at roundtable.kein.org last accessed 20/11/11.

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eagerness in any form of profit, derived from the concept

of terror must be critically analyzed as terror itself. In

addition, this thin line of objectivity, mostly treating

such a topic, has enhanced the worries of critical

theorists. G.C. Smith and Maurice Owen on their book Art in

the age of terrorism analyze “The topic of Art in a post-9/11

politics of fear, is not an easy one and there are no

definitive answers. However, it is through art that

difficult issues are discussed in spite of the air of

unease generated by the so–called “War on terror.”5

The potential benefit of visual artistic language as an

understanding apparatus of the complexity in terror is

reflected in Pia Lindman’s New York Times performances and

videos by analysing the social construction of public

expressions on grief.6 “After videotaping myself re-

enacting gestures of mourning captured in photographs in

the New York Times, … I tried to illuminate the

relationships between a photograph, its mediation, and the

idea of original content, in this instance human emotional

reaction to terrorism.”7 Lindman further supports Smith’s

5 Coulter-Smith , Graham, and Maurice Owen, Art in the Age of Terrorism (London: Paul Hoberton Publishing 2005 ) p.49.

6 Pia Lindman, Laokonikon (2004), Figure 1 in the image list.7

Quote from Pia Lindman’s official website www.pialindman.com last accessed 20/12/11.

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and Owen’s theory in Art as an understanding vehicle of the

unspeakable terror experience. 8

In a similar approach, Sebastião Salgado9, highlights the

precarious conditions of manual labour workers. It is

through photography that he explores the concept of

suffering as an image that enhances workers capacity to

adapt, resist, and survive.10 However, Ingrid Sischy11

criticises the drawbacks in Salgado’s beautification of

tragedy. In her article for the New Yorker – Good Intentions –

she exemplifies how “Salgado is too busy with the

composition aspect of his pictures – and with finding the

grace and beauty in the twisted forms of his anguished

subjects. … Beauty is a call of admiration, not to action.

To aestheticize tragedy is the fastest way to anaesthetize

the feeling of those who are witnessing it.”12

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In Lineman’s The New York Times, Monuments , Art and Effect: Re-enactments in Grey Scale (2004) shows the extent to which her gestural performances are notreducible to expressionism, Instead she does this in order to deconstruct the power of mass dissemination of such imagery to cloud our objectivity. Information from www.pialindman.com last accessed 22/12/11.9

Sebastião Salgado, Workers (1986): Gold mine at Serra Pelada. Figure 2 on the image list.10

Information from Sebastião Salgado official website www.amazonasimages.com, accessed last time 21/12/11

11 American journalist and Editor-in-Chief of Interview magazine.12

Sischy, Ingrid “Good intentions” in The New Yorker (USA:The New Yorker 1991 ), pp. 4-7 accessed in digital format at http://paulturounetblog.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/good-intentions-by-ingrid-sischy.pdf last accessed 20/12/11.

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Artist Stephen J. Shanabrook explores these obstacles in

artistic language as an understanding apparatus –

beautification. In an astute way, he casts in chocolate,

body parts from morgues or the exploded bodies of suicide

bombers; his work not only make these realities visible,

but in a manner that complicates revulsion with pleasure,

and destruction with beauty.13 For Shanabrook it is exactly

the vanity of chocolate that makes the image so difficult

and so powerful that it catches the viewers off guard. The

familiarity, smell, and the hidden psychological effect of

chocolate – particularly the connection with pleasure and

desire – make the connection with death so problematic.

“How is that we should desire to eat the representation of

others dead? To what extent does consumption, the

sublimation of desire, ward off our fear of dead?”14

The questioning and the preponderance of images I kept

seeing in galleries that seemed to belong more in magazine

pages or in news coverage than in an art space, bring out a

new question – Were they protest? In such imagery

abundance, art curator Manon Slome, in his essay – The

Aesthetics of Terror – makes a query in the translation of

terror through art – “The appropriation of war imagery,

images of suicide bombers, real or fictional, itself

13 Stephen J. Shanabrook. On the Road the Highway to Hell (2008). Figure 3 in image list.

14 Stephen J. Shanabrook , from his oficial webcite www.stephenshanabrook.com in his work on chocolate. accessed last time 21/12/11.

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becomes another trope, a kind of “pop”, an uncritical

mirroring of images already circulating in our culture,

only now the soup can has become a gun?”15

Stereotyping terror and rendering it as a common

denominator in our contemporary culture, also used, as a

catalyser of mass attention, is the new cultural “pop”

explored by the artist Ivana Spinelli. “The codes or

stereotypes that fashion employs to represent women are

linked to the codes with which the media represents war and

terror, a connection that serves to link desire and

fear”.16 In her Global Sister: Series (2008) she explores our “pop

terror culture” with her Barbie-like glamour figures

holding hands, wearing gas masks and hoods which strike

coquettish poses with suicide belts and hand grenades

strapped across their otherwise nude bodies.17  Spinelli’s

terrorist chicks, further support Manon Slome’s theory in

war imagery; one without context, without narrative,

deployed in a white background ready to satisfy society’s

voyeuristic instincts or been mirrored in the attempt of

artistic attention.

The use of stereotype, of course, blocks complexity hence

the media’s use of them, lubricates easy consumption, and

has transform the mesmerizing power of terror in a gigantic15 Slome, Manon and Joshua Simon, The Aesthetics of Terror (USA: Charta 2009) p.816

Quote from Ivana Spinelli oficial webcite www.ivanaspinelli.net las accessed 22/12/11.17

Linda Spinelli, Global Sister: Series (2008).Figure 4 in the Image list.

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tool over mass opinion therefore media begets a monumental

capability to become terroristic itself.

Acknowledging the commotion the TV begot in the early

1960’s (by making the introduction of the Vietnamese front

lines to every citizen home), we can envisage why today,

the main battle field is not one in physical grounds, but

rather in a covetous media encounter. W.J.T Mitchell in his

essay – The Unspeakable and the Unimaginable – explains that

“terrorism is a war of words and images carried by the mass

media, … Terrorists do not occupy territory. They

deterritorialize violence, making it possible for it to

strike anywhere.”18

The ethereal threat and fear had materialized a visual

culture of shock and awe. This global scope of terror, in

1973, influenced artist Chris Burden to aim a pistol at a

Boeing 747 at Los Angeles airport19. Being much too far

from the plane to have any actual impact on the fuselage,

his action was the gesture of a threat. Furthermore, as

shown in the photograph, Bourden was nearly silhouetted, he

abstracted himself and his gun into the symbolic function

of the generic violent perpetrator, threatening a vessel

containing an essentially random sample of the public; such

as the plane has the capacity to signify the collective

identity of the public. 18 Mitchell , W.J.T, Cloning Terror: The war of images. 9/11 to the present. (London: The univercity of Chicago Press 2011) pp. 64

19 Chris Burden, 747,January 5; 1973 Los Angeles, California: At about 8 a.m. on a Beach near Los Angeles International Airport, I fired several shots with a pistol at a Boeing 747. (1973) Figure 5. in the image list .

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Burden’s action of shooting at a plane that is out of

range, becomes an effective symbolic image, which incite

psychological fear and terror in his viewers. Images from

an iconological standpoint are both verbal and visual

entities which formulate the most potent weapon in the

battle of public opinion.

Cultural theorist Susan Sontag has challenged the power of

imagery by eloquently pointing out in her book On

Photography – “Reality has always been interpreted through

the reports given by images; and philosophers since Plato

have tried to loosen our dependence on images by evoking

the standard of an image free way of apprehending the

real.”20 However, today’s society’s lack of ability to pull

away from the dependence of imagery can result in a

redundant, stereotyped view of terrorism. It is thus,

evident how imagery is now very much capable of

manipulating and transforming reality to realise and

embrace new notions. This power of imagery is then utilised

by politics as a tool of propaganda to sway public opinion.

Therefore, image making has become a significant weapon, in

a distinctly new kind of warfare; war is fought through

ideological representation in the media as well as on the

bloodied streets of the conflict.

20 Sontag, Susan On Photography (London:Penguin 1979) pp. 153

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Overall we can observe that art inherently is in this

culture of the repeat, where human capacity for cruelty has

been emphasised and visual supremacy of pain and wail could

be the consequence of our necessity of understanding

terror.

Terror has become the central rationale for many artists,

if the creation of an objective understanding apparatus has

been successful it is dependent on the individual to judge.

Artists in theme of terror have attempted to expose us to

the subject not purely for shock value, but rather in an

attempt to desensitise us to a topic that we are powerless

to change.

IMAGE LIST

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+

Figure 1. Pia Lindman. Stills from Laokonikon, (2004), DVD

Figure 2. Sebastião Salgado, IV Workers(1986) : Gold mine at Serra Pelada, Para,

Brazil.

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Figure 3 .Stephen J. Shanabrook, On the Road the Highway to Hell (2008).

Figure 4. Lindas Spinelli, Slides from Global Sister: Series (2008).

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Figure 5,Chris Burden, 747,January 5;1973 Los Angeles, California: At about 8 a.m. on a Beach near Los Angeles International Airport, I fired several shots with a pistol at a Boeing 747.(1973)

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Bibliography

Books

Coulter-Smith , Graham, and Maurice Owen, Art in the Age of Terrorism (London: Paul Hoberton Publishing 2005 ).

Mitchell , W.J.T, Cloning Terror: The war of images. 9/11 to the present. (London: The univercity of Chicago Press 2011).

Slome, Manon and Joshua Simon, The Aesthetics of Terror (USA: Charta 2009).

Sontag, Susan On Photography (London:Penguin 1979).

Strauss , David Levi, Between the Eyes: Essay on Photography and Politics (London: Aperture Foundation 2003).

Articles

Benjamin, Walter, “The Author as the Producer” in New Left Review, ed. by Okwul Enwezor (London: New Left Review 1970).

Sischy, Ingrid “Good intentions” in The New Yorker (USA:The New Yorker 1991).

Web

www.amazonasimages.com

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www.ivanaspinelli.net

www.pialindman.com

www.stephenshanabrook.com

www.wordpress.com

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