Art and Terrorism

Constructive thinking begins with a problem. Subsequently, the mind engages philosophy and design. With design we arrive at the beginning of knowledge. Knowledge, Francis Bacon would say; knowledge is generated by comparison of similar things. Because, only by comparison can we analyze difference, and in this difference we discover innovation, beauty or perhaps even a poem. A linguistic relative to the word problem (albeit with more static qualities) is the theme. If the problem is to be solved, then the theme is to be contemplated on. The theme taken up to be analyzed, must be disintegrated in order to be observed more clearly.

Art’s theme, of course, is art itself. Regardless of cross-disciplinarity, and other theoretical terms used to describe the fragmented characteristics of art practice: art is endlessly self-referential. Art is like a vacuum: it sucks bioengineering inside, using its symbolic values in the semiotic order of meanings. Art sucks history in, narrating it until it elevates to mythological heights. Art sucks political context in, and reshapes its substance with artifice, redefining it in iconographic terms.

The artist’s problem today, is similar to that of the terrorist’s. Contemporary terrorism, such as that of kidnapping and execution videos, 9/11, Bali and Sharm el-Sheikh deal not with cause and ideology, but with radicalism for the sake of radicalism. The aim is no longer to transform one’s own situation; the aim is visibility and spectacle. Cloaked by something as empty and ambiguous as holiness, goodness, evil, or the struggle against the so called West, contemporary terror is absent of traditional pragmatic manifestos. Therefore it shares similar conceptual concerns to graffiti, or tagging and bombing, which reefers to marking up of walls with ones own name. Moreover, contemporary terrorism uses the weapons of hegemonizing systems: symbolism and mass dissemination of meaning through media in combination with the sublime: real death. More conventional terrorism on the other hand, as the case with Palestinian suicide bombings, is merely using ones own death as a weapon against other more powerful weapons. Palestinian suicide bombings await filmmakers such as Hany Abu-Assad with Paradise Now to carry them into the world of aesthetics and images. Just like graffiti of course, art then functions through the spectator, through discourse, and the grand art historical cannon [regardless of art’s new-found heterogeneity and particular contexts]. Contemporary terrorism has grown far beyond the conventional infliction of terror and death, now involving advanced psychological methods, such as aestheticized meanings through media, biological terror, internet terror, even porno-photographic terror, as was the case with Abu Grahib. By this I am referring to the multimediality of terrorists, and am, by no means, passing any positive value judgement or relativizing the issue.
All this shares a compelling parallel to contemporary art, and art’s new strategies. Since art’s problem became the critique of the hegemony of Modernism, it has expanded from a marginal contemplation on traditional materials and form, to an all inclusive practice involving everything. To deal with Modernism or Post-modernism as a relevant issue has become passe, and mere style. Artists are pushing to all sides in an effort to kill some kind of imagined core [the mother of all art]. But of course, it has been pointed out, there is no core, and this massive cloud of knife thrusts is just getting larger and larger, invading everything about our existence. At Documenta in 2001, the thing that told me that the ice cream made from water was art, was the fact that I encountered it in the catalog many weeks later. Since I, in fact, had that kind of ice cream before as a child in Bosnia, I innocently failed to notice it.

A colleague reminded me of a quote. “Duchamp was a terrorist and so was Hitler.” Donald Kuspit made this statement during a discussion at the CAA conference in NYC at the Hilton Hotel, in the year 2000. Kuspit probably hates or loves Duchamp because he would argue that Duchamp was trying to kill art. But really, Duchamp was just trying to get seen. Paul Virillio points out in an absolutely different context, but it appears useful to abuse here anyway, that line of sight, is line of fire.


Thank you,
Sincerely

Isak Berbic