Showing at The Chelsea Art Museum in the The Chelsea 22nd area.
Starts in 50 days
Media: Sculpture
The Aesthetics of Terror maps the relationship between abstraction and technology; color and violence, pixilated images and sovereignty, saturation and contour, authenticity and resolution. One of the questions raised by the exhibition is whether much of this art can be considered "art engage" i.e. politically motivated, bitter denunciations of slaughter, profiteering and hypocrisy (as for example in the work of Grosz and Dix) or whether the work is emptied out of moral content1 to become itself a self conscious participant in the spectacle of consumerism of images, an appropriation of which "terror" becomes one more trope. As Zizek comments in, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, we should be aware of the dangers of the "Christification of Che", turning him into an icon of radical - chic consumer culture."2
Much of the work in the exhibition deals less with direct depiction of violence and terror than with its media representations or perceptions of war as filtered through the media - itself a corporate entity whose failure to lay bare the species of evil that is being enacted under the rubric of a war on terror is also very much the point. For example, Coco Fusco's examination of the apparatus of psychological torture used in interrogation is filtered through the rubric of a reality show, Harun Farocki and Johan Gimonperez dismantle news coverage of high jackings and war coverage, Jon Kessler creates war machines with imagery derived directly through magazines and action heroes, Claude Muller pits one kind of media representation against another.
What the exhibit strives to suggest is the emergence of an artistic sensibility which has been informed by the imagery and politics of terrorism in the current common culture as they have been formulated and conveyed through the popular media. Since current-day global terrorism actually relies on the global media network to maintain and extend its psychological impact on its targets, artworks that work from the media-imagery of terror may be, in fact, engaged more with the means by which terrorism works as a primarily psychological phenomenon. Artworks might imitate or mirror this media rhetoric, identify its mechanisms to the viewer, critique it, push back or protest against it.
From 2008-11-15 To 2009-01-21
Adults $6, Students and Seniors $3, Members and Children 16 and under Free
From 12:00 To 18:00
thursdays closing at 20:00
Closed on Mondays, Sundays
Between 10th and 11th Ave. Subway: C/E to 23rd Street
556 W 22nd St., New York, NY 10011
Phone: 2122550719
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