Art and Fear

by Paul Virilio

Paul Virilio traces the twin development of art and science over the 20th Century, a development that emerges as a nightmare dance of death. In Virilio's scorching vision, art and science vie with each other for the destruction of the human form as we know it. At the start of the 21st Century science has finally left art behind as genetic engineers prepare to turn themselves into the worst of expressionists, the Human Genome Project their godless manifesto, the human being, the raw material for new and monstrous forms of life. Virilio makes all the connections between the way early 20th Century avant-gardes twisted and tortured the human form before making it vanish in abstraction and the blasting to bits of men who were no more than cannon fodder in the trenches of the Great War; between the German Expressionists' hate-filled portraits of the damned and the "medical" experiments of the Nazi eugenicists; between the mangled messages of sensationalist advertising and terrorism. A brutal logic rules this shattering of our ways of seeing are now fatally shaped by unprecedented "scientific" modes of destruction.

Genres: Philosophy, Art, Theory, Nonfiction, Art History, France, Politics

113 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Paul Virilio is a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.

Reviews

[littlemiao · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really, strongly, and thoroughly disagree with Virilio. I won't pretend that I am familiar with all his references or follow every detail of his arguments, but I think I comprehend the general gist of his harangue against contemporary art enough to disagree with him. He raises important issues of ethics and aesthetics, which is why I read the book. He talks about the violence of twentieth-century art, deconstructing and destroying the human form with a violence that he likens to the extermination camps of Nazi Germany. He starts with the question of what it says about contemporary art that a visitor to the museum at Auschwitz could get the impression that they are at a museum of contemporary art. Maybe that says more about the visitor than it does about contemporary art. Perhaps the role of art is, in part, to remind us that atrocities are always with us, that it is part of our human heritage and if we do not open our eyes and let ourselves be horrified, these atrocities will never end. Is our feeling of entitlement to unlimited artistic expression really part of the same syndrome that drives dictators to an unlimited expression of power? As he may perhaps grudgingly concede, we still recognize the difference between art and mass murder. He parallels unrestricted art with unrestricted science, foreseeing a future of transgenic art-as-experimentation in which humanity will disappear into chimerical grotesquery. While these parallels are intriguing, he is actually positing a causal relationship. He claims that artists mastered the techniques of terrorism long before terrorists. German Expressionism is pretty much at the root of all of the ills of the twentieth century. Indeed, there was a pronouncedly militaristic element among German Expressionists, but that was hardly a sentiment limited to artists in pre-WWI Germany. Virilio picks and chooses from history and art in order to support links that are tenuous at best. He paints with a broad brush, inevitably weakening his arguments, which framed differently might provide fodder for productive interrogations of the relationship between art and violence. Does the fact that a lot of artists commit suicide reflect the inherent violence of their art, or is it better understood as the result of of individual, social, and historical processes that converge both in their lives and in the art that their lives produce?

He comes across as an angry and fearful man who has seen too much death and destruction, and in order to make sense of the senseless, howls ineffectually at a nebulous target – contemporary art. The world is ending, and artists are the architects of its demise. Not that art is innocuous, belonging to a sphere that transcends our profane political and social purposes. No one is denying the propagandistic power of art or the terrifying ability of the mass media as a political machine to shape perception and thus shape behavior. But in condemning contemporary art as a whole, or even just art that depicts violence, or art that distorts and negates the human form, he confuses the medium with the message, a message that he has imposed over everything like a thick coat of paint.

The real violence in these pages is the violence against us, those who create art and those who are moved by it, even in its sometimes ghastly and horrifying dimensions, those who feel troubled, disturbed, but somehow more human through what we make, and see, and hear. He talks about the arrogance of contemporary art, but what about his arrogance in assuming, even dictating, how we individually interpret and experience individual instances of art? But he has already written off our critical powers of judgment. We are OVEREXPOSED, desensitized, our opinions conditioned by mass media – we are puppets of the war machine, eaten up by speed and the aesthetics of disappearance. We live on the instant availability of information; we seek the catharsis of loud music that temporarily obliterates the self; heck, we even watch TALKIES. We are in no position to challenge his critique because we are, in effect, symptoms of the problem, products of the forces that are erasing pity and humanity. His sweeping language, with its strident capitalization and apocalyptic resonances, reduces all of our creations and our experiences of art to pitilessness. Perhaps only the pitiless are blind to pity.

[Erdem Tasdelen · Rating 1 out of 5]

A storm in a teacup.
Calm down Virilio.
Calm down and look at more contemporary art. It's not as unitary and one dimensional as you seem to believe.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short and vicious. Watch your back, aesthetes... radical formalism dovetails into complacent nihilism.

[Zeb Rodgerson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Can appreciate some of what our guy is saying about silence but I think he is missing the mark about movies with sound and the world falling apart.
Certainly keen to give his more reputable stuff another crack with a slightly better understanding of how he works.

[Valkyrie Pierce · Rating 3 out of 5]

Incredibly narrow viewpoints that are very right leaning - borderline fear mongering. His ideas are interesting, but overly excitable. Name dropping like an Art Historian. This went over my head a few times and I've studied art history for almost 4 years. Oh, and formatting for whatever version I read was atrocious (translated by Julie Rose). Her preface was exceedingly dry and boring and her translation is both verbose and complicated. It seemed like "vocabulary words" were capslocked. It also seemed like a lot of these "vocabulary words" were words/phrases of his own, or the translator's own, making. I don't know what's worse: that or quoting yourself. Haven't read Virilio's other work, and am not that interested to after this book. Someone would have to make a strong case. Will keep this book in the library for entertainment's sake, but is not a must read.

[Grace Suarez · Rating 2 out of 5]

As others have stated, while Virillo brings up some interesting points about violence in art, I don't necessarily agree with him. Auschwitz and WW2 were great tragedies, but say that all violence in art stems from those events (also the shattering of humanism, the lowering of ethical values, the suicide rate in the bourgeoise community) is a massive leap to make.

An interesting read regardless.

[Devon · Rating 2 out of 5]

some interesting bits...but mostly blah...the intro by John Armitage really turned me off- so my reading of the actual text probably suffered...overall the essays come off as a lil behind the times

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

a sweeping and polemical work that makes many assertions about contemporary culture and art.

[Christina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great ideas and valid points made difficult to understand through loose argumentation.

[Aaron Schuschu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is he always on about cliche 90’s topics and associated canned critiques? And I’m still searching for that point in time at which the left started making the opposite arguments.

[Nathalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Virilio, in this book, compares how art (symbolically) and science (militarily) worked in the twentieth century at destroying the human form.

[Ben Walker]

Not an easy book. Some incredible ideas, but by the time I mad it to the end I couldn't face going back to figure out what they were. ;)

[Victor]

Interesting argument. He apparently did not like the German Expressionist painters and artists, and blamed them the atrocities of World War II.

[razonabilidad · Rating 1 out of 5]

the nazis do not have the last word on the reconceptualization of the human. to assume so is to reinforce violence in the name of pity.

[Keight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Link to booklog