Age of Terror: Art Since 9/11 Imperial War Museum, London, until May 28
“When I watch the towers fall … it cannot be denied … that as a spectacle it is a realisation of the mind” – the dolorous vocals play, primal and slowed down, over dubstep artist Shackleton’s eerie Blood on my Hands track.
Age of Terror, the exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, goes straight to the jugular of our malaise – 9/11 – and explores its sundry fluvial arteries.
At first, being at an exhibition about the War on Terror evokes a positive feeling of responsibility. We feel like good citizens, because we are grappling with a subject that is palpably part of the political dialogue.
And then, like a patient being cured of a parasite, we are able to appreciate how systemically the language of the War on Terror has been ingrained into our consciousness.
Tony Oursler’s video piece opens the exhibition. He lived near the World Trade Centre and captures harrowing footage of the actual attack: saline drips that were left attached to the stanchions at ATMs to treat victims of the attack; official aid trucks with a “Wanted: Dead” poster of Osama Bin Laden taped on them. We see seas of candles and good-humoured arguments conducted in political street debates, New York-style.
There are big names exhibited here: Grayson Perry, Ai Weiwei, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Gerhard Richter and Jenny Holzer. Yet Oursler’s work is perhaps the most pungently direct. Like Perry, Richter went straight into his studio after the attacks and created a work, September, which uses squeegee painting to create the feeling of tailwind, as we see the clinical, menacing two-plane stack waiting to fall upon the Twin Towers.
Jake and Dinos Chapman’s piece in show, Nein! Eleven?, was the one that struck me the most. Its dexterous, miniaturised violence hit the spot, so to speak, with its human mass of Nazi soldiers, horribly mutilated corpses and bestrewn skulls. All this, on a toy-soldier scale, reminds us subconsciously of the cruelty of children.
We have, all of us, lived through this era. The Imperial War Museum, once a mausoleum to wars none of us had any side in, and which some vilified as a glorification of violence, is now performing a service as a field hospital. The Age of Terror has burrowed into us, and we need to disentangle ourselves from it, and look at it from a certain distance, for a while at least, or risk being the walking wounded.
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