Since then, it seems as though free speech reigns largely uncontested, and now anyone can read or write anything. We barely bat an eyelid if a book is released which contains formerly radical elements. Sympathetic paedophiles have long found their way into literary portrayal, so where else is there to go? Chris Morris’s mockumentary Four Lions portrayed sympathetic terrorists and this failed to cause a response. In the build-up to its release, there was discussion about the potential reactions to such a comedic portrayal of terrorists’ attempts to attack a London Marathon event, but the film itself has gone largely unnoticed. Do we now just accept any interpretation of “culture?” Is this the triumph of free speech? Or is it the waning of resistance and reaction, of affective response and activism?

In fact, literature does cause controversy. Protesting still goes on, but it is more insidious. Literature is ‘challenged’ regularly. Issues surrounding The Catcher in the Rye recurs again and again; a book that I (and many others) read as a teenager in school, and which certainly did no irrevocable harm. On the contrary, it opened the gates of literature and of a more complex way of understanding one’s place in the world and one’s values. For many people, however, these books do still provoke disgust and anger. The American Library Association (ALA) is an incredible source of information on these issues.

http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/index.cfm

It tells us that even in 2009, books were challenged for having homosexual content, or issues from a religious viewpoint (for example in the Twilight series). There are places all over America where parents try to prevent Twilight being taught in schools. The ALA also provides information on the authors of colour who are challenged (a high proportion, as one, sadly, might expect). Apart from Banned Books Week, there seems to be no other publicity or activity about the challenges and bans that take place.

Freedom of speech is a complex issue, and one that often complicates left/right political distinctions. The title of Nat Hentoff’s book Free Speech for Me – But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other encapsulates this idea. In the case of Rushdie, it is hard to know where to stand. If one supports free speech, is one allowing the sort of Islamophobia that leads to racist attacks today? Or does the book help people to understand this complexity? This video, a debate on BBC’s weekly political panel show Question Time, just after Rushdie was knighted, helps us to consider such complexity.

One artist (filmmaker) who is still under fire is Werner Herzog. As I was reading about his new film – Cave of Forgotten Dreams – I was alerted to a video of him being shot at. His nonchalance suggests that this extremity of reaction is what artists should expect.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is released Spring 2011.

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Mitchell has applied this dual theoretical approach to contemporary media and its use of images. In the aforementioned work he discusses the ‘War on Terror’ as a “War of images in which the real-world stakes could not be higher” (2). He argues that 9/11 was an act of image terrorism. Without denying the “real-life” atrocities inflicted, Mitchell suggests that the wider (it is difficult to say ‘more important’) impact was upon the American (and Western) psyche. The war itself, as well as being literal and physical, is an “imaginary, metaphoric conception” (xii). The West responded with its counter-attack of imagery in the disturbingly named ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing of Baghdad, which began on 19th March 2003. I remember these images vividly, as I sat, five days before my 13th birthday, watching the evening news with my family. 9/11 itself is a more hazy memory, having occurred when I was a few years younger, but its impact on my own psyche is nonetheless still felt, and always will be. The image is still ingrained, despite the fact I didn’t fully understand its significance at the time and am still trying to comprehend it today. The shock and awe campaign, which I suspect killed very few identifiable “enemy Iraqis,” killing many civilians instead, functions more effectively (as its title suggests) in terms of imagery. Particularly memorable are the night-vision images, which enable mass human destruction to appear like a fireworks display, or a high-tech computer game. (This is all the more worrying considering recent reports about the use of video-games in military training.) Ironically, the technology which allows further vision into the darkness of night, in fact renders the “real-life” effect (death) all the more distant and aestheticized.

This second video is accompanied by a voice-over which makes the horrifying indulgence of these images explicit. For this man, the bombs are “motherfuckers;” he expresses the desire to insert “my ballistic in their asses.” He demands they “give me the footage,” leading to the culmination of the final explosion as the “the money-shot.” The sexual connotations are wholly explicit, comparing bombing footage to that of photography, the release of the bomb to the sexual ejaculatory release onto the object of desire. We might recall here the way this relationship between bombing and sexuality was satirically envisaged by Stanley Kubrick in his 1964 film Dr Strangelove:

The great irony of the “War of Images” is the paradoxical “real-life” effect. As Mitchell puts it, hereby explaining the ‘cloning’ aspect of his book, “the war on terror was having the effect of recruiting more jihadists and increasing the number of terrorist attacks” (xii). He cites political scientist Robert Pape who tells us further: “There were no suicide bombers in Iraq before the U.S. invasion and occupation, and suicide bombing in Israel-Palestine only began after decades of military occupation” (173). Despite this, the erotic and egoistic lure of images is what propelled the war onwards. Even the name ‘War on Terror’ is a part of the imaginary image-making tactic, so effective that few have of us have stopped to consider what it even means. For Mitchell, this name makes about as much sense as a “War on Nervousness” (xvii). The enemy (‘Terror’) is metaphoric and imaginary, but this has not prevented it being translated into material – or human – results: loss of life.

As I hope to have shown, an exploration of images, particularly in our media and image driven culture, is not merely aesthetic exploration. Mitchell wants to understand why the images of this war are what they are, what they signify, what desires they manifest, and hence, most importantly, what realities they produce. This is why I have considered them too and I urge you to be aware of them further as conflicts unfold and the war of images continues. I also urge you to see Mitchell speak at the Musee d’art contemporain (MACM) this coming Wednesday (March 9) at 6.30 p.m. The talk was inspired by the book I have been discussing and will be entitled “The Historical Uncanny: Phantoms, Doubles, and Repetition in the War on Terror.”

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To some extent, the Gothic relies upon antiquated values: aristocratic opulence, superstitious belief, and often xenophobia or even racism (Van Helsing’s fear of Dracula is at least partly based on the otherness of Eastern Europe). However, I think the real reason we find it hard to engage with the Gothic in contemporary life is because it relies on uncertainty. What lies behind the veil? Ann Radcliffe’s mammoth novel The Mysteries of Udolpho literalizes this metaphor – or perhaps is the source of it.  Around 500 of its 700 or so of pages rely upon the reader wondering, along with the protagonist Emily, what lies behind an eerie veil she once glimpsed in a castle. To read and enjoy the novel requires an extended period of waiting, obsessing and pursuing – we must replicate Emily’s experience. The experience depends upon the ability to pursue what will inevitably be an anti-climactic ending.

The problem with this kind of narrative, or aesthetic experience, is that we are not used to waiting for answers anymore. With the click of the mouse, they dangle accessibly in a web of revelation. Why wait in suspense, why hover in uncertainty, a potentially painful and frustrating ordeal, when we can relieve and extinguish the experience immediately? This attitude, however, overlooks the fact that in that liminal moment of mystery and suspense, other ideas reveal themselves and a new kind of experience arises. There is more to knowledge and understanding than a means to an end.

Art historian Lawrence Rinder discusses the “atmosphere of fear” in the work of Gothic artist Luc Tuymans. Such an atmosphere is “impalpable and omnipresent” and so the aesthetic experience extends beyond the space of the image. The mystery of the image amounts to a lot more than its constituent parts, a bit like the veil and the object behind it that Emily pursues in Udolpho.

The reason I am talking about the Gothic is not to analyze Radcliffe’s writing or Tuymans’s art, but because I have (re)discovered some eighties electro-gothic music. A former McGill student alerted me to a record label Minimal Wave and their eponymous compilation album, The Minimal Wave Tapes. Some tracks are more overtly Gothic than others, but I feel that this genre seems to encapsulate a sort of dark, yet playful, unknowability. The use of early synths (often cheap and cheap-sounding) created a new wave of experimental music. I am tempted to call it the technological Gothic or the Gothic of technology. This music – at once dance-able and technologically advanced (at least for the 80s) – is an appealing way to establish a place for the Gothic in contemporary life. The tracks provide no obvious “answer” – there is rarely a chorus which culminates in some kind of climax – but instead an eerie feeling of emptiness and the attempt to fill it with words and electric drum beats. Here, Das Kabinette’s track “The Cabinet” is accompanied by a wonderful scene from Wiene’s film, an apt fit as the lyrics recount the film’s narrative. It is quite an amazing combination of artistic products from 1919 and 1983.

One of my favourite tracks from the eighties Gothic resurgence is undoubtedly “Warm Leatherette” by The Normal. I would not immediately describe this track as Gothic, but its content and form are that of fear intermingled with desire. Its minimalist and imagistic lyrics describe the erotic experience of driving a car and crashing it. Influenced by JG Ballard’s novel Crash, the track captures an urban void, the terrifying yet addictive experience of driving on endlessly long roads, thrusting oneself violently close to death. As Ballard has claimed in interviews, if we really wanted to live, we wouldn’t drive – there is a suicidal element to turning the key. Trent Reznor (from Nine Inch Nails) and Peter Murphy (from Bauhaus) produced a version of the track which further suggests this type of contemporary experience as a Gothic one. “You can see your reflection in the luminescent dash.”

The renewed enthusiasm for Gothic inspiration is still continuing (Esben and the Witch, Zola Jesus), but I feel like there must be a more interesting direction than what these bands offer. Anyone have any suggestions?

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Last Monday I attended professor Jennifer Doyle’s (University of California at Riverside) excellent talk entitled Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. She began by discussing controversies in contemporary art and recalled a recent example from the exhibit “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” at the National Gallery in Washington D.C.. Last December, the video piece “Fire in my Belly” by David Wojnarowicz was removed from the gallery due to the protests of a small Catholic contingent (Bill Donohue and the Catholic League). The news story had caught my attention at the time, but – foolishly – I had not followed up my awareness with an investigation of the artwork itself. I assumed that the work should not have been pulled and got on with things.

Many like-minded, but more influential, folk rallied behind Wojnarowicz. As Doyle persuasively argued, however, there is a tendency in liberal academic arts discourse to defend controversial or scandalous art, which in fact diminishes the political power of that work. No, Doyle protested, let’s not lose the vital radical praxis of these works. As she put it, “controversy comes from a real place,” and it is important that scandalous works offend. They offend because they are new and disturbing, they are difficult and emotional, and they challenge the established order. If we feel like art no longer kicks up a fuss as it did when Manet made his debut at the Salon des Refusés, it is because art’s defendants acquiesce to criticism rather hail the controversy of the works. Impressionism was a term of derision. Manet did not respond by claiming his art was in fact adhering to academic convention. He had thrown out these principles for a reason and stuck to his guns. We admire him for it.

If Wojnarowicz hates the Catholic Church and expresses that in his art then let’s make space for it (I’m not sure he actually does, but still, it is worth being able to consider). Of course, the irony is that I would probably never have watched this video unless it was banned. Thank you Catholic League! I have now seen the video; it is intriguing and perhaps shocking. All the better.

On another note, it occurred to me this week that the music video has been a somewhat wasted form. In essence, it is the combination of music and short video art. The amount of short filmmakers who make stunning 34 minute pieces who do not turn their skills to creating music videos must be huge. I was alerted to one example of a fine song and video working in conjunction and I hope to discover more.

If anyone has any favourite suggestions, please make me aware. If there is indeed a serious lack, then one of you budding filmmakers, please fill this void!

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