Art and Fear (review)

Paul Virilio's latest effort, Art and Fear, is a deeply frustrating book. It is a brief volume containing two essays: "A Pitiless Art" and "Silence on Trial," with an introduction by John Armitage that is nearly as long as the essays themselves. Those familiar with Virilio's work will recognize the main ideas here, but find little that is new. Those unfamiliar with his work will most probably come away bewildered by the scattershot and unintentionally flippant character of the essays. The notes for Armitage's introduction state that these essays "were originally given as two talks" (97) and this goes some distance to explain the pervading sense that Virilio is preaching to the choir here, presuming that his particular use of terminology and underlying themes are well known. That was probably true for his audience at the Maeght Foundation in 1999, but not so for the reading public. Art and Fear reiterates many of the ideas expressed in earlier works by Virilio, and particularly inThe Information Bomb (1998).¹ In fact, the reader might do better to read that earlier work in order to understand what Virilio is attempting to say.

In Art and Fear, Virilio extends his meditations on modernity and the dark side of technological "progress" to consider modern art, film, and genetic research, drawing unexpected and vaguely defined linkages between the two. Virilio's writings over the years have offered incisive observations about modern visuality and the ever-increasing speed and pervasiveness of technology; pointing out, for example, that the invention of cinema was dependent upon both the mechanism for the Gatling gun and the invention of searchlights.² But here he has wandered far from his field of expertise. Virilio's discussions of individual artists and works appear to be unfettered by historical specifics or by the intentions of particular stylistic movements. Whether the intellectual satire of dada or the deeply personal distortions of expressionism, all are lumped together by Virilio as the "profanation of forms and bodies over the course of the twentieth century" (27).³ Pushing this line of thought further, he states that the "Early warning signs of the pitiless nature of MODERN TIMES" can be found in "the visual arts of that historical period [that] never ceased TORTURING FORMS before making them disappear in abstraction. Similarly others would not cease TORTURING BODIES afterwards to the tune of the screams of the tortured prior to their asphyxiation inside the gas chambers" (87).

More than once Virilio equates modernism's break with mimesis (the imitation of perceptual reality) with Nazi death camps and eugenics experiments. In the second paragraph of the book he quotes a recent visitor to Auschwitz who states that she is more horrified by the exhibits of contemporary art in the museum there than by the camp itself. "I took the train back, telling myself that they had won! They had won since they'd produced forms of perception that are all of a piece with the mode of destruction they made their own" (28). He backtracks to 1925 to cite an art dealer who found the new German art (referring to Nolde, Kokoschka, Lehmbruck) frightening: "They would like to carve the Germans of tomorrow out of fresh meat . . . " (33). Virilio then tells us that this man, René Gimpel, disappeared in the Neuengamme camp twenty years later. While Virilio's intentions are not to write art history or criticism, his use of these artists and images reduces them to little more than cardboard props, drained of all their individual complexity. For example, Emil Nolde supported the National Socialists and joined the party, but this did not shield him from being one of the "degenerate" artists most persecuted by the Third Reich. How are we to interpret Virilio's reference to his work (or to Kokoschka, whose work was also branded "degenerate")?

The question left unanswered by Virilio has to do with relationship between the art works and events he mixes together. What are we to make of this claim: "The...