I believe in monsters: Frankenstein, terror and the creative event

Before tackling the question of there being a structural relationship between art and terrorism, it is necessary first to explore the connection between art and terror. This is because the relationship between art and terror has its own deep and complex genealogy – one that cuts across aesthetics, ethics, politics and history and in so doing, gets inextricably bound up with the attendant notion of the sublime.Footnote ¹⁶ I am not of course going to attempt to compress a complex history of ‘the sublime’ into a few lines – the latter of which has in any case been the subject of much discursivity from within IR, art theory and visual culture more generally. However, in order to cut more quickly into the flesh of this ‘genealogy of terror’ and to engage with the subject more summarily, I intend instead to take my lead from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Frankenstein, I argue below, proposes a different method by which to conceptualise the relationship between art, terror and the sublime. The reasons for this are fourfold: Firstly, Frankenstein is itself partly about terror – The Terror, that is. As Gerald McNiece has shown, both Mary and Percy Shelley were ardent students of the literature and polemics written about the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror and the meteoric career of Napoleon.Footnote ¹⁷ They had systematically studied the works of both the radicals, (including Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin) and the conservatives and anti Jacobins (including Edmund Burke, Abbé Barruel, John Adolphus and the anonymous French Revolutionary Plutarch).Footnote ¹⁸ In all of these works (as Les Sterrenburg points out), the revolutionary crowds are depicted as demons and monsters and in this way, a strong correlation is suggested between the monster in Frankenstein and the force and operation of the French Revolution.Footnote ¹⁹ Indeed, not only is the Reign of Terror an enduring focus in the Shelleys' studies, but so also is the notion of the revolutionary sublime – a concept which combines art, politics and terror into a single mode of operation.Footnote ²⁰ And thus because it speaks to contemporary notions about political change, whilst simultaneously addressing the nature of the sublime, Frankenstein is therefore an ideal vehicle by which to explore the parallel concepts of art, terror and the sublime.

However – and this brings me to my second reason as to why a study of Frankenstein reveals new methods by which to conceptualise the relationship between Art and terror – Frankenstein is not just a novel about terror. It is also one which enacts different kinds of experiences of, or encounters with terror. Dr Frankenstein is, needless to say, beset by terror throughout the entire novel. Most notoriously, his terror arises of course as a result of his repulsion towards the ‘hideous phantasm’, otherwise known as ‘the Creature’.Footnote ²¹ But Frankenstein also experiences a repressed psychic terror – one that is hidden within his unconscious and – as literary critics consistently remind us – one which is made manifest in the Creature as Frankenstein's assumed-to-be alter ego.Footnote ²² There is another kind of terror in the novel however – one which has hitherto gone unremarked upon, but which is the focus of my study here: that is, that terror which arises from the instigation of the (event of) art. I will speak more about the nature of this ‘event’ below. At this point however, suffice it to say that such terror is accompanied by a kind of epiphany – albeit a destructive one – this terror besets the ‘creator’ when he realises that he does not have mastery over the created ‘thing’ – that monster, which I will call ‘Art’. It is this terror – that which produces a ‘destructive epiphany’ at the instigation of the event of Art and which is therefore always already implicated within that event – that I wish to consider now. For Frankenstein, I believe, per-forms a kind of sequencing of the event of art; it shows the process of the unfolding of the event of Art as that which is necessarily involved with terror, with (in this case) The Terror and by extension, with conceptions of terrorism.

In Frankenstein, the ‘destructive epiphany’ is experienced from the very first description of the Creature as he stands over the sleeping Frankenstein, ‘look[ing] on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.’Footnote ²³ Terror arises when Frankenstein sees that ‘his’ created ‘thing’, his Creature, can neither be un-created, nor can it be governed by its ‘creator’, but will go about the world on its own, wreaking havoc where it wills. In fact, from very early on in the book, ‘creation’ is evoked as necessarily involving some kind of encounter with ‘terror’ and (self) destruction. For example, Shelley tells us that, prior to his medical ambitions, Frankenstein had struggled (and failed) to become a poet – only to abandon the creative task, after a year of having to live ‘in his own creation’. The suffocating, dominating, terrorising force of such ‘creation’ is, unmistakeable here.Footnote ²⁴ If the artist has been the instigator of Art, then it is ‘creation’ itself which (well in advance of the creation of the Creature) is the instigator of terror – it is ‘creation’ which simultaneously terrorises both the reader and the ‘creator’.

In this description then, Frankenstein is already doubly haunted by terror. But the effect is tripled when we turn to Shelley's description of her ‘own’ creation of the creator of the Creature who creates terror. This endlessly self-replicating wave of creation and terror brings me to my third reason as to why Frankenstein offers an opportunity to reconceptualise the relationship between art and terror. Frankenstein's terror at having created ‘the Creature’, or at having been trapped in his own creation, is, it transpires, only a repetition of Mary Shelley's terror at having created the creator of the creature. This point is broached for us by Shelley herself when, in her introduction to the 1831 edition of her novel, she recalls how the original idea for Frankenstein came to her in a ‘waking dream’. The image jolts Shelley from her vision and she exclaims how she is forced to, ‘open[ed] my eyes in terror’.Footnote ²⁵ Thus the terror of Frankenstein-as-creator of the creature who creates terror is revealed and redoubled as the terror of the creator-of-Frankenstein. This troubling link between the self-replicating process of creation, terror and destruction is therefore one which, at one and the same time, extends out in different directions – in the ‘created’ event (of fiction/Art) and in the (‘real’) event of ‘creation’.

My fourth and final reason for using Frankenstein as a vehicle by which to explain the relationship between art and terror can be seen in the continuation of the event of Frankenstein. In other words, the creation of Frankenstein does not end with the writing, publication and reading of Shelley's novel. Indeed, Frankenstein is not so much ‘a story’ as it is an ongoing mode of production and operation – one that goes on ceaselessly extending itself in a never-ending stream of Frankensteinian spin-offs. The Frankenstein event tirelessly continues to proliferate – endlessly producing new versions of itself in the forms of follow-ups, film adaptations, critical interpretations and newspaper stories. All of these ‘new’ Frankensteinian creations then continue to create their own affects in the broader cultural realm. Frankenstein therefore functions as a kind of model for how the peculiar and terrifying event of Art operates more broadly: wherein the ‘original’ detaches itself from the author/artist/originator and continues, across time, to recreate; produce and reproduce still more material. As event, it is continually extending itself into directions which cannot be foreseen in advance. Beyond the control of any ‘maker’, the event's massive, stitched-together body is stuffed with cancerous cells that constantly metastasise, creating new growths in secret, unexpected places.

Is it ‘good’ to create?

What is so fascinating then about Frankenstein as both description/enactment of (the event of) Art, is its focus on terror as necessarily implicated within the creative event. Such an understanding of creation/creativity stands in contrast with other contemporaneous, but more frequently evoked notions of Art as ‘fine’ and art-making or ‘creativity’ as ‘good’ – or as an essentially benevolent value. This explains why the suggestion that a structural link exists between Art and Terrorism at first is hard to swallow – because such a link makes a mockery of many of the inherited or commonsensical understandings of Art, as described by Western Art History over the past three to four centuries at least. It stands in opposition to the much more palatable view put forward for example by Kant's Critique of Judgement. For in the latter – published only a couple of decades before Frankenstein – ‘the scene’ of creation is evoked, literally, as one of harmony: ‘genius’ exists ‘in th[at] happy relation’ which leads, firstly, to the discovery of ‘ideas for a given concept’, and secondly, to ‘a way of expressing these ideas.’ The discovery and expression of these ideas will subsequently ‘communicate to others […] the mental attunement that those ideas produce’.Footnote ²⁶ In other words, for Kant, the creation of (fine) Art is analogous with a kind of force for ‘good’:Footnote ²⁷ that is to say, the activity of art-making enlarges our mental powers in new ways and in so doing, enhances social communication and demonstrates culture's ability to transcend itself.Footnote ²⁸

Indeed the assumption that a structural link exists between Art and ‘goodness’ is consistently put forward in Western aesthetics and philosophy. For Hegel too, lecturing not long after Shelley has written Frankenstein, ‘the scene’ of creativity has a beneficent quality to it. Thus, following Kant, the Hegelian artist is a kind of martyr (another variety of the above force for ‘good’), whose life is dedicated to creating the conditions for the progress of the ‘spirit’ and for whom, art ‘passes over into higher forms of consciousness’.Footnote ²⁹ Hegelian creativity has ‘the Idea’ being ‘shaped forward into reality’; or alternatively expressed, the Idea is ‘advanced to immediate unity and correspondence with this reality’.Footnote ³⁰ Such creation is ‘good’ because as Hegel tells it, it forms a question, it makes a ‘call to the mind of the spirit’, while at the same time producing a substantial expression of ideas.Footnote ³¹

In a similar vein, but writing nearly a century later, Heidegger concurs in his depiction of creativity as a tranquil, serene productive activity: ‘all creation’ he says, ‘is a drawing, as of water from a spring’.Footnote ³² The Heideggerian artist (albeit in a different way from that of the Hegelian and Kantian artist) is thus still a mechanism for the production of some kind of ‘good’. A kind of elicitor of truth, Heidegger's artist takes ‘a founding leap’, which ‘brings something into being from out of the source of its nature’ and thus, he prepares for ‘the setting into work of truth’.Footnote ³³ Here, creativity is seen as supporting some kind of ‘good’. ‘Art’ says Heidegger ‘lets truth originate’.Footnote ³⁴

What then are we to make of Mary Shelley's evocation of the creative event as that which unlooses some kind of monstrosity? On reading Frankenstein, one is constantly struck by the slippage which again and again, arises between the monstrous ‘Creature’ and the work or activity of creation. In fact the Creature is often referred to directly as ‘the creation’ and this reciprocity which exists between creator, creativity and creation is understood both by Frankenstein and by Shelley, as being a highly dangerous one.Footnote ³⁵ It is this interchangeability between ‘the Creature’ and creation which suggests that for Shelley, the creative event may well be a force for destruction, if it is also to be a force for ‘good’.

The structuring of terror/ism

In this way then, Frankenstein provides a provisional starting point for addressing the larger question as to whether creativity, art and terror(ism) are structurally linked. It functions as a literary and artistic proposition – one that connects Art, (or the creative event) with terror and the sublime. Of course, it could be argued that the terror of Frankenstein has more to do with the creativity of the scientist than that of the ‘artist’. Certainly, it is this aspect of terror which the media and popular press play upon in their frequent reference to ‘Frankenstein foods.’Footnote ³⁶ Similarly, Frankenstein's ‘Creature’ continues to be evoked in order to raise concerns about the acceptable limits of cloning and xenografting (the use of animal organs in human bodies).Footnote ³⁷ Such readings proceed from the continuing fear that Science is becoming ever more ‘arrogant’ – attempting to rival ‘nature’ and/or Godly ‘creation’.Footnote ³⁸ However these concerns do not negate the proposal that Shelley's story figures as a kind of metaphor for ‘artistic’ creation – rather they enhance it, by deliberately playing on the increasing ability of all ‘creators’ to forge new kinds of created things, which they must inevitably lose control over.

Prior to Shelly, Edmund Burke, (following Longinus) had of course forged a structural connection between art and terror.Footnote ³⁹ Mary Shelley's tale however goes much further than Burke's essay in its implications. While Burke confines himself to the aesthetic impact of art and describes art as proceeding in a manner ‘analogous to terror’,Footnote ⁴⁰ Shelley's novel forms a much more dangerous bond between Art and terror – one in which the creative event leaves the aesthetic realm entirely. In Shelley's novel, it is art's disconnection from the artist – its autonomy and ability to move around on its own as it were – which seals the deep-seated bond between the creative event and the destructive one. This pact between creativity and destruction is thus perfectly engendered in Shelley's novel which, on the level of content, but also on the levels of its structure and operation, collapses the distance between art and terror that normally characterises writing about the workings of terror in art. It is the argument of this article however, that the connection between art and terror is not merely an analogous one but one that produces some ‘real’ or terrorising affect in its own right. Such an affect is no ‘less real’ because it does not result in an obvious harm being perpetrated to the body. It may be of another order of experience, but the affect of such terror is in no way ‘unreal’. Psychological violence, is after all, readily acceptable in cases of domestic abuse today – where what characterises the relationship is the operation and maintenance of power and control of one over another. The power that the artwork exerts over the viewer/reader is comparable to this. The viewer/reader does not necessarily elect to encounter art. Indeed we are increasingly ‘subjected to’ artworks which operate far beyond the confines of the gallery walls and which seek to interrupt and to disrupt the viewer's ‘normal’ sense of ‘reality’. The Situationists' ‘détournements’, graffiti and poster campaigns make for an obvious case in point here, but so too do the Guerrilla Girls' anti-sexism campaigns, or Hi Red Center's street-cleaning events, or Asco's Walking Murals (and many of their other interventions besides), or Richard Serra's Tilted Arc (1981) or Simon Leung's Squatting Projects, or the actions of the WAC (Womens' Action Coalition) or as is the case of many, many more such contemporary interventions into public spaces.

From terror to terrorism?

The shift from ‘art-and-its-relationship-to-terror’ to ‘art-and-its-relationship-to-terrorism’ is both complex and problematical. Partly, this has to do with the lack of clarity that continues to trouble existing and revised definitions of the term ‘terrorism’.Footnote ⁴¹ Partly however, this also has to do with the long and complex relationship between ‘terror’ and art – a relationship which culminates in Stockhausen's notorious comment made in 2001, shortly after seeing media coverage of two planes crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. For, when Stockhausen exclaimed that this was the ‘greatest work of art ever’, he blurred the event of ‘terrorism’ with the event of art – the latter of which had, perhaps until then, always been assumed to operate in a manner analogous to terror.Footnote ⁴² The composer was quickly dismissed as having ‘dangerously overblown ambitions for art’. He needed, it was said, to be ‘confined to a psychiatric clinic’.Footnote ⁴³ However, following on from Stockhausen's comments, on the first anniversary of 9/11, Damien Hirst made a similar statement: ‘The thing about 9/11 is that it's kind of like an artwork in its own right […] David Hockney said that it was the ‘most wicked piece of artwork’ – a lot of people have compared it to a work of art’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Yet despite the condemnations of these and other similar remarks, they are nevertheless – particularly in the case of Stockhausen – repeated again and again. Amongst the (by no means comprehensive) list of those who have referenced Stockhausen's coments are: Lentricchia and McAuliffe (2002), Fredric Jameson (2003), Susan Buck-Morss (2003), Lee Harris, (2004), Anthony Fothergill (2005), Mary Schmidt Campbell & Randy Martin (2006), Christine Battersby (2007) and Emmanouil Aretoulakis (2008). In other words, it is not just in the popular media that structural links between art, terror/ism and the sublime are made, but in numerous academic journals and debates, which frequently use Stockhausen's remarks as a springboard from which to proceed into larger debates about the nature of aesthetics and/or of terrorism.Footnote ⁴⁵ It would appear that the ‘indecent’ mixing of terror/ism with – can we call it ‘jouissance’?Footnote ⁴⁶ – will not easily be unmixed again. However, what I want to draw attention to here is a factor which has been largely overlooked to date – that is, both Stockhausen and Hirst's remarks find their resolution in the event of creating, rather than in the attendant spectacle of destruction. That is to say, the work of art as proposed above, is not an object but an event – it is characterised by its propensity to transform itself over time and therefore paradoxically, by its ability to continue to differ from itself.Footnote ⁴⁷ In this way, the event threatens to wreak havoc with ‘order’ as it has previously been imagined. Any assumed ‘order’, as artists know however, can never be fully secured and it is this possibility which provokes the event of making as that which is a kind of disordering of the given: ‘Many artists’, says Stockhausen, ‘try to do something like that, to go beyond the limit of what is thinkable and possible, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves for another world.’Footnote ⁴⁸ Even Hirst, who is nonetheless clearly breath-taken by the visual impact of the event-as-media-spectacle, nevertheless blusters on with the following observation: ‘because they've achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible’.Footnote ⁴⁹ What interests him in other words, is the way in which the event was devised: ‘It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact.’

Of course, by definition, an event cannot be ‘devised’ – at least not in any straightforward way. Still, what Hirst and Stockhausen have in mind more precisely, is the role that imagination plays within the event of making – they understand the event as that in which some kind of creative leap is taken. Such an event is one which will disturb the existent (imagined) order and thus trigger some kind of opening onto ‘another world’. To say that Stockhausen (et al) have therefore ‘aestheticised’ terrorism, is simply too clumsy a conclusion to draw.Footnote ⁵⁰ Rather they have noticed, in the way that artists do, the role that imagination plays in the making (that is, in the orchestration) of an event – whether it be an event of terrorism, or an event of art. Derrida makes a similar point when speaking specifically about the role of the imagination in the ‘event’ of September 11. In discussion with Giovanna Borradori, he says that September 11 is ‘part of the […] theatre of violence aimed at striking the imagination.’Footnote ⁵¹ He points out that the terrorist event is an ordeal not only because of what has already happened in the past, but because of

It is, in other words, the imaginative power of terror which gives it its force – the imagining of what might take place. On the other hand, this imagining can, as it were, be used more imaginatively, as Derrida also notes with the following questions:

This of course causes those very narrow definitions of terrorism that dominate in the media and in other public spaces, to completely implode.Footnote ⁵⁴ It collapses the conceptual categories which allow us to draw a line around ‘terrorism’ and to demarcate it, as that which largely occurs ‘elsewhere’. Curiously, this is the line that Jean Baudrillard took in his essay ‘The Spirit of Terrorism’ – itself published shortly after the destruction of the WTC. There, Baudrillard hit upon the imaginative component of the event of terrorism when he said:

We dreamed it. We imagined it. The inference that one must make therefore, in light of both Derrida and Baudrillard's assertions, is that the imaginative faculty is somehow a determining feature in ‘terrorism’. Conversely, that art, or the act of imagining, must have something of the ability to terrorise – to wound (without actually killing) us. This is not to say that ‘imagining is terrorism’, or that ‘terrorism is art’. Rather it is to observe, that both terrorism and art have features which are, whether we like it or not, conflated with one another and that the act of differentiating between the two may not be as ‘obvious’ as hitherto assumed.

Avant-gardism and terrorism

Some of this conflation arises as a result of that other structuring logic which underpins our understanding of art at least in the 20th century – that is, the logic of avant-gardism. Avant-gardism is founded upon the notion that in order to be ‘progressive’, art must radicalise itself.Footnote ⁵⁶ Art must destroy its links with ‘tradition’ and cease to be submissive before existing aesthetic orders (authorities). Here originality is everything. And from the standpoint of originality, ‘order’ is not order, so much as it is a hegemonic system which should be challenged and destroyed if art is to ‘progress’. It is precisely this connection between avant-gardism and terrorism which Baudrillard makes when casting himself as a terrorist:

A (retired) Situationist poet, Baudrillard merely gave voice to that long-standing dialectic which extended (at least) throughout the 20th century and into the 21st – that tension between creation and destruction. Such a tension and its connection to avant-gardism are also observed by Alain Badiou in Handbook of Inaesthetics.Footnote ⁵⁸ Hence Badiou depicts the avant-gardes as ‘harbingers of a didactico-romantic schema, or as the partisans of the absoluteness of creative destruction’.Footnote ⁵⁹ I differ from Badiou here however, in that I argue that that ‘tension’ between creation and destruction, is not a feature of the art movements of the past but has become so entrenched within contemporary art-making practices, that it is now a structuring logic. To develop this line of reasoning further, I will illustrate two things: firstly, that avant-gardism hinges not just on the ‘transgressive’, but on the ‘terroristic’; and secondly that, for many contemporary art practices, such a logic is a foundational one.

It is not difficult, I would suggest, to demonstrate a ‘terroristic’ dimension in avant-gardism. Paul Virilio for example, has (wrongly) picked up on this in Art and Fear – his post 9/11 diatribe against contemporary art:

However, in his denunciation of contemporary – what he variously calls a ‘pitiless art’,Footnote ⁶¹ a ‘terminal art’Footnote ⁶² or an ‘extreme art’Footnote ⁶³ – Virilio hyper-polemicises what otherwise would have been a valid (if arguable) observation. In other words, he proceeds from simple ‘slippery-slope’ logic – if we allow this kind of thing to go on, then wherever will it end? The trouble with this kind of reasoning is that it is unashamedly teleological – it assumes that contemporary artists today are somehow more perverse than their precursors, and that they will therefore go on becoming even more perverse as time goes by.Footnote ⁶⁴ Such logic however, fails to acknowledge the structuring tension which, as argued above, cuts right across (Western) art-making practices at least since the emergence of Romanticism in the second part of the 18th century (if not much earlier).Footnote ⁶⁵ Following on from this, if it is Romanticism, (or at least the crisis within Romanticism) which determines the onslaught of modernity during the last two hundred years,Footnote ⁶⁶ then it would appear that the entire Modernist project owes something to this enduring, structuring tension that exists between destruction and creation. Virilio is right in his identification of a ‘terroristic’ element which must be acknowledged as having long since existed in art-making practices, but wrong in his reasons as to why such practices might be considered ‘terroristic’ and wrong also, in his predictions about the consequences of such an element. That is, in his teleologically-driven conclusion, Virilio sees it as inevitable that ‘we will look on helplessly […] as a profaned art emerges in the image of the annihilated corpses of tyranny’.

However, as noted above, Virilio is nevertheless not far off the mark when he identifies a connection between avant-gardism and terrorism. And he is not alone in making this connection either. For example, Boris Groys, a contemporary art critic and curator, has also tried, in his short essay ‘The Fate of Art in the Age of Terror’, to tie down this connection.Footnote ⁶⁷ Groys however, makes an error which is as fatal error as Virilio's when he has the ‘terrorist’ and the ‘artist’ compete with one another in a contest for greatest radicality – before eventually submitting that, though the artist would lose any such a contest, his/hers is in any case a different kind of radicality.Footnote ⁶⁸

Decadent terrorism: arson, bombs and bellies at barrel level

The connection between art and terror is therefore not the result of any recent post-9/11 sentiments. However, in a long succession of artists of different kinds, the connection between terrorism and art-making has been more than ‘symbolic’. For Wagner for example, who set buildings on fire during the Dresden uprising in 1848, arson ignited a ‘beautiful spark of divine Joy’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The continued likening of the effect of artworks to that of bombs is also noteworthy. For example, in 1906, the Expressionist painter Emile Nolde praised Munch's painting for their likeness to the anarchist acts of Bakunin, saying:

More unnerving however is Andre Breton's famous proclamation in the ‘Second Manifesto of Surrealism’ that:

(Incidentally this ‘sentiment’ was more recently repeated by Brian O Doherty when he said that ‘perhaps the best avant-garde act would be to invite an audience and shoot it’.)Footnote ⁷² In a similar vein however, we could turn also to Richard Hulsenbeck – the Dadaist who said that ‘life should hurt’ and that ‘there is not enough cruelty’.Footnote ⁷³ Or for another obvious example, Antonin Artaud's often-cited ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ is exemplary. Here Artaud evokes what he calls a ‘violent cruelty’ – the latter of which, he says ‘will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so.’Footnote ⁷⁴ By ‘theatre of cruelty’, Artaud meant to hurl the spectator into the centre of the action, forcing him/her into the middle of the ‘spectacle’, so that s/he would be engulfed by ‘violent physical images [which] pulverise, mesmerise the audience's sensibilities […] as if in a vortex’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Such cruelty was, Artaud thought, necessary, so as to remove aesthetic distance; to bring the audience into direct contact with the dangers of life; to turn the theatre into a place where the spectator is exposed and threatened, rather than protected.

Of course, it may be objected that these examples only constitute what one might call, a kind of decadent ‘terrorism’ – one that ‘talks’ without actually torturing. But, returning again to Derrida's rhetorical question in which he asks if terrorism can occur without actually killing people, we must at least admit to the possibility of an art which can cause harm. Such an argument cannot be fully elaborated here, but if, as above, the act of asking this question leads to a redefinition of the term terrorism, then so also does it lead to a revision of any understanding of art as that which necessarily, or essentially, is always already a social ‘good’. Bakunin famously proclaimed that ‘the passion for destruction is at the same time a creative passion.’Footnote ⁷⁶ But if we allow for ‘creative destruction’, then presumably we must also allow for the possibility of destructive creation – in art as in anything else. In this way, the conflation into Art of terroristic tendencies (or the conflation into terror of ‘artistic’ ones) makes it difficult for us to utterly divorce it from ‘real’ ‘terrorism’. And, as is illustrated by the series of examples above, such artistic/terroristic tendencies cannot be confined solely to say, the works of the Vienna Action Group, or to participants in the Destruction in Art Symposium,Footnote ⁷⁷ or to say, Marina Abramowitz, Franko B and Orlan (the latter of whose ‘body-works’, Virilo takes to be an ‘obvious’ example of sadism).Footnote ⁷⁸ Rather, we must consider such conflation against two different contexts – firstly against that of the Western-centric construct called the ‘history of art’ – the latter of which has consistently combined ‘creation’ with ‘destruction’; and secondly, we must consider it in the context of those political and philosophical writings which have been so highly influential on (in particular) ‘Modern’ and ‘postmodern’ artists.

As regards the ‘history of art’, space does not permit the inclusion of an extensive chronology here, but examples, at least from the late 18th century, have already been cited above. In terms of philosophical writings which appear to advocate a kind of creative destruction, the instances here are equally numerous. Heidegger for example, sees an essential connection between creation and destruction. Being and Time frequently proceeds from the notion that destruction is related to, or is a ‘moment’ of transformation.Footnote ⁷⁹ Additionally, Nietzsche must be mentioned for his argument that ‘cruelty’ is a principle element of the creative will and its ability to make artistic ‘transfigurations’. In the Birth of Tragedy, for example, he develops his ‘Dionysian philosophy’, which, as the ‘highest artistic primal joy’, is experienced through destruction.Footnote ⁸⁰ Similarly, Henri Bergson's concept of ‘creative evolution’ envisages change as accompanied by ‘organic destruction.’Footnote ⁸¹ In the same way, Deleuze thinks of catastrophe as something to be sought out. Indeed, in a phrase reminiscent of Stockhausen's, Deleuze says that catastrophe culminates in an experience which ‘is like the emergence of another world’.Footnote ⁸² One could note here in passing also, that the term ‘creative destruction’ was popularised by the economist Joseph Schumpeter, who used it to describe the process of transformation that he claimed accompanied radical entrepreneurial innovation.Footnote ⁸³

I have written elsewhere about contemporary visual artworks which are in some way fascinated by terrorism and shall therefore not rehearse these accounts again here.Footnote ⁸⁴ However, before concluding, I wish to consider two artists whose works are continually evoked under the rubric of ‘terrorism’. Out of the numerous examples available, I have selected only two: that of Gregory Green and Kendell Geers.

Turning firstly to the work of Gregory Green, this artist has amassed an impressive array of bomb/artworks including the large series of works entitled ‘Bible Bomb’, ‘Suitcase Bomb’ and ‘Nuclear Bomb’. His series of Worktables present in detail a list of materials, technical manuals and other tools necessary to construct one's own explosive devices. In fact, earlier works by Green, include his ‘people traps’, his ‘Daring Death Machines’ of 1986 (in which participants wearing homemade wooden armour or occupying towers fitted with movable arms would engage in fierce battles) and his wall blade installations (sculptures made of circular saw blades mounted on fully functioning high-speed motors). In 1993, Green's work was exhibited in Potsdam, Germany. His exhibition included a number of billboards which diagrammed how to make Molotov cocktails and book-bombs. The billboards were viewed as seditious however and destroyed by police who subsequently arrested Green's curator and curatorial assistant under German anti-terrorist laws.Footnote ⁸⁵ In 1995, police again raided one of his exhibitions in Chicago. This resulted both in the arrest of his dealer and also in the issuing of a warrant for Green's own arrest. In this instance however, felony charges were dropped when it was shown that ‘10,000 Doses’, which was thought to contain a large amount of LSD, lacked the active ingredient of the hallucinogenic.Footnote ⁸⁶ For police, in a post Waco, or a post Baader-Meinhof context, these ‘artworks’ provided information which (although already publically available for those who cared to look for it) could incite or facilitate terrorist practices.

In a similar vein, the artist Kendell Geers' work aims also to place viewers in potentially threatening situations. By way of bomb threats, thrown bricks and exploded walls, Geers has developed a hybrid practice that resides, or so it has been said, ‘somewhere between conceptual art and political activism’.Footnote ⁸⁷ For example, in 1993, in a work called ‘(Blow)Situation/Installation’, Geers used explosives to blow a hole in the gallery wall. This was followed in later years by ‘Title Withheld (Brick)’, 1994/6Footnote ⁸⁸ during which the artist lobbed bricks through gallery windows. Or again, ‘Title Withheld (Deported)’, 1993/7 consisted of an electric fence charged with 6000 volts and erected across the gallery space. It should be noted here, that the original evidence for the existence of these works has long since been destroyed, so we will never fully know the extent to which Geers has actually put audiences at risk, and/or is simply playing on existing fears. However, as a work like ‘By Any Means Necessary’, 1993, shows, whether these fears arise from a ‘real’ threat or an invented ‘myth’, they nevertheless have real effects. This is obvious in the case of the latter work, with which the artist included the following statement:

Certainly, Geers, at least according to the writer Ruth Kirkham, 'seems to take this label of ‘terrorist’ as a compliment.Footnote ⁹⁰ Indeed he makes further use of the term in his essay, ‘I, TerroRealist’,Footnote ⁹¹ wherein the terrorist is portrayed as an ‘outsider, the other to whom our codes do not apply and who, in consequence, is now our enemy.’ Here Geers argues that: ‘we classify people as terrorists only because they do not play by our rules, respect our currency, worship our gods and they certainly do not respect our crusades and declarations of war.’Footnote ⁹² The traditional image of the artist as a kind of outsider is thus simultaneously evoked.

Of course it can be objected, that this kind of ‘terrorism’ is only an ‘ironic engagement with the tools of violence’, or that it is a ‘controlled desperation, striking at conceptual and material, political and cultural walls.’Footnote ⁹³ However, these acts/artworks, I would argue, are less examples of ‘ironic terrorism’ than they are of ecstatic terrorism of the Baudrillardian variety. As self-proclaimed terrorist, Baudrillard was of course drawing on Virilio's notion of ‘pure war’Footnote ⁹⁴ when he declared that ‘terrorism is an ecstatic form of violence.’Footnote ⁹⁵ However he first makes the connection between the real and the ecstatic in Simulacra and Simulation, when he suggests that ‘the representative apparatus’ would ‘react more violently to a simulated holdup than to a real holdup.’Footnote ⁹⁶ In Baudrillard's account, simulation has become more dangerous than ‘real violence’ because it suggests that ‘law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation’.Footnote ⁹⁷ To support this claim, Baudrillard drew on the example of a simulated robbery and argues that there is no ‘objective’ difference between this and a ‘real’ robbery, since ‘to the established order, they are always of the order of the real’:

The power of symbolic violence (ecstatic terrorism) was again attested to more recently in an incident involving Brad Jayakody, from Bayswater. Mr Jayakody, who was wearing a T-shirt depicting a cartoon character holding a gun, was prevented from boarding a flight by Security at Heathrow's Terminal 5 until he had changed his T-shirt.Footnote ⁹⁹ The confusion between ‘ecstatic’ terrorism and ‘real terrorism’ is ultimately, not only unnerving but further evidence of the instability of the line that exists between ‘creative’ and ‘destructive’ events. In closing, it would appear that the terrorist act relies upon the imaginative faculty – both in terms of its orchestration (creation), and also in terms of understanding its impact (destruction). In other words, as Elaine Scarry has observed in her still seminal study of pain and ‘acts of creativity’, the experience of pain itself ‘cannot be apprehended’ without being imagined or pictured:

The line between ‘making-up’ in the event of art and ‘making-up’ in the event of terrorism is thus not as substantial as one perhaps might have hoped. Perhaps the final word here should go to Joseph Beuys who, at the Guggenheim in 1979, presented various small objects which he claimed demonstrated the process of their making.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Amongst these was Beuys' ‘sculpture’ of a knife blade bound in gauze and entitled: When you cut your finger, bandage the knife.