NOTES
- “PM says Canberra Fires the Worst He's Seen”, Sydney Morning Herald (AAP), 19 January 2003.
- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 79.
- “Sept 11 Sculpture Covered Up”, CBS News online (Associated Press), 19 September 2002. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/19/national/main522528.shtml
- Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
- I will draw especially on the text “Figures of the Transpolitical” in Fatal Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchman and W.G.J. Niesluchowski (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990). References herein, however, are to the translation by Paul Foss and Julian Pefanis, editors of Jean Baudrillard, Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and its Destiny, 1968–1983 (Sydney: Pluto Press and Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1990).
- Baudrillard, Revenge of the Crystal, 163.
- Obscenity designates an ambivalence native to imagery. Transparency has a further resonance at the organisational and institutional level. In both cases, the ambivalence is scopic.
- Against this enormous promotional edifice, the terrorists’ strategy remains one of secrecy, silence and disappearance. Where defence has become promotional, the most offensive strategy is silence.
- See his The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 2002); first published in Le Monde, 2 November 2001. The West's complicity with terrorism was noted in Baudrillard's earlier texts. “[T]his is what the balance of terror means”, he wrote in 1983, “the world is made collectively responsible for the order which governs it”. Revenge of the Crystal, 173.
- Baudrillard, Revenge of the Crystal, 177. In a more developed account of Baudrillard's theory of terrorism we would need to consider this comparison to the ritual or “symbolic” register—especially since his analysis of 9/11 posits a return of the repressed “symbolic” order.
- ibid., 174.
- Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (London and New York: Verso, 1989).
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War [6th century BC], trans. Samuel B. Griffith (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
- Stockhausen's initial faux-pas was made in a press conference at the Hamburg Music Festival. He suggested that 9/11 was “the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos”. For the composer's clarification, see: http://www.stockhausen.org/message_from_karlheinz.html
- As in Searle's “Chinese room” thought experiment, in the terrorist scenario, data is entered, data is issued, but what goes on inside is always secret. Philosopher Vilém Flusser used the metaphor of the black box to describe the information processing of the veiled “program” of photography. See his Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Hubertus von Amelunxen (London: Reaktion, 2000).
- As I write this, a similar confusion unfolds around the biopolitical art of Steve Kurtz and fellow members of the Critical Art Ensemble. On 11 May 2004, Kurtz awoke to find his wife dead from a heart attack. Police attending his home mistook his art supplies for bioterrorist material. They detained the artist, and impounded his computers, his papers, and even his wife's corpse. The FBI has since brought down the full force of the USA Patriot Act (revamped amid some controversy immediately after 9/11) upon Kurtz, one of his students, and seven fellow artists, as well as the publishing company Autonomedia. The artists have been subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury on charges related to “bioweapons”. See http://www.caedefensefund.org/
- Melanie Lefkowitz, “An Unusually Arresting Art Project”, Newsday, 17 December 2002.
- Baudrillard, Revenge of the Crystal, 170–4. Just as Giorgio Agamben's homo sacer clings to’ a life that is always already forfeited to the sovereign, so are the hostages’ lives always already forfeited, to the masses they haplessly represent. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Rare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
- Baudrillard, Spirit of Terrorism. I borrow here the translation of Rachel Bloul, circulated on various mailing lists, 15 November 2001. http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-1–011l/msg00083.html
- Agamben, Homo Sacer, 18–20. The State of Exception is also the title of the second volume of Agamben's work on homo sacer, Stato di Eccezione (Torino: Bollati Borighieri, 2003).
- Or perhaps it is more like Deleuze and Guattari's war machine, not so much post-national as extra-national, bound up with states, but properly external to the state apparatus. The worldwide arm of the war machine, a form “irreducible to the State”, may include commercial and religious formations, and can even take peace as its object. See the “Treatise on Nomadology” in A Thousand Plateaux, esp. 360 and 421.
- Zachary R. Dowdy, “A UN Cover-up? Just for One Day”, Newsday, 6 February 2003. See also Laurie Brereton's account of the episode in his speech to the Australian Parliament, 4 February 2003, reproduced in the SMH's webdiary (5 February 2003) as “Shroud over Guernica”, http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/05/1044318661158.html
- See the suitably circumspect account by Gertje R. Utley in Picasso: the Communist Years, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000) 27.
- The term “redundant” here belongs to Paul Virilio. See his “A Pitiless Art” in Art and Fear, trans. Julie Rose (London: Continuum, 2003).
- Brereton, “Shroud over Guernica”.
- David Walsh, “UN conceals Picasso's Guernica for Powell's presentation”, World Socialist Website, 8 February 2003. See http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/feb2003/guer-f08.shtml
- Derrida, Truth in Painting, 9.
- ibid., 11. Derrida uses the word entame which has no direct correlate in English. In French, entamer once meant to make the first cut (in a piece of bread or meat), or to open a conversation or debate, to broach a subject. “Broaching” is the approximation of Bennington and McLeod.
- Virilio, Art and Fear, 35. All emphases are Virilio's.
- Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Cape, 1970) 217–8.
- See the “Aphorisms” of Hippocrates, trans. J Chadwick and WN Mann, in Hippocratic Writings, G.E.R. Lloyd (ed.), (London: Penguin, 1983) 206.
- See “Sept. 11 Sculpture Covered Up”. See also Dan Brinzac “Heart of Stone”, New York Post, 18 September 2002.
- Derrida, Truth in Painting, 57–8.
- The ethical tension thus found in the public artwork (not to mention its parergon) could also be illuminated by Derrida's concept of the archive. Fischl's sculpture would perhaps be exemplary of the kind of public record whose “archontic function” is “[t]o shelter itself and, sheltered, to conceal itself”. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 3. This tension of archive and veil, of the archive which veils and which veils itself, is perhaps the very tension of art after its “monstrative” phase. This would open a new perspective on contemporary art's fascination with the practices of museology and ethnography. One rather literal example is the recent installation by French artist Annette Messager at Paris's Couvent des Cordeliers, entitled sons vent. An enormous veil of silk breathes and billows, illuminating—but also re-concealing—a miscellany that includes archival objects from the convent's rich history. See http://www.paris.fr/musees/MAMVP/arc/arc_presentation.htm
- According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the English word “veil” derives from the Latin velum meaning a sail, curtain or veil. The term's polyvalence was preserved in Old French (voile) where it meant “veil” in the masculine and “sail” in the feminine.
- See Gary Genosko, “Baudrillard and Surveillance”, ed. Victoria Grace, Heather Worth and Laurence Simmons, Baudrillard West of the Dateline (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 2003) 37–56.
- See Mark Cousins, “Security as Danger”, Ctrl[space], (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2001). http://hosting.zkm.de/ctrlspace/e/texts/55
- Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
- See, for example, Beaubois’ work entitled In the Event of Amnesia the City Will Recall, 1996. Documented at http://dirtymouse.net/emg/surveillance/index.htm
- See Dougal Phillips, “The Element of Asphyxia: from Baader-Meinhof to Children Overboard”, conference paper presented at the annual conference of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, Canberra, 5 December 2003.
- http://www.notbored.org/the-scp.html
- In February of 2004, French National Assembly voted to adopt a law banning symbols and clothing that “ostentatiously show students’ religious membership” in public schools. A similar initiative issued, under cover of “terrorism”, from (inter alia) NSW Christian MP Fred Nile in 2002, see Mark Riley, Kelly Burke and AAP, “PM's Veiled Comments on How Muslim Women Dress”, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 November 2002. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/11/21/1037697806923.html
- In Baudrillard's theory of “symbolic exchange”, the symbolic is what “puts an end to the opposition between the real and the imaginary”. Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993) 133. Cf. Slavoj Zizek's account of 9/11, in very similar but inverted terms, in Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dales (London and New York: Verso, 2002).
- For Baudrillard, the terrorists succeed by “mastering the appropriation of the real time of images, their instantaneous global diffusion…in the same way as they have appropriated financial speculation, electronic information or air traffic.” Spirit of Terrorism, (Bloul's translation).
- Indeed, Blanchot's account of the “impossible” limit of death (as transgression) might be articulated alongside the impossibility of exchange in Baudrillard's hijacking. Are we not all beholden to the sheer simplicity of this transgression, this strategy? This case, “far from erasing it, heightens what is most scandalous in the scandal par excellence that is mortal violence.” Maurice Blanchot, “The Ease of Dying” in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) 167.
- James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001).
- Derrida, Truth in Painting, 59–60.
- Baudrillard, Revenge of the Crystal, 175. (emphasis mine)