| For me, the first encounter with the aesthetics of terror took place in front of the TV. Growing up in Tel Aviv, one could not help seeing images of state and underground terror on television. During the 1990s, when the phenomenon of Palestinian suicide bombers first emerged, it had a distinct visualization—suicide bombers’ videos. These videotapes of the Shahids, Muslim martyrs, capture the moments before the suicide bomber goes on to carry out his or her attack. These videos can be regarded as death masks, public suicide notes, and self-portraits. Terror is a part of TV—it involves the distribution of self-documentation made by underground organizations and by militaries and states. The exhibition The Aesthetics of Terror is an opportunity to examine the forms and formats of terror that have been embedded in our visual culture. | 
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Manon Slome and Joshua Simon curated The Aesthetics of Terror, which will be on display at the Chelsea Art Museum from November 15, 2008 to January 21, 2009.
Johan Grimonprez, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997. Video, 01:08:00 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Statement by Joshua Simon
For me, the first encounter with the aesthetics of terror took place in front of the TV. Growing up in Tel Aviv, one could not help seeing images of state and underground terror on television. During the 1990s, when the phenomenon of Palestinian suicide bombers first emerged, it had a distinct visualization—suicide bombers’ videos. These videotapes of the Shahids, Muslim martyrs, capture the moments before the suicide bomber goes on to carry out his or her attack.
These videos can be regarded as death masks, public suicide notes, and self-portraits. Terror is a part of TV—it involves the distribution of self-documentation made by underground organizations and by militaries and states. The exhibition The Aesthetics of Terror is an opportunity to examine the forms and formats of terror that have been embedded in our visual culture. Without claiming that there is a symmetry of power between the two, we are using Israeli artist Roee Rosen’s polemic depiction of the visual distinction between state terror and underground terror, suggesting that the first prefers abstraction while the later thrives for figuration.
Statement by Manon Slome
In 9/11, thousands may have died, but billions of people watched the attack and the falling towers endlessly until those images were etched into the global psyche. In contrast, the war itself—the so-called war on terror—is marked by as much invisibility, in terms of image-making and distribution, as the government apparatus supported by the networks can muster.
Much of the work we have selected for The Aesthetics of Terror deals less with the direct depiction of violence and terror than with media representations of the war or perceptions of war as filtered through the media—Coco Fusco’s examination of the apparatus of psychological torture used in interrogation is filtered through the rubric of a reality show; Harun Ferocki and Johan Gimonperez dismantle news coverage of hijackings and war coverage; Jon Kessler creates war machines with imagery derived directly from magazines and action heroes; others make works that play around with invisibility through stain, abstraction, grainy pixilated photographs and painting.
What we hope our viewers will get from the show is, first, an experience of some incredibly powerful art from around the world, and second, to paraphrase Martha Rosler, an understanding through these artistic interpretations of how our perceptions of war and terror are channeled through imagery, or its very absence.
Several threads that initially did not seem related were playing in my mind when I began to think about The Aesthetics of Terror. The first was the preponderance of images I kept seeing in galleries that seemed to belong more in the pages of Time magazine or in news coverage than in a gallery—images of tanks and soldiers, riots in the streets, bodies strewn on the ground in the “aftermath” of conflict. As striking as many of these images were—some meticulously printed and presented, others more “raw” with the negative edges as part of the composition—I questioned their function in the museum/gallery setting. Were they protests? Did they make visible (a claim I have heard) images that the newspapers would not print because of their inflammatory nature—making visible what the government wanted to keep hidden? Or did this translation or appropriation itself become another trope, a kind of Pop, in the sense that it was a mirroring of images already circulating in our culture?
A second incident heightened this questioning. I was in Barney’s and saw a coat that was “designed” to look like the coat worn by the “homeless.” Its components included a sleeve fastened to the body of the coat with safety pins, a rope belt, mismatched and missing buttons, etc. The price tag was $3,500. It was one of the more immoral objects I have seen and I was struck by how the market/fashion can transform and make palatable (and thus invisible) aspects of our world that either don’t conform to the consumer visions of America or would somehow challenge the prevailing fictions.
