Art that makes little or no sense of our times
Age of Terror: Art Since 9/11
IWM London
In the atrium of the Imperial War Museum in London, among all the yesteryear weaponry on permanent display, a thick white line is snaking across the floor. At ground level, it’s easy to miss, overlooked by most. Seen from above, from the third floor, though, it coalesces into something recognisable and sinister: the silhouette of a Predator drone, controversially used by America’s military to obliterate enemy positions in Afghanistan and Pakistan with Hellfire missiles.
Like one of those chalk outlines detectives use to trace the contours of a murdered body, Drone Shadow, Predator (2017), by James Bridle, the British artist, is both there and not: a chilling reminder of the elusive, stealthy power of these unmanned aircraft, a spectral angel of death. Bridle is one of more than 40 artists participating in IWM London’s
Age of Terror: Art Since 9/11, the museum’s largest ever exhibition of contemporary art.
In keeping with the inventiveness of its recent exhibitions programme,
Age of Terror offers an original proposition for a show. Sixteen years on from the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, we still live in an age of extreme frailty and worry, forever queasily anticipating news of a fresh terrorist atrocity.
Surely, if any group of people can illuminate the tense half-light of our predicament, artists can. Which is why it is so disappointing that, at least on the evidence here, we are still waiting for a great masterpiece about 9/11 or its aftermath.
Gerhard Richter’s oil painting September (2005), which he donated to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, may come close, with its gestural squeegee marks mimicking an aeroplane’s tail fin moving at high velocity. Here, though, it is merely represented by a small reproduction. An eye-catching installation at the start allows us to diagnose the problem faced by artists who make work explicitly about our “age of terror”. The day after 9/11, Hans-peter Feldmann, a German artist, asked friends all over the world to send him newspaper front pages documenting the attack. Scores of them are presented here, arranged in two elongated grids on the facing walls of a corridor-like gallery. As ever, it is frightening to contemplate the crystal-clear imagery of the catastrophe: the sleek geometries of the towers’ architecture versus the maelstrom of fireballs and black smoke; the serenity of the blue sky, as if the cosmos was oblivious to the suffering.
Indeed, it’s hard to conceive of a terrorist attack calculated to have more impactful “aesthetics”, if that doesn’t sound horribly inappropriate, precision-engineered for a media age.
Most newspapers, of course, recognised the immensity of 9/11 at once: this one, for instance, devoted almost its entire front page to a photo of the towers ablaze, beneath the headline, “War on America”. The trouble is, the 9/11 attacks were so immense, and have had such epoch-shattering consequences, that artists responding to them risk either overreaching or lapsing into triteness and banality.
The latter tendency is exemplified by several works from senior British artists, including Grayson Perry and Jake and Dinos Chapman. Perry offers a characteristically pretty vase about another subject altogether (the Dungeness nuclear power station in Kent), which, in response to 9/11, he swiftly altered with a few vapid gags. The definition, surely, of half-arsed. The Chapmans exhibit two grotesque mounds, consisting of piled-up toy figurines of Nazi soldiers and mutilated corpses, which they call Nein! Eleven?. A cheap and silly joke, it tells us precisely nothing.
In fairness, there are many more thoughtful and serious works on display. Nathan Coley’s A Place Beyond Belief (2012), in which the title’s phrase is spelt out with illuminated letters in the manner of fairground lights, avoids the trap of responding to the news in an overly literal or forthright fashion, offering instead something more enigmatic, which may consequently achieve longevity. A subtle video installation by the Belgian Francis Alÿs is also worth seeking out.
Both the young Lithuanian Indrė Šerpytytė and Briton Rachel Howard offer compelling, if contrasting, paintings. Mona Hatoum’s cabinet of hand grenades cast from glowing Venetian glass is beautiful and unsettling, albeit related to the theme only in the broadest sense.
In general, Age of Terror demonstrates an axiom about good artists – that they rarely respond quickly or directly to news and current affairs. Those that do risk sounding like pundits – and often bad ones, at that. Any artist is free to give their opinion, of course. At the same time, we are at liberty to stop listening, if what they say is obvious, trivial, or stale.