[-empyre-] Steve Redhead' First Post - 'The art of the accident'

S.C.Redhead at brighton.ac.uk S.C.Redhead at brighton.ac.uk
Wed Nov 26 02:17:34 EST 2008


Hi Empyreans

It is good to expand the discussion, I think, to catastrophe and
artistic response in general (rather than Virilio in particular) but
there is still  a little mileage in Virilio's provocations as a
self-styled'critic of the art of technology'. He predicted, after all,
the effects of speeded up, interlinked stock exchange trading programmes
twenty years ago which are so prescient now in the Wall Street, Tokyo
and other crashes of 2008.
 
For Virilio what really counts is not so much the technology itself but
the need to show what he sees as fallibilism in scientific and
technological development in what is more and more an accelerated
culture filled with danger. The demand by Virilio is for our global
culture to go beyond an ideology of progress, linear and interrupted,
excluding the importance of the mishap or the beneficial mistake. To
expose the accident, to exhibit the accident, in what he calls the
accident museum is the crucial task for Paul Virilio the artist. As
artist and exhibition creator, the job is to expose the unlikely, to
expose the unusual and yet inevitable, recognising the symmetry between
'accident' and 'substance'. The accident museum is necessary in
Virilio's thinking in order to preserve for posterity the collapsing
buildings, high speed plane crashes and other accidents (or attacks) of
accelerated culture - 9/11 for instance (hailed by Stockhausen and
Damien Hirst as an art work). 

As a critic of the art of technology (rather than any sort of
conventional social theorist) Virilio jettisoned the televisual form and
settled for the art gallery in his quest to preserve for example the
'accident' of 9/11 along with hundreds of other disasters, catastrophes,
urban network failures, crashes and explosions for his own real life
museum of accidents. A little over a year after 9/11, Virilio helped to
create the accident museum's first concrete realisation in a major
French contemporary art exhibition (officially entitled 'Ce Qui Arrive'
in French or 'What Happens' in English), published in English as a
catalogue entitled Unknown Quantity. The English version of the
catalogue included diverse textual commentary on the theory of the
accident by Virilio plus hundreds of photographs and other artefacts.
Virilio created the exhibition with a number of other artists at the
Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris (opening in November
2002, closing in March 2003) explicitly incorporating photographic,
video and other visual material from the event of 9/11 as well as
assorted plane crashes, earthquakes and high rise collapses from all
over the world. Virilio, in the main, provided the concepts for this
pioneering art exhibition while curator Leanne Sacramone mapped them
onto a series of artworks. As an addition to the catalogue of the
exhibition Virilio interviewed Svetlana Aleksievich, the author of a
book about Chernobyl victims and witnesses. Virilio's emerging ideas on
the accident formed the text of the catalogue's long introduction, under
subheadings such as: the invention of accidents; the accident thesis;
the museum of accidents; the future of the accident; the horizon of
expectation and the unknown quantity. According to one contemporary art
commentator on the Paris exhibition, 'as war between nation states gives
way to the less defined area of international terrorism, so the
distinction between acts of war, man made accidents and natural
disasters becomes less distinguishable'. This situation 'in turn leads
to a panorama in which acts of God and events such as Chernobyl and
September 11 together occupy an undifferentiated position at the centre
of the world stage'. Paul Virilio's museum of accidents, then, in this
context is a twenty-first century equivalent to the 'traditional war
memorial's "lest we forget"'.

All the best from credit crunched England

Steve Redhead
Professor of Sport and Media Cultures
Chelsea School
University of Brighton
UK
http://www.steveredhead.com



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