"The reason I'm painting this way is becasue I want to be a machine" --Andy Warhol
In an age of Total War what becomes of the language of aesthetics? In the age of the machine we become the servants of the machine . . . our servitude is reflected with great pride in our plastic arts. this is what Virilio calls, Art Terrorism.
In the age of the machine representation is not enough: "The art of painting at the time was already busy trying to outdo mere REPRESENTATION by offering the very presence of the event, as instantaneous photography would do, followed by the PHOTO-FINISH and teh first cenematographic newsreeels of the Lumiere brothers and, ultimately, the LIVE COVERAGE offered by CNN." (21)
Drawing on Bonhoeffer, Virilio critiques this fetishism of immediacy (the cheap whore of forced materialization!!) as ultimately an attack on personhood. Our serventhood of the machine is reflected in the plastic arts whose Mengeleian (un)creators continue the scientific arts which were begun in the research labs of Auschwitz-Birkenau . . . Upon Pope Benedict Ratzinger's visit he lamented that the Nazi hope was to kill the God of Abraham, Isaac and David . . . if Nietzsche was right, Virilio laments, and God is dead then the coming victim is not the creator but the created!
"Avant-garde artists, like many political agitators, propagandists and demagogues, have long understood what TERRORISM would soon popularize: if you want a place in 'revolutionary history' there is nothing easier than provoking a riot, an assault on propriety, in the guise of art . . . the art of the twentieth century became 'monstative' in the sense that it is contemporary with the shattering effect of mass societies, subject as they are to the conditioning of opinion and MASS MEDIA propaganda - and this, with the same mounting extremism evident in terrorism or total war." (17-19)
The problem of the simulacra . . . the problem of representation is a question that must be addressed (theologically?) at the dawn of the 21st century. In an age of the machine what can the church offer as a response when it is a servant of the machine? when art -as an extention of 20th century mutilation- is the main commodity of a people then what becomes of the people? when the tools of Total War (the virtual) becomes the language of social interaction what is left, save the hyperreal?
what will we do?