What are you afraid of?

TERROR?

INTERSECTION FOR THE ARTS

SAN FRANCISCO

SEPTEMBER 11-NOVEMBER 11, 2006

Intersection for the Arts' exhibition "Terror?" opened on the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks. In anticipation of renewed hysteria and sentimental media coverage surrounding this grim milestone, the exhibition attempts to take back the night on the subject of fear. It asks questions such as What is terror?, Who perpetuates it?, and How does fear control us? The exhibition's curators literally put these questions out there for people around the world to answer. In the gallery's first open call for visual art submissions in a decade, they received work from nearly twenty countries, resulting in an exhibition that includes a daunting 360 works.

The gallery required that submissions be more-or-less two dimensional and no larger than a standard sheet of paper. Aside from these criteria, artists were free to send all types of media. The show includes paintings, photographs, illustrations, graphic designs, textiles, collages, and relief sculptures. The gallery also allowed artists to submit work in electronic form, which the gallery then printed out in color. This enabled the works of artists who make large-scale work or objects that cannot be mailed--graffiti, for example--to be included. The democracy of this approach is admirable even if a few of the pieces seemed to lose something in the translation.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

As might be expected, a number of works in the show address specific acts of terrorism. Aaron Bowles of Denver sent Incendiary IPod (2006), a painted canvas shaped like an iPod that refers to the failed London terror plot to use electronic devices to ignite liquid explosives on airplanes. C.G. Clark of Manchester, England, mailed Suspicious Package #3 (2006) to the gallery. Trustful and willing to play along, the gallery staff has not opened it. These works point to the absurdity as well as the conundrum of trying to protect Americans against every possible threat.

Other works in the show allude to the myriad threats that Americans encounter every day but that receive proportionally little of society's or the government's attention. In his series of drawings titled "Vans" (2006), Andrew Kozlowski of Richmond, Virginia, refers to the 2002 sniper attacks in Maryland, but the subjects could also suggest kidnapping and rape. The fact that the drawings are delicate and almost transparent only highlights the terrifying opacity of these vehicles. Dana Hemenway of San Francisco finds sources of fear in her own home. In Household Threats--Microscopic Image of Mold (2006), she layers a close-up of spores drawn on mylar over flowered wallpaper to suggest the dangers that lurk just beneath pretty surfaces. John Darwell of Carlisle, England, takes us even further into the interior with a series of staged, color photographs (1999-2003) of himself that reference his struggles with depression and self-mutilation. We are our own worst enemies, he reminds us. As is the exhibition's goal, these works provide alternatives to today's most prevalent definitions of fear and terror by offering a more nuanced picture of what makes us afraid.

The show is also rich with pointed political commentary. Ellie Brown's book Ronald Reagan (2006) offers a chilling perspective on the policies and tactics of the current administration. Brown, of Philadelphia, modified a paperback copy of We Must Defend America: A New Strategy for National Survival (1983) by Daniel O. Graham, a Reagan insider and one of the originators of the "Star Wars" missile defense initiative. The cover quotes the well-known speech Reagan gave on March 23, 1983, in which he introduced the Star Wars initiative to the American people. In these excerpts, the father of contemporary conservativism, speaking at what then seemed the height of American paranoia about foreign attack, actually sounds reasonable: "Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope ... what if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon instant retaliation to deter a Soviet attack ... would it not be better to save lives than to avenge them?" The irony here is thick. Brown reminds us just how reactionary and unrestrained our government has become.

Many of the works in the show point out that what Americans need is a reality check. Laren Leland of San Francisco submitted Neighborhood (2006), a digital print of several rows of houses. Lines of text underneath each row suggest a disembodied voice talking about the homogeneity of American suburbs and the unquestioned sense of safety and calm that pervades life in this country. Leland's last line of text is the zinger: "Take a moment to look around ... and remember, whatever you see is literally what war looks like in the United States." It would be difficult for the family of a soldier serving in Iraq to agree that we have made few sacrifices for our war, but Leland's point that most of us are insulated from the tough realities is well taken.

The exhibition gains much of its strength from its global viewpoint. Gallery curators tapped contacts and sister organizations all over the world to spread word of the open call. As a result the show is remarkably international. Submissions came from places as far-flung as Crete and Uruguay. This gives much-needed perspective to the subject of terror. In Current Terror (2006), for example, Mikho Bertlani of Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, mocks the U.S. government's colorcoded terror threat level by likening the system to a rainbow and an array of colorful lollypops. Things are not so candy-coated in other parts of the world. Our Daily Snap Shots (2006), a group of works submitted digitally by the Harem, an artists' collective in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, practically explodes off the wall. Among the twenty-seven color printouts, a few different makers are apparent. One of them, using anime style illustration, pictures a girl hugging a tsunami as though it were a stuffed toy or resting her head on the soft, billowy smoke emanating from a volcano. Another member of the Harem created a mushroom cloud collage of images of garbage. By pointing to natural and environmental disasters--and without even delving into the disease, poverty, and social strife that follow such events--these works give a sense of scale to the problem of terrorism.

"Terror?" may suffer from its own ambitious nature--there is just too much to see--but once you penetrate the profusion of imagery you find a rich and absorbing show. By bringing together so many different and occasionally conflicting visions of terror, the gallery opens new avenues of discourse. This is important not only because fear of terrorism has eclipsed discussion of all other concerns in the U.S., but also because the terms of the debate have been defined by those in power. Using an array of media and diverse visual and conceptual strategies, the artists in "Terror?" show us that there are other ways of communicating what we fear and what is important to us.

ERIN GARCIA is an independent curator and writer based in Los Angeles.