By Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes
September 1 2007

Has fear become our permanent condition? This question launched the Spanish edition of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book, Multitude, a sequel to their previous work, Empire, a key 2000 text from this pair of highly relevant political philosophers for understanding the economic, social, cultural, and political transformations of late capitalism and a new proposal for a democratic society. The question about fear has gained greater importance, especially in the generalized low-intensity war that characterizes the current period of capitalist society, which has been greatly accentuated by the 9/11 attacks and the advent or global extension of what Noam Chomsky had previously defined as a “culture of terrorism.” Fear and terrorism, then, are keys for understanding the general global state. Terrorism is the “magic word” used to explain things relative to the “other world” and is a talisman that expands fear like a rumor, capable of producing a controlled panic as the fruit of “an elaborate network of illusion and deceit.”

Alongside the concepts of fear and terrorism, a third one is needed in order to understand the narrative of Carlos Amorales’ recent works. This is the concept of risk. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck says, “In late modernity, the social production of wealth is systematically accompanied by the social production of risk.” These risks are no longer solely national, they have become global: for instance, the risks derived from climate change or expanded terrorism. Beck also highlights another characteristic phenomenon that is intrinsically connected: “The promise of security that grows with risk.” We live, then, in an economic and political society that promises security in the face of growing risks, which paradoxically result from uncontrolled economic growth and a distribution of wealth that is unsustainable. In a famous report of the 1970s, Dennis Meadows and others already spoke of a planetary collapse due to ecological devastation. Beck also points out the economic and political potential of such catastrophes. Regarding the former, he mentions that it not only “doesn’t break with the logic of capitalist development” but also constitutes a big business opportunity. Regarding the latter, he writes, “The state of exception threatens to become our normal state.”

Hardt and Negri say, “War is becoming a general, global, interminable phenomenon,” even if they define it as a state of “civil war” within the globalized world, or what they call Empire. For them, “War is becoming society’s basic organizing principle, and politics is just one of its means.“ Fear, terrorism, risk, and generalized war are countered by a demand for security, to which the State responds with a sustained state of exception-curtailing liberties and enhancing measures for social and individual control, since policing issues (the discipline society of Foucault) as well as military issues are now intertwined with the cultural within what has been defined as a biopolitics. At any rate, this is an old issue because, as Edward W. Said wrote in reference to colonialism, “The relationship between imperialist politics and culture is astonishingly direct.”

In Carlos Amorales’s most recent animations, this state of generalized threat hangs over them as a symptom of the times. As an art medium that has historically oscillated between the experimental and the commercial, animation today congregates features that on the one hand make it possible to cut back the degree of reality and on the other partake in its hybrid language of some of our era’s triumphant art mediums, such as drawing and film. Reducing the degree of reality and having a tradition that creates the illusion of life by imposing movement on that which doesn’t possess it offers great allegorical possibilities, of which many artists take advantage. Carlos Amorales has entered this field with animations that have a strong symbolic charge. In fact, the two animation installations presented at Daros-Latin America were the bookends of an individual show devoted to the Mexican artist, and they spoke of the threatened world and the attendant fear of the future. Amorales effectively explored the world of fantasy and imagination that animation symbolizes and develops, enveloping the viewer in a physical space where the animated drawings were captivating both because of the medium in itself and because of its ability to tell allegorical stories that convey personal and collective fears. We are accustomed to animation as a language; we have been weaned on Disney’s cartoons and on Japanese anime. Extraordinary things and catastrophes can take place, but they can also be exorcized and brought into the world of fantasy, where the phantasmagoric reigns. Thus, fear is diffused and catastrophe is something that occurs beyond reality. Critical thinking, which artist animations are producing at this point, should not be dismissed because it possesses specificities that facilitate its reception.

In terms of symbolism, Amorales used the wolf as a metaphor for Man in order to talk about the current global situation of apparent chaos, war, terrorism, conflict and death. If “Man is wolf to Man,” as Plautus proposed and Thomas Hobbes later argued, the collective human condition and its relationships post-9/11 are dominated by the culture of fear and terror. Airplanes and symbols of rapid global communications are now allegories of the threat and, like in Hitchcock’s film, are birds that turn from mere companions of human life into menacing, rebellious attackers. Birds, airplanes, and wolves are emblems of the symbolic violence that governs citizens in the “clash of civilizations” postulated by Samuel Huntington.

Dark Mirror, the installation that greeted visitors at Daros-Latin America, has been shown previously at Casa de América in Madrid, as part of a project significantly titled Why fear the future? At Daros, the orientation of the screens was reversed. It was the projection of the real image that welcomed the viewer-but closer inspection revealed it to be a reflection and therefore a representation of the real. In it, a pianist played a composition that accompanied an animation, which the viewer discovered on another screen in back of the first one. The music dramatized the animation, but in this case the trick was revealed; in previous showings of the work, viewers could think that the music was incorporated into the animation, not suspecting that it came from another screen. Amorales here made an allusion to the trompe l’oeil technique and to the origins of the cinema, when animation as a medium played an important role (think of the pre-cinematographic visual artifices and mechanisms).

The installation titled Manimal closed the show-although to exit, one needed to walk by Dark Mirror once again-and proposed a somber world in black-and-white animation, in which packs of wolves seemed to be fighting over the control of an urban space. The animals’ flight and struggle-along with a musical score that enhanced the sensation of being in a post-apocalyptic world-took place in a devastated landscape, in buildings, and in a large, fenced airplane parking lot. The catastrophe seemed to have already occurred. Man had devolved to a previous evolutionary stage, at which the struggle for survival seemed to allegorize both the “Me First” generation (to use Beck’s term) and the collective politics of “With Us or Against Us,” so much in fashion after 9/11. This video could very well symbolize the state of generalized war and organized irresponsibility in which late capitalism moves with particular political and economic arrogance.

However, despite being the most visually powerful works, the two animation installations did not contain the essence of the Daros show. No, the soul or rather the brain of the show was in the large gallery: Amorales’s archive, a project on which he has been working for quite some time. He displayed the project’s entrails as though it were a museum-bound laboratory, a kind of visual dictionary into which images and shapes that interest him at any given moment are entered. Amorales arranged a series of display tables on which one could see the shapes and models that will later be used in the animations and the paintings. In this way, he physically presented an archive that is not digital, a large portion of it rotoscopes (a traditional medium recently used in some films, such as A Scanner Darkly) and vector drawings, which total more than 1,000 images and which are available for collaborations, as is his record label Nuevos Ricos. Amorales understands the way that late-capitalist culture works-the importance of the idea, of the archive, and of collective work in the elaboration of a vocabulary of images that symbolize in their combination some of contemporary society’s archetypes: fear and risk, catastrophe and terror.