In the Photoshop age, with photographs often bearing only a passing relationship to reality, the X-ray image remains the authority on a deeper kind of truth. In "Inside Terrorism: The X-Ray Project," on view at a gallery in Brown/RISD Hillel until April 11, artist Diane Covert has mined the honesty of X-rays to put the suffering experienced by victims of terrorism into stark focus.
The traveling installation consists of X-rays and CT-scans drawn from hospitals in Jerusalem, showing the shrapnel-pierced bodies of suicide bombing survivors. Most of the images are presented bluntly, with matter-of-fact medical descriptions. Others are paired with artist's statements or the victims' personal accounts.
An X-ray series titled "I Was Riding the Bus" reads, "I was in college then, riding the bus to campus. When he exploded, his watch blasted into my neck. Some of the shrapnel tore through my carotid artery, which carries blood to my brain." In the accompanying images, the watch face, clearly visible in the woman's neck, and physically on display itself, becomes an almost absurdist element underscoring the arbitrariness of this violence.
Three chilling X-rays show a nail embedded in a man's neck, a spike of searing white where there should only be empty space. This triptych includes one print in unfiltered black-and-white, one in cool colors and one in hot red and orange, exploring a range of possible emotional responses to a single unsettling image.
Frustrated with apologists for terrorism, Covert conceived of the project in 2002 as a way to reintroduce an element of certainty into this discourse.
"I'd say the moral relativists are right 98 percent of the time, but I think sometimes things are so out of whack that we have to reject it and go back to a more absolute value system," she said during a discussion at Hillel on Thursday night. "The purpose of terrorism is to create victims. When we muddy this fact, we create an ethics-free world that's kind of like what Dante was talking about."
In her statements, Covert somewhat grandiosely situates "Inside Terrorism" in an art historical narrative with Francisco de Goya's "Disasters of War," Pablo Picasso's "Guernica" and Mathew Brady's photographs of Civil War battlefields. But "Inside Terrorism" is too clinical to match the emotional impact of Goya or Picasso. Moreover, X-ray art as a medium is so well established that this exhibit could not hope to equal Brady's pioneering photojournalism in terms of formal exploration.
The central problem with "Inside Terrorism," though, is that asking viewers to sympathize with the individuals whose bones we see fractured by bolts and nails is not particularly controversial or particularly difficult, and leaves little room for any other interpretations but Covert's own. Because of this, the exhibit, while generally succeeding as social commentary, only intermittently achieves the status of art.
In addition, there is something exploitative about appropriating these shredded bodies and putting them on display in order to make a point. The exhibition's title is misleading - viewers only see inside the victims of this violence. Terrorism itself remains utterly opaque.
