DJ Chris Korda and the Eroticization of Terrorism

Is terrorism sublimated sex? That question arose after seeing the performance of video artist and DJ Chris Korda in Paradiso last Wednesday - although there was little sublimation to be discovered in his performance.

By Corine Vloet, November 16, 2002

He is not a terrorist either, although there are people who think differently. Korda is the leader of the Church of Euthanasia, a religious movement that proclaims that the human species is an evolutionary disaster, `dumb apes' who endanger the survival of the rest of the earth. So be it. But Korda is a fundamentalist. He preaches `anti-humanism' as a solution to this problem: euthanasia, abortion, cannibalism, childlessness and anal sex. This is not appreciated by other fundamentalists.

When CDA council member Hans Res got wind that Korda would come to Amsterdam with a controversial pornographic film about the collapsing WTC towers, he asked the city council to ban the performance. The Amsterdam chairman of the Christian Union also insisted on this, although mayor Job Cohen and chief public prosecutor Leo de Wit had seen no reason to take action against Korda.

Those Christians! How many people would have come to see it if they hadn't made a fuss about it? Fifteen tickets had been reserved in advance. But after the CDA PR stunt, at least thirty-five members of the press had shown up, and that created a much grimmer atmosphere in the half-empty main hall of Paradiso than Korda's relatively innocent videos. Four or five camera crews jostled around the few who weren't actually from the press and were simply dancing at the front of the stage.

Meanwhile, Korda, a beautiful woman in drag, played hard house music to accompany his video images, which largely consisted of talking heads. The music made it impossible to understand what was being said, but fortunately many protest signs appeared on screen that left little to the imagination. Save the planet, kill yourself. Eat people not animals. Make love not babies. Eat a queer fetus for Jesus. To motorists: Honk if you need an abortion. But what we saw most of all was the beautifully coiffed, lipsticked head of Korda himself. Like so many prominent fundamentalists, Korda does not draw the full consequences of what he preaches. I have rarely seen someone who wanders around with such zest for life, so in love with himself and his own body. When, after an hour, he had beaten everyone to a pulp with his artwork, and the assembled media, desperate with boredom, no longer knew what to do, we finally got to see what we had come for: `I like to watch', the WTC video. The familiar images of the collapsing towers were edited alongside hard porn and sports: cum shots that seamlessly merge into flames and debris spouting towers, licked by enormous female tongues, while sports fans jump up in cheers. "I don't think I'm the only person in the world who got sexual satisfaction out of watching the destruction of two of America's tallest buildings," the artist says in an Internet interview. "The endless loops of the plane penetrating the towers were unmistakably pornographic." One might think this is a legitimate criticism of the eagerness with which television viewers repeatedly reveled in the `emasculation' of America. Yet there is a nasty flavour to Korda's video, which can also be tasted in other recent examples of the aestheticization and eroticization of terrorism. The controversial posters of the Amsterdam Autonomous Center, for example, depicting Bin Laden as Che Guevara, complete with revolutionary beret with Nike logo, are intended as criticism of America, but they do portray Bin Laden as the sex symbol of the sixties. The glossy magazine Strictly depicts a model dressed as an Islamic woman on the cover, showing us her long bare legs by pulling up her skirt to her crotch, under the headline `Fundamentalism. Resurrection of the Muslim Woman'. And two weeks ago, the Volkskrant opened its art supplement with a story about the Baader-Meinhof trend in Germany. `Terrorism has become cool,'' the paper wrote, Baader `a rock star,' and printed a photo of a `Prada Meinhof' shawl on the front. The art supplement showed work by Andreas Schiko, a photographer who created an advertising campaign based on photos of Andreas Baader in the courtroom and in prison. Young people who have little or nothing in common with the ideas of the RAF, Schiko argues,are drawn to the Baader-Meinhof Gruppe out of boredom, out of a desire for the intensity and excitement of a hero's existence, and out of admiration for the radical idealism and contempt for death of the RAF, for people prepared to go to extremes.

Indeed, monomaniacal passion, uncompromising devotion, losing yourself in something greater than yourself, you can hardly find that in everyday life. It is the kind of rapture that can be read on the faces of Palestinian `martyrs', especially the girls, posing beautiful and unapproachable with a belt of explosives around their necks, a sublime, triumphant look in their eyes. And slowly the familiar danger triangle between fundamentalism, sex and terror begins to emerge.

But what is the actual value of art that moves in this danger triangle, or vicious circle? It doesn't even matter that these forms of art are intended to shock or hurt, and portray terrorism as sexy and glamorous, they are too unoriginal for that. What is annoying is that everything that even remotely resembles political radicalism and violence is taken seriously as Art. You can't even speak of the bankruptcy of radical art, because it has never been an artistically flourishing industry. Provocation is fun, and Korda is a nice DJ, but as art it doesn't amount to anything.

The preceding is a translation. The original language is here.