Aesthetic Violence 103

Dankmar misjudged the distance from the campus mess to the Art Department Lecture Hall, arriving embarrassingly early. He made the most of his misfortune, however, taking a prestige seat at the back of the hall. From this vantage he could see eager students noisily filing into the front rows without being seen in return. "Never lose the advantage of situational awareness," Dankmar said silently to himself as he pulled out his datalink and stylus.

Dankmar had no particular interest in the Aesthetics of Violence. He had mostly enrolled in the lecture series to reduce the challenge of his academic workload. Art studies straddled perfectly the space between the physical demands of Applied Disembowelment and the intellectual rigors of Visceral Taxonomies. Professor Kleiber, who would be delivering the lectures, was reportedly a subaltern from the Outer Periphery. Dankmar knew with confidence that such a professor would grade leniently out of deference to his students' far superior rank. Where else but the reviled halls of academia could an alien and an academic dare to stand in judgment over future Praetors of the Imperium?

Silence sounded through the hall like a clarion, announcing the arrival of Professor Kleiber on the pedagogy dais at the front of the hall. As expected, the professor was clearly some manner of alien - short and pinkish with porcine features reminiscent of an Ork. Nothing in his demeanor suggested direct experience with the orgies of epic violence immortalized in the artworks he had listed on the course syllabus. His head barely reached the top of the podium where his lecture notes were arrayed on simple sheets of paper. The little man had to roll forward onto his toes to even read his own words, which he uttered in a protracted monosyllabic drone.

"Welcome to Art History 103: Aesthetics of Violence. Some of you may have received an erroneous dispatch from scheduling that this would be an introductory seminar in Field Embalmment. If this is you, you have twenty minutes to reach Augenstein Hall in the Anatomy Department. For those of you who are here intentionally, I will begin with a lecture overview of the course syllabus which you were already provided and with which you are expected to be familiar. So without further ado, I will begin..."

Dankmar stifled a yawn and began to doodle on his datalink with his stylus, drawing a crude portrait of the little professor down on the dais. Behind his portrait subject, the dais alcove darkened, leaving the holographic projection of ancient cave art glowing in the air.

"As you already know, the history of aesthetics in violence is a history of technology, and the history of technology is a history of ideology. The earliest cave art depicting acts of violence, as you see here, was representation in its simplest, some would say most sublime, state. You can see there is no clear delineation between aggressor and prey - beasts and men are frozen in postures of attack. There is no explanation or celebration of purpose. Yet already we see represented the technologies of violence - spear, club, claw, horn - and the division of labor between the killer and the dead..."

Dankmar doodled a little six-legged beast to the left of his Professor Kleiber. On its far side, he drew a crude portrait of himself swinging a double-bladed axe down towards the beast. 

Down on the dais, the cave art faded into an elaborate triptych: "...with the first Imperial Ages we see a temporal component added to art, introducing more elaborate abstractions into the depiction of carnage. Note the archers to the left of the image have launched the volley of arrows traversing the central panel before striking the crowd of victims on the right. With the depiction of linear time, art becomes a chronicle - a sequence of cause and effect dividing the killer from the killed."

Dankmar stifled a little chuckle as he drew an animal skull, cleaved from the doodle-beast, with curved horns piercing the side of his Professor Kleiber. He drew little vector lines to indicate the skull's flight from the dead beast into the professor's side. Maybe he should have enrolled in an applied art course, after all.

Down on the dais, Kleiber now stood before a vast pyramid of skulls arrayed in the courtyard of a castle made from bones: "... with the Age of Massacre, we see another shift in the ideal of artistic representation. The attacker disappears from the image, as does the act of violence. Instead, the body of the victim becomes both the object of representation and its medium. This is the era of skull pyramids and charnel palaces that we sometimes refer to as Pre-Kingship Art."

Dankmar knew he was bored now. His wristchron indicated the lecture was still in its first half. He drew a little pile of circular skulls with crosses for eyes under the feet of his battle-axe warrior, trying to speed the passage of time by will alone.

The images on the dais changed again. Professor Kleiber was now lecturing from between the knees of the God-Emperor's visage wrapped in dancing flames as he sat on a throne of skulls wielding a massive hammer: "As with all things, art was fundamentally transformed by the reign of the God-Emperor, who elevated violence to its apotheosis. The God-Emperor himself was the subject of representation, portrayed in the full horror of his visage. This is art as violence, its observer becoming directly implicated in the act of representation as the potential victim of violence implied or actual..."

Dankmar added spiked epaulets to his axe-wielding warrior, along with spiked boots and a horned helmet. Using the color pad, he added little splashes of red to depict puddles and splatters of blood.

The projection of the God-Emperor flickered and dissolved into a transluscent blood-red cloud punctured by angry black starbursts. Seemingly suspended in space, the little Professor still droned on in his nasal voice: 

"After the God-Emperor, art as direct violence could not be sustained. It would be blasphemous for his regents to have competed with the God-Emperor for the terror of his subjects. And by bringing violence on a galactic scale, the God-Emperor had transformed violence into an abstraction of itself. The site of destruction was no longer the body of the victim, but entire worlds engulfed in flames. In this manner, the abstraction of modern art follows the reality of modern violence..."

Dankmar drew a red starburst around his Professor's skull, as if it were exploding from within. He giggled out loud as he added little yellow chunks of brain matter spewing forth from the image.

Silence fell again upon the hall, as the holographic projections on the dais disappeared entirely. Dankmar looked up eagerly, anticipating the final resolution of Kleiber's lecture: "...contemporary art reflects the distribution of violence across all levels of society by reintroducing the sublime into the concept of art. The art is ambiguous, often subtle and surprising - a trap luring its observer into violence as often as a hammer inflicting it upon him."

Professor Kleiber stepped back from his podium, gesturing to a large display cabinet stuffed with severed heads in the alcove behind him. "Take, for example, my personal project which you can see behind me here. At first impression it seems dry and clinical - a mere scientific display of severed heads in arrested states of surprise and fear. But what marks it as sublime performance art is the revelation that it represents the consequences for my students from doodling distractedly through my lectures..."

Dankmar's eyes widened first in surprise, then in fright. He turned his head to look over his shoulder, precisely one moment too late.