The following article is part of the exhibition catalogue for "The Horror Show," curated by Debra and David Tolchinsky and on show at Chicago City Arts Gallery through Feb. 23, 2008.

By Timothy Murray

What does it mean for an exhibition on “Horror” to eschew the representation of horror itself? Absent from the gallery are those familiar depictions of mangled bodies, violent assaults, fleeing crowds, and rampaging chainsaws that we associate with the horror of B movies and the shock of tabloid photos. Missing in action is the recognizable gore of horror and the expectant surprise of shock, whether from pools of blood or screams of terror. In their wake, almost as if clouded in the affect of melancholy for the loss of horror itself, lies something far more discomforting than the mass reproduction of what popular culture has accustomed us to seek but really no longer to fear.

Debra and Dave Tolchinsky chill their viewers with the psychic residue of disquiet itself. Here we’re caught in psychic zones of time travel between fictions of old and terrors of new. We are solicited by the sounds of disembodied voices while being seduced by visions of disembodiment itself. And when the curators comfort us with the more solid ground of technological prosthesis — whether the book, the mirror, the door, the television, or the camera — they do so to eschew what Jean-François Lyotard called the terroristic “megamachine of reproduction, which understands alterity only as an opposite for dialectical reabsorption” (Les TRANSformateurs Duchamp, 92). When we finish the journey through Terror Tolchinsky, we remain tensed by a discomforting web of contrasting voices and sounds, by a photographic stream of uncanny apparitions of lost limbs and found objects, and by a sense that the frisson of disquieting sound moves ever so freely between these many artworks, as if specters disturbed in their slumber.

At every move this exhibition seems to unsettle the conventional discourse of terror. Perhaps this is most apparent in relation to psychoanalysis, whose terror was defined so chillingly by Freud in the divisive language of castration and its fright. We all know Freud’s familiar tale of how males are discomforted by the visual shock of female lack, only to have their shaken subjectivity bolstered by disavowal through fetishistic reabsorption in the foot, the shoe, the leg. It is somewhat wondrous that so many of this exhibition’s artists circulate limbs in ways that seem to diminish the fright of castration and the comforts of disavowal. Striking in this regard are Christopher Schneberger’s enigmatic sepia photos showing an adolescent girl suspended in midair (whether dancing or posing with a doll) without the aid of her invisible legs. By levitating so leglessly in a rather stark environment, the girl denies the very possibility of Freud’s fetishistic line of vision, from the feet up. What’s particularly thrilling is how her limbs, or someone else’s, reappear in the most incongruous setting in Brian Getnick’s Old Airport, whose sculptural aperture reveals a set of bizarrely detached legs flailing in uncanny suspension. Jeanne Dunning then greets us with an equally detached image of a hand whose isolation is rendered cozily familiar by its inviting framing in luscious bed sheets. Jean Marie Casbarian seems to take up the theme even more perversely by presenting a hazily suspended torso whose headlessness seems rather naturalized and benign within the show’s recontextualization of horror (no headless horseman, this!). Taken together, these differing presentations of corporeal detachment work as “enigmatic signifiers” that gesture to the very Freudian tradition of terror without grounding the artworks in the clarity of disavowed vision or the pride of patriarchal confidence in the megamachine of reproduction.

Jean Marie Casbarian, "The Outcast"

Even the gaze is turned asunder by Craig Yu, who provides a bird’s-eye view of a falling plane, and by Stephen Nyktas, who reverses vision in his inventive photographs to dislocate point of view from positions “underneath” cinderblocks, porches, and cabinets. Here subject becomes upside-down object, endowed with curious perspective. Similarly, many exhibited artists move from Freudian cabinet to Lacanian mirror to disquiet symbolic confidence in the gaze. In Frances with Mother’s Shoes, Schneberger’s legless girl stands in front of a mirror, but instead of looking back in horror at her inadequate self turns her mirrored vision at an angle to the floor, where her mother’s shoes stand empty below her floating torso. It’s almost as if Schneberger’s shoes mirror Nyktas’s cabinets to nullify the promise of the gaze, if not to grab it back for the daughter through the absent mother in an empowering redefinition of the fetish. If the shoe fits? The stain of the mirror is enacted literally by Debra Tolchinsky’s ingenious Smoke and Mirrors, through which the idealized mirrorical portrait vanishes before the viewer’s eyes in an electrified puff of smoke. The horror of mirrorical masochism is here nullified by the terror of digital conceit.

Debra Tolchinsky, "Smoke and Mirrors"

Digital terror, then, is a means by which many works in this exhibition reflect the reversals of terror in contemporary digital and media culture. The issue is less the paranoia of two-sided mirrors, surveillance, and tracking than the appropriation and reversal of nefarious procedures of digital invasion though artistic performance. Indeed this is a show that seems tied to the beat of media disquiet. Renate Ferro’s Facing Panic marks the time travel of retrospective trauma by juxtaposing Cold War media tips for nuclear survival with contemporary interviews of 9/11 survivors and their elder kin, for whom the war on terror catalyzed unanticipated flashbacks to earlier anxieties. The medialization of trauma receives equally complex treatment in Melissa Grey’s sound piece, 13 sonic variations of character response to the infamous shower scene in the cinematic icon of horror, Psycho. This medialized slide between stained gaze and grain of voice acquires particularly slimy resonance in Jeffrey Sconce’s parodic sound appropriation of child molesters from To Catch a Predator — matched visually by Josh Faught’s ironic drawing The First Person I Ever Came Out To Was a Convicted Sexual Predator.

Josh Faught, "The First Person I Ever Came Out to Was a Convicted Sex Predator"

The network of electronic disturbance is most disquieting in Brad Todd’s interactive sculptures and Dave Tolchinsky and Dan Silverstein’s Horror. Todd’s Æther, for instance, transforms the book of Poe’s tales into a mobile EMF detector that makes audible the otherwise invisible flow of environmental electromagnetic currents. Todd’s interactive performance of Poe’s disquieting voice calling out from the past resonates strongly with Tolchinsky and Silverstein’s nightmarish narratives, from behind three doors, of a body’s strange deterioration, endless torture, and mental evaporation. Emitted from under doors lying curiously on the floor, these confusing sounds of terror speak in ghastly fashion to the extensive disquiet of disembodiment, mirrorical stain, and electronic disturbance figuring Tolchinsky Terror.

Timothy Murray is curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art and professor of comparative literature and English at Cornell University.