ART/Berlin
Through Nov. 13th

The Ludovico Treatment will be familiar to readers of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, as the experimental aversion therapy undergone by Alex, a young hooligan recently incarcerated for murdering an elderly lady.

He's offered a reduced prison sentence in return for agreeing to submit to an intense, visually disturbing barrage of projected images accompanied by a soundtrack of Beethoven and Handel.

More memorable, perhaps, is Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film adaptation, where Malcolm McDowell, playing the charismatic and remorseless Alex in his trademark bowler hat, suspenders and jackboots, is strapped into a dentist's chair as technicians in white lab coats peel back his eyelids with forklike calipers.

They attach electrodes to his body, and pump a nausea inducing serum into his bloodstream while vignettes of horrific footage loops endlessly in a darkened theatre.

The ostensible goal of the Ludovico Treatment is to render Alex incapable of thinking of a future violent act without experiencing extreme bodily discomfort.

Henceforth, all anti-social thoughts will be inextricably bound up with the catalog of 20th Century horrors he is forced to watch, and existential nausea is replaced here by actual gut-wrenching, physical nausea brought on by the serum.

Rather than rehabilitating Alex by showing him the error of his ways, the Ludovico Treatment eliminates Alex's free will and renders him as incapable of enjoying Beethoven's 5th Symphony as he is of committing the least aggressive act.

Subtle conditioning by association, the grail of Western Civilization or 'improving culture,' is hijacked here by the politically scheming Minister of the Interior and his team of social-scientists to become a form of brainwashing mind-control: instantaneous, cost-effective, and with 0% recidivism.

Not only is Alex's waking life held in check by the treatment, but his dreams — when crude or lascivious — force him to wake in a confused, panicky sweat.

Cut to CNN, the History Channel, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Nip & Tuck, Crime Scene Investigation, Court TV, The Passion of the Christ, City of God, and Abu Ghraib.

It is my contention that the current morbid fascination with extreme spectacles of violence, torture, incarceration, interrogation, humiliation, surgical invasion and eviscera is beginning to seize contemporary art, for better or for worse, in two ways:

1) work that mirrors elements of the grotesque, the erotic shading into the pornographic, or the sense of claustrophobic helplessness induced by a purely visual landscape of infantile titillation and adolescent destruction and 2) the exhaustion of modernist tropes to the point where only an extreme aesthetic can be heard over the din of competing media.