A State of Anxiety: Artworks at the Edge of Emotion

The article revisits themes developed in Fear and Art in the Contemporary World and discusses the centrality of art practices as an irritant and reflection to contemporary culture of fear.

Since the mid-1990s we live in what has been variously called an "age of anxiety", a "risk society" and a "culture of fear". Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman coined the phrase "liquid fear" to suggest the pervading and pervasive sense of insecurity, uncertainty and profound anxiety that has now-in Bauman's words- "settled inside, saturating our daily routines; it hardly needs further stimuli from outside, since the actions it prompts day in, day out supply all the motivation and all the energy it needs to reproduce itself." Such condition is maintained through a privatisation of public fears and a projection of private ones into the public sphere by rendering them a blueprint of daily interaction. Individual anxieties reflect socio-cultural constructs and vice versa: to various degrees we are all participants, observers and complicit in our actions and responses to the dense perpetuation of the current emotional climate. The increase in anxiety-related disorders, racial and social phobias, economic insecurity, political uncertainty, surveillance and terrorism are only some of the overt symptoms of the pervasiveness of anxiety as the affective currency that dominates our lives and the lens through which we read reality. Bauman's metaphor of liquidity well conveys the angst in which we live, the constant "low-level fear" that, as he argues, characterises our apprehensive response to circumstances and environments as they are fuelled by the politics of fear.