“We are living,” he writes, “in the age where materialism has finally triumphed.The world has been purged of fairies, elves, witches, angels, enchanted castlesand hidden treasures.Dreaming and fantasizing is nowadays considered a chemical imbalance inthe brain of the child. For reasons of national security there are no realms ofimagination anymore in which to escape—children are held in the mercilessheadlight of the adults level-headed, common-sense-madhouse: a world ofstock-markets, war, rape, pollution, television-moronism, prozak, prisoncamps,miss universe-competitions, genetic engineering, child pornography,Ronald McDonalds, Paris Hilton and torture” (Helnwein, n.d.).

Importantly, for Helnwein, art responds to the violence of the world byraising the right type of questions and not colonizing the imaginary withfixed interpretations. Helnwein’s Disasters of War 13 is a compelling exampleof this. This unsettling and provocative image depicts a blood-soaked, innocent,white young girl. Given the artist’s definition of the function of thework, we might ask what questions this image raises? Consciously disruptingfamiliar representations of casualties of war, the questions we might heararising from the work echoes: What if it was your child? What if this wasyour daughter? What if this was your neighbor? What if this was you, orwhat if it were I? This is not about shocking the spectator into submission.Nor is it simply the mirroring of experience to bring about certain empathyor produce a shallow and sensationalist response. It is to bring about a forcedassimilation with the unassimilated, to face the intolerable, so that it viscerallyregisters as such.