Dora Apel | Wayne State University (original) (raw)

Videos by Dora Apel

The art historian and cultural critic Dora Apel talks about her personal memory, monuments, and p... more The art historian and cultural critic Dora Apel talks about her personal memory, monuments, and place and her recent monograph Calling Memory into Place (Rutgers UP, 2020).

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Dora Apel, W. Hawkins Ferry Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne Sta... more Dora Apel, W. Hawkins Ferry Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne State University, returns to the program to talk about her book Beautiful, Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline, published by Rutgers University Press in 2015.

"In Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline, Dora Apel goes on the offensive against the myriad myths and delusions peddled about the Motor City; not only that, she rebuffs the blame and shame that have traditionally been directed at the Detroit citizenry, and redirects our attention to the corporations and bureaucrats who have abandoned it. The result is a work that seems to invigorate a depressed debate and ask timely questions about social values in America and the world it influences." ― Los Angeles Review of Books

Books by Dora Apel

How can memory be mobilized for social justice? How can images and monuments counter public forge... more How can memory be mobilized for social justice? How can images and monuments counter public forgetting? And how can inherited family and cultural traumas be channeled in productive ways?

In this deeply personal work, acclaimed art historian Dora Apel examines how memorials, photographs, artworks, and autobiographical stories can be used to fuel a process of “unforgetting”—reinterpreting the past by recalling the events, people, perspectives, and feelings that get excluded from conventional histories. The ten essays in Calling Memory into Place feature explorations of the controversy over a painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial and the debates about a national lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. They also include personal accounts of Apel’s return to the Polish town where her Holocaust survivor parents grew up, as well as the ways she found strength in her inherited trauma while enduring treatment for breast cancer.

These essays shift between the scholarly, the personal, and the visual as different modes of knowing, and explore the intersections between racism, antisemitism, and sexism, while suggesting how awareness of historical trauma is deeply inscribed on the body. By investigating the relations among place, memory, and identity, this study shines a light on the dynamic nature of memory as it crosses geography and generations.

Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities ... more Once the manufacturing powerhouse of the nation, Detroit has become emblematic of failing cities everywhere—the paradigmatic city of ruins—and the epicenter of an explosive growth in images of urban decay. In Beautiful Terrible Ruins, art historian Dora Apel explores a wide array of these images, ranging from photography, advertising, and television, to documentaries, video games, and zombie and disaster films.

Apel shows how Detroit has become pivotal to an expanding network of ruin imagery, imagery ultimately driven by a pervasive and growing cultural pessimism, a loss of faith in progress, and a deepening fear that worse times are coming. The images of Detroit’s decay speak to the overarching anxieties of our era: increasing poverty, declining wages and social services, inadequate health care, unemployment, homelessness, and ecological disaster—in short, the failure of capitalism. Apel reveals how, through the aesthetic distancing of representation, the haunted beauty and fascination of ruin imagery, embodied by Detroit’s abandoned downtown skyscrapers, empty urban spaces, decaying factories, and derelict neighborhoods help us to cope with our fears. But Apel warns that these images, while pleasurable, have little explanatory power, lulling us into seeing Detroit’s deterioration as either inevitable or the city’s own fault, and absolving the real agents of decline—corporate disinvestment and globalization. Beautiful Terrible Ruins helps us understand the ways that the pleasure and the horror of urban decay hold us in thrall.

Reviews
"Writing against the genre of ruin porn, Dora Apel's wonderful Beautiful Terrible Ruins reveals the way decay is inbuilt into capitalism at its creation. An excellent and penetrating study."
—Greg Grandin, author of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

"In her thoughtful and riveting take on the decline of Detroit, Dora Apel makes the case that 'ruin porn' images of urban decay say less about a specific city than about the grinding forces of globalism and political abandonment."
—Scott Martelle, author of Detroit: A Biography

"In the early twentieth century, Detroit was defined by Charles Sheeler's photos of the River Rouge plant and Diego Rivera's murals of work. Today, the hulking ruins of old industrial buildings and empty skyscrapers symbolize the city. In this provocative analysis, informed by urban geography, political economy, and art history, Dora Apel reflects on what images of ruined Detroit teach us about the city, popular culture, and American capitalism."
—Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit

"'The borders between art, media, advertising, and popular culture have become increasingly permeable,' Apel writes, 'as visual imagery easily ranges across these formats and as people produce their own imagery on websites and social media.' And the aestheticized ruination of Detroit feeds into a more widespread (even global) 'anxiety of decline' expressed in post-apocalyptic videogame scenarios, survivalist television programs, zombie movies, and so on ... Much of the imagery analyzed in Beautiful Terrible Ruins seems to play right along with that social vision. The nicely composed photographs of crumbling buildings are usually empty of any human presence, while horror movies fill their urban landscapes with the hungry undead - the shape of dreaded things to come."
--Inside Higher Ed - Scott McLemee

"Dora Apel's multi-layered, thought-provoking account of the decline of Detroit and our visual perception of that decline uses Detroit as a case study to explore the anxiety brought by the repeated and continual emphasis on ruin imagery. An eloquent examination of the aesthetics of decay, the charismatic appeal of both the beautiful and the repulsive, drives the book."
--ARLIS/NA Reviews

"Bringing her usual due diligence to bear, Apel digs deep, tracing the roots historically, culturally, and politically of the West's fascination with ruination and its import for today ... Essential reading."
--Infinite Mile

A provocative and challenging book … Recommended. General readers, upper-division undergraduate students, graduate students, and research faculty."
--CHOICE

"What is refreshing about Apel's approach is that her analysis reaches far beyond the spectacle of abandonment and decay to address the forces behind urban decline. In the process, she delivers a powerful critique of the role of corporate disinvestment and neoliberal globalization in ruining cities."
--Journal of American Studies

"Apel again captivates with her incisive reading of cultural production."
--Journal of American History

"Apel mounts a scathing critique of the dominant narrative [of Detroit in Beautiful Terrible Ruins]."
--International Sociology Reviews

"Beautiful Terrible Ruins is a fascinating book. Apel makes a powerful statement about how we need to look more closely at our own material culture, especially as it is expressed in visual imagery and in the built environment itself in order to better interpret our history. As Apel aptly comments, 'to look at Detroit’s beautiful terrible ruins and talk about its decline is talk about everything that is wrong with global capitalism today.'”
--Middle West Review

Published by Rutgers University Press, June 2015

Analyzes the relationships among contemporary war, documentary practices, and democratic ideals a... more Analyzes the relationships among contemporary war, documentary practices, and democratic ideals and examines a wide variety of images and cultural representations of war in the United States and the Middle East, including photography, performance art, video games, reenactment, and social media images. This book also explores the merging of photojournalism and artistic practices, the effects of visual framing, and the construction of both sanctioned and counter-hegemonic narratives in a global contest of images.

Why do we look at lynching photographs? What is the basis for our curiosity, rage, indignation, o... more Why do we look at lynching photographs? What is the basis for our curiosity, rage, indignation, or revulsion? Beginning in the late nineteenth century, nearly five thousand blacks were put to death at the hands of lynch mobs throughout America. In many communities it was a public event, to be witnessed, recorded, and made available by means of photographs. In this book, the art historian Dora Apel and the American Studies scholar Shawn Michelle Smith examine lynching photographs as a way of analyzing photography's historical role in promoting and resisting racial violence. They further suggest how these photographs continue to affect the politics of spectatorship. In clear prose, and with carefully chosen images, the authors chart the history of lynching photographs—their meanings, uses, and controversial display—and offer terms in which to understand our responsibilities as viewers and citizens.

Co-authored with Shawn Michelle Smith
Defining Moments in American Photography series, vol. 2
edited by Anthony Lee
Published by University of California Press, 2008

Reviews
"A lucid, smart, engaging, and accessible introduction to the impact of lynching photography on the history of race and violence in America. "—Grace Elizabeth Hale, author of Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in America, 1890-1940

"With admirable courage, Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith examine lynching photographs that are horrifying, shameful, and elusive; with admirable sensitivity they help us delve into the meaning and legacy of these difficult images. They show us how the images change when viewed from different perspectives, they reveal how the photographs have continued to affect popular culture and political debates, and they delineate how the pictures produce a dialectic of shame and atonement."—Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, author of Neo-Slave Narratives and Remembering Generations

Outside of the classroom and scholarly publications, lynching has long been a taboo subject. Nice... more Outside of the classroom and scholarly publications, lynching has long been a taboo subject. Nice people, it is felt, do not talk about it, and they certainly do not look at images representing the atrocity.

In Imagery of Lynching, Dora Apel contests this adopted stance of ignorance. Through a careful and compelling analysis of over one hundred representations of lynching, she shows how the visual documentation of such crimes can be a central vehicle for both constructing and challenging racial hierarchies. She examines how lynching was often orchestrated explicitly for the camera and how these images circulated on postcards, but also how they eventually were appropriated by antilynching forces and artists from the 1930s to the present. She further investigates how photographs were used to construct ideologies of "whiteness" and "blackness," the role that gender played in these visual representations, and how interracial desire became part of the imagery.

Offering the fullest and most systematic discussion of the depiction of lynching in diverse visual forms, this book addresses questions about race, class, gender, and dissent in the shaping of American society. Although we may want to avert our gaze, Apel holds it with her sophisticated interpretations of traumatic images and the uses to which they have been put.

Published by Rutgers University Press, 2004

Analyzes the ways in which artists born after the Holocaust-whom she calls secondary witnesses-re... more Analyzes the ways in which artists born after the Holocaust-whom she calls secondary witnesses-represent a history they did not experience first hand. She demonstrates that contemporary artists confront these atrocities in order to bear witness not to the Holocaust directly, but to its "memory effects" and to the implications of those effects for the present and future.

Drawing on projects that employ a variety of unorthodox artistic strategies, the author provides a unique understanding of contemporary representations of the Holocaust. She demonstrates how these artists frame the past within the conditions of the present, the subversive use of documentary and the archive, the effects of the Jewish genocide on issues of difference and identity, and the use of representation as a form of resistance to historical closure.

Artists discussed: Shimon Attie, Frédéric Brenner, Vera Frenkel, James Friedman, Matthew Girson, Erich Hartmann, Mikael Levin, Pier Marton, Rachel Schreiber, Susan Silas, Marina Vainshtein, Jeffrey Wolin

Reviews
"Promises to extend the discussion of 'second-generation' art and literature about the Holocaust in important ways." -- James Young, author of The Texture of Memory

"Apel grounds her analyses of contemporary artworks in a wide-ranging examination of debates about the limits and possibilities of Holocaust representation. " Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Published by Rutgers University Press, 2001

Book chapters by Dora Apel

Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media, 2022

Migration in the 21st century is one of the pre-eminent issues of our present historical moment, ... more Migration in the 21st century is one of the pre-eminent issues of our present historical moment, a phenomenon that has acquired new urgency with accelerating climate change, civil wars, and growing economic scarcities. Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media consists of eleven essays that explore how artists have imaginatively engaged with this monumental human drama, examining a range of alternative modes of representation that provide striking new takes on the experiences of these precarious populations. Chapters included here focus on the power of aesthetic engagement to illuminate the stories of refugees and migrants in ways that overturn journalistic clichés.

Terrorism and the Arts: Practices and Critiques in Contemporary Cultural Production, 2021

A twenty-five-year-old man tries to swim across the river Rio Grande with his nearly two-yearold ... more A twenty-five-year-old man tries to swim across the river Rio Grande with his nearly two-yearold daughter on his back; she is tucked under his t-shirt with her arms around his neck. He doesn't make it. A current sweeps them away and they drown, their bodies washing up facedown along the shore, in the reeds, with blue beer cans bobbing nearby. The child has slipped to the side, one arm still around her father's neck, evidence of a diaper under her red shorts. A photo of their corpses in the water goes viral, distributed by the Associated Press around the world and picked up by major media, a picture that allows us to look down upon them from a height of safety.1 Is it a picture of a foolhardy venture or an act of desperation driven by terror (1.1)? The man is Óscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez with his daughter Valeria. Mexican photojournalist Julia Le Duc took the photo. Ramirez and Valeria had traveled from El Salvador and spent some months in Mexico trying to negotiate the nearly impossible asylum process before Ramirez decided to swim from Matamoros to Browns-ville, Texas. His wife, Valeria's mother, swimming some way behind them, saw them go down and returned to shore. Ramirez and Valeria are only two of thousands who have tried, one way or another, to make the crossing, only to die-by drowning, thirst in the desert, gunfire, animal attack, or abandonment in airless locked trucks by the "coyotes" who took their money and promised to escort them to safety. The hopeful path to a presumed haven in the U.S. is marked by an endless stream of dead bodies. In an essay in the New York Times Magazine, Teju Cole traces the responsibility of many U.S. presidents for the deaths of those like Ramirez and Valeria. He notes that Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush both supported El Salvador's military-led government in a civil war in which tens of thousands of Salvadorans died and hundreds of thousands fled to the U.S. Bill Clinton conferred only "temporary protected status" on them, forcing them to go back at the end of the war, and many formed or joined gangs now heavily involved in the violence there. Barack Obama oversaw an increase in the apprehension and deportation of almost three million undocumented immigrants, more than any other president so far. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president after repeatedly calling migrants "drug dealers," "rapists," and "criminals," even though evidence shows that immigration correlates with lower crime rates. His administration funded Salvadoran security forces that illegally executed dozens of suspected gang members. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have clearly played a major role in producing the ongoing social, economic, and humanitarian crisis. In 2018, Trump declared an end to the temporary protected status of almost 200,000 people from El Salvador who had fled a series of earthquakes there in 2001, cutting off their support to relatives at home and further devastating the Salvadoran economy. This was followed by a

The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries, 2018

One of the most pressing challenges in the world today is access to clean water. This chapter exp... more One of the most pressing challenges in the world today is access to clean water. This chapter explores the crises of contaminated water in Flint, water shutoffs in Detroit, and larger questions about the control of water by private corporations and the changing nature of urbanization. As neoliberal policies seek to privatize infrastructure and essential resources, the resulting crises illustrate the disastrous results of decisions driven by profit rather than the public good and demonstrate the need for a rethinking of the urban imaginary to produce a radically democratic, anticapitalist form of global urbanization.

Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media, 2022

This essay examines select visual representations of refugees and migrants as embodied subjects i... more This essay examines select visual representations of refugees and migrants as embodied subjects in photography, art, and video. It focuses on American asylum politics and explores the questions of free movement, the right to have rights, and the ethics and efficacy of border walls. It argues that the catastrophe of global forced displacement makes the elimination of national borders and the nation state itself a revolutionary necessity.

Violence and Visibility in Modern History, 2013

War reenactors and “living history” groups (who perform for the public only while reenactors perf... more War reenactors and “living history” groups (who perform for the public only while reenactors perform both publicly and privately) have grown from a small phenomenon to a startling array of contemporary groups and events. In the United States alone, war reenactments draw thousands of participants and spectators each year; in 1998 as many as 25,000 “troops” took part in a huge recreation of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg. Reenactment is not focused on the Civil War alone, however; it has grown to encompass nearly every war that has ever been prosecuted. Is the drive to reenact a passion to make history “visible” or a desire to personally participate in a grand imagined narrative? How does historical reenactment intersect with contemporary culture, politics, and society?

What is Radical Politics Today?, 2009

This essay highlights the character of radical art through three case studies: a work on paper by... more This essay highlights the character of radical art through three case studies: a work on paper by Martha Rosler, a new media sculpture by Krzysztof Wodiczko, and a guerrilla theatre performance by Iraq Veterans Against the War. It reflects on different ways of being political within the public sphere of visual culture, specifically in relation to the inequities of capitalist culture, abuses of human rights, and investments in antiwar activism in relation to the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Articles by Dora Apel

Membrana, 2022

This conversation revolves around Dora Apel’s work in the field of art and memory. Memory, in its... more This conversation revolves around Dora Apel’s work in the field of art and memory. Memory, in its mediating force, is critical for our understanding of the present and the construction of a future, or, rather, as Dora Apel
posits it in her recent book Calling Memory Into Place: “Memory effects are not about the past. How do they shape the present and future? Can
the way we remember the past play an active role in fighting ongoing forms of oppression and persecution?” (2020). These questions are a
critical invitation to think about events, topics and processes that also mark Dora Apel’s work. In this conversation we discuss the issues of
memory and ruin, justice and oppression, as well as the environment in the context of thinking about art. Thus, we hope to bring forward not
only the mechanics of how memory in the arts operates in the present, what it foregrounds and obscures, but also its relation to the environment.

Jacobin magazine, June 5, 2015

By depicting urban decay and ecological crisis, ruin imagery shows the people and places that cap... more By depicting urban decay and ecological crisis, ruin imagery shows the people and places that capitalism left behind.

Journal of Visual Culture, 2009

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A provocative and challenging book … Recommended. General readers, upper-division undergraduate students, graduate students, and research faculty."
--CHOICE

"Apel again captivates with her incisive reading of cultural production."
--Journal of American History

"Apel mounts a scathing critique of the dominant narrative [of Detroit in Beautiful Terrible Ruins]."
--International Sociology Reviews

Published by Rutgers University Press, June 2015

Co-authored with Shawn Michelle Smith
Defining Moments in American Photography series, vol. 2
edited by Anthony Lee
Published by University of California Press, 2008

Published by Rutgers University Press, 2004

Reviews
"Promises to extend the discussion of 'second-generation' art and literature about the Holocaust in important ways." -- James Young, author of The Texture of Memory

"Apel grounds her analyses of contemporary artworks in a wide-ranging examination of debates about the limits and possibilities of Holocaust representation. " Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Published by Rutgers University Press, 2001

Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media, 2022

Terrorism and the Arts: Practices and Critiques in Contemporary Cultural Production, 2021

The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries, 2018

Refugees and Migrants in Contemporary Film, Art and Media, 2022

Violence and Visibility in Modern History, 2013

What is Radical Politics Today?, 2009

Membrana, 2022

Jacobin magazine, June 5, 2015

Journal of Visual Culture, 2009

Catalog essay for "Brotherville," a photographic exhibition by Farah Al Qasimi

Detroit Cultural, 2019

Discussion of key ideas in Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline

The Brooklyn Rail, June 3, 2015

Bright orange houses, totemic garbage mounds, ice-encased houses, and sculptures of lost neighbor... more Bright orange houses, totemic garbage mounds, ice-encased houses, and sculptures of lost neighborhoods-these are some of the sites of protest or resistance of Detroit artists today. Abandoned houses painted orange suddenly appeared along some of the city's major freeways in 2006, calling blaring attention to their dereliction. The anonymous artists who were behind Object Orangepainted the structurally unsafe houses in a series of guerilla actions, using the Disney color Tiggerific Orange. Painting only the side facing the highway, their goal was to make the houses visible to middle-class commuters who were rushing home from the city to the northern white suburbs, who could otherwise easily ignore the dilapidated homes already marked for demolition but left standing by the city. Object Orange signals the story of urban decline that is told not only through shuttered factories, shops, and civic architecture, but also through the thousands of ordinary vacant homes that are mostly modest wooden structures. These ruins are generally invisible because they are not memorialized in any way and tend to be located in poor and minority neighborhoods. Of the first 11 houses painted orange, four were almost immediately demolished, and more have been demolished since. The city, however, viewed the project as criminal vandalism and claimed the demolitions were coincidental.

This is the open-access issue on the events of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

Essay on Cass Corridor art in Detroit, from Up from the Streets: Detroit Art from the Duffy Wareh... more Essay on Cass Corridor art in Detroit, from Up from the Streets: Detroit Art from the Duffy Warehouse Collection
Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, 2001

Journal of American Studies, 2018

Michigan Historical Review, 2017

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2010

Contemporary Sociology, 2004

Biography-an Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 2009

Mediapolis, 2018

Interview on Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline, Part 1 and 2