Icarus’s Fall from 110 Stories (original) (raw)
Related papers
Toppling Things. The Visuality, Space and Affect of Monument Removal
Toppling Things Conference at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2021
Toppling Things. The Visuality, Space and Affect of Monument Removal Date: 21-22 January 2021 Organizers: Nausikaä El-Mecky, Tomas Macsotay It is possibly too soon to know whether the events of 2020, after the shocking murder of George Floyd, will represent a point of no return for the ways in which we engage monuments and memorials. What is true is that Black Lives Matter (BLM) has made it possible to open new territory in thinking though monuments, going far beyond a political debate on (partial) obfuscations and removals of statues. Instead, the movement has shifted attention towards painful remembrance and protest action, whether they pivot around a statue or not. As part of the research project Prehistories of the Installation, the two-day colloquium Toppling Things examines the longer tradition of art environments marked by performative complements, where ceremonies, iterations, games or the applying of parerga allow for a scenography or immersive space to come alive. This event, where scholars of historical and contemporary art destruction join the company of activists and artists involved in or inspired by BLM, examines the tensions and (seeming) contradictions that come into play when monuments are attacked. Important questions broached here connect up with monument removals over the past few years, but emerge equally strongly from scholarship on historical iconoclasm. For instance, how protest and punctual attacks on monuments upset notions of the permanent and the ephemeral, how they dissolve the contradiction between the spontaneous and the staged, inscribe the emotional into the pragmatic, or collapse the authentic into the performative. The unusual point of entry for this conference is its determination to combine the perspective of a historical understanding of iconoclasm with the situatedness of participants in the new wave of monument removal actions, where special attention is paid to dynamics of visuality, presence-absence, reciprocity and emotionality within the economies of the actions undertaken by protesters on the streets, and on to the mediatized gestures and sited artworks that follow on from them or that share in their goals. The conference proposes that we can no longer rely for this work of interpretation on models of aesthetic viewing developed for modernist and contemporary art, but must look instead to give the agendas, ethics and motivations of activists and artistic interventionists their due. These drives and modes of resistance represent far more than a mere “context” for the protests – indeed, they should be treated as pertinent accounts for how, why and in what way we memorialize in public space. The event will be held on 21 and 22 January 2021 via Zoom. If you wish to attend, please register, free of cost, via this link: https://forms.gle/5pHftYvEnjuDxshX9
The Politico-Aesthetics of Groundlessness and Philippe Petit's High-Wire Walk
On August seventh, 1974 Philippe Petit spent forty-five minutes a quarter mile above New York City, walking on a wire suspended between the two towers of the newly erected World Trade Center (WTC). Only a handful of photographs attest to his early morning walk. His body, in some photos barely discernable as such, instead merely a smudge of black suspended in open air, is juxtaposed to the monumental façades of the newly completed towers. His body defies the possible, tracing with each careful step across the wire, a space caught somewhere between ground and air. This essay forwards a politico-aesthetics of groundlessness as a means of framing the relationship among performance practices, urban planning, and economic marginalization in the 1970s. His high-wire feat becomes a nexus point for discussing the mid-century master plan to re-vitalize Lower Manhattan (the centerpiece of which was the WTC) and the effects such large-scale development had upon the city’s increasing unemployment and ballooning debt. An analysis of Petit’s performance fits within a growing body of performance studies scholarship that focuses on the shifting economic landscape of the US in the 1970s, theorizing one way in which we might link his virtuosic performance to the economic instability of a rapidly changing nation. I turn to Petit’s high-wire walk as a means to examine how one negotiates the precarious space between, not only, ground and air, but also between revitalization and marginalization, a city’s master plan and artists’ strategic practices of infrastructural disavowal.
Planes of Immanence: Walking on Carl Andre's Art in Moments of Protest
Art History, 2021
This essay examines the stakes of walking on Carl Andre’s sculptures during moments of protest, particularly from the 1990s onward, when his art became the target of feminist protest actions. Walking on Andre’s sculptures has often been framed in highly generalized terms, as an almost universally shared experience that prompts an immanent connection between body and matter. To open up a space for addressing the diverse, subjective nature of spectators’ experiences when walking on Andre’s art, the present study explores how his metal planes have functioned as ‘planes of immanence’, a term drawn from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In particular, it considers how the act of treading on Andre’s sculptures during moments of protest has contributed to reshaping his planes of immanence, transforming them into surfaces that create new ‘lines of flight’ for contesting power, meaning, and the parameters of knowledge
Counter Revanchist Art in the Global City Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action , 2024
Introduction from Counter Revanchist Art in the Global City Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action (Routledge, 2024). 9781032195117 Book Abstract: Through analyses of public artworks that have taken the form of blockades and barricades since the 1990s, this book theorises artists’ responses to global inequities as cultural manifestations of counter-revanchism in diverse urban centres. This book is the first to analyse artworks as forms of counter-revanchism in the context of the rise of the global city. How do artists channel the global spatial conflicts of the 21st century through their behaviours, actions, and constructions in and on the actually existing conditions of the street? What does it mean for artists—the very symbol of freedom of personal expression—to shut down space? To refuse entry? To block others’ passage? The late critical geographer Neil Smith’s influential writing on the revanchist city is used as a theoretical frame for understanding how contemporary artists engender the public sphere through their work in public urban spaces. Each chapter is a case study that analyses artworks that have taken the form of walls and barricades in China, USA, UK, Ukraine, and Mexico. In doing so, the author draws upon diverse fields including art history, geography, philosophy, political science, theatre studies, and urban studies to situate the art in a broader context of the humanities with the aim of modelling interdisciplinary research grounded in an ethics of solidarity with global social justice work. Collectively these case studies reveal how artists’ local responses to urban revanchism since the end of the Cold War are productive reorientations of social relations and harbingers of worlds to come. By using plain language and avoiding excessive academic jargon, the book is accessible to a wide variety of readers. It will appeal to scholars and graduate students in the fields of studio art, modern and contemporary art history, performance studies, visual culture, and visual studies; especially in relation to those interested in conceptual practices, performance art, site-specificity, public art, political activism, and socially engaged art. Cultural geographers and urban theorists interested in the social and political ramifications of temporary and everyday urbanism will also find the analysis of artworks relevant to their own studies.
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2010
If images of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the subsequent engulfment of lower Manhattan in soot and debris have come to signify 9/11 in the popular imaginary, so, too, have they become a trope in many 9/11 novels. Claire Messud's The Emperor 's Children (2006), Jay McInerney's The Good Life (2006), and Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007) employ this trope by positioning their protagonists, mostly in crucial moments in their character developments, within eyeshot of the World Trade Center. While the character developments take on different directions from there, the individual descriptions of the attacks on the Twin Towers all offer similar impressions; so similar in fact, that readers might feel that they are now reading, in a fictional context, the very images that they themselves witnessed, either in person or mediated through global media. Such passages invite the reader to remember, rather than to imagine, the extent to which the collapse of the Twin Towers signifies the deep rupture in the social grain of American culture that 9/11 has come to constitute. Employing different modes of visualization, Messud's, McInerney's, and DeLillo's novels exemplify to which degree descriptive passages can mediate simultaneity, metaphoricity, and performance, respectively. These visual turns add a new perspective to discussions about the fictional mediation of 9/11 in contemporary literature.
The Art of Protest: Understanding and Misunderstanding Monstrous Events
Theory & Event, 2021
This essay explores the basis for dialogue at the junction of political theory, historical research and aesthetic analysis. It does so by making two claims. The first one concerns political emergence, which refers to movements that emerge outside democratic institutions and portend profound reorganizations of political order although they are not yet fully recognizable as political entities as they have weak political representation. The second claim implies that aesthetic presentations and performances (fiction, poetry, visual arts, film, theater) offer unique ways of understanding political emergence, and hence also collective protest, revolt and revolution. Artworks embody this potentiality because they register the experience of protests, not as representations of fixed historical agents, but in ways comparable to the testimonial mode of the participant and the witness in situations of social stress, struggle and political violence.