Cracks in the Urban Frame: The Visual Politics of 9/11 (original) (raw)
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Dreams and Nightmares: Filmic Fantasies of New York Since 9/11
Written as a chapter for a 2007 illustrated book about New York, this essay traces the author's personal story in publishing a decade-long work about New York and the movies in the weeks and months following September 11th, 2001, then examines several key films which, in the years since, have reasserted the skyscraper fantasies of the "mythic city" of movie New York. It looks in detail at Spider-Man (2002) and Shark Tale (2004), using the latter to propose a new vision of contemporary urban life, in which the virtual televised realm -- thought to have vitiated physical space in the second half of the 20th century -- has, at the start of the 21st century, been re-imported (via large electronic screens) into central city gathering places such as Times Square, creating a hybrid realm in which reality and representation merge together in new and complex ways.
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.
Contemporary Art and the Media after 9/11
Život umjetnosti, 2018
The collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001 and its direct transmission around the globe introduced a new paradigm in warfare conducted through the media. The time span between the first and the second attack on WTC was a suitable moment for the cameramen and photographers to install their equipment and make it possible for the viewers to watch the second airplane crushing into the towers live. The disturbing images travelled around the world in no time, and their character shifted from documentary to symbolical. The resulting hypertrophy of meaning led to an image production encoded with the explicit content of violence and trauma. The newly created media setting generated new viewing mentalities and new visual literacy. Art produced in the period since September 11, 2001 has been an indicator of the new social order, which endows images with the brutal power of reality. The aim of this paper is to present some examples from the contemporary artistic production—primarily works of Hans Peter Feldmann, Doug Ashford, Francis Alÿs, Thomas Hirschorn, and Munir Fatmi—and to perform an analysis of the way in which the contemporary art practices deal with the issues imposed by the post-September eruption of images. The works of the said artists have thereby been used as primary sources in articulating a perspective that will lead to a better understanding of the new role of the media.
Beyond the Inferno: Literary Representations of New York City Before and After 9/11
From its founding, New York City has served as the gateway to the New World and has been the impetus behind the American Dream. As the city grew in size and importance, so the levels of antagonism rose among its inhabitants, for, like any large-scale urban environment, it was filled with what Georg Simmel labels “overwhelming social forces” (1950:410). These forces became even more relevant within the context of what Fredric Jameson calls the “postmodern hyperspace” (1984:83) of urban society which emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century. Thus, by focusing on the real-world example of New York, this dissertation examines how the dialectical negotiation between a postmodern city’s form and its function has a profound impact on the identities of that city’s inhabitants, producing alienating and antagonistic experiences of city life which, in turn, places increasing pressure on both the conception and perception of an individual’s status within the boundaries of that cityscape. The terrorist attacks that occurred on 11 September 2001 functioned as yet another overwhelming force that greatly affected New York’s inhabitants. The dedicated media coverage of the event effectively burned the image of a ‘wounded’ New York into people minds. This emotional imprinting occurred not only because of the horrifying destruction wrought upon the city, leading to the loss of the spectacle that was the World Trade Centre, but also because of the change that this destruction brought about in the mindset of everyone who watched those buildings fall, leading to the establishment of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ dialectic. Two literary texts that highlight this dialectic were chosen to provide the basis of this dissertation’s analysis. These are Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2001) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007). Written and set in 2000, Fury provides an insightful and provocative account of life in New York at the turn of the twenty-first century and, through a retrospective reading of this novel, one can identify its prescience in depicting a New York in which the escalating antagonism, both within and without the city, seems to herald impending disaster. Indeed, that disaster was the 9/11 attacks, which Falling Man takes as its subject, providing individualised, albeit fictional, accounts of the trauma that was experienced by those who were in the towers and their families, as well as those who witnessed it. By offering an analysis of Rushdie and DeLillo’s narrative strategies in these novels, specifically in light of Michel Foucault’s theory of the heterotopia, Italo Calvino’s conception of the “infernal city” in his Invisible Cities (1974), and the work of key 9/11 theorists, such as Jean Baudrillard, Slajov Žižek and David Simpson, among others, this dissertation will plot the trajectory of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ dialectic in order to ascertain how effectively these novels function as (re)presentations of the real-world city of New York.
Aesthetics of Terror: Reflections on Post-9/11 Literature and Visual Culture
Doctoral Dissertation, 2014
This dissertation project investigates cultural responses to visual representations of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. I examine the aesthetics, contexts, movements, and politics of post-9/11 visual culture across a range of media with a primary focus on photography and fiction. Recent scholarly articles and book length surveys on post-9/11 culture overwhelmingly charge popular literary and visual texts with participating in the reproduction of hegemonic norms and supporting a regressive climate of anti-feminism, hyper-masculinity, and reactionary politics. I contend that many scholars have actually foreclosed alternative interpretations and the production of new knowledge regarding post-9/11 literature and visual culture in the pursuit to reveal dominant ideologies at work. This project unfolds in three main sections, each of which develops "reparative readings" of visual and literary texts in an attempt to redeem valuable political, ethical, and affective aspects of post-9/11 visual culture that scholars have previously discounted or overlooked. The first section outlines post-9/11 victory culture and American exceptionalism through corporate media suppression of Richard
Art After 9/11: Critical Art in Lean Times
Cultural Sociology, 2011
This article presents fieldwork that I conducted on the response of several New York artists to the events of 9/11 and the representation of these events in the mainstream media. Through interviews, analysis of works of art, and the development of a theoretical framework derived from both Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, I argue that the work of these artists constituted a critical response to historical events. I explain how Adorno's argument concerning the critical dimension of aesthetic experience is useful for understanding this response. In addition, I invoke Adorno's dialectical understanding of art's 'dual-character' in order to explain how critical art is possible within an art world dominated by market concerns. I also explore Walter Benjamin's contentions concerning the democratizing capacities of new media and the withering of the aura as an important corrective to Adorno's narrow focus on modernist formal development.