Aesthetic Counter Memories

Flnerie at Ground Zero: Aesthetic Countermemories in Lower Manhattan
Author(s): Devin Zuber

Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Jun., 2006), pp. 269-299
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Flanerie at Ground Zero: Aesthetic
Countermemories in Lower Manhattan
Flanerie at Ground Zero I
269
Devin Zuber
ruins of the former World Trade Center have been one of the
most contested sites of
public memory
in recent
history,
a
staging
ground
for both war
campaigns
and
protest
suicides.1 Like
many
New
Yorkers who
experienced
9/11,
I found it
challenging
to
piece together my
own
experience
of that
day
as the ruins were
quickly
transformed into a
politi-
cal arena. In
2001,
I
attempted
to maintain a balance while
watching
the
towers burn from
my rooftop,
and then
seeing
the
repetition
of
explosions
and
people falling
to the streets on the television afterward.
"They
hate us because we're
free,"
a student later informed
me,
in
response
to a
question
about how humans are driven to such extremes of violence. I was
teaching
a
composition
course at the
Borough
of Manhattan
Community
College
(BMCC),
three blocks north of what
quickly
came to be known as
Ground
Zero,
trying
to sort
through
our collective traumas. After our classes
had
finally
resumed in the
building
-
which had been taken over
by
the Na-
tional
Guard,
and used
temporarily
as a
morgue
-
and with acrid smoke still
pervading
the
hallways,
I found several students all too
willing
to
repeat
what
they
were
hearing
on their televisions.
Being
near an
ongoing, smoldering
site
of devastation made some of them feel
-
they
confessed in their narrative es-
says
-
like
they
were
living
in an
exciting
disaster
movie,
perhaps
the latest
Schwarzenegger
vision of a
techno-apocalypse.
This frank
enjoyment
imme-
diately
reminded me of Walter
Benjamin's
famous
warning
that
capitalist
cul-
ture could afford to
"experience
its own destruction as an aesthetic
pleasure
of
the first order."2
The
past
five
years
have seen the
space
of Ground Zero
hyperpoliticized
in
ways
that exceeded
my expectations
in the classroom then.
Though
construc-
tion for a new
building
and memorial have
already begun,
the
space
remains
framed
by
incoherent and
problematic interpretations,
a
perceptual
dilemma
that drove the creation of Art
Spiegelman's graphic
novel In the Shadow
of
No
Towers
(2004).
Spiegelman explains
in his introduction that he needed to "sort
out the
fragments
of what I'd
experienced
from the media
images
that threat-
2006 The American Studies Association
270
I American
Quarterly
ened to
engulf
what I
actually
saw."3 His
personal recounting gives way
to a
sort of Blakean
rage
at the
chicanery
of
subsequent politics,
with
large,
full-
color
vignettes
that
explode
out of their
square
frames like the
very
flames that
tore
apart
the
geometry
of the twin towers.
Spiegelman's montage
of different
comic
styles suggests
a lack of
resolution,
an
incomplete
search for a stable
way
of
reading
the
empty space
left
by
their
collapse.
The final
warnings
of the
book
anticipate
the
velocity
at which Ground Zero was
repeated
in countless
reelection commercials and
blithely figured
as the successful
campaign
back-
drop
for the 2004
Republican
National Convention. Within this media al-
chemy,
both 9/1 1 's
pretext
(the
mounting
factors that led to such
terrorism)
and
posttext
(the
consequence
of casualties in
Iraq
and
Afghanistan)
were
effectively
dissolved.
Today,
the World Trade Center has
thoroughly
ossified
into what Paul Virilio calls a
phatic image:
a
repeated target
"that forces
you
to
look and hold
your
attention . . . the result of an
ever-brighter
illumination,
of
the
intensity
of its
definition,
singling
out
only specific
areas,
the context
mostly
disappearing
into a blur."4
Precisely
at a time when words such as
freedom
are drained of content
by
war
propaganda,
and World Trade Center ruins stand frozen for
reinscription
as the new Freedom Tower with an attendant
memorial,
I have found
my eyes
distracted
by
a series of
public
artworks that lie hidden on the
perimeter
of the
World Trade Center.
Despite
the fact that most were made before
9/11,
their
visual
particularities powerfully
counter the reconstitution of Ground Zero
into the
ongoing
narrative of war.
My
interest in Walter
Benjamin
was simul-
taneously being
redoubled;
quite literally,
as I walked around the ruins after
teaching my
classes at the
community college
in
2001,
the
twilight
streets
unfolded their art in the same
way
that
Benjamins
flaneur discovers secret
sites of
meaning
in the
city. Particularly
in
Benjamins
unfinished
masterwork,
the Arcades
Project
(Das
Passagen-Arbeit)
,
the
rambling
flaneur is able to locate
in the streets a
"colportage
of
space"
-
an
unraveling
and distribution of social
secrets
paved
over
by
time.
"Space
winks at the
flaneur,"
writes
Benjamin.
"What do
you
think
may
have
gone
on here?"5
The dialectical
perception
behind the
eyes
of
Benjamin's
flaneur
suggests
an alternative
way
for
seeing
this
question
at Ground
Zero,
a means to break
down the
space's
current
phatic inscription
and recover alternative memories
lost in the hubris of war. Critics
began discussing
the aesthetics of Ground
Zero almost
immediately
after the
attack,
and
today,
the abundance of litera-
ture related to 9/11
typically
deals with "before" and "after" scenarios at the
site: the concerns with the
corporate style
of Minoru
Yamasaki,
the
original
World Trade Center
architect,
and the effects of his "brutalist"
buildings
be-
271
fore
9/11,
and the current
shifting
terrain now that these towers have col-
lapsed
into a miasma of
politics,
real estate
greed,
and
high-pitched grief
at the
loss of human life.
Inserting
the flaneur into this
space,
I
argue,
can broaden
the discourse
by recovering
artworks that have tended to be omitted
by
such
post-9/11
discussions. These local aesthetics
problematize
the blithe use of
Ground Zero as an
impetus
for a
global
war on terror and the invasion of
Iraq,
two strands of a broader nationalist narrative that are
being
woven into the
very physical shape
of what will come to
occupy
Ground Zero. The forthcom-
ing
Freedom
Tower,
for
example,
is to be
exactly
1 776 feet
high,
in
auspicious
reference to the date of the Declaration of
Independence,
and
correspond-
ingly tying
the violence of 9/1 1 to the most
patriotic
war in American
history.
As
Benjamin
conceives flanerie as a form of cultural
archaeology
that mines
through
the
masking facades
of
capital,
a
slicing
of "strata" to recover sub-
merged pasts, surveying
these counteraesthetics will also work backward in
time: a literal and
metaphorical
flanerie around the area will core to the World
Trade Center's
original
function as a monument
(perhaps
the
monument)
to
global capital.
After
assessing
how artworks
peripheral
to Ground Zero
perform
critical
interventions into the memorial
debate,
this
essay
will conclude with
locating
in
Benjamin's
work a constructive
way
to think
through
what could have been
done at the site. At this
point
in the
protracted
and convoluted reconstruction
process,
Ground Zero has
indubitably
lost a remarkable
opportunity
for inno-
vative
design.
An
unprecedented
number of
visionary
ideas for memorials and
new architecture
emerged
from all over the
globe
in the
year
after the
attack,
setting
several records for the number of entries submitted to various architec-
tural
competitions
held in the
city.6 Quickly, though,
the
space
became mired
in
imperial
war rhetoric and encumbered
by
the
sacrilizing language
of the
various coalitions of bereaved families and victims of the attack who
argued
that the
buildings'
foundational
footprints
were
among
"the most sacred
ground"
in all of
America,
and that
nothing
should ever be built over them.
The sixteen acres of land are now so overdetermined
that,
in the words of
Marita
Sturken,
"a
tyranny
of
meaning"
has unfolded for its architects and
planners.7
The architectural historian
Philip
Nobel more
scathingly
writes how
this "crutch of the sacred
footprints"
has
permanently
"condemned the me-
morial to
superficiality,"
no matter how the
winning Reflecting
Absence memo-
rial
design
is
ultimately shaped.8
Benjamin
and his
type
of flaneur can
usefully
frame this
problem. Every-
one
agrees
that some
"thing"
should
signify
the devastation and loss of that
day
and as a memorial
effectively
function as a site of commemoration and
272
I American
Quarterly
ritualized
mourning.
The
dilemma, then,
is one of translation: what are all
these deceased bodies to
represent? Just
how should the remains be re-mem-
bered?
Here,
Elaine
Scarry's
work offers a fruitful
conjunction
with
Benjamin's
words on translation and
aesthetics,
for
perhaps
no other writer has so
closely
analyzed
the
process by
which individual hurt bodies are constituted into the
legitimation
of state
power. Scarry's reading
of
injured
bodies as
radically
un-
stable
agents
that are crucial for
larger political
and cultural validations bore
itself out
immediately
after
9/11,
when the dead were hailed as "heroes" who
"sacrificed for freedom"
-
an odd choice of
general phrases, considering
the
free will and
autonomy they imply,
which a civilian disaster like 9/11
typically
lacks
(the
people
on the
upper
floors of the World Trade Center didn't choose
to be blown
up,
or at least not in the
way
a human who chooses to enlist in the
army
has made fundamental decisions about
potential mortality
and sacri-
fice).
How is the terrorist destruction of office towers a "sacrifice"
(and
implic-
itly
with this
word,
a
necessary
event)
for the abstract
concept
of
political
freedom? This is not to
disingenuously
take
away
from the
very
real acts of
courage
and heroism shown
by many
on 9/1 1
,
but to make evident the
strong
collectivizing impulse
that the
totality
of the dead should
grandly
confer a
meaning
that transcended the individual: a
pressure
that has
shaped
Ground
Zero's memorial to
comply
with what
Scarry
calls
"analogical
verification,"
the translation of
pain
into state
power.9
An
objection might
be
initially
raised that
Benjamin's
flaneur is an
inap-
propriate
scrim for memorial
concerns,
or at
best,
an
antiquated type
ill-suited
for
considering twenty-first-century
urban
space. Benjamin
himself,
even as
he
deployed
flanerie as an
avant-garde
form of cultural
critique
in texts such as
the "Berlin Chronicle" and "One-
Way
Street,"
was conscious that the
trope
of
the
meandering,
critical observer was tied to dated architecture
(the
glass-
roofed
shopping
arcades of
Paris)
and a mode of bohemian
living quickly
eclipsed by modernity.
The
"botanizing
on the
asphalt"
the flaneur under-
takes to crack the
anonymity
of crowds and commerce
especially
bothered
Benjamin's
friend,
Theodor
Adorno,
who
thought
it was too
"objective"
of a
type
that "suffers
gravely
from the risk of the
metaphorical."10
In Andreas
Huyssen's
more recent work on cultural
memory,
he
argues
that the flaneur
has been
eclipsed by
a
type
of
global
tourist who consumes commodified
memory space.11
This is indeed
paradigmatically
true for commercialized ar-
eas such as Times
Square,
or Berlin's
burgeoning
Potsdammer Platz. But for
the
complicated layers
of the World Trade Center
area,
its role as not
only
a
former monument to
capitalism
and
present graveyard
memorial,
but current
home to thousands of New
Yorkers,
makes the
figure
of the
urban-dwelling
273
flaneur all the more relevant. The flaneur inhabits urban
space
with local in-
vested
knowledge,
in direct contrast
-
as
Huyssen
notes
-
to the
globe-trot-
ting
tourist. The flaneurs dialectical
seeing exposes
the hidden confluence
between aesthetics and
politics,
a value for cultural criticism that a recent
commentator on
Benjamin
has worded
thusly:
The flaneur . . . thus offers a
unique
and
privileged position
from which to understand
modern
capitalist society,
and to
bring
to
light
the
mythological
structures on which the
present
stands. . . .
Intimately paralleling
Freudian dreamwork,
the flaneur reveals the
mythical
secrets of
society, especially
when
society
has
forgotten
about them and
they
function un-
consciously.12
The artworks that are scattered
throughout
lower Manhattan
dredge up
the
willfully repressed,
a local
recovery
that
provides
a literal counter to the emer-
gent
Freedom Tower and its
specious continuity
with a "war for freedom" in
Iraq.
Roy
Shifrin's Icarus
(1981)
and Tom Ottemess's The Real World
(1992)
In the immediate
vicinity
of the World Trade
Center,
strategically placed
at
the entrance to the
Borough
of Manhattan
Community College,
one of the
largest yet
most unknown
public sculptures
in Manhattan carried a
strong
dialectic to the
looming
bulk of the World Trade Center.
Measuring
some
thirteen feet wide and fourteen feet
tall,
Roy
Shifrin's Icarus
depicts
the
very
end of the Greek
legend.
The bronze torso is headless and
wingless,
tilted at an
angle
that
suggests
a
plummet
from the
sky (fig.
1),
the muscular torso
frag-
ments in
places, exposing
abstract
gashes
of raw flesh and bone. Shifrin and
the BMCC
positioned
the
high pedestal
in such a
way
that when one left the
college
at
night,
Icarus seemed to
perpetually
free-fall into the dark
space
be-
tween the Twin Towers
-
its torn
body crudely prefiguring
the actual
people
who
desperately
threw themselves to the streets on 9/11.
The visual dialectic Shifrin created when he mounted the work in 1981
bears further
prescience
for the flaneur.
Today
the naked
sky,
the lack of tow-
ers to frame the
falling figure, provoke
the double sense of time
Benjamin
called
Jetztzeit ("now-time")
-
an
explosive
flash of
possibilities
latent in the
past,
realized
only
in a
present
field.13
Benjamin's
messianic
Jetztzeit
unfolds
for the
topographical
consciousness of his
flaneur,
who meanders the com-
mercialized streets to discover how "far-off times and
places interpenetrate
the
landscape
and the
present
moment."14 One of
Benjamin's
earliest
experiments
with flanerie as a critical mode for
writing
about cultural
space,
his autobio-
graphical
"Berlin
Chronicle,"
proposes
that the
palimpsest
nature of cities
274
I American
Quarterly
Figure
1.
Roy
Shifrin, Icarus, 1981.
Photograph courtesy
of
Roy
Shifrin.
creates
special "prophesying places,"
locations of
Jetztzetis
double vision
-
especially
if such
places
happen
to reside in the
margins
between different
socioeconomic
regions.
"Just
as there are
plants
that
primitive peoples
claim confer the
power
of
clairvoyance,"
he
writes,
"so there
are
places
endowed with such
power: they may
be deserted
promenades,
or
tree
tops
. . . and above all the thresholds that
mysteriously
divide the districts
of a town."15
Shifrin's Icarus accrues another relation to the World Trade Center when it
is
correctly positioned
as
being
on a threshold between two
very
different such
districts. The BMCC
buildings
were constructed in 1977
adjacent
to a series
of
public housing projects
that shelter low-income families. The
eighteen
thou-
sand students who
annually
attend the
college
do not come from the immedi-
ate
area, however;
a
predominant
number are first- or
second-generation
im-
migrants hailing
from
poor
and
working-class
communities in
Brooklyn,
Queens,
and the Bronx. While the
neighborhoods
of the Ground Zero area
once reflected such ethnic
diversity,
the so-called revitalization initiatives un-
275
dertaken
by
David Rockefeller
(son
of
Nelson)
in the 1960s
instigated
serious
gentrification.
The median income of the area
today
is in the hundreds of
thousands,
far above the incomes of the
public
students and
housing
residents
who fall under the circumference of Shifrins Icarus. There is
very
little of the
economic
diversity
that characterizes other areas of
Manhattan; rather,
a clear
and
sharp
border divides the
ultrawealthy
from the
many aspiring
have-nots,
a
very
real line
presided
over
by
Icarus.
This line became
sharper
in 2001 and 2002 when the federal
government,
burdened with multibillion-dollar
military operations
in
Afghanistan
and
Iraq,
threatened to cut financial aid
programs
while
simultaneously raising
admis-
sion fees. The
upward journey
that
many
students dreamed of
making,
of
going
from a
public college
to a
position
of
greater
financial
stability,
was
impeded by
obstacles that for some
proved
insurmountable.16 The
image
of
Shifrins Icarus as it thrusts in the
sky
toward Wall Street becomes
doubly
ironic:
emblematizing
not
only
the
mortality
of the
towers,
but also the trun-
cated
aspirations
of the students who file
past
its base.
And,
in a wider
radius,
this
inequality
that Icarus evinces is related to an economic
disparity
that fac-
tored into the terrorist attacks.
Reflecting
on his
sculptures post-9/1
1
valence,
Shifrin states
that,
If there is a link between Icarus and
September
11th, it is to be found in the reason the
sculpture
was commissioned for the
college,
as a
cautionary
tale. If the world of commerce
uses its
technology
to continue to enrich the few while
impoverishing
the
many,
it
may fly
temporarily
but it will
eventually
near that sun of discontent and then comes terror. Nine-
eleven should teach us that the
wings
of the affluent West are
fragile:
both wax and struc-
tural steel can melt.17
Shifrins words are further unfolded
by turning
to another
public sculpture
on
Ground Zero's
periphery,
located several blocks to the west of the BMCC.
Like Shifrin's
Icarus,
Tom Otterness's
large
installation in
Battery
Park
City
was created
during
a
period
of
rapid development
that further transformed
the Bread and Butter
district,
as it was once
known,
into million-dollar
luxury
complexes.
Whimsical
figures
move across a
large square
toward a central foun-
tain,
and its built-in checkerboards and
playgrounds
reflect the works double
function as a recreation
ground
for
nearby Battery
Park children. A second
look reveals an ironic
commentary
on the
regions
financial institutions: the
figures
are dark humanoids who are
pushing
oversized
pennies,
nickels,
and
dimes from all different directions. The
rolling currency converges
on the
centerpiece
fountain,
an island with a tall tower at its center
(fig.
2).
Inside is
anarchy;
the
money uncontrollably piles up
and
spills
over,
apparently
shak-
276
I American
Quarterly
ing
the foundation of the structure so that it twists and
turns,
threatening
to
collapse.
With a
sly
nod toward the stock market crash of
1929,
figures jump
out of windows while others watch and drink out of cocktail
glasses,
and
atop
the
structure,
alluding
to both
Humpty Dumpty
and Nero
observing
the burn-
ing
of
Rome,
an
egg-shaped
man
plays
a fiddle. Here
money
seems,
in
spite
of
the
merriment,
to be
anything
but
play.
With this
general
theme of accumu-
lating capital
and a central visual thrust toward structures about to
collapse,
Otterness's choice of title is indeed lit with
Benjamin's Jetztzeit
when held
against
the
nearby
embers of Ground Zero: The Real World. For the
eyes
of the
flaneur who seeks dialectical
allegories,
who
keeps
in mind the terrorist vio-
lence of 9/ 1 1
,
the
position
of humanoids in a
destructive,
one-way
flow of
currency
can emblematize the
lopsided
nature of
globalization
and interna-
tional finance for
many
Middle Eastern countries.
Benjamin's
flanerie in the Arcades
Project
is a mode of
perceiving/walking/
writing
that
exposes
the
masking
mechanisms of
capital.
The flaneur's
percep-
tive
knowledge
becomes "akin to the occult sci-
ence of industrial
fluctuations,"
his aesthetic
meditations and
meanderings
an "idleness" dem-
onstrating against
the division of labor.18 To
stand beneath the
opulence
of
Battery
Park
City
Figure
2.
Tom Otterness, The Real World,
1992.
Photograph by
Devin Zuber.
and meditate on the echoes between The Real World &n<& the destruction of the
World Trade Center
prompts
broader
speculation
on intimate ties between
American
capitalism
and distant
spaces
that are "othered" as the dark
breeding
grounds
of terror. Otterness's
figures
on the
periphery,
connected
by
the cash
flow to the
collapsing money
tower,
visually
counter the claim that terrorism
happens simply
because of "an
ideology
of hate"
(to
quote
the
President),
that
some
people just
dislike Americans
(to
quote my
student
again),
"because
we're free." A flaneur
might
reflect on U.S.
foreign
aid
-
and
subsequent
mili-
tary-industrial profit
-
for an undemocratic and
repressive
Saudi
regime,
and
the obvious correlation that fifteen of the nineteen
hijackers
of 9/11 came
from that
country.
Or,
given
the
escalating
crisis
concerning
Iran and its
weap-
ons
technology,
the flaneur can recall the connected
history
to this
particular
"axis of evil": the
American-instigated coup against democratically
elected Prime
Minister
Hedayet Mossadegh
in 1953
(who
had wanted to nationalize Iranian
oil),
and blind
support
for the
shah,
a
despot
who
kept
Iranian oil
open
to
U.S.
corporate
interests. The shah
brutally suppressed any attempts
at demo-
cratic reform with his C.I.A.-trained secret
police,
SAVAK,
who were
respon-
sible for the torture and murder of tens of thousands.19 The flow of commerce
in The Real World mirrors the
way
the shah
recklessly spent
the
profits
earned
277
278
I American
Quarterly
from U.S. oil
companies:
he
purchased
more than
$9 billion in
weaponry
from the U.S.
government
and
weapons
manufacturers while the
majority
of
Iranians remained
impoverished.20 Many
in
Europe
were
frightened
in De-
cember 2004 to hear
allegations
that Iran would soon have the
capability
to
fire missiles on cities as far
away
as London or Berlin. If
so,
this
weapons
ability grows directly
out of the shahs earlier American-sanctioned
buying
frenzy
that enriched Lockheed Martin and
Northrop
Grumman21
-
two of
several
global
arms
companies
that had
strong banking
and investment affili-
ations with firms located in the World Trade Center. That New York's towers
of finance were
ultimately destroyed by
men
wielding nothing
more than crude
box-cutters adds
irony
to the
proliferation
of the
high-tech weapons
market
that thrives on the divide between "first" and "third"
worlds,
and further ex-
poses
our flawed
technophilia
that assumes more
high-tech
machines
equals
more
security,
a dominant
policy logic
that
many
critics,
including Scarry,
see
as
wholly
shattered
by
the events of 9/1 1.22
To note these constellations of
power
and
money
that link
impoverished
global spaces
to U.S. economic interests is not to
disgrace
the
very
real loss of
life in Manhattan on 9/1 1 .
Indeed,
the Lefts
knee-jerk
reaction to the
surge
of
American
patriotism
after 9/11 often
displaced
the event
by referring
to
other,
more
tragic
disasters elsewhere
-
that
2,801
deaths
might
be
unfortunate,
but
what about the
ignored
tens of thousands in Rwanda.
Slavoj
Zizek
suggests
in
his short work on the terrorist attack that this
patronizing
counterstance is
precisely
the
temptation
to avoid:
The moment we think in terms of
"Yes,
the WTC
collapse
was a
tragedy,
but we should not
fully
solidarize with the victims,
since this would mean
supporting
U.S.
imperialism,
"
the
ethical
catastrophe
is
already
here: the
only appropriate
stance is unconditional
solidarity
with #// victims. The ethical stance
proper
is
replaced
here
by
the
moralizing
mathematics of
guilt
and
horror,
which misses the
key point:
the
terrifying
death of each individual is abso-
lute and
incomparable.23
The
space
of the twin towers is so
lopsided
with the
comparative
terms Zizek
stridently
warns
against
that there is no chance to consider what the aesthetic
implications
of his commendable moral
position might
mean for a memorial
at Ground Zero. The Coalition of 9/11 Families
-
a
lobbying organization
formed
shortly
after the attacks that has
proved perhaps
the most effective of
all the various voices around Ground Zero in
shaping
the
space
-
maintains
that a
planned
cultural center in the area must be
solely
dedicated to "the
enormity
of the attack and the
unprecedented
loss of life."24 The dominant
feature for the sixteen
acres,
vociferously proponed
as the most
important
de-
279
sign
criteria
by
the
coalition,
is the aforementioned
predominance
of the
original
bedrock
footprints
of the two
towers,
and the creation of a
plaza
around their
recessed
depths.
The
largeness
of the intended
space
and its focus on the mono-
lithic destruction of that
particular day
-
rather
than,
say,
a more
integrated
park
that accords with the dominant concern of local residents who "don't
want a
graveyard
in
my backyard"
-
signified
for
many
critics a
profound
fail-
ure of
imagination.
While the
winning
Ground Zero memorial
design by
Michael Arad and Peter
Walker,
Reflecting
Absence,
has structural
problems
of
its
own,
as will be discussed
later,
the other final contenders in the memorial
design competition
even more
strongly emphasized
the individual
singularity
and
"exceptionalism"
of 9/ 1 1
space:
Brian Strawn and Karla Sierralta's Dual
Memory
featured thousands of
light portals,
one for each
victim,
that illumi-
nated an
underground
chamber where enormous translucent
photos
of each
victim would
hang,
surrounded
by
attendant
biographies
and memorial mes-
sages.
The
ghostly
sea of
larger-than-life
faces in the
accompanying design
renderings suggests
a
labyrinthine
and
overwhelming totality
of
people.25
Zizeks
stance that 9/1 1 should foster an "unconditional
solidarity
with tf// victims"
everywhere
works in an
opposite
direction,
opening
the losses of life into a
broader field that
acknowledges
the mundane fact that events such as 9/11
have
always happened.
The
Baghdad
woman
mourning
her child slain
by
an
American rocket sheds the same tears as the wife whose marine husband has
been killed
by
a roadside
bomb; or,
inversely,
the fanaticism of
Al-Qaeda
be-
comes not othered into an
incomprehensible beyond,
but remembered as be-
ing inherently
within the fabric of American
culture,
from the
right-wing
evan-
gelical fringe
that
lay
behind the Oklahoma
City bombing
to the messianic
violence of
Jonestown.
The
challenge
for an effective Ground Zero memorial
is to honor the
specific
horror of 9/1 1 while
opening
the site's aesthetic field to
global
and transnational
values,
thereby circumventing
the intense
political
hagiography
that
pollutes
the
space.
One arena where these memorial ten-
sions first
played
out was
underground,
in the web of
subway
tunnels that
honeycomb
Manhattan.
Memory Underground: Jeffrey
Lohn,
Paul
Chan,
and
Copper
Greene
in the
Subway
The New York
City subway system
has a
long history
as a
public
venue for the
expression
of countermemories.
Especially
in the
early
1980s,
subway
stations
and cars became scrims for
emerging graffiti
artists such as
Jean-Michel
Basquiat,
Keith
Haring,
and Fred Braithwait.
Basquiat's subway
work and
280 I American
Quarterly
later
paintings
were concerned with the
suppressed identity
of African Ameri-
cans
-
"black
people
are never
portrayed realistically,
not even
portrayed
in
modern
art,"
he once said26
-
and this investment was rooted in
Basquiats
experience
of the
subway
as a
place
for
presenting
the
unpresentable. Harings
day-glow images,
while
arguably
less concerned with
problems
of cultural iden-
tity
than
Basquiat
s,
increasingly
dealt with themes silenced
by
the mainstream
media,
such as AIDS and the
proliferation
of nuclear
weapons.
The later
legal
crackdown on
graffiti by city
authorities,
as well as the
gallery
world's
appro-
priative consumption
of street artists like
Basquiat
and
Haring, greatly
dimin-
ished their use of the
subway
as a
ready template
for
repressed
social con-
sciousness.
Still,
the
subway
continues to function
today
as a
place
for
inscriptions
of counterculture and resistance
-
from
organized campaigns
to
deface
Britney Spears posters
to statements
against
the war in
Iraq
(often
in
permanent
black marker across Fox News
ads).27
When one descended into the
subways
after
9/11,
the miles of
platforms
became a
primary space
for collective
memory.
Thousands of
posters
and
pic-
tures of
missing people began
to
appear
within hours after the towers' col-
lapse,
but unlike other
ephemera displayed
in the
subways, they
remained in
place
for months
thereafter,
disappearing slowly
and
only
as the materials dis-
integrated. They
also became sites of ritualized
mourning,
with flowers and
messages periodically taped
onto their
fragile
surfaces. The Manhattan com-
mute thus became a
daily
visual contact with the
dead,
the
underground
trans-
formed into a veritable underworld. The
presence
of the
photos
in the
subway
also outlived the remarkable
spontaneous
memorials that unfolded at Union
and
Washington Squares.
As Setha Low and others have
noted,
the
city
made
little effort to maintain these demotic
spaces
of
ritual,
even
attempting
to
destroy
or contain their
activity;
at Ground
Zero,
Low
writes,
there is
great
irony
in the
daily
destruction of left
personal
mementos while various licensed
vendors are
permitted
to hawk Ground Zero memorabilia and souvenirs.28
Public and
personal expressions
of
grief
are discarded for the sanctioned con-
sumption
of bric-a-brac.
Three artistic uses of the
subway highlight public memory
concerns as
Ground Zero was
placed
within the
logic
of
war,
and Manhattan streets con-
tinued to lack a viable communal
space
for
mourning. Jeffrey
Lohn felt com-
pelled
to document the
persistence
of the thousands of
"missing persons" pic-
tures and
flyers, especially
as weather and time took their toll. His
photographs
of the
deteriorating photographs
are less
postmodern representations
of
repre-
sentation than Lohn s own act of
honoring
the dead. "One intention of
my
project,"
he
writes,
Flanerie at Ground Zero I 281
was to rescue the
images
-
to halt their effacement so that the
images
would be locked
-
or
crystallized
-
in
photo-chemical
emulsion like
specks
of
organic
material
trapped
in amber.
In this
way, perhaps
the
humanity
of those who
perished might
be witnessed
anonymously.29
Benjamin famously
wrote that the commercial
reproducibility
of the modern
image
shattered the "aura" of a work of art
-
he felt that
technology
had sev-
ered the mimetic
continuity
between an individual artwork and a
particular
time and
place, dealing
the final deathblow to the
genesis
of artistic
represen-
tation in
religion. Image replication
meant
desacrilization,
a
"freeing
of art
from its
parasitic dependence
on ritual."30 Lohn's
sequential images
of blurred
faces and effaced identities work the other
way, piecing together Benjamin's
fragmented
aura
through
their ritualistic attention to an
image's
connection
to an individual
identity.
The
figures
in Lohn's
series,
precisely
because their
serial
reproducibility
is
juxtaposed
with loss and
erasure,
become all the more
affectively
human and
fragile
and
might again,
like
Scarry's
consideration of
the
metaphorical implications
of the
hijacked planes, expose
the fault lines in
our cultural
assumptions
about
technology's power.
Paul Chan's
Baghdad Snapshot
Action Team
(2003-Present)
takes the
repro-
ducibility
of the
image
and the
space
of the
subway
in a more critical direction
than Lohn does to reveal the
implicit
exclusions in the memorial discourse of
Ground Zero.
Chan,
a multimedia
artist,
had
spent significant
time in
Baghdad
shortly
before the American invasion of 2003.
Upon
his
return,
he created a
series of
easily
downloadable
photographs
of
everyday Iraqis
that he had en-
countered
during
his
sojourn
there.31 Friends and volunteers
began placing
these
images
in urban areas around the
globe
in an
ongoing attempt
to visu-
ally
counter the absence of such
Iraqis
in mainstream Western media. In New
York
City
(where
Chan is
based),
the
appearance
of the
Baghdad snapshots
in
the
subway system
took on
special
resonance,
immediately evoking
the thou-
sands of
missing
9/11
pictures (fig.
3).
On the eve of the
Iraqi
invasion,
Chan's
work became electrified. Unlike Lohn's
series,
which looked backward as an
act of
mourning,
Chan's
project
became a
ghostly
memorial for the
future,
distracting
the commuter's
gaze
with the
prospects
of death for
ordinary
men
and women in a distant but connected
place.
Several members of the
Baghdad
Snapshot
Action Team were
subsequently
arrested
by
the NYPD for deface-
ment of
subway property
-
something
that never
happened
to those who
posted
the 9/11
missing pictures.
Chan's work was an
underground
return of the
repressed, precisely
at the time when Ground Zero was
being
reified for
pro-
war rallies and Bush reelection
campaign speeches.
The use of the
subway by
the
Baghdad Snapshot
Action Team hearkens back to
Haring's deployment
of
282 I American
Quarterly
283
the
space
for his fluorescent
public art-as-advocacy;
as Chan has
engaged
with
Benjamin's
aesthetics for other
projects,
he
may
have also been aware of
Benjamins
focus on sewers and
subway
tunnels as
spaces
of cultural subver-
sion in the Arcades
Project.
One of the most
explosive
artistic uses of the
subway mysteriously appeared
in 2004. A
guerilla
media
campaign organized by
an
anonymous
artist known
simply
as
Copper
Greene
(an
allusion to a
Pentagon
code word for detainee
operations
in
Iraq) appropriated Apple computer's
iconic iPod silhouette and
reframed it as a
poster
of the infamous Abu Ghraib
prisoner standing
on a
crate. Instead of white iPod
earplugs
and a
grooving
black
body,
white elec-
trode wires snaked from the
prisoner's fingertips
to a human hidden
by
a
formless,
hooded
bag.
The outstretched arms
against
the neon
purple
or
green
monochrome
background
made the
figure strikingly
emblematic,
almost
Christlike. Rather than the well-known
slogan
"iPod:
10,000
songs
in
your
pocket,"
the
posters parroted "iRaq:
10,000 volts,
guilty
or innocent"
(fig.
4).
They appeared
all over lower
Manhattan,
in the
subways
and above the
ground,
often
blending
in
seamlessly
with a swarm of authentic iPod advertisements.
While the
city
and the
Metropolitan
Transit
Authority
were
quick
to remove
their
unsettling presence, they
were
instantly
enshrined on the
Internet,
and
Figure 3.
Paul Chan,
Baghdad Snapshot
Action, 2003-
present. Photograph courtesy
of Paul Chan.
have most
recently
been included in an im-
portant survey
of
design by
Milton Glaser.32
Their
longevity speaks
to their dialectical
power
to freeze critical relations to both
the war in
Iraq
and the
high iconography
of consumer
culture;
iPod's black silhouette becomes a
metonym
for the dark
bodies of
people expended
for the march of "freedom" and the
privileged,
technologized
fantasies of
global capitalism.
The visual effect of Abu Ghraib
greatly
unsettled the
attempt
to claim the
Iraq
invasion as an
unfolding
narrative of
progress
and
freedom,
and
Copper
Greene's
subway response
shows how
memory inscriptions
around Ground
Zero could be
correspondingly
tainted. Given the intense sacrilization of
Ground
Zero,
the
iRaq posters
can be read as
instigating
what
Benjamin
called
a
"profane
illumination"
against
the site.
Benjamin
coined this
pungent phrase
in his 1929
essay
on
surrealism,
in which he values the surrealist tactic of
combining unlikely objects
to
explode
the continuities of
religious-political
discourse: "the
true,
creative
overcoming
of
religious
illumination . . . resides
in
profane
illumination,
a
materialistic,
anthropological inspiration."33
The odd
poses
of the Abu Ghraib
photographs
-
their combination of soft
porn,
tour-
ism,
and torture
-
profanely
disturb older strata of
repressed
American
memory.
284
I American
Quarterly
/';-=09 )(8* =-0/']
286 I American
Quarterly
graphical propinquity
of
suffering
and
keep
instead their aesthetics
firmly
embedded in a field of rhetoric controlled
by
the
global
war on terror and
"Operation Iraqi
Freedom." The mute
persistence
of Greene's
iRaq posters
and Chan's
snapshot project
will continue to
profanely
illuminate the conse-
quences
of that discourse.
Greening
Ground Zero:
Agnes
Denes's Wheatfield
(1982)
and Robert Smithson's
Floating
Island
(1970-2005)
Across the
board,
at
many
civic
meetings
and forums to receive
input
from
New Yorkers on what was to be done with Ground
Zero,
citizens
again
and
again
articulated the desire for
larger green space
and a more humane
park
than what the concrete
pavilion
around the World Trade Center had afforded
in the
original
Yamasaki
design.
Local residents of the area have
especially
voiced the desire for a more useable "commons" rather than a
large
recessed
pit
devoted to the dead
(as
Reflecting
Absence
currently
has
it);
given
the
plethora
of memorials related to trauma
already
in the area
(such
as the Holocaust
Memorial
Museum,
a
large
memorial to fallen NYPD
officers,
and the Irish
Hunger
Memorial),
some
Battery
Park residents have
felt,
as Low
records,
that
"we're like a
dumping ground
for memorials."39 The use of natural
greenery
as
a
metaphor
for
regeneration
is obvious and
universal;
even the
original sky-
scraper design
for the Freedom Tower
by
Daniel Libeskind was first called
"Vertical World Gardens" after a
poetic,
tall
glass spire
at the
top
of the build-
ing
that was to be filled with
multistory greenery
(a
visionary concept
that was
quickly
nixed after Libeskind was forced to work with the more
practical
ar-
chitectural firm of David
Childs,
the
designers
who
represent
World Trade
Center landlord
Larry
Silverstein).
Despite
all these
precedents,
the
Reflecting
Absence memorial will focus on an
underground
immersion in the concrete
footprints
of the former
towers,
and its
above-ground green spaces
are mini-
mal when
compared
to some of the other final
design
contenders. As Suzanne
Stephens
notes in her excellent
catalog
of the various Ground Zero
designs,
Reflecting
Absence
(first
conceived
by
Michael
Arad,
with later additional in-
put
from Peter
Walker)
relies on
sweeping pools
of water that
might "bring
psychological
relief in a
hot,
arid climate. But
they
are not so
pleasant
in a
location with
high
winds and
freezing temperatures."
In all
likelihood,
the
water would be turned off for a
good portion
of the winter
season,
leaving
large
cold
spaces
of
gray poured
concrete in
Reflecting
Absence
-
an
experience,
Stephens
writes,
that could be like
going
into "an
underground parking ga-
rage."40
Walker and Arad have also
planned
-
meeting
more
specifications
from
287
the 9/11 victim coalitions
-
that a
large
chamber of unidentified human re-
mains is to be
placed
in the
depths
of
Reflecting
Absence,
a
corporeality
that
makes the Ground Zero memorial
quite
different from the Vietnam Veteran's
Memorial in
Washington,
D.C.,
to which
Reflecting
Absence is often com-
pared.
Given the
open-ended
nature of the current
global
war on
terror,
the
ultimate
encapsulation
of human bodies at Ground Zero will
likely
occur
during
a time of cultural
uncertainty,
of contested
war,
and
Scarry's
words on
the valence of the human
body
in such
positions,
its
translatability
into na-
tional
fictions,
warns of that future ritualized moment: "when some central
idea or
ideology
or cultural contest has ceased to elicit a
population's
belief . . .
the sheer material factualness of the human
body
will be borrowed to lend
that cultural construct the aura of 'realness' and
'certainty.'"41
Entombed be-
low the Freedom
Tower,
the bodies will be reified into a
larger
substantiation
project
as "hard" and "real" evidence for
inflicting pain
and
injuring
else-
where.
Two
large-scale public
art
projects
have utilized
green space
in lower Man-
hattan and afford trenchant
insight
into this
particular danger
at Ground Zero.
Both
Agnes
Denes's
Wheatfield:
A
Confrontation
and Robert Smithson's Float-
ing
Island set themselves in
pointed
contrast to Manhattan's
urbanity
and fur-
ther
provide
the dialectical structure for
Benjamin's
critical
aesthetics,
his flash
oijeztzeit. Floating
Island and
Wheatfield
existed
only
in a tense
relationship
with the
commercial,
metropolitan space
around them
-
isolated on their own
and taken out of
juxtaposed
context,
they
lost all content. In
1982,
Denes's
Wheatfield:
A
Confrontation occupied
two acres of landfill
property facing
the
Hudson River that were slated for
development
into multibillion-dollar
luxury
complexes. Using
more than
eighty
truckloads of earth that were taken from
the construction site of the World Trade Center in a
project
that
required
hours of
daily
maintenance
by
volunteers,
Denes
successfully grew
a shim-
mering
field of wheat in the center of the world's financial
capital.
The field's
subsequent
visual intervention
against
the
towering skyscrapers
was
simple
but surreal. A curator of Denes's work writes that the
charged juxtaposition
against
the Statue of
Liberty,
Wall
Street,
and the
nearby
Trade Towers
posited
"an effort to call the world's richest
country
to account for its
greed
and short-
sightedness."42
The harvest of
Wheatfield
Vent on to feed New York
City po-
lice
horses,
seed further fields around the
globe,
and travel as
part
of the
group
exhibition The International Art Show for the End of World
Hunger
(1987-
1990).
Well aware of the
poignancy
that her seeds
sprang
from soil that is now
linked to so much trauma and
death,
Denes returned to the site of her
project
288 I American
Quarterly
in
early
2002 to document the devastation. The contrast between the sheer
beauty
of her earlier field and
photos
of the current
smoking
ruins couldn't be
sharper, underscoring
the difference between Denes's commitment to a
prag-
matic idealism that art can
shape
a better world and the
reality
of recurrent
geopolitical inequities.
Although
its tenure was
brief,
Wheatfield provoked meaningful dialogues
about
larger
issues as it
occupied
the controversial
city ground.
Denes writes
how she
hoped
it would make viewers
question
"the status
quo
and the end-
less contradictions which we seem to
accept
into our lives.
Namely,
our
ability
to see so much and understand so
little;
to have achieved
technological
miracles
while
remaining emotionally
unstable."43
Wheatfield
was also
just simply
beautiful to behold: a wave of
gold
that
shimmered
against
a
backdrop
of
glass
and steel
(fig.
5).
Denes records how at
harvest
time,
many
residents and area workers were moved to
tears,
and
begged
her to
keep
the field where it was. All these are
aspects
that made
Wheatfield
&n
exemplary
model for a Ground Zero memorial
-
it bore
poignant
content
without
becoming overtly political,
a
problem
doomed to haunt
any perma-
nent Ground Zero monument if it abides
by
the current
configurations.
To
indemnify
in stone the victims of the terrorist attack as "sacrifices for free-
dom" on "hallowed
ground"
comes
dangerously
close to the
warning
Ben-
jamin
leaves at the end of his most famous
essay,
"The Work of Art in a Me-
chanical
Age
of
Reproduction":
"all efforts to render
politics
aesthetic culminate
in one
thing:
war."44
Much of Robert Smithson's oeuvre is
germane
to
Benjamin's
ideas;
like
Benjamin's
own declaration to use the
"rags
and refuse" of
popular
nineteenth-
century
culture to construct a new
historiography
in the Arcades
Project,
Smithson wrote he was "convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the
dumps
of the nonhistorical
past;
it is in
yesterday's newspapers,
in the
jejune
advertisements of science fiction
movies,
in the false mirror of our
rejected
dreams."45
Coming
out of
minimalism,
Smithson was
keenly
attuned to how
the movement
productively antagonized
the traditional aesthetics of memori-
als and monuments
-
in the blank
spaces
of
sculpture by
Donald
Judd
and
Robert
Morris,
Smithson wrote that "instead of
causing
us to remember the
past
like the old
monuments,
these new monuments seem to cause us to for-
get
the future." Smithson conceived of such artwork
dialectically
-
their aes-
thetics
"helped
to neutralize the
myth
of
progress,"
a
myth
that
Benjamin's
Arcades
Project
set out to
explode through
a
flaneur-like,
rambling
fusion of
quotes
and
aphorisms.46
In
particular, Floating
Island was Smithson's own com-
plex
dialectic with
personal
and
public
histories,
and
though
he was unable to
289
Figure 5.
Agnes
Denes,
Wheatfield
-
A
Confrontation.,
two-acre wheat field
planted
and harvested
by
the artist in Manhattan's financial district,
summer 1982. Commissioned
by
Public Art
Fund, 1982. 1982
Agnes
Denes.
Photograph
courtesy
of
Agnes
Denes.
see it realized before his
untimely
death
in
1973,
the works
spectral appearance
thirty-five years
later
brings
the
lyrical
force of his more remote earthworks into
direct confrontation with
post-9/11
metropolitan space.
Viewed from the shoreline of lower Manhattan
-
an island that often for-
gets
it is an island
-
the
graceful
forms of
oak,
maple,
and
weeping
willow that
grew
wild on the back of a
moving barge
were
poignant (fig.
6).
Floating
Island was an earthwork
garden,
walled off
by
the
Hudson,
a
paradise glimpsed
and then lost as the boat
slipped
out of view. When it was seen
against
the
towering
walls of shoreline
skyscrapers, pulled by
a small
tugboat, Floating
Island
appeared tiny
and
fragile,
a
symbolic
ark for our much more
ecologi-
cally precarious
moment than Smithson's. The
moving landscape suggested
a
backward
chronology
as much as a
forward-looking
environmental
ethos,
its
sylvan greenery
and
circumnavigation evoking
the lost
green
wilderness that
greeted European
sailors in the seventeenth
century.
The work's doubled sense
of time
-
at a
very
real
level,
it
anticipates
what Manhattan Island will one
day
revert to
-
creates the conditions for
Benjamin's Jetztzeit,
the flash that freezes
dialectics into a standstill.
290
I American
Quarterly
Figure
6.
Robert Smithson,
Floating
Island to
Travel around Manhattan, 1970. Art
copyright
Estate of Robert Smithson/
Licensed
by
VAGA, New York, N.Y.
Image courtesy James
Cohan
Gallery,
New York.
Floating
Island also
pays
tribute to
Frederick Law Olmstead and Central Park.
Smithson revered Olmstead and theorized
that his
landscape
aesthetic was
"dialectical,"
and made the incredible claim that Olmstead
was
really
the first earthwork artist. In
Smithson's
writings
on Central
Park,
he
praises
not Olmstead's
idyllic
meadows or
pondscapes,
but the
park's
road
system
and tunnels that
effectively
core modern industrial life into the center
of a sacrosanct
planned garden.
Olmstead was "an
ecologist
of the
real,"
who
"faced the manifestation of
industry
and urban
blight
head on."47
Thus,
while
Floating
Island evokes associations to
Eden,
given
Smithson's roots in
Olmstead,
the island is not
virginally
"natural" or
pristine
at
all,
but
wholly
human-
made,
an artificial semblance of nature like Central Park itself
(or
Smithson's
own
Spiral Jetty)
.
Appropriately, Floating
Island 'was
partially
built with boul-
ders from Central
Park,
and New Yorkers had a literal
fragment
of their most
iconic
landscape floating freely
before them
-
as with Denes's
Wheatfield,
this
disruption
of normative
ground space
afforded an
insightful
reflection on the
291
layered topography
of New York
City
and the
powerful cycles
of water and
earth on which the island still
depends.
When
Floating
Island was finished
after its
nine-day
tenure,
the boulders went back to their
place
in Central
Park. The trees on the
barge (originally
from nurseries in New
Jersey,
where
Smithson
grew up)
were also
replanted
at different locations in the
park
where
they
continue to
grow today, providing
a
powerful
emblem of
continuity
and
endurance: the material
things
of
Floating
Island live
on,
even as the
concept
was terminated and the
tugboat
returned to industrial use. This is
precisely
a
valence that Ground Zero
chronically
lacks,
wherein the
spectator
s vision will
be tied to a chamber of human remains and the death of a certain
day,
and the
space
is narrowed into the too-familiar
story
of war and nationalism. The
afterlife of
Floating
Island in Central Park is also
bitter-sweetly
ironic for an
evocation of
Benjamin
and his flaneur.
Benjamin
named a central sheaf of
quotations
in the Arcades
Project
"Central Park" after his cherished dream of
emigrating safely
to New York
City,
where friends had
promised
him an
apart-
ment within
walking
distance of the
green space,
so
perfect
for flanerie
-
a
hope destroyed by Benjamins
disastrous
attempt
to
escape
into
Spain through
the
Pyrenees,
where,
upon being
detained
by Spanish
authorities and told he
would be returned to Nazis
waiting
back in
France,
Benjamin
took his life.
The Flaneur and Memorial Aesthetics
Thus
far,
Benjamins
flanerie has
provided
a valuable model for
surveying
im-
portant
sites of
countermemory
that chafe
against
the dominant aesthetic dis-
course of Ground Zero. The Freedom Tower and
Reflecting
Absence
memorial,
along
with other structures on the sixteen
acres,
like
Santiago
Calatravas trans-
portation
hub for the Port
Authority,
are slated for imminent
construction,
so
in one
regard, arguments
for what should be done are indeed futile. Ground
has
already
been broken for the Freedom Tower
(its
cornerstone
ceremony
was
conveniently sped up
to occur on the
July
4th
preceding
the 2004
Repub-
lican National
Convention),
even
though
the
skyscrapers
final form remains
in
dispute,
due in
part
to the
complicated
and fractious
multiparty design
team
overseeing
its
design. Benjamin
nonetheless offers
potent
ideas for
thinking
about what could have taken
place
at Ground
Zero,
and this
essay
will con-
clude with
framing
these lost
possibilities
as a
response
to two
potential objec-
tions that
might
be lobbied:
first,
the
frequent charge
that
Benjamin
"aban-
doned" aesthetics and his mature
corpus provides
no certain foundation for
thinking through
a
positive process
of
creation;
that
is,
his "dialectics at a
standstill" affords
ample
room for
critiquing
the
imagery
of
capitalism,
but
292
I American
Quarterly
offers no viable alternative to the
problems
he raises for visual
representa-
tion.48
Second,
a more focused accusation
might
assert that the flaneur is a
particularly wrong place
to think
through
a memorials
permanent
aesthetics,
given
that the flaneur s
roving
nature is characterized
by impermanence
and
mutability
-
on the "irresolution of the
flaneur,"
writes
Benjamin
in the Ar-
cades
Project, "just
as
waiting
seems to be the
proper
state of the
impassive
thinker,
doubt
appears
to be that of the flaneur."49 Doubt and irresolution
would
hardly
seem to be
appropriate departure points
for the
tangible shape
of an effective
memorial;
yet
I
hope
to demonstrate that
exactly
these
qualities
of aimlessness and irresolution have characterized several
important public
art
projects
in New York
City
that have
effectively
functioned as
memorials,
and
their
widespread
success rebuffs the
rigid political
substantiation of what is
happening
at Ground Zero.
There is not
space
left to rehearse the
long
debate over the relations be-
tween
aesthetics,
capitalism,
and
technology
in
Benjamin.50
It is sufficient to
note,
against
a reductive assertion sometimes made that the shattered "aura"
of art disenchanted
Benjamin
from aesthetics'
possibility
to effect
agency,
that
in one of
Benjamins
most
politically
radical and
challenging
texts,
the "The-
ses on the
Philosophy
of
History,"
a
painting by
Paul Klee
steps
in to
signify
for
Benjamins
con-
cept
of
history.
Rather than this most traditional
mode of
representation
-
a
beautiful,
delicate
watercolor
clearly painted by
hand
(fig.
7)
-
fail-
ing
to
represent,
which one could also
expect
from
Benjamins alignment
elsewhere with
Dada,
Klee's
painting
has a
plenitude
of
charged,
affective
Figure 7.
Paul Klee, Novelus
Angelus,
1920.
2006 Artists
Rights Society
(ARS),
New Yrk/VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn.
Reproduction
of the
image
outside of the article is
prohibited.
Image courtesy
of the Israel
Museum,
Jerusalem.
meaning.
The famous
passage
in the "Theses" on the Klee
painting
(which
Benjamin personally
owned,
having bought
the
jewel-like
watercolor in 1 92 1
)
is worth
repeating
here,
for it
crystallizes Benjamins skepticism
toward na-
tional
myths
of
progress
and
suggests
how this wariness
might
be
represented
by
visual art
-
an aesthetic concern that lies at the
epicenter
of Ground Zero
memorialization. He writes:
This is how one
pictures
the
angel
of
history
. . . Where we
perceive
a chain of
events, he sees
one
single catastrophe
which
keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage
and hurls it in front of
his feet. The
angel
would like to
stay,
awaken the
dead, and make whole what had been
smashed. But a storm is
blowing
from
Paradise; it has
got caught
in his
wings
with such
violence that the
angel
can no
longer
close them. The storm
irresistibly propels
him into the
future to which his back is
turned, while the
pile
of debris before him
grows skyward.
This
storm is what we call
progress.51
293
294
I American
Quarterly
What would Ground Zero look like from
above,
from this
hindsight perspec-
tive of Klee s Novelus
Angelusi
The ruined rubble here
suggests something
of
monumental
remains,
in both
Benjamins reading
of the
painting
and in lower
Manhattan itself. Some of the most
striking design
submissions for Ground
Zero
proposed
a sort of zero on the
space
-
from the
simple
natural
greening
of the acres with nature
slowly transforming
the ruins into a
giant garden
(from
the Michael Sorkin
Studio),
to
painter
Ellsworth
Kelly's haunting lop-
sided
square imposed
above the
ruins,
an
image
that first
appeared
in the New
York Times.51
Kelly
was not
suggesting
an actual
hovering
construction to be
built above the
site;
the
simple montage
of his
signature lyrical
abstraction
atop photo-realism
rather
suggested, according
to
Stephens,
that "the more
appropriate response
to the
overwhelming tragedy
is silence."53
What
distinguishes
these
relationships
to the ruins from the
Reflecting
Ab-
sence focus on the towers'
footprints
is the
green spaces'
refusal to frame the
event within
larger
metanarratives of
sacrifice, freedom,
and
progress.
As Klee's
angel
would "like to
stay,
awaken the
dead,
and make whole what had been
smashed,"
but cant and is forced to
correspondingly
move ahead into
future,
these alternative
approaches
to Ground Zero would have also have let
things
be while
moving
into new aesthetic terrain.
Thus,
a zero at Ground
Zero,
a silence over the contested
space
that would
keep
the wound of the attack somehow
open
and
available,
yet
unframed: as
an artwork that must
re-present
a moment of
trauma,
Benjamin's concept
of
translation offers another useful
way
for
thinking through
this aesthetic
prob-
lem for Ground Zero memorialization,
especially
when
put
in tandem with
the
injured,
wounded
body
in
Scarry's
The
Body
in Pain.
Benjamin
did not
ascribe to
simple,
one-to-one notions of
translation;
he conceived of the rela-
tionship
between a translation and its
original
source as not
genealogically
derivative,
but that both versions were
necessarily
simultaneous and coexist-
ent. Translation was not a
simple process
of
transforming
one
thing
into the
other; instead,
the two
languages together
would make a
larger
whole of lan-
guage
and
meaning,
a
unity
that
Benjamin significantly imagines
as a
ruined,
fragmented
vase:
Fragments
of a vessel which are to be
glued together
must match one another in the smallest
details,
although they
need not be like one another. In the same
way,
a translation,
instead
of
resembling
the
meaning
of the
original,
must
lovingly
and in detail
incorporate
the
original
s
mode of
signification,
thus
making
both the
original
and translation
recognizable
as
frag-
ments of a
greater language, just
as
fragments
are
part
of a vessel.''4
295
A
space
of
representation
at Ground
Zero,
figured
as a
Benjaminian
transla-
tion,
would
ideally
make evident the cracks and fissures of its
process
of cre-
ation as memorial: the unanchored chaos and rubble of the violence of 9/1 1
would nestle
against
a second shard of
meaning,
a translation that did not
claim to
ontologically signify
for the bodies that
they
were "sacrifices" for
freedom and
progress.
The exact inverse has taken
place
at Ground
Zero,
where
bodies have been
alchemically
transmuted into some
startling positions,
trans-
lations that bear little or no
relationship
to the antecedent of 9/1 1 itself.
Scarry
has shown how bodies are unanchored
referents,
especially
in a time of war:
when "national self-belief is without
any compelling
source of
substantiation,"
when culture s
binding
fictions are
being actively challenged,
the
process
of
validation demands the material
reality
of
bodies,
both of
patriots
and of those
designated
as enemies.55 Given the unstable link between Ground Zero and
wars in
Iraq
and
Afghanistan,
it is then no
surprise
that
explicit problems
of
bodies have so
occupied
the aesthetics of the
site,
and not
only
for the civilians
who died on that
day.
In
2003,
at a
pro-war rally,
New York's Governor
George
Pataki told a
wildly
enthusiastic crowd that the famous
toppled
statue of Saddam
Hussein,
which had
signaled
the so-called Fall of
Baghdad,
should be melted
down and
reincorporated
as a foundational
girder
in the new
skyscraper.56
That the Freedom Tower should be established
atop
a
symbolic corpse
of the
dictator
speaks deeply
from an assumed American
prerogative
over
Iraqi
bod-
ies
-
and their
translatability
into national fictions
-
that also controls the
poses
in the Abu Ghraib
photographs,
a casual
arrogance
that
Copper
Greene's
iRaq
poster points
to. Pataki achieved his
smelting fantasy,
sort
of,
when he ar-
ranged
for a ruined World Trade Center
girder
to be
liquefied
and recast into
the hulk of a new state-of-the-art
battleship,
the USS New York.
Bragged
Pataki,
"We're
very proud
that the twisted steel from the World Trade Center Towers
will soon be used to
forge
an even
stronger
national defense. The USS New
York will soon be
defending
freedom and
combating
terrorism around the
globe."57
Ultimately,
the
discursive,
meandering trope
of the flaneur
might provide
the best antidote for this kind of
warmongering.
In their
polyvalent
and
ephem-
eral
forms,
Floating
Island and
Wheatfield
thematized the
process
of
memory
itself. Their
incomplete
nature necessitated an active
participation
from mul-
tiple
viewers,
which
protected,
in
turn,
their aesthetics from narrow
political
inscriptions.
S. Brent Plate has found in
Benjamin's writing
a similar
ethos,
one that "articulates
buildings
and urban
spaces
that remain
open
to interac-
tion,
but most
importantly
. . . interactions that lead to chance
encounters,
especially
seen
through
the movements of the flaneur."58 In Plate's book on
296
I American
Quarterly
Benjamins
aesthetics,
he further demonstrates how the flaneur is
figured
as a
collector,
a
nineteenth-century
aesthete who
endlessly rearranges
his collec-
tion of beautiful
things,
and in the
end,
it
might
be
beauty
that a Ground
Zero memorial most
seriously
needed.
By "beauty"
here,
I mean an aesthetic
experience
that
emotionally
moves a
beholder,
an affective
response
that takes
us
beyond
ourselves into new
(and
often
unexpected) positions
of
being
and
feeling.
Elaine
Scarry
has more
recently argued
that this base
experience
of
beauty inherently
contains ethical seeds
-
that when we are affected
by beauty,
we
undergo
a "radical
decentering"
that takes us out of our normal
compla-
cency.
Beautiful
things
are "smaller tears in the world that
pull
us
through
to
some vaster
space."
Because our breath can be taken
away,
and because the
beautiful holds the
gaze
and makes the beholder
subordinate,
the human con-
sciousness is humbled and then broadened. This
humbling experience
is criti-
cal for
internalizing
the values of social
equality, just
as
beauty's generative
effect
(the
desire to
replicate
its
"good" feeling)
is
reciprocal,
and can
expand
the
scope
of human consideration.59
Scarry
s
phenomenology
of
beauty
also
makes its
experience ripe
for a flash of
Benjamin's Jetztzeit, given
how she
articulates
beauty's operation
in time: "what is beautiful
prompts
the mind to
move
chronologically
back in search for
precedents
and
parallels,
to move
forward into new acts of
creation,
to move
conceptually
over,
to
bring
new
things
into
relation,
and does all this with a kind of
urgency
as
though
one's
life
depended
on it."60
Descending
into the
"parking garage"
recesses of Re-
flecting
Absence will
likely
not induce this sort of relation with the beautiful.
The various
aspects
of
positive
aesthetic
experience
that radiate off the
flaneur
-
irresolution,
openness, apprehending
and then
collecting beauty
-
might
have been most
perfectly
embodied
by
The Gates
project
(2005)
in New
York
City's
Central
Park,
undertaken
by
Christo and
Jeanne-Claude.
Christo
and
Jeanne-Claude
have made a career of
"questioning
the
monumental,"
as
Huyssen puts
it,
perhaps
most
famously
with their
wrapped Reichstag project
in Berlin that united two halves of a
city split by
contention.61 With The
Gates,
7,503
portals
with saffron-colored fabric lined some
twenty-three
miles of
pathway
in the
park,
a random number
marking
a stark contrast to the
dog-
matic insistence that the Freedom Tower cannot deviate an inch from its
pa-
triotic 1
,776
feet. On
days
with even a little bit of
wind,
the fabric would
sweep
out and
slowly
undulate in the air. If the sun
happened
to be
shining
to
further set the saffron cloth
aglow,
the
panels
could move
against
the brown-
grey
branches of the leafless trees and become
ghostly,
like a
floating
river of
light (fig.
8).
Apropos
of
Scarry
and
just
as
unapologetic,
Christo and
Jeanne-
Claude
proclaimed
that with The
Gates,
"we want to create works of art of
joy
297
Figure
8.
Christo and
Jeanne-Claude,
The Gates,
Central Park, New York
City,
1979-
2005.
Photograph by
Devin Zuber.
and
beauty,
which we will build because we
believe it will be beautiful."62 The
open
struc-
tures that held the fabric
appeared
at times like
church windows of stained
glass,
or Mark
Rothkos monochromatic
paintings
of
light-filled squares
and frames that
grace
the walls of
nearby
museums.
77?^ Gates demanded that New Yorkers slow down and
approach
a familiar
space differently. They
were the
archetypal experience
of the
flaneur,
enforcing
a
meandering
that led nowhere.
Importantly, they
did not
open up
to a
par-
ticular
place
or lead to a
spectacular
vista;
their
point
was the circuitous nature
of
rambling
in itself. The
impermanence
of The Gates
(lasting only
sixteen
days
in
February
2005)
perhaps
made them all the more effective as memorial
art,
like Denes and Smithson s
ephemera;
New Yorkers attested to
being deeply
swayed
as
they
walked beneath
them,
knowing
that their
beauty
was
tempo-
rary.
Its short life
span
did without the inevitable erasure and destruction that
the Freedom Tower
complex
will
bring
to its
framing
of Ground Zero. That
record numbers of New Yorkers
repeatedly
returned to Central Park in the
dead of winter
suggests
how The Gates
successfully
satisfied a
deep
aesthetic
hunger
-
feeding something beyond
mere
curiosity
at all the
hype
-
which
also informs the
public craving
for a memorial at the World Trade Center. But
Ground Zero is fated to not achieve the same. The
memory
of the
beauty
of
298
I American
Quarterly
77?^
Gates,
and of the
ephemeral landscapes
in Smithson's
Floating
Island and
Denes's
Wheatfield,
will continue to
ghost
the lost
opportunities
at the
site,
just
as the more
jagged
countermemories of Paul Chan's
photographs,
Otterness's
sculpture,
and Greene s iPod
poster
will continue to
dialectically
work
against
the reification of Ground Zero into a
global
war on terror.
Notes
1 . The
day
after
George
W. Bush was reelected, Andrew Veal of
Georgia,
who had been
deeply
distressed
over Americas
engagement
in the Middle East, drove hundreds of miles to Ground Zero and shot
himself in the head. Robert McFadden, "Ground Zero Is
Setting
of a Suicide, and a
Mystery,"
New
York Times,
November 8,
2004.
2. Walter
Benjamin,
Illuminations:
Essays
and
Reflections,
trans. Hannah Arendt
(New
York: Schocken
Books, 1968),
242.
3. Art
Spieeelman,
In the Shadows
of
No Towers
(New
York: Random House, 2004),
2.
4. Paul Virilio,
The Vision Machine, trans.
Julie
Rose
(Bloomington:
Indiana
University
Press, 1994),
14.
5. Walter
Benjamin,
The Arcades
Project,
trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard
University
Press, 2004),
418-19.
6.
Philip
Nobel, Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the
Outrageous Struggle for
the Future
of
Ground Zero
(New
York:
Metropolitan,
2005), 71.
7. Marita Sturken, "The Aesthetics of Absence:
Rebuilding
Ground Zero,
American
Ethnologist
31.3
(August
2004): 312.
8. Nobel, Sixteen Acres,
244.
9. Elaine
Scarry,
The
Body
in Pain: The
Making
and
Unmaking of
the World
(New
York: Oxford Univer-
sity
Press, 1985),
14.
10. T. A. Adorno to Walter
Benjamin, February
1, 1939, in Walter
Benjamin:
Selected
Writings,
vol. 4 ,
trans. Edmund
Jephcott (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard
University
Press, 2003),
202.
1 1 . Andreas
Huyssen,
Present Pasts: Urban
Palimpsests
and the Politics
of Memory
(Stanford:
Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2003), 50.
12. S. Brent Plate, Walter
Benjamin, Religion,
and Aesthetics:
Rethinking Religion Through
the Arts
(New
York:
Routledge,
2005), 131.
13.
By using Jetztzeit
rather than
Gegenwart
("the
present"), Benjamin
adds a
mystical,
messianic dimen-
sion to this sense of time
-
it is a moment seized for
revolutionary possibilities. Benjamin,
Illumina-
tions,
261.
14.
Benjamin,
The Arcades
Project,
All, 419.
15. Walter
Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings,
trans. Edmund
Jephcott
(New
York: Schocken Books, 1978),
25.
1 6.
John Hyland,
"The Future of Public Education: The Case
Against
Tuition Hikes,
The Clarion: News-
paper of
the
Professional Staff Congress,
December 2002, 7.
17.
Roy
Shifrin, e-mail
correspondence
with the author, March 24,
2006.
18.
Benjamin,
The Arcades
Project,
All .
19. Ervard Abrahimian, Tortured
Confessions:
Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran
(Berkeley:
University
of California Press, 1999), 105.
20. Melani McAlister,
Epic
Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000
(Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2001),
204.
21. Feroz Ahmed,
"Iran:
Subimperialism
in Action, Pakistan Forum 3.6-7
(March-April
1973): 13.
22. Elaine
Scarry,
Who
Defended
the
Country?
(Boston:
Beacon Press, 2003), 39.
23.
Slavoj
Zizek, Welcome to the Desert
of
the Real: Five
Essays
on
September
1 lth and Related Dates
(New
York: Verso, 2002), 51-52.
299
24. See
http://www.coalitionof91 lfamilies.org
(accessed
April
15, 2005).
25. Suzanne
Stephens, Imagining
Ground Zero:
Official
and
Unofficial Proposals for
the World Trade Center
Site
(New
York: Rizzoli, 2005), 45.
26.
Quoted
in Michael Archer, Art Since 1960
(New
York: Thames and Hudson, 1
997),
161.
27. See
http://www.britneyunderground.com
(accessed
January
7, 2006).
28. Setha M. Low,
"The Memorialization of
September
1 1: Dominant and Local Discourses on the Re-
building
of the World Trade Center Site," American
Ethnologist
31 .3
(August
2004): 329.
29.
Jeffrey
Lohn, The Art
of
911 1, curated
by
Arthur Danto
(New
York:
Apex
Art
Gallery,
2005).
30.
Benjamin,
Illuminations, 224.
31. See
http://www.nationalphilistine.com/baghdad/snapshots/index.html (accessed
March
20, 2005).
32. Milton Glaser, The
Design of
Dissent:
Socially
and
Politically
Driven
Graphics
(Gloucester,
Mass.:
Rockport
Publishers, 2005).
33.
Benjamin, Reflections,
179
(emphasis
in
original).
34. Susan
Sontag, "Regarding
the Torture of Others," New York Times
Magazine, May
23, 2004: 25-34.
35.
Quoted
in
James
Allen and Hilton Als, Without
Sanctuary: Lynching Photography
in America
(New
York: Twin Palms
Publishing,
2000),
11.
36.
Huyssen,
Present Pasts, 22-23.
37. Ira Berlin and Leslie Harris,
Slavery
in New York
(New
York: New Press, 2005).
38. See
http://www.africanburialground.com
(accessed June
3 2005);
Howard Dodson, The
City
Has
Another Ground Zero," The
Daily News, August 4, 2003.
39. Low, "The Memorialization of
September
11," 335.
40.
Stephens, Imagining
Ground Zero, 39.
41.
Scarry,
The
Body
in Pain,
14.
42. Eleanor
Heartney, "Cultivating Hope:
The
Visionary
Art of
Agnes
Denes,"
in
Agnes
Denes:
Projects for
Public
Spaces
(Bucknell University,
Pa.: Samek Art
Gallery,
2003),
28.
43.
Agnes
Denes, "The Dream" in Art and the Public
Sphere,
ed. W.
J.
T. Mitchell
(Chicago: University
of
Chicago
Press, 1992),
186.
44.
Benjamin,
Illuminations, 241.
45. Robert Smithson,
"A Tour of the Monuments in Passaic, New
Jersey,"
in Robert Smithson: The Col-
lected
Writings (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996), 74.
46. Robert Smithson,
"Entropy
and the New Monuments, in Robert Smithson,
1 1.
47. Robert Smithson, "Frederick Law Olmstead and the Dialectical
Landscape,"
in Robert Smithson, 164.
48. See Rebecca
Comay's
surmise of
Benjamin's
iconoclasm in "Materialist Mutations of the Bildverbot,"
in Walter
Benjamin
and Art, ed. Andrew
Benjamin
(London:
Continuum International, 2005), 32-
55.
49.
Benjamin,
The Arcades
Project,
425.
50. In addition to Walter
Benjamin
and Art, see
Mapping Benjamin:
The Work
of
Art in the
Digital Age,
ed.
Hans Gumbrecht
(Stanford:
Stanford
University
Press, 2003).
51.
Benjamin,
Illuminations, 258.
52. Herbert
Muschamp,
"One Vision: A Hill of Green at Ground Zero, New York Times,
September
1 1
,
2003.
53.
Stephens, Imagining
Ground Zero, 188.
54.
Benjamin,
Illuminations, 78.
5 5 .
Scarry,
The
Body
in Pain, 131.
56. New York Sun,
April
1 1
, 2003.
57.
Quoted
in Nobel, Sixteen Acres, 208.
58. Plate, Walter
Benjamin,
135.
59. Elaine
Scarry,
On
Beauty
and
Being Just (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton
University
Press, 1999),
1 1 1-13,
55.
60.
Scarry,
On
Beauty,
30.
61.
Huyssen,
"Monumental Seduction: Christo in Berlin," in Present Pasts, 30-48.
62.
James Pagliasotti,
"An Interview with Christo and
Jeanne-Claude," January
4, 2002;
http://
christojeanneclaude.net/eyeLevel.html
(accessed
March 15, 2005).

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Flnerie at Ground Zero: Aesthetic Countermemories in Lower Manhattan

Author(s): Devin Zuber

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