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Traumatic Trace

No human trace was left of more than 40 percent of the nearly 3,000 victims of the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001. Most of the material in the two towers was pulverized, and much of the other debris (1.8 million tons in all) consisted of columns and beams. Several of these structures, broken and bent, were kept as graphic evidence of the sheer force of the double strike; eventually some 1,200 objects were chosen as tokens of the catastrophe. Initially warehoused at a hangar at JFK Airport, these things were later dispersed to memorials around the US, foremost among them the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at Ground Zero, which opened on the tenth anniversary of the attacks.¹

The Spanish artist Francesc Torres, a longtime resident of New York, was two blocks from the north tower when the first jet struck, and he witnessed the fall of both buildings from the rooftop of his studio ten blocks away. Commissioned by the September 11 Museum, Torres photographed the objects in the 80,000-square-foot interior of the JFK hangar every day in April 2009 and gathered his images in Memory Remains: 9/11 Artifacts at Hangar 17 (2011). It is difficult, as one looks at the photos, not to consider these tokens in terms of iconic value. Especially prized in this respect is “The Last Column,” a thirty-seven-foot piece of an interior support from the south tower, so named because it was the final thing to be removed from the site. (Last object out, it was the first one in the September 11 Museum, which was constructed around the column due to its size.) Covered with pictures of victims, badges, and tags from fire and police departments and notes and mementoes from loved ones, the column lies flat, supported on steel beams of its own, like an industrial version of the True Cross. Placed in this same semi-sacral register are also beams with little crosses and stars cut out by metalworkers for families and friends of the deceased.

Most evocative of the fallen buildings are the fragments of the 360-foot antenna that once stood atop the north tower, and most telling of the courageous response are the battered vehicles of the aid professionals who rushed to the scene. Torres offers close-ups of torched insignia, on trucks and cars, of rescuers turned victims—a blistered FDNYC here, a melted AMBULANCE there. At the same time, he includes photos of banal things that convey the random effects of the attacks, such as clothes and tchotchkes from the underground mall that were somehow preserved. As the journalist Jerry Adler writes in Memory Remains, “the objects with the best odds of survival were those small enough to have lodged safely in a crevice: keys, coins, and rings.”² Such are the things that shall inherit the earth.

In the introduction to his book, Torres notes the blurred line between document and art in both the objects and the photographs. First, there are fragments from actual artworks, such as the steel sculpture by Alexander Calder once sited on World Trade Center plaza; laid out on white slabs, Bent Propeller (1970) exists in a limbo between ruin and art. Then, too, some of the trashed cars and smashed commodities recall the work of John Chamberlain and Arman, who once aimed to aestheticize such debris. And, finally, there is the ambiguous display in the hangar: the pictures reveal an arrangement of things that is no longer forensic but not yet museological, and the entire layout might be mistaken for a vast art installation.

Francesc Torres, Memory Remains, 2011. Photograph © the artist and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

Along with the aestheticization of the remains there are other troublesome issues to consider.³ Early on, the skin of the Last Column, scorched and rusted, began to flake, and conservators rushed to reattach the chips. Is that the right response to a thing whose value lies largely in its indexing of time? “Everything down to the smallest residue was of the utmost importance,” Torres writes. One understands what he means and appreciates the care in his approach, yet can this be true? Many objects in the photographs seem both significant and meaningless, at once auratic and empty. Here, both the project of the book and the mission of the museum become tricky. “They’re not sculptures. You don’t want them to be beautiful,” Chris Ward, the executive director of the Port Authority at the time, comments of the remains: “They are sacred.”⁴ This touches on the most ambiguous opposition of all—not art versus document but artifact versus relic. (The last word recurs throughout the book.)

Is there a line between human tragedy and oppressive sublimity? If there is, the events of 9/11 were soon pushed over it, and that is where they have remained ever since. For Americans, the World Trade Center became the world trauma center, and that trauma was soon converted into support for “the war on terror”—for what victims, the lex talionis of terror runs, do not have the right to be perpetrators? Thus was the violence of the attacks returned with interest. Wounded, the American empire aimed not only to “build the towers higher than before” but also to “hunt the terrorists down and smoke them out,” and, in keeping with a rhetoric that al-Qaeda used to its own advantage, it marched into battle as the Crusades came again.

In this light, the talk of relics and icons, not to mention the appearance of crosses and stars, was never benign; here, the experience of the sublime and the traumatic was all but captured by the category of the sacred. Early on, Ground Zero was described as “hallowed ground,” and, to this day, 9/11 is often treated as a catastrophe that cannot be assimilated. This framing tends to turn an historical event into a theological one, a misprision that conforms not only with the turn to the reactionary thought of Carl Schmitt in recent policy-making and political theory alike (what the sovereign makes, as in law, he can unmake, as in a state of emergency) but also with the theocratic bent of so many political leaders (“the exception in jurisprudence,” Schmitt wrote, “is analogous to the miracle in theology”).⁵ Can the remains of 9/11 be both relics and artifacts, iconic and evidentiary? Can the National September 11 Memorial and Museum both rehearse the trauma of the day and assist in its comprehension? Might a memorial and a museum be at cross-purposes in this respect?⁶

Ten years after 9/11, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) at PS 1 opened a show titled simply “September 11.” Its gambit also appeared simple: not to display any images of the attacks or any works made in response to them. Instead, curator Peter Eleey explained, “this exhibition considers the ways in which 9/11 has altered how we see and experience the world in its wake.”⁷ For Eleey the attacks were an intervention in spectacle that was a spectacle in its own right: 9/11 “was made to be used … Why would I want to repeat such transgression?”⁸ With an epigraph drawn from the Philosophical Investigations of Wittgenstein—“A picture held us captive”—his show sought to loosen us a little from this capture, to despectacularize 9/11 somewhat. To this end, Eleey exhibited only art, created independently of the attacks, that “transcends the specificities of its epoch, form, or content to uncannily address the present.”⁹

That art can resonate across time and place is a familiar notion, but, usually, it concerns the retroactive effect of present practices on past ones, as in accounts of literary revision from T. S. Eliot to Harold Bloom. Here, the question was pitched differently: might historical works foreshadow contemporary events and be changed by this unexpected connection? Thus Eleey suggested that, after 9/11, a 1956 photo by Diane Arbus of a newspaper blown across an empty Manhattan intersection is seen in a different light, one even darker than the dim illumination in the desolate original; or that a 1982 smashed-car sculpture by John Chamberlain is viewed through the cracked lens of the crushed rescue vehicles at the Word Trade Center; or that a 1968 wrap piece by Christo, a long slab bound in red tarp by rope, is altered in its effect—that where there was once enigma there is now threat (the package as bomb) or loss (the bundle as bodily remains). His strongest claim about this recharging of artworks was made in relation to Unidentified Woman, Hotel Corona de Aragón, Madrid (1980) by Sarah Charlesworth, a murky print of a news photo of a female suicide plunging to her death, her dress fluttering up to reveal her bare legs and backside. This image, which evokes prior ones by Andy Warhol, “no longer belong[s] to itself,” Eleey asserted; read through our representations of the desperate jumpers from the twin towers, it is “subsumed by 9/11.”¹⁰

The proposition that traumatic events might alter artworks after the fact is a complex one. Most often, such resonance is a calculated effect that artists elicit from the image-repertoire of a pictorial tradition. Thus, for instance, did Édouard Manet draw on the iconic power of the dead Christ for his fallen toreador of 1864, as did Gerhard Richter for his lifeless terrorist of 1988. Such is one sense of the definition that Baudelaire once offered for painting as “the mnemotechny of the beautiful.”¹¹ However, as “September 11” implied, our inclination today is more in keeping with Aby Warburg, for whom art was the mnemotechny of the traumatic. (For this German art historian, ancient art lived on through Pathosformel, or pictorial formulae of emotional turmoil that are inscribed in us to the extent that we are inculcated in the classical tradition.) Key here is that both Baudelaire and Warburg understood such memory-techniques as internal to art, whereas “September 11” proposed that this resonance is a worldly effect and that it is most likely to operate in relation to media events of a catastrophic nature, from the Kennedy assassinations, say, to the World Trade Center attacks and beyond.

Sarah Charlesworth, Unidentified Woman, Hotel Corona de Aragón, Madrid, 1980. Gelatin silver print. 78 × 42˝. © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

Anachronism is typically regarded as a great vice in art history, the smooth operation of which gets jammed if dates are confused. “September 11” made anachronism a virtue, and in this respect it was in keeping with recent provocations like Anachronic Renaissance (2010) by Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, who resist the default demand that we understand the significance of art strictly in terms of its historicity, that is, in terms of the particular circumstances of its initial making.¹² Again, Eleey was concerned with work that “transcends the specificities of its epoch, form, or content to uncannily address the present.” Yet how exactly are we to understand this anachronic address to the viewer? It is not quite transcendental; some of the specificities of the art prepare the recharging that is precisely at issue. Nor is it truly uncanny; strictly speaking, the uncanny involves the return of a familiar image, person, or event made strange by repression, and this is not the case here either. More than anything else, the works in “September 11” were made to appear portentous; they were treated as floating signifiers turned into piercing ones by accidental association with 9/11. In the end, the subject of “September 11” was our own subjectivity, as Eleey all but admitted: “what we read into images [is] itself a thematic undercurrent of the exhibition at large.”¹³

The prevalent mode of art viewing today is an affective one. If Kant resumed the ancient question “Is the work beautiful?” and Duchamp formulated the avant-garde query “Is the work art at all?”, our primary criterion seems to be “Does this image or object move me?” Where we once spoke of the “quality” of a work, as judged by comparison with great art of the past, and then about its “interest” and its “criticality,” both of which were measured by relevance to contemporary aesthetic and/or political debates, we now look for pathos, which cannot be tested objectively or even discussed much. (A work that is a hit for me might be a miss for you.)¹⁴ Eleey believed that “the terrorists had spectacularly politicized our visual sphere.”¹⁵ This was so, yet is the best response to aestheticize it traumatically in turn?