by Jon Lackman | 19 March 2008 | Contemporary
In the Winter 2007 Art Journal, Andrea D. Fitzpatrick writes on “The Movement of Vulnerability: Images of Falling and September 11″:
Are those who fell to their deaths on September 11, 2001, exploited or honored by the display of images representing their experiences? … images of falling are not new to photojournalism or contemporary art … my questions are as follows: What reinterpretations can be brought to art created prior to September 11 (by Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, and Sarah Charlesworth, for example) that takes falling as its subject matter? How do artworks made in response to September 11 (by Eric Fischl, Carolee Schneemann, and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, for example) hold up under critical scrutiny when the photojournalistic images of the actual event are already so aesthetically powerful?
She concludes:
The visualization of falling, after September 11, is an ethical concern because it comprises a paradigm of vulnerability. In this paradigm, three forms of vulnerability are revealed. First is the corporeal vulnerability of the subjects conveyed by the images of falling. Are the experiences endured by them recognized as having been fatal rather than merely serving as visual curiosities for the living? This is not the simple proposal (disputed by many) that aesthetic values in representations of human suffering preclude an ethical engagement with them. The goal is not to impose prohibitions on certain aesthetic or formal gestures but to identify what they do to embodied subjects in this unique genre at the limits of life, language, and the medium. Second is posthumous vulnerability to a subjectivity slandered by representations or names the dead can neither refuse nor negotiate. The fact that subjectivity is produced posthumously (and how) is not often enough considered in cultural theory, but even in death, subjects continue to be vulnerable to representations and to the names one calls them (e.g., “falling,” “jumper,” “suicides,” “unidentified”). Third, I am concerned with the extent to which the viewer’s relationship with the images is one in which an openness to the state of vulnerability is maintained–but not necessarily prescribed. After Butler’s insight that in mourning the living come “undone,” the experience of pain when viewing the Other’s mortality constitutes an ethics in which vulnerability can be conceived as a reciprocal possibility. Despite the obvious, radical imbalances inherent to the situation (in which the living view images of people about to die), a paradigm of vulnerability might offer an enabling point rather than a weakened state, a humbling manner of approach whose result is ultimately the dignification of the experiences of all the subjects involved.
