9/11 EMERGING
What use is my experience? What do I make of it, putting it together? A form it may take in what we make. A half-recalled remark someone made about a very long sentence or two of mine.
Imagination is doing something. It may not be art, but it is putting materials together for yourself or helplessly. It is action, emerging from the materials.
We made of that what we could. We steered off from the atomisation problem.
“History’s inevitability as an art collectively chosen or anyway OK’d.”
Jean Baudrillard
➜ ‘Events are back at work. With the attack on the World Trade Centre, we have now witnessed
the ultimate event, the mother of all events, an event so pure it contains within it all the events that never took place.’
Karlheinz Stockhausen
➜ compared the attack on the Twin Towers to a work of performance art and praised such a spectacle of destruction and its effect on an audience
⬥ which would require us ‘to rearrange our brains.’
Richard Serra ⬍
➜ ‘a nihilistic distortion of the ethical imperatives to make art.’
➜ rebuked Stockhausen for losing completely ‘the distinction between art and reality’ and envisioning ‘the preposterous and hypertrophic competition between an art performance and the annihilation of thousands of people.’
➜ the reality of the attack, no more than what Baudrillard insists is ‘witnessed’ (i.e., foretold) in a
decade of Hollywood disaster fantasies, isn’t the only reality
⬥ the dialogue doesn’t end here in languages
Recyclable coverage
9/11 emerging in spite of coverage.
One reality emerging to coat another. A succession of these displacements.
Free society coverage discouraging you like the totalitarian from setting out to speak: the spread and noise and occupied space of coverage proliferates, more inevitable, by a talent for seeing whatever, and by speech free or pre-packaged.
Steve Hall
➜ The gruesome readily turned to words isn’t it, necessarily.
➜ Protect can mean ‘censor,’
➜ Steve finds himself using the word ‘accident’
The variety of reaction to 9/11 may displace our own. Is there really much variety?
It was theoretically an attack on the nation
Does patria give me the identity or do I give mine to it?
The event - sublime
Patriotism transcends
Impact : a chance to think
Frank K. Schleicher (photographer)
Photo of owl habitat near city ➜ recontextualised as ‘this ghostly pre-9/11 image’
his juxtaposition is made to say what he may hardly have implied
Richard Serra’s ‘Tilted Arc’ (1981 - 1989)
➜ ‘Tilted Arc’ was in dialogue with the place where it stood so surprisingly and clearly
➜ A way of being in that space that might
with art challenge, not without
complementing, an architecture that has
nothing to do with art except as it might
complement the art that arises in its
vicinity.
➜ change the way you look at (and are in)
space
Experience
For experience as we must experiment with it in order to use it bears in itself our own abstracting powers.
My experience is at many differing (obviously) distances, which drives me to ‘move on it’ – to know more
What have I seen that changes what I must do? How to take command of my experience
Experience = Distillation
We learn by building on what we know or have half-forgotten.
My story on yours, though story can seduce you away from some other real as easily as it may mysteriously embody it all
Dreams - Like art, like real experience, they add to me.
‘experience’ used to refer to something you had or underwent in the course of the quiddities of daily existence.
Experience today is something to be architecturally engineered
Interpretation
Jean Baudrillard’s theorems in ‘The Spirit of Terrorism’
Predicting more than describing what may but in the real world may not materialise
Baudrillard likes to imagine are as inevitable as terrorist acts lack logic
It is we who released ‘the violence now spreading throughout the world and… the terrorist imagination that (without our knowing it) dwells within us all.’
‘In the end, it was they who did it but we who wished it,’
Rhetoric = “a Manhattan ‘disaster film’ projected by a fictional reality in the locus of which we live.”
We are interpreted by the same Baudrillard who says:
‘we can make whatever interpretation. But there is no meaning’
Baudrillard’s sentences are self-certifying and they do not know me.
Experience propagates itself and, dependent still on us, perseveres in its own existence.
Mcelroy, J. (2013) ‘9/11 EMERGING’, The White Review, September. Available at: http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/911-emerging/
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