Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
67
result(s) for
"Stubblefield, Thomas"
Sort by:
9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster
The day the towers fell, indelible images of plummeting rubble, fire, and falling bodies were imprinted in the memories of people around the world. Images that were caught in the media loop after the disaster and coverage of the attack, its aftermath, and the wars that followed reflected a pervasive tendency to treat these tragic events as spectacle. Though the collapse of the World Trade Center was \"the most photographed disaster in history,\" it failed to yield a single noteworthy image of carnage. Thomas Stubblefield argues that the absence within these spectacular images is the paradox of 9/11 visual culture, which foregrounds the visual experience as it obscures the event in absence, erasure, and invisibility. From the spectral presence of the Tribute in Light to Art Spiegelman's nearly blank New Yorker cover, and from the elimination of the Twin Towers from television shows and films to the monumental cavities of Michael Arad's 9/11 memorial, the void became the visual shorthand for the incident. By examining configurations of invisibility and erasure across the media of photography, film, monuments, graphic novels, and digital representation, Stubblefield interprets the post-9/11 presence of absence as the reaffirmation of national identity that implicitly laid the groundwork for the impending invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
eBook
Do Disappearing Monuments Simply Disappear? The Counter-Monument in Revision
James Young has coined the term “counter-monuments” to refer to a handful of memorial sites in postwar Germany that utilize strategies of disappearance and erasure in order to subvert the ossifying tendencies of the conventional monument. According to Young, in positing an activated spectator, these process-oriented sites sabotage the top-down trajectory of official histories and in turn instigate a more fluid relationship to the past. However, an in-depth reading of the reception of Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz'sMonument against Fascism(1986) calls into question not only the relevance of this influential concept to the site, but also its viability as a whole. By taking into consideration the actual discourse that was prompted by the Harburg monument, the work's appropriation of the visual language of iconoclasm, and the historical baggage of the motif of the “unrepresentable” from which it draws, this essay will claim that such sites ultimately serve to reaffirm an already remembered past at the same time that they preserve the artist's position of authority. From this perspective, the concept of the “counter-monument” falls back on a troubling formalism whereby the site itself once again becomes the origin of meaning.
Journal Article
Toward a History of the Medial Regime: Force, Representation, and the Female Body
This essay traces a recurring regime of representation in which the motor
capacities of the female subject are overwhelmed by force so as to prompt the
flesh to produce recognizable signs of desirability. Targeting the automatic
relations of the body, this “medial regime” appears in the rapture of the
Renaissance nude and in the demonic possession of Romanticism before being
recast in the nineteenth century in terms of the mechanical, electrical and
luminous energy that innervated female bodies at the Salpêtrière hospital. More
recently, it surfaces in the online sphere where postindustrial formations of
labor transform the overtaken body into a medium for the production of surplus
value. In order to excavate the underlying grammar of this regime, this essay
presents three constellations that animate its history. Designating the mode of
force exerted and the correlative body it produces, these modalities are the
discursive/symbolic, the machinic/actual, and the algorithmic/virtual.
Journal Article
Does the disaster want to be photographed? Reconsidering the camera's presence at Ground Zero
According to Sontag, as an instrument of \"non-intervention,\" the camera effectively removes its operator intellectually and emotionally from the reality before the lens, a dynamic that becomes especially disconcerting in the face of human suffering. [...] as the sequence of images that produced Richard Drew's famous Falling Man photograph (2001) confirm, in the context of disaster the singular snapshot is often replaced by \"coverage,\" a practice of incessantly photographing for fear that one might miss the pivotal moment within a monumental event.
Journal Article
Conclusion
While the immediate aftermath of 9/11 saw Hollywood pull virtually anything from distribution that vaguely resembled the experience of that day, five years later in 2006 the event would be front and center in films such asUnited 93andWorld Trade Center.Writing in February of the same year, Julian Stallabrass noted, “There is . . . a vast outpouring of 9-11 merchandise that surely seeks to heal the image wound: posters of heroic firemen against the backdrop of the fallen towers, badges, caps, T-shirts, magnets and memorial candles.”¹ The cries of “too soon” seemed to have rescinded and
Book Chapter
Lights, Camera, Iconoclasm
The World Trade Center was targeted on 9/11 not so much for the number of casualties it would produce or the damage to the infrastructure it would inflict, but rather for the larger symbolic statement that the destruction of this iconic structure would make. As the architectural centerpiece of the economic capital of the world, the triumphant verticality of the Twin Towers succinctly embodied the global reach and selfassuredness of postwar American capitalism. Their unnerving gigantism implicitly guaranteed a future where such structures, though grossly oversized for the present, would eventually be the norm as the fruits of capitalism flowed
Book Chapter