| Entitled "Visual Culture and 9/11: The Making of History," the thesis explores a number of ways in which diverse visual media have been mobilized into projects of identification following September 11th, 2001. Each chapter incorporates visual motifs into its structure, a strategy designed to highlight themes of visuality, and the logocentrism under which we continue to operate when we "read" images. In the first chapter, I juxtapose the story of Eric Fischl's infamous sculpture, Tumbling Woman, which was banned and condemned as obscene shortly after it was unveiled in Rockefeller Center, alongside photographer Richard Drew's equally notorious image of a man falling to his death from the Trade Center. This chapter serves to introduce several key themes: mourning, memory and history, the identification of a thing as obscene or proper, and the drive to identify the victims. Most importantly, the chapter focuses on the liminal space between life and death, imaged in both sculpture and photograph, as a way to read the horror of the future anterior---the "what will have happened" of history.; In my second chapter, I use several patriotic postcards, produced in the wake of 9/11, in order to interrogate the US administration's obsession with identifying its citizens as either benign or evil. Combining an overview of the Patriot Act with some of Derrida's thoughts on the postcard as a viral object, I have also designed some of my own postcards to further reflect upon surveillance and self-surveillance. The third chapter, "The Face of a Terrorist," uses images of Osama bin Laden which have been circulating online ever since he was named by Bush as the prime perpetrator. All of the images are hyper-sexualized, and rely upon tropes of primitivism and misogyny in order to signify. My argument here consists in identifying a fundamental fascism at work in both the official and popular imaginings of the terrorist identity.; Finally, I end with a return to mourning by looking at several New York Times ads which ran in the months following 9/11. The ads were digitally altered versions of Norman Rockwell paintings, which worked by invoking/producing a sentimental remembrance of an ideal America in earlier days. Using the doctored Rockwells, as well as kitsch items available for sale from Ground Zero vendors, I argue that mourning was transformed by kitsch sentiment into a communitarian vision of Us against Them. |
