Learning How to Fall: Art and Culture After September 11 by T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko (review)

This engaging book offers a deftly woven exploration of the representation and mediatization of “real-world” events, especially those events where “it becomes less possible to distinguish between the event and its artistic representation . . . the latter stands in for the former” and “the event itself becomes its documentation” (10). Taking the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 as a starting point, T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko traces the representation and documentation of real-world events across a surprising, but critically productive set of examples, each providing a new perspective to bear on the book’s exploration of the politics of art and spectatorship. Schotzko troubles new conditions of production and reception afforded by representational forms that interweave the public sphere: from the news item and popular television serial to the performance art project, animated art film, and social-media platform. She draws on two critical areas to support her investigation: debates about presence, reenactment, and documentation from performance art scholarship; and a more diffuse body of work that includes theories of affect and reception from contemporary media studies, theatre studies, and cultural studies. In all, this scholarly work makes an important contribution to debates about the value and status of art in contexts of crisis and terror, building on Jill Bennett’s Practical Aesthetics (2011), a work that Schotzko credits as contingent to the argument in her own book. Learning How to Fall also contributes to discussions of the “real” in documentary theatre, pursued, for example, in Carol Martin’s Theatre of the Real (2012) and Liz Tomlin’s Acts and Apparitions (2013). In addition, the book provides a useful accompaniment to treatments of similar themes in accounts of theatre, performance, and terrorism—for example, Rustom Bharucha’s Terror and Performance (2014), among others.

The examples examined provide an opportunity to deepen analysis and argument via juxtaposition, and the focus here is on artworks and performances drawn from popular culture and the professional art scene, including examples that cross these domains, such as the evocation of Marina Abramović in the final season of popular television series Sex and the City (chapter 2). Richard Drew’s Falling Man, the photograph of an unknown man falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Center following the 9/11 attack, attracting controversy for its aesthetic framing of a horrifying moment, offers the motif for the book’s central argument. This core thesis rests on an exploration of “falling,” and Drew’s photo is considered alongside a range of artworks that feature falls of various kinds, from Li Wei’s performances and images of precarious elevation and Kerry Skarbakka’s photographed performance events depicting the body in descent to Carolee Schneemann’s Terminal Velocity and Dark Pond (2001–05), which also feature photographs of people falling from the towers on 9/11. Toward the end there is a chapter that explores what Schotzko calls “a recognizable, if accidental, pop-cultural archive of falling” (167), including the opening-credits sequence of the fifth series of Mad Men and Vojin Vasović’s animated short 5 Minutes Each (2011). The phrases “falling through” and “feeling with” feature as a critical resting place for the overarching argument. Schotzko points to the existential state of falling as characterizing the contemporary experience of the real and its mediations, and explores how different figurations of falling offer distinct opportunities for moments of intimacy, care, interpretation, and interrelation. In particular, for Schotzko, our “feeling with” the anonymous figure of a falling human body—a precarious form lacking identity and other pinnable “truths” that might condition and limit empathic response—has a potency that offers a “gesture to life beyond the fall” (56). The final chapter sees the reader placed gently on the ground: here, Schotzko describes artist Didier Morelli’s reenactment of William Pope.L’s crawls through the streets of New York, a reenactment that took place as part of a university course the...