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

Learning How to Fall engages a number of enduring debates within performance studies—the relationship between the representational and the real, the (in)distinction between the performance event and its documentation, and the ethics of spectatorship. It does so by attending to art and news media in the wake of the events of 9/11 2001 and the subsequent shift in “information technologies by and through which events travel” (9). Many of the art and media objects under examination, such as Richard Drew’s infamous Falling Man photograph (2001), explicitly reference or signify 9/11 and its reaestheticization in visual art, literature, and television. But others—such as the Marina Abramovic;–esque performance artist on Sex and the City (2003)—converse with Drew’s photograph less in terms of a shared historical referent than in terms of what Cesare Schotzko identifies as “a seismic cultural and epistemological shift in a collective understanding of and access to the real” in the wake of 9/11 (29). Cesare Schotzko reads these works in tandem with disciplinary debates about performance, presence, and media by the likes of Philip Auslander, Amelia Jones, Peggy Phelan, and Rebecca Schneider. At the heart of Cesare Schotzko’s inquiry are two critical questions: “What do art and imagery do to the event” that they aestheticize, however abstractly; and what methodological opportunities and challenges do the shifting relationships between the event and its documentation present to performance theorists (8)? Learning How to Fall argues that such imagery offers opportunities for spectators to have “potentially redemptive experiences” of events by “bearing witness” to and corroborating the life and fate of the other (36). (While perhaps a strategic choice for a book concerned with the conflation of events themselves with the circulation of those events through art and media, Cesare Schotzko could nonetheless be clearer about how she defines “the event,” a term which, as the coda to her introduction demonstrates, has been widely theorized.)

The “fall” referenced in the book’s title enjoys varying degrees of literality within the art, media, and scholarship that Cesare Schotzko convenes (xvi). But she does not theorize the fall so much as she enacts it as a writerly mode, one that embraces being “caught somewhere in between” (40). Cesare Schotzko enacts the fall by combining reflexive accounts of her experiences of performance (“live” and otherwise) with an impressive theoretical archive that she cites aggressively: we leap with Carrie Bradshaw, crest with the NEA Four, and cascade with Horkheimer and Adorno.

This emphasis on between-ness—familiar enough terrain for performance studies—manifests beautifully welcoming prose that, like the work it analyzes, is “if not falling, then flying... or leaping or floating” (40). Like the artful falls populating its pages, Learning How to Fall thrives most fully in the soaring suspension between its initial leap and its landing. Indeed, it is in the second and third chapters that Cesare Schotzko offers some of her most incisive contributions to performance studies. Both chapters grapple with art and media that signify 9/11 less explicitly—if at all—than the works explored within the remaining chapters. Chapter 2, “The Untruth of Style,” enriches recent conversations about performance, political economy, and the question of presence through both contemporary and historical considerations. For example, Cesare Schotzko engages Marina Abramovic;’s omnipresence in popular representations of performance art and the commodification of the performing artist in the contemporary art market: “Abramovic; has so quickly and so, if I may, omni-presently, become the stand in for performance art” (77). She reads these multiplying Abramovic;es alongside a consideration of the fact that Phelan first rehearsed her writings about performance’s ontology of disappearance “in an article critiquing the systematic de-funding of the NEA Four” (91). In so doing, she demonstrates how the “economy and ontology of performance are not always already but always ever inextricably bound to each other...