Art in the Wake of September 11

Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, the attacks remain curiously difficult to assimilate into the history of art. This is not because they lacked images. Quite the opposite. Few historical events have been so comprehensively photographed, televised, replayed and digitally circulated. The second aircraft entering the South Tower, the towers burning against an unnaturally blue sky, bodies falling, streets disappearing beneath ash, the final vertical structures dissolving into dust: these images entered collective memory almost instantaneously.

The problem for artists was therefore not how to make an image of September 11. It was what an image could possibly add.

Historically, catastrophe has often depended upon art to become imaginable. Goya’s Disasters of War, Picasso’s Guernica and the paintings and monuments that followed the Holocaust all attempt, however uneasily, to give form to events that otherwise exceed ordinary comprehension. September 11 presented almost the reverse problem. The catastrophe arrived already aestheticised. It was experienced by millions through framing, repetition, slow motion and replay. The event and its representation appeared almost simultaneously.

A decade later, when MoMA PS1 organised its exhibition September 11, curator Peter Eleey began from precisely this paradox. Although the attacks were among the most extensively pictured disasters in history, they remained strikingly underrepresented in contemporary art. Rather than assembling pictures of September 11, the exhibition largely avoided both direct imagery and works specifically made in response to the attacks. Instead, it asked how the event had changed the conditions under which images, buildings, bodies, borders and public space could subsequently be understood.

That may be the most important artistic legacy of 9/11. It did not simply produce a body of commemorative art. It altered the meaning of representation itself.

The Unbearable Body

Eric Fischl discovered almost immediately how narrow the permissible territory had become.

His bronze Tumbling Woman of 2002 represented a nude female body twisting through space, inspired by those who jumped or fell from the burning towers. Installed at Rockefeller Center around the first anniversary of the attacks, the sculpture provoked intense criticism and was removed after only days.

The controversy tells us something fundamental about the visual culture surrounding 9/11. Images of the towers could be shown almost infinitely. The aeroplanes could strike again and again on television. Fireballs, smoke and architectural collapse became permissible components of public memory. The human body was another matter.

Fischl’s sculpture restored corporeality to an event increasingly represented through architecture.

This was profoundly disturbing because it disrupted the abstraction by which disaster becomes historically manageable. Buildings collapse; skylines change; nations are attacked. Such language possesses a certain monumental dignity. Bodies fall.

The difference is ethical as much as visual.

One of the most haunting consequences of 9/11 photography was the gradual disappearance of pictures of people falling from the towers from mainstream commemorative culture. Their absence created a strange division between what had happened and what could acceptably be remembered. Fischl violated that boundary. The scandal of Tumbling Woman was therefore not that it invented something unbearable, but that it materialised something already known.

The sculpture confronted precisely the question Susan Sontag would examine in Regarding the Pain of Others two years after the attacks: what obligations arise from looking at another person’s suffering? At what point does witnessing become consumption? And conversely, when does protecting ourselves from an image become a form of refusal?

Fischl’s later Ten Breaths: Tumbling Woman II, made in 2007–08, continued the subject, returning to bodily vulnerability and the human dimension of the catastrophe. What had initially appeared intolerably literal gradually became capable of entering the museum. Time had changed not the sculpture’s subject but the conditions of looking.

Gerhard Richter and the Failure of the Image

If Fischl restored the body, Gerhard Richter did almost the opposite.

His small painting September, completed in 2005, is based on the familiar photographic image of an aircraft approaching the World Trade Center. Yet Richter dragged paint across the surface until the scene appears half-erased. The towers remain discernible, but the image seems to be disappearing at the moment we recognise it.

Its scale is essential.

September 11 had already become monumental through television. Richter refuses to compete. Instead, he takes one of the most recognisable images of the twenty-first century and makes it uncertain.

Richter had spent decades interrogating the relationship between photography, historical memory and painting, particularly in relation to Germany’s twentieth-century history. In September, his characteristic blur acquires another significance. It resembles both censorship and memory: an image being rubbed away, yet stubbornly refusing to vanish.

The painting asks whether looking more closely actually brings historical knowledge nearer.

Here the logic of photography is reversed. Ordinarily, photographic detail promises evidence. Richter’s intervention denies that promise. We know what we are seeing before we can properly see it. Recognition precedes vision.

This is one reason September remains among the most intellectually compelling responses to the attacks. It understands that the central problem of 9/11 was never a shortage of visibility. It was an excess of it.

The catastrophe became familiar before it became comprehensible.

When Pixels Become Memory

Thomas Ruff’s enormous photograph jpeg de01 of 2005 begins from the same problem and arrives somewhere different.

Ruff downloaded a low-resolution image of the devastated World Trade Center from the internet and enlarged it to almost three metres high. At that scale, the digital image begins to disintegrate. Buildings, smoke and debris break apart into visible blocks of colour. What initially appears documentary becomes almost abstract.

It is a remarkably prescient work.

September 11 was perhaps the first genuinely global catastrophe of the internet age. Images were no longer simply produced by professional photographers, printed in newspapers and deposited in archives. They were downloaded, compressed, copied, forwarded, reposted and degraded.

Ruff makes that technological condition visible.

The pixel becomes the equivalent of Richter’s blur: not an obstacle placed between us and historical truth, but part of the mechanism through which history now reaches us.

There is something almost archaeological about jpeg de01. Yet instead of excavating a ruin, Ruff excavates a file.

The distinction is crucial. By 2005, September 11 already existed simultaneously as an event and as data.

The Monument Made of Absence

If Fischl’s sculpture was intolerably corporeal, Tribute in Light succeeded partly because it contained no body at all.

First presented six months after the attacks, the installation sends two immense columns of light upward from Lower Manhattan, reproducing the position and dimensions of the absent towers without attempting to reconstruct them. Conceived by artists and designers including John Bennett, Gustavo Bonevardi, Richard Nash Gould, Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, the work subsequently became an annual part of New York’s commemorative landscape.

Its intelligence lies in the distinction between representation and substitution.

The lights do not pretend that the buildings remain. They make their absence visible.

This places Tribute in Light within a broader history of the anti-monument: memorial practices that reject heroic statues and permanent symbolic closure in favour of absence, voids, disappearance and negative space. The most powerful memorials of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries frequently work this way because historical trauma has made conventional monumentality morally suspect. A heroic figure on a pedestal implies that history can be resolved into meaning. An empty space admits that something cannot be restored.

The beams are simultaneously architectural and immaterial. They evoke the towers while refusing to rebuild them. Their disappearance at dawn is part of the work.

Memory must be produced again.

From September 11 to the War on Terror

But the art made in the wake of 9/11 cannot be confined to representations of the attacks themselves, because September 11 rapidly became something larger than an event. It became the organising justification for wars, detention systems, surveillance regimes, border technologies and new forms of executive power.

The artistic response consequently changed.

Jack Whitten’s enormous painting 9.11.01, completed in 2005, already begins to enlarge the subject beyond mourning. Measuring approximately ten by twenty feet, it incorporates the pyramid of the American dollar bill within a dense field of imagery. Its black triangular geometry is capable of reading simultaneously as monument, ruin and burning structure, while the work as a whole connects the attacks to money, oil, national power and historical violence.

Here September 11 is entering political history.

The attacks can no longer be understood solely as a scene of victimhood. They are being connected to economics, ideology and American power. The artwork becomes less elegiac and more forensic.

That transformation is still clearer in Martha Rosler’s House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series, begun in 2004. Rosler returned to a method she had originally developed during the Vietnam War, inserting images of military violence into immaculate magazine interiors.

This time the war was Iraq.

In works such as Hooded Captives and Photo Op, fashionable domestic interiors become contiguous with prisoners, soldiers and bodies from the war zone. The repetition is itself devastating.

Rosler’s decision to resurrect a technique from Vietnam collapses the comforting idea of historical progress. The furniture has changed. The magazines have become glossier. The war has moved. The fundamental relationship between domestic consumption and distant violence remains.

Her montages therefore extend the central visual problem of 9/11. What does proximity mean in an age when suffering elsewhere can enter the home instantly as an image while remaining politically remote?

The screen abolishes geographical distance without necessarily producing moral closeness.

The Invisible Architecture

Eventually, some of the most consequential art produced in the wake of September 11 ceased to depict September 11 at all.

Artists including Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl and Laura Poitras began examining the invisible systems that expanded under the War on Terror: surveillance, classified military infrastructure, data collection, drone warfare and the transformation of ordinary citizens into measurable information.

Poitras’s 2016 Whitney exhibition Astro Noise explicitly situated itself within this post-9/11 environment, examining mass surveillance and the War on Terror alongside a broader network of artists, whistleblowers and theorists.

By this stage the visual vocabulary has changed completely.

The tower is gone.

In its place are cables, databases, metadata, thermal cameras, redacted documents, satellites and secret facilities.

Yet this too belongs to the art history of September 11. Perhaps more profoundly than a painting of the towers ever could.

The attacks changed not merely what could be photographed but who was permitted to look, who could be watched, what could remain secret and how images themselves could become instruments of state power.

The history of post-9/11 art therefore moves from the visible catastrophe toward its invisible consequences.

After the Spectacle

Twenty-five years later, the most significant art made in the wake of September 11 shares remarkably little stylistically. Fischl gives us flesh. Richter gives us erasure. Ruff gives us pixels. Tribute in Light gives us absence. Rosler gives us political collision. Poitras and Paglen give us systems that are difficult to see at all.

What unites them is a distrust of the uncomplicated image.

Perhaps that was inevitable.

The attacks were themselves inseparable from spectacle. They occurred in physical space but became historical through screens. Television transformed catastrophe into repetition; photography transformed seconds into icons; the internet transformed those icons into endlessly reproducible data. Political rhetoric subsequently attempted another transformation, converting trauma into narrative: good and evil, freedom and terror, before and after.

Much of the strongest art resisted precisely that closure.

It refused to explain September 11.

Instead, it complicated our ability to see it.

That may ultimately be what art was able to do that television could not. News images told us what happened. Memorials told us whom we had lost. Governments told us what the event meant.

Art remained with the more difficult question.

What happens to a culture after an image has become impossible to forget, but remains impossible fully to understand?