End Term Assignment and Self Reflective Essay: Malayka Shirazi

Non-Fiction:  Using 2000 to 2500 words, give an evocative description of your favourite painting, photograph, dance-performance or sculpture. Feel free to explore various dimensions of this work - the creative process of the artist behind the work, the spaces of its exhibition, its impact on you, and the work's many afterlives, among other aspects.

A Death Wasted

There is an interesting piece by Tom Junod called The Falling Man, on a photograph of the same name, published exactly fifteen years after the photo was taken during the 9/11 tragedy in the United States of America. On September 9, 2001, when two airliners crashed into the north and south towers of the World Trade Centre under a terrorist attack, almost 200 people jumped from the towers to their deaths in what Junod described as “mass suicide.” The photograph is of one such man, The Falling Man, who was captured mid fall, almost perpendicular to the frame as he catapulted head-first to an invisible ground. “Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation,” says Junod, “others see something else—something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom.” The Falling Man—the piece, is Junod’s ode to the power of an image. He does this by illustrating the search for the man in the photo, but in this search one sees a kind of peek into the American life post 9/11. There is a poignant moment where the daughter of the man in the photo is informed— at her father’s funeral, by Peter Cheney, that the man is her father. The daughter, in her grief, asked Cheney to leave and told him, “That piece of shit is not my father.”  In another moment in the same piece, Eric Fischl talks about the response to his sculpture and its exhibition at the Rockefeller Centre following 9/11: “That image is not my father,” someone tells him. 

What is it about images that moves us so? What makes art so poignant it drives humans to iconoclasm? (Rockefeller received bomb threats for displaying Fischl’s sculpture.) What makes us feel? These are questions far beyond the limits of a two-thousand word essay, but I believe they are the exact reasons why my favourite sculpture is what it is. The Tumbling Woman is a sculpture made by Eric Fischl as an ode to the jumpers of the 9/11 tragedy. Fischl, whose friend had also died in the tragedy, had wanted to commemorate the deaths caused by the event with Tumbling Woman. It was displayed in Rockefeller centre for a week before it was removed following several threats received by the museum. “It is very disrupting when you see it,” an onlooker who saw the statue was quoted to have said (Holguin, 2002).

Fischl created The Tumbling Woman from photographs he took of a model tumbling around in his studio, a year before September 2001. The life-size bronze sculpture shows a naked woman, tumbling. She is mid-fall: her head twisted, her legs parallel to the floor giving the sculpture direction, her left arm flailing—almost reaching out to someone, some purchase. The woman is neither graceful nor slender. She is muscled and bulky in her thighs. The odd angle at which her head is twisted is a clear depiction of the actual dignity of a fall— there is none. There is no imagined aesthetic beauty of the tumbling. The sculpture is all about the impact. It is a clear visual representation of the moment when the jump becomes the fall, and in being so it is a brave attempt at demonstrating a truth a society chose to overlook.

The Tumbling Woman was intended (and then rejected) as a memorial, but what makes a memorial? The physical form of the memorial ranges from sculptures such as The Haymarket Martyrs' Monument in Illinois to architecture such as The Victoria Memorial in Kolkata to even parks, such as the Jalianwala Bagh in Amritsar. The memorial is not a categorical form that serves as an object of memory, but a medium through which a memory lives on. Perhaps it is this memory that Eric Fischl wanted to preserve in the public sphere. But who decides what remains in public memory? Wulf Kansteiner (2002:180) tried to deconstruct this idea of the “collective memory” of a particular historical event. He calls it a “result of the interaction among three types of historical factors: the intellectual and cultural traditions that frame all our representations of the past, the memory makers who selectively adopt and manipulate these traditions, and the memory consumers who use, ignore, or transform such artefacts according to their own interests.” Collective memory is therefore created, not felt. It is in fact felt after creation, not created from feeling— not of the public anyway. An interesting example of such a creation of public memory is the Cenotaph in London. Commissioned by the British government in July 1919 and made by Edward Lutyens, it is a cubic structure made to commemorate the British soldiers who fought and died in the First World War for Britain. The memorial was well received and made a permanent monument in 1920, but it is important to look at the cultural context of its creation. Johnson and Gilbertson (2010:520) speak of the cultural changes that occurred within the people as a result of the war: post-war was a period of disillusionment for the soldiers who returned alive, and who were shocked at how little people knew of the violence of war itself. The veteran experience was markedly different from the civil experience, and the memorial can be seen as an effort of valorising the efforts of veterans and soldiers to make, as George Moses (2009) says, “an inherently unpalatable past acceptable” and justify “the nation in whose name the war had been fought.” The Cenotaph has a wreath on one side, below which it says, “The Glorious Dead.” On the day it was put on display, the number of people who came to pay their respects to the dead at the memorial was so high that people could only pass wreaths forward (Johnson & Gilbertson, 575). The memory makers manipulated the memory of the war to make it glorious and acceptable for the memory consumers: the general public. The Cenotaph became a symbol of the manufactured collective memory of the war, and continues to be so.

It is this collective memory of 9/11 that caused the rejection of The Tumbling Woman more than its form (which I shall discuss later). Post globalisation, United States had a cultural and intellectual tradition of being the global capital, one of the leading countries of the world. The 9/11 attack was not just an attack on the country’s people and its buildings, it was an attack on the US assertion of power. Following 9/11, United States waged a war on terrorism with an aggressive foreign policy. To such a cultural tradition, the image of the Tumbling Woman was almost an antithesis, much like the images of the jumpers which were removed from newspapers and news channels alike. The Tumbling Woman was unlike most memorials— it depicted an individual memory, perhaps one more authentic than the collective. It did not seek to demonstrate the aggression of war the US had turned to; it showed victimhood in its most debasing form— helpless, weak, almost broken, and most importantly, womanly. It was a striking contrast to the images of Bush on screen announcing war against terror outfits. It was a contrast to images of armed US forces on screen waging this war. It was a contrast to the American spirit, and in being so, it was rejected.

The form of The Tumbling Woman is also unlike most memorials. Unlike valorising the dead or making death look acceptable, peaceful even, The Tumbling Woman shows death as a fall, a failure. It is true that The Tumbling Woman gives a specific physical form to victims that may have looked more different than alike, but I would like to argue that the form is not categorising the victim. Instead, it challenges the image of a victim. While the Cenotaph in its elemental form does not give any image to a victim, such that any fallen soldier can be commemorated within its structure, the Tumbling Woman very specifically announces itself as a victim. It serves as a reminder of mourning. When I see this image, I am not wont to valorise the dead as a part of a thousand other dead men and women who lost their lives to a greater cause. Instead, I see a single human in the middle of action—action that is happening to her and not being done by her. This individuality expresses her helplessness more than any individual trait. The form can in fact represent several victims for the focus of the form is not on who the victim was but what happened to the victim. Moreover, the woman in the sculpture is physically almost androgynous: her breasts are small and her thighs are muscled and meaty. Even her hair is short. The bronze used to make this sculpture shows more roughness of skin than marble. These physical characteristics have traditionally not been associated with women— which shows that the form itself is not trying to symbolise femininity. Instead, Tumbling Woman is making a statement against the masculine imagery of power. It is not trying to be feminine— it is simply trying to not be masculine. If power has to bear its masculine aesthetic, then we should be able to see who the victims of this masculinity are.

Many, including the sculptor, argued that the sculpture was displayed too early, when the event was too fresh in public memory, for it to be received well. It was displayed almost a year after the incident, but Tom Junod argues that the concept of the right time for the display of such a sculpture is irrelevant as the right ‘time’ for such displays has always been arbitrary:

“In fact, they did [show things like that], at least in photographic form, and the pictures that came out of the death camps of Europe were treated as essential acts of witness, without particular regard to the sensitivities of those who appeared in them or the surviving families of the dead. They were shown, as Richard Drew's photographs of the freshly assassinated Robert Kennedy were shown. They were shown, as the photographs of Ethel Kennedy pleading with photographers not to take photographs were shown. They were shown as the photograph of the little Vietnamese girl running naked after a napalm attack was shown.”

The difference, Junod believed, in case of the images of the jumpers was that the American public was asked to be sensitive for the victims. Their collective memory was asked to be of respect towards the victims, dignity for their families and a valorised vigour against how they were wronged. No one was asked to mourn, no one was allowed to regret. (All images of the jumpers were removed from newspapers and TV.) No one was allowed to reason why they were angry. No powerful state wants to show their victims of war, you see— they simply want to commemorate them as warriors, as if they died for the nation state by choice, for the ones who are alive. These deaths are shown as sacrifices for the country and the one who are left, the ones alive, believe so and fight for the dead’s dignity and ask memories like The Tumbling Woman to be covered up because seeing the woman mid-fall would show that no victim chose to die, even the ones who were a part of the ‘mass suicide.’ It would make death more real than the country’s borders. This is the death both people who don’t see their father in the images are afraid to see— a death wasted.

Eric Fischl with The Tumbling Woman

References:

1. Holguin, Jaime. “Sept. 11 Sculpture Covered Up.” CBS News, CBS Interactive, 19 Sept. 2002, www.cbsnews.com/news/sept-11-sculpture-covered-up/.

2. Johnson, David A., and Nicole F. Gilbertson. “Commemorations of Imperial Sacrifice at Home and Abroad: British Memorials of the Great War.” The History Teacher, vol. 43, no. 4, 2010, pp. 563–584. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25740777.

3. Junod, Tom. “The Falling Man.” Esquire, Esquire, 9 Sept. 2016, www.esquire.com/news-politics/a48031/the-falling-man-tom-junod/. Accessed 26 Apr. 2018.

4. Kansteiner, Wulf. “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies.” History and Theory, vol. 41, no. 2, 2002, pp. 179–197. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3590762.

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Using 700 to 1000 words, write about your experience of doing creative writing/visual work for the 'Ways of Reading' course. You can choose to explore various dimensions as you write interestingly about your creative process, preoccupations and techniques. What were the relationships between the texts you read in this course and those you wrote or made for it? What ideas, objects or writings aided your imagination and the execution of the works that you wrote or made? What did you discover about yourself as a creative writer or artist in creating these works?

There are two ways in which this course has changed my writing process.

The first is the superficial. This is what one sees on the surface: technique, skill, a management of verbal diarrhoea. It is like teaching an artist how to angle their strokes better to reach the kind of deep paint swirls one would find in Van Gogh’s painting. I was nothing short of a novice in poetry when I started this course. All my attempts—however few they were—at writing a poem were based on an instinctive understanding of how meter may operate (this means I just took a lot of lucky guesses). However, throughout this course we were taught the purpose of line breaks, metaphors, spacing and even visual formatting in poetry. This helped me understand the purpose of these functions and employ them better in order to convey what my work is trying to say. I no longer place line-breaks where I please—there is reason to it. 

The second way is beyond the canvas. It is in the way the course has helped me think as a creative person and a creator of art. In learning methods of writing poetry and sharpening poetic skills, I first unlearned my aversion to poetry itself. I was afraid of writing things I did not know about because I was afraid they would not be good enough. There is a method of conduct in this class whereby no answer is ever seen as wrong (unless it’s a simple true or false question on some trivia). All responses to any text, poem or prose are heard and analysed, and our professor has this unique ability of making sense out of them, making us realise that there is no wrong interpretation to a work of art— simply a different one. I believe this is also what Stephen Dobyns is trying to say in ‘Metaphor and the Authenticating Act of Memory’: that a successful poem is one which, in its expression of formally heightened emotion, is able to establish a relationship with its reader such that the reader becomes a part of the creative process. There does not seem to be a limit to the accuracy of the reader’s interpretation— just that the poem would fail if the relationship is not established. When this theory became a praxis for class conduct, my fear about writing seemed to evaporate, slowly but steadily. This evaporation in turn lead to further engagement with my own work— I was no longer rejecting poems as good or bad, I was engaging with what was wrong with them, theoretically and critically. I have come to realise no one is born with an innate talent for writing, or for anything for that matter. All good work comes through learned skill and practice— so my first few attempts at poetry will be terrible since I haven’t practiced enough yet. But this also means I can get better— that there is nothing innately wrong with me and I am not poetically handicapped.

I particularly enjoyed the section of classes on John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and the discussion that followed it. John Berger’s analysis of art was revolutionary compared to the historians before him, and following a discussion on the photo essay in his book, I felt compelled to analyse art similarly— to look beyond that which is visible and try to see art in its moment of historical ontology. This is why my final assignment is an attempt at a Berger-like analysis of a sculpture where I tried to see the value of the sculpture not in the skill with which it was made but in the tension that exists within its frame between the sculpture and the people it was shown to. There was also a poignant moment where our professor, discussing Berger, emphasised the importance of demystifying art for us. “Everyone wanted to write about the human condition,” he said, “but which human’s condition is being talked about?” I am starting to realise we cannot write without understanding our own human condition as writers first. The grand story we want to write can only be ours. This is why the following poem was my favourite piece of all my submissions. The original was titled differently without the mention of chin hair and it did not help the reader understand what was being talked of in the poem— after making a few edits, I have come to be proud of this piece because I believe it comes closest to an expression of a heightened emotion for me and I am hopeful the metaphor serves it function. It embodies most of what I learned through this class on writing poetry: to not be afraid of work. 

a chin hair called mongryong

Another one appeared yesterday.

It’s down my chin

   a little to the side

   coarse

   dark

     and curly

almost an inch long

as it sits in a graveyard

bopping as I walk

like a pocket poodle

running to strangers on the metro

who like to stop and stare

barking for attention

biting friends who touch it too much.

I would have liked to call him Monggie.

Forgive me,

I am late

I had to shave him.