Eric Fischl’s <i>Tumbling Woman,</i> 9/11, and “Timeless Time”

Abstract

In October 2002 Eric Fischl’s bigger-than-life-size bronze sculpture, Tumbling Woman, was installed in the lower concourse of New York’s Rockefeller Center. One week later, public outcry resulted in its removal. Fischl’s sculpture was said to depict a “jumper,” and images of those who had leaped or fallen to their deaths from the upper floors of the World Trade Center had quickly disappeared from media coverage of September 11 in the United States. This essay asks how events beyond measure can have fixed visual limits by probing the ban on figurative representation in relation to 9/11. It notes that prohibiting figurative representation renders the human form, and the human condition of particularity, unsayable. It argues that Tumbling Woman offers an aesthetic experience of contingency, or what Hannah Arendt called “timeless time,” in which the dignity of particularity—the particular condition of being a singular body, the particular vulnerability that arises from that condition—is all that remains when beauty is mere appearance and categories of thought and standards of judgment are in ruin, and that perhaps this is why Tumbling Woman would be a fitting memorial to the extremities of September 11.