“Too Young and Vibrant for Ruins”

Abstract

There is a photograph of the ruins of a place in New York City that no longer exists. All that remains is a gaping hole in the earth-the empty footprint of an obliterated skyscraper. Day after day and year after year, the hole confronts commuters from New Jersey with its barren, rubbed -raw edges. This photograph, however, takes the viewer back to that period when what was left of the Twin Towers still clung to Lower Manhattan. It is a tight shot of the standing remnants of the facade. Twisting in on itself, the ruin invokes a number of forms, besides the horror this image represents. On a colossal scale, the ruin surreally resembles the kind of weathered, rickety, dune-running fence favored by beach photographers. The facade's delicate arches claim distant kinship with the monasteries burned down by order of Henry VIII some five hundred years ago. Even more fantastically, the building's shell calls to mind the exoskeleton of some monstrous, alien insect. In short, the ruin is an interloper into the Manhattan cityscape. These architectural remains twist and loom over a red-and white Coca-Cola delivery truck, which is somewhat dented and ashy but oterwise miraculously intact. Coca-Cola logo dares to jockey for prominence even with the ghastly ruins of the World Trade Center.This is indeed an American ruin. Yet the red of the Coca-Cola truck thrums with insistent life-pulsing through the deadened neutral color of the ruins, the rubble on the ground, and those heart breaking sheets of white office paper that blanketed the area along with the ashes from the inferno. The red truck almost seems to prop up the leaning ruin. The ruin needs support because the toxic smoke that hangs in a pall over the scene almost appears to be pushing down on the structure. A final bitter pictorial element threads through the scene, driving home the atrocity that gave rise to these ruins. Police tape has been stretched across the length of the truck. The yellow band of tape literally underlines the Coca-Cola logo, extends beyond the right side of the frame, and then seems to re-enter the picture in a ribbon in the immediate foreground. The tape snakes across a patch of rubble and office paper bisected by a couple of fallen I-beams. The yellow tape forms the thinnest of barriers marking off the crime scene. The police tape empasizes the precarious perch of the ruins. If the tower falls, it will squash the truck, jaunty logo and all. The photograph was taken by Steven Hirsch, and included in the exhibition catalog for here is new york: a democracy of photographs. In the documentation of the attack on the World Trad Center and the ruinous aftermath, the image of the Twin Towers' skeletal facades immediately became iconic. What had lived as towering boxes of glass and steel became in death something more reminiscent of ancient days. The remains of those interlocking perimeter columns-a High Modernist innovation for what briefly was the world's tallest building became likened to the ruins of a cathedral. The invocation of religious architecture both expressed the sacrosanct nature of Ground Zero for many and connected the ruins to western culture's venerable past. Valid, too, is the comparison of the towers' shell to the pagan ruins of ancient Rome, especially the Coliseum. Calling to mind Berlin or Dresden in the wake of World War II, the ruins resonated with other devastating events of the twentieth century. The fallen towers also echoed familiar forms from the history of the representation of ruin . Like human figures in Caspar David Friedrich painting, images of Ground Zero. showed recovery workers all but swallowed by the mountain of rubble. Friedrich's paintings such as Abbey in the Oakwood (1810) and Cloister Cemetery in the snow (1817-19) depict monks as dabs of black paint dwarfed by towering fragments of gothic cathedrals and winter-bare oaks, which enveloped the ruins like prayerful sentinels. Friedrich balanced the natural and cultural worlds in an expression of the sublime: the forces of time and the majesty of landscape redeem the violence that produced the cathedral ruins. …