Art from Catastrophe: Home

This book presents a series of articles investigating how we address and interpret catastrophes and crises in film, literature, art and theory, ranging from Voltaire's eighteenth-century Europe, haunted by revolutions and earthquakes, to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda to the bleak, prophetic landscapes of Cormac McCarthy.

Published to accompany an exhibition organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and held at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., October 24, 2013-May 26, 2014

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were among the most pictured disasters in history, yet they remain, a decade later, underrepresented in cultural discourse--particularly within the realm of contemporary art. Responding to these conditions, MoMA PS1 curator Peter Eleey brings together more than 70 works by 41 artists--many made prior to 9/11--to explore the attacks’ enduring resonance. Eschewing both images of the event itself and art made directly in response, the exhibition and its accompanying catalogue provide a subjective framework within which to reflect upon the attacks and their aftermath, and explore the ways that they have altered how we see and experience the world in their wake. Opening on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, September 11 includes works by Diane Arbus, John Chamberlain, Bruce Conner, Christo, Ellsworth Kelly, Mary Lucier, Stephen Vitiello and others.

includes the chapter: "art after catastrophe" by Robert Storr.

Summary: Over the past eight years, Lori Nix (born 1969) has created meticulously detailed model environments and then photographed them--locations within a fictional city that celebrate modern culture, knowledge and innovation. But her monuments of civilization are abandoned, in a state of ruin where nature has begun to repopulate the spaces.

The catastrophic events of March 11, 2011 the earthquake, tsunami, and ensuing nuclear meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant have been called the triple disaster in Japan. Among the first artists to respond to these experiences were photographers. Some, including those with personal ties to the affected Tohoku region, attempted to document the devastation, drawing on a long history of depicting natural disasters in Japanese art. As the immediate effects of the earthquake and tsunami gave way to the slowly unfolding nuclear disaster, artists began to respond to the challenges of depicting an invisible threat that calls up the collective memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The resulting images assembled in this lavishly illustrated volume are by turns poignant, searing, disturbing and often strangely beautiful. With interpretive essays from leading American and Japanese scholars and statements from the artists themselves, this book presents the unfolding process of how photography can address destruction, social change, anxiety and memory, through images that express emotions beyond words.

The specter of the apocalypse has always been a semiotic fantasy: only at the end of all things will their true meaning be revealed. Our long romance with catastrophe is inseparable from the Western hermeneutical tradition: our search for an elusive truth, one that can only be uncovered through the interminable work of interpretation. Catastrophe terrifies and tantalizes to the extent it promises an end to this task.9/11 is this book's beginning, but not its end. Here, it seemed, was the apocalypse America had long been waiting for; until it became just another event. And, indeed, the real lesson of 9/11 may be that catastrophe is the purest form of the event.From the poetry of classical Greece to the popular culture of contemporary America, The End of Meaning seeks to demonstrate that catastrophe, precisely as the notion of the sui generis, has always been generic. This is not a book on the great catastrophes of the West; it offers no canon of catastrophe, no history of the catastrophic. The End of Meaning asks, instead, what if meaning itself is a catastrophe?

Art Spiegelman's Maus and the after-images of history -- David Levinthal's Mein Kampf : history, toys, and the play of memory -- Sites unseen Shimon Attie's acts of remembrance, 1991-1996 -- Memory, countermemory, and the end of the monument : Horst Hoheisel, Micha Ullman, Rachel Whiteread, and Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock -- Memory against itself in Germany today : Jochen Gerz's Countermonuments -- Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin : the uncanny arts of memorial architecture -- Germany's Holocaust memorial problem--and mine.

"Nearly a decade ago, Esopus debuted Hogancamp's photographs of Marwencol, the imaginary town he built to 1/6th- scale in his backyard to help recover--emotionally and physically--from a brutal attack that left him with significant brain damage. Hogancamp populated the town with Barbie dolls and military figurines representing himself, his friends, and even his attackers and began documenting their activities through a series of striking photographs. . . . The images featured in the Esopus edition, which depict a number of the town's female inhabitants--ranging from Hogancamp's mother, Edda, to the 'Belgian Goddess of Youth' Deja Vu

Documentary movie about the artist.

A number of contributors address the problems facing refugees from terror in the post-9/11 era, exploring the cruel logic by which the contemporary refugee from terror is often perceived as a terrorist and treated accordingly. Other essays address the topic of terrorism more directly and in so doing demonstrate that this 'unspeakable' topic can, and indeed must, be openly discussed.

. Focusing on a diversity of art and media forms—including memorials, literature, visual and installation art, music, video, film, and journalism—they both apply dominant theories of trauma and explore the former's limitations while bearing in mind other possible methodologies.Trauma, Media, Art: New Perspectives contributes to a critical trauma studies, a field that reinvigorates itself in the twenty-first century through its constant reassessment of the relationship between theory, representation, and global histories of violence and suffering.