H. Ronnes

Reflecting Absence, or How Ground Zero Was Purged of Its Material History (2001-2010)

The development of the urban space of Ground Zero has been a long and difficult process, resulting in the removal of almost all of its material history. The material objects formerly present on the site had an important part and significant agency in the struggle between different stakeholders of Ground Zero. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and Larry Silverstein, owner and leaseholder of the sixteen acres that held the Twin Towers, intended to rebuild the ten million square feet of office space that was destroyed on 9/11. This force of production asserted itself over possible modes of consumption of the space, each championed and represented by overlapping groups of people. Some wished to see the space redeveloped as a site of mourning, others as a site fit for touristic consumption, as a space for residence, or as a site representing a material past older than 9/11. It shall be argued that for these consumer groups the symbolic complexity of the site, and its potential power in political performances, was intricately connected to space and the material agency of objects remaining on Ground Zero post 2001.

The Dutch Renaissance in a straightjacket: recent research on Netherlandish Art and Architecture in the Netherlands

During the last decade, research on Renaissance art and architecture in the northern Netherlands has tried to overcome persistent late nineteenth-century concepts connected to the nation-state, and started to adopt more dynamic ideas of culture and the arts in the period between 1450 and 1620. Especially the geographical divide between Flanders and the Northern Netherlands is increasingly contested, and more attention is being paid to the exchange between the Netherlands and Italy. This more international outlook has resulted in publications on artists such as Adriaen de Vries and Abraham Bloemaert, and architects such as De Keyser. Still, this field is overshadowed by the public attention paid to the Dutch Golden Age, and its essentialist interpretation continues to have an impact on the way the preceding period is studied. As a result, there still exists a rather fragmented idea of what ‘Renaissance’ means with respect to the arts in the Netherlands.

Tropes of a Texan trauma: monumental Dallas after John F. Kennedy

Dealey Plaza in central Dallas serves both as a ‘cradle’ and a ‘grave’; at this historic site Dallas was born and an American president died. The assassination of President Kennedy on 22 November 1963 changed Dealey Plaza, the site where the first citizen of Dallas settled in 1841, from a symbol of civic pride into a place of guilt and shame. After the events of 1963, the Dallas community voiced a wish to forget and hence, the exact location where Kennedy was murdered was initially remembered by neither monument nor plaque. At the same time, America grieved and from all over the country US citizens started to visit the assassination site. Dealey Plaza became a place of pilgrimage, which caused a change in the monumental landscape and eventually transformed civic guilt into civic pride. This article offers an analysis of the responses to this Texan trauma in terms of commemorative heritage and describes Dallas’ shift from ‘amnesia’ to ‘identification’, two contrary responses to traumatic, or mourning, heritage.