Karen A. Lang

The Dialectics of Decay: Rereading the Kantian Subject

It is striking that Kant omits the ruin—as emblem and as idea—from his philosophical enterprise, considering the immense popularity of ruins at the end of the eighteenth century. His blindness to the contemporaneous cult of ruins may be emblematic of his own unwillingness to consider the ruination of his overconfident systematics, as well as a less than idealized, or “ruined,” subject. While an idealized notion of the Kantian subject has been fundamental to the history of art, the essay demonstrates how the Kantian subject is itself divided, thereby raising questions concerning subjectivity and objectivity in art history.

The sense of the past and the writing of history : Stephen Bann in conversation with Karen Lang

Karen Lang: I’d like to start in the 1960s, when you were writing about concrete art. You were also concerned with kinetic art, comparative criticism, history, and more besides. But in one of your first publications on concrete art you noted that all definitions are dangerous. I think that’s a fitting place to begin because from the outset you haven’t necessarily inhabited a discipline but a space between disciplines. I wonder if you would tell us about your intellectual formation?

Eric Fischl's Tumbling Woman, 9/11, and "Timeless Time"

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.