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It has now been a decade since a group of nineteen men affiliated with al-Qaeda-fifteen from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirate, one from Lebanon, and one from Egypt-hijacked four US airliners and flew two of them into the World Trade Center towers, another into the Pentagon, while the fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania when the passengers attempted to retake the cockpit. Despite Paul Greengrass's film United 93 (2006) that depicts the heroics of these same passengers, out of all these coordinated events, the attacks on New York alone have become iconic in the American imagination. That is, in part, because the twin towers themselves were iconic, an immediately recognizable element of the New York City skyline, familiar from countless films, television shows, and even video games. When the terrorist attacks occurred in New York, one of the US media centers, eyes all over the world watched, through the immediate mediation of television, the at-the-time incomprehensible inferno and subsequent collapse of the twin towers, which killed nearly 2700 people.
Whether one believes that 9/11 changed everything or changed nothing, in the aftermath of the attacks the Bush Administration unquestionably generated an Orwellian litany of naming-"coalition of the willing," "extraordinary rendition," "War on Terror," "enhanced interrogation," "regime change," "preemptive war," "homeland security"- that has reshaped America's political discussion during the 2000s and widened the divide between Red and Blue states, not to mention the divide between the US and other nations.
While the realm of politics was quick to seize the imaginary of 9/11 to construct a new form of PC (Patriotic Correctness) in order to help justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the last ten years have not been kind to artists' attempts to represent 9/11. Everyone seems to find something wrong with 9/11 art-both the visual and the literary. At the one-year anniversary of the attacks, the works of two contemporary artists received such hostile public responses that they were effectively censored. Eric Fischl, a prominent New York artist, created Tumbling Woman, a bronze sculpture of a nude woman in free fall. Fischl did so explicitly to commemorate those who leapt to their deaths from the towers. In September of 2002, the Rockefeller Center contracted to display Fischl's statue for a...