Whereas The Dreadful Details examines historic representations of battle as a collage of established clichés, the images presented in Circumambulation explore the ambiguity that follows a profound “event” like September 11th and the duality of time experienced in its wake, “a time” described by philosopher Pierre Zaoui “which contracts and expands and must be reflected upon in the hope of escaping its haunting.”
Contemplating the meaning and lack of meaning not only of this event, but also in the attempt to create a trace of it, and the linked times of its capture and of its loss, Baudelaire creates a space, identified by Zaoui, where images attempt to elucidate September 11th in terms of what it has left us with, “almost nothing: a Ground Zero that is an empty space, a suffering that is either repressed or expressed but is devoid of images; and at the same time, a necessity to understand this event in terms of what it announces: possibly the daily experience of terrorist violence, where terror borders indifference, where hatred looses its object as it multiplies, where war can no longer be thought of outside of its staged nature, where image is only a witness to what is no longer there.”
Although Baudelaire was living in New York during September
11th, these image-based meditations on its aftermath are
situated in Paris, where the artist has made his home for
the past four years.back
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