The Brooklyn Rail

An eerily familiar moment echoes across social media in the form of nearly identical skits. In each one, we see a commercial plane flying across the frame towards a Manhattan skyscraper. The camera urgently zooms in on the aircraft, distorting the distance between the plane and building despite the thousands of feet that actually separate them. Onlookers scream in fear and chortle at the parallels they can draw between this simulated moment and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, reactions that veer into contempt—in one, a spectator jeers “aww, man!” when the plane inevitably disappears and emerges from behind the building unscathed.

Contemporary artist Jenna Bliss’s short film Spectacle (2021), now on view as part of her solo exhibition Basic Cable at Amant, employs similar imagery and figure-ground manipulations to a sobering effect. Bliss’s film features shots of a commercial airliner superimposed over stylized renditions of both pre-and-post 9/11 landscapes, like a sunset-dappled skyline absent the glass high-rise buildings popularized in the 2010s and the narrowed, angular spokes of the Bloomberg-era Oculus. Bliss compiles this footage like an abstract highlights reel, devoid of music or commentary, filtered through and enriched by its Super 8 mm grain. The camera zooms in and away from the airliner while the film’s layered landscape shots remain either static or consistently distanced. Bliss’s cinematography makes the plane appear as though it were hovering over and retreating from its backgrounds and the viewer, like an off-kilter housefly, imbuing the film with both a haunting prescience and dark humor.

In keeping with its title, Basic Cable presents Spectacle along with companion film Conspiracy (2021) on a simplified box television set. The monitors rest on a pair of asymmetrical pedestals that assume the form of the Twin Towers, evoking the urgency and anguish of receiving live news updates that day while emphasizing the distance that separates the technological, journalistic, and ideological landscapes of 2001 from those of the present day. Conspiracy, like Spectacle, is an abstract compilation of New York City film footage, dramatizing the traumatic and continuous impact of 9/11 by layering footage of the Twin Towers with common New York City objects like neon window displays and chainlink fences. In one particularly poignant moment, Bliss frames a shot of the Twin Towers—filmed at a distance from a moving above-ground subway—with the 6 train’s green dotted halo.

The skits with which I opened this text embody an increasingly detached attitude towards 9/11, especially amongst younger people, a phenomenon exacerbated by social media’s capacity to function as an empathy-diminishing echo chamber. Bliss, by contrast, incorporates her perspective as a New Yorker and millennial in depictions of 9/11 like Spectacle, which embody the familiarity and sensitivity that comes from her clear recollections of 9/11 and its wake of devastation. Bliss’s application of No Wave film aesthetics to the early twentieth century—the midpoint between the 1970s and today—draws a clear historical and cultural throughline between 9/11 New York and its aftermath while acknowledging her temporal distance as a practicing artist in the 2020s.

Bliss represents another pivotal, collectively traumatic event of the Bush administration through the lens of personal experience in her 2023 film True Entertainment. Here, Bliss satirizes the pre-2008 financial crash fine arts market with pretentious gallery attendees and pastiches of Y2K mood boards and Tumblr collages. Bliss uses this setting to call attention to the public’s unending commodification and consumption of women’s suffering—two male art handlers make sexist cracks about their female colleague, the gallery’s manager capitalizes on mysterious blood splatters appearing on one of artist Lola Van Haas’s paintings as a signifier of her artistic authenticity, and Lola herself experiences a public nervous breakdown. Lola’s outburst resembles the effects of public scrutiny on Britney Spears, the subject of several of Lola’s paintings and an artist whose work and persona have since been reappraised, and are today regarded as unfairly maligned. While True Entertainment’s snappy, sketch comedy-esque dialogue is both a tonal and thematic departure from the more abstract, atmospheric Spectacle and Conspiracy, all three films embody the act of bearing witness to early 2000s phenomena, both as they unfold and bolstered by hindsight.