When the historian Dolores Hayden noted the resemblance of skyscrapers to phalluses, she did so only to develop the fratty metaphor into dark analogy. “Rape has often been presented as seduction. The aggressor ‘couldn’t help himself,’ we are told, or the victim ‘really wanted it,’” she wrote in 1977. “The skyscraper is justified by builders with the same rhetoric: Developers ‘can’t help themselves,’ or the city ‘really wants it,’ despite the economic and social anguish it brings.”
Hayden went on to analyze the typology’s slippery symbolism: for example, the ability of skyscrapers to flatter the “procreant power” of corporations and defense contractors or to give gravitational heft to the illusoriness of real estate speculation. The subjects of Matt Kenny’s Tower Paintings at 56 Henry viscerally exposed this process, as when an anthropomorphic One World Trade Center, brimming with cartoon rage, peels its own face off in a double act of disfigurement and castration. Kenny’s seemingly facile violence reveals multiple wounds: national grief, the domestic and internatio…