The Art of 9/11 (Page 3)

I spoke with Robert Zakanitch a week or so after 9/11, and he told me he was painting lace. Readers may recall an essay I devoted to an ensemble of huge paintings by Zakanitch a few years ago, which he called the Big Bungalow Suite. He had made his first reputation as an Abstract Expressionist, but like many, including Audrey Flack, felt that he wanted to produce something more meaningful, having to do with life. He became part of a movement in the late 1970s called Pattern and Decoration--"P and D"--which attracted a number of artists disaffected with mainstream art. Big Bungalow Suite refers to the wallpaper and slipcover designs of his Mitteleuropa grandmother's house in New Jersey, where his family worked in factories. He associated that profusion of decorative motifs with the comforting femininity present in what was a sanctuary for him. Lace made a lot of sense, given this background, even if he might have painted lace if 9/11 had not happened. But it had a particular meaning for him because 9/11 had happened.

The sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard was born to peasant parents in a labor camp in Germany, and her work is an effort to create a world she never really knew. Her immense wooden sculptures refer to a primitive form of life in primordial worlds. One of her main forms is that of the bowl--she did a huge bowl for her last show at the Neuberger Museum, in Purchase, New York, which was eighteen feet across. They are made of milled cedar beams, stacked, glued and shaped with power tools. They feel as if they were made with giants in mind. Interestingly, von Rydingsvard sometimes carves lace. But her first work after 9/11 was a crisscross, fencelike structure that she titled mama, build me a fence! A fence, like lace, is, as Wittgenstein would say, understandable.

The idea of an edge or a boundary also suggested itself to Mary Miss, whose studio is situated just north of Ground Zero. Miss is sometimes referred to as a "land artist," and her work is public through and through. Her most recent installation is a kind of "acupunctural" transformation of the Union Square subway station: Various points and fixtures throughout the space have been neatly painted a uniform red. She and her assistants conceived the idea of a "moving perimeter" around Ground Zero, which would in the course of the work take on the form of a wreath--and indeed the title of the piece is A Wreath for Ground Zero. It would have the form of a figure eight, with reference to the two linked areas where the towers stood, or of the infinity sign, symbolizing the "endless knot" of mourners. The "wreath" would allow visual access to the site as the rebuilding took place, and it would also "make a place for the flowers, flags, candles and notes that have appeared throughout the city." Miss's idea got the backing of various public arts agencies, but inevitably ran into resistance with the bureaucracy and business interests of the city. One bureaucrat rudely asked who the hell she thought she was, coming forward like that when there were so many who had just as great a right as she. Her response was that everyone should be called to come forward with their ideas. Nothing immediate came of her project, but on her webpage she has issued a call for ideas, in a way modeled on the shrines that appeared everywhere, for memorial sites throughout the city, recognizing that New York as a whole was and is a mourning site. We should all be memorial artists.

I would certainly want to include in my exhibition an example of a post-9/11 shrine (attributing it, perhaps, to N'Onymous). But I might also include some art that somehow belongs to the experience, but only, in a way, after the fact. Let me explain. There is an artist-in-residence program sponsored by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which had used the ninety-second floor in tower one as studio space. The artists, whose work had been destroyed (and one of whom was killed), were given a chance to show their work at a special exhibition given by the New Museum of Contemporary Art after 9/11. I had the sense that many of them were in a way continuing what they had been doing during their residency, which is certainly the sort of thing many New York artists did, however deeply affected they were by the circumstances. A lot of the best artists I know would either have continued along their trajectories or simply stopped working. As part of his residency in 1999, however, Stephen Vitiello, impressed by the silence within the tower in contrast to the vitality of the city outside, placed two contact microphones against the glass to record external sounds. He called these "World Trade Center Recordings," and one of them, Winds After Hurricane Floyd, 1999-2001, was included in the Whitney Biennial of 2002. It became a very affecting work, in part because of the metaphor that powerful and destructive winds generate, in part because of the fact that no such sounds will ever again be made. And in part because the sounds are the noises of a building far more vulnerable than it looked, or than the interior silences due to the thick glass walls would have led one to suppose. Like all the 9/11 art in my imagined exhibition, it tells us something profound about art, and about ourselves.

I have not made an especially systematic effort to track down further examples of 9/11 art. I really lack the curatorial impulse. And it would be a very strange exhibition were it all brought together, since the work would have very little in common other than the experience that occasioned it. I don't think 9/11 art will stop being made just because the anniversary is at hand. Who knows when an experience will need to be expressed in art? But because of the conditions on its authenticity, it will differ from memorial art, which must be public and take on the responsibility of putting the event at a distance, and must negotiate the controversies such memorials generate. The 9/11 art was private and personal, and dealt with the mitigation of grief.

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