Metropolis
The following article was
borrowed from
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=1571
Remembering 9/11 by Examining Its Political
Fallout
The Lower Manhattan Community Council's
history is intimately tied to the rise and fall—and now the future—of the
World Trade Center. Before September 11, the community arts organization
founded by David Rockefeller had its offices and studios on the 92nd floor
of the WTC's North tower. When the building collapsed, it took with it one
of the LMCC’s own: resident artist Michael Richards, who was in his studio
working on a sculpture dedicated to the Tuskegee Airmen.
The LMCC drew upon its Downtown history and authority for
What Comes After:
Cities, Art, and Recovery, a series of cultural events held
September 8-11 in Manhattan. The programming and discussions—and a
concurrent month-long series of exhibitions— focused on remembering and
rebuilding after tragedy. They also were the city’s first genuinely
challenging arts events examining the WTC attacks and their political
aftermath.
It was inevitable that official remembrance ceremonies for 9/11’s victims
would cede ground to a more vigorous examination of the attacks'
implications and consequences, and a more thoughtful consideration of the
future. For the LMCC, this meant, among other things, confronting the
reality that in this new climate of fear, some artists’ work is labeled
unpatriotic. For example, “A Knock at the Door…,” an exhibition that
opened the series and runs through October 1 at the Cooper Union for the
Advancement of Science and Art and the South Street Seaport’s Melville
Gallery, assembles a collection of works that test the limits of free
expression to the point of running afoul not only of political pieties,
but also the law.
The most celebrated example is the work of Steve Kurtz of the Critical Art
Ensemble, who was detained by the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force
in May and charged with bioterrorism for his research on genetically
modified organisms. His case is represented in a video screen showing news
footage about his arrest along with a selection of materials confiscated
by the FBI. Others, like Hackett of the Madagascar Institute--who
manufactured a bomb for the exhibition that can be set off with his cell
phone--stretch the limits to the point of being scary.
Diamanda Galás’s Defixiones, Orders from the Dead, an operatic
mass performed twice over the weekend at Pace University’s Schimmel
Auditorium, indirectly placed the attacks in the context of the massacre
of Armenians, Assyrians, Anatolians, and Greeks in Turkey from 1914 to
1923. Her incantations, sung in a half-dozen tongues, were like a vision
of multiculturalism gone to hell, refusing to assume a common language for
the expression of grief. At one point Galás, shrouded with scarves and
holding a microphone in each hand, raised her arms to cast a shadow that
eerily recalled the image of the Abu Ghraib prisoner that was wired with
electrodes. The gesture forced one to acknowledge that the war in Iraq is
also part of the legacy of 9/11, whether you agree or disagree with its
legitimacy or role in the struggle against Islamic extremism.
Not all of the series’ events were full of sound and fury, however.
Korean-born artist Chang-Jin Lee achieved a more soothing note in her
Homeland Security Garden installation, where she displayed in plexiglass
cases on Astroturf-covered pedestals a collection of objects associated
with safety. Ranging from the humorous--a package of Plan B birth control
pills--to the poetic--a Bible turned to Genesis with all of the instances
of the word “garden” highlighted--and accompanied by Arabic music, the
installation managed to produce a sense of peace and harmony.
Yet there was little consolation to be found in “Design of Recovery,” one
of a half-dozen roundtable discussions examining arts and culture after
catastrophe. Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, former World Monuments Fund
manager Jon Calame, Lebanese architect Jad Tabet, and former director of
Manhattan’s City Planning office Vishaan Chakrabarti discussed strategies
for transforming buildings that served as tools of colonial occupation,
historic bridges destroyed by bombs, and districts decimated by civil war
into functional symbols of renewal. But the examples of perfectly good
housing torn down in Gaza; the Old Bridge in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina
rebuilt in the-still divided city; and the Beirut neighborhoods razed to
make way for ill-conceived redevelopment suggested that no matter how much
one rebuilds, the catastrophe remains.
For all of the bureaucratic drama surrounding the future plans for the
World Trade Center site, the LMCC’s success in claiming space in Lower
Manhattan for politically challenging cultural events could be regarded as
a signal: an indicator that the city is finally ready to start thinking
seriously about what kind of monument to erect in 9/11's memory. If not
for the ongoing presence of New York Governor George Pataki, who serves as
a sort of feudal landlord over the site, perhaps we could scrap rebuilding
plans and start all over--again.
Issue Date:
September 19, 2005