Remembering 9/11 on its anniversary is to remember everything: fear, terror, hope, loss, love, anger, resentment, safety. No other event in American history is comparable to the ongoing emotional, political, and social effect that 9/11 had on America. Perhaps since Pearl Harbor, no foreign fighting or war has taken place on American soil. It induced a collective sense of vulnerability that was devastatingly new for Americans, and importantly, unnervingly familiar to other countries.
And although it has been a decade, 9/11 exists as an event that defies understanding, and for that reason it is perhaps not surprising that we have trouble figuring out how to remember it. What is the best way to memorialize our loss while retaining our resilience to live without fear? What are we remembering? What can we remember when 9/11 hasn’t actually ended, when the “war on terror” rages on despite the ten year distance? What is the story of 9/11? Can there be a story when 9/11 is really about all that is in absentia?
P.S. 1 MoMA tries to remember in its September 11 exhibit. On view from September 11, 2011 – January 9, 2012, it “brings together more than 70 works by 41 artists—many made prior to 9/11—to explore the attacks' enduring and far-reaching resonance. Eschewing images of the event itself, as well as art made directly in response, the exhibition provides a subjective framework within which to reflect upon the attacks in New York and their aftermath, and explores the ways that they have altered how we see and experience the world in their wake.”
P.S. 1 MoMA smartly chose to showcase works that were made prior to the attacks in emphasizing how 9/11 has not only radically altered our perceptions of everyday objects – an unattended suitcase, a pile of ash – but also how 9/11 persists as an ongoing trauma in American public consciousness. In other words, to talk about 9/11 is to talk about how we as a country can’t, or refuse, to get over it. Or maybe we just don’t know how.
The exhibit, which grimly opens with black party banners, very early on situates 9/11 from the American perspective. For an exhibit that wished to focus on the aftermath of the attacks, it is slightly curious that few pieces consider the global or religious reactions, but considering the (perhaps inevitable?) memorializing tilt of the exhibit, it’s possible that the curators felt boxed into creating a U.S. centric interpretation of the event. For instance, in the large gallery the soundtrack from the Mel Gibson movie, The Patriot, surges through the exhibition. Full of over dramatized crescendos, the instrumental music is melancholy and cliché, a wry comment on the American patriot fulfilling the role of both hero and anti-hero in the post 9/11 political landscape. As I ambled through the exhibit, passing by an unattended leather suitcase, a red tarpaulin bag that looked like a body bag, the soundtrack came to suggest the uncomfortable oscillation between hero and villain, in which each and every person is both potential hero or potential threat in fulfilling their own patriotic visions.
The rigid 9/11 boundaries between friend and foe are the most unnerving in one of the few Arabic related pieces. In one of the smaller galleries, a poster entitled “Arabic Joke” turns out to be more tragic than funny in the post 9/11 world. To briefly paraphrase it (since the MoMA guards prohibited all photography), an Arabic man thinks he is made of grain and begins to fear that the chickens will eat him. His wife chastises him and eventually sends him to a psychiatric ward. When the doctor tells her that her husband has improved, she picks him up but is dismayed to see her husband curl up in fear when they pass by some chickens. She asks, “I thought you were better and no longer thought you were made of grain?” The man replies, “Yes, I know I’m not made of grain, but it doesn’t matter what I think, it only matters what the chicken thinks.” The mad man has a good point, and the disaster of being wrongly perceived and categorized, as either “good” or “evil”, permeates the entire exhibit; it becomes a black joke of how terrorism has rendered ourselves and everyone suspect, but of course, especially Muslims.
As I continued to wander through the galleries, what struck me was how many of the pieces depicted absence. Ostensibly, this is because 9/11 is all about loss, but I think there is more to it. For instance, in a piece by Ellsworth Kelly entitled “Ground Zero”, a green trapezoid covers the spot where the two towers stood in a New York Times photograph, and in “Gray Twilight” by Alex Katz, a darkened shroud envelops the entire canvas except for a cluster of gray smears that either illuminate or disappear into the horizon. In another room, a series of photographs depict bone chilling emptiness: uninhabited desks, chairs, blurred shadows in glass windows, a singular cup on a table. In all these works, the sense of loss is complicated by the ambiguity of whether things have actually been lost, or if things have been covered up (the green trapezoid over ground zero), if things were never lost since they were never there to begin with (reading the gray twilight for signs of life), or if absence can take on a presence of its own (the empty chairs and desks). In these works, nothing is apparently there. But as people we like to project our stories and memories and associations on these blank spaces. We like to create a story because otherwise the absence of meaning becomes overwhelming, painful, if not frightening. The exhibit indeed shows how 9/11 has radically altered interpretations of otherwise benign objects.
The photograph, “Unititled (Glass in Airplane)" by William Eggleston, is a prime example.
Before the attacks, the photograph was of a glass on an airplane, perhaps merely suggesting luxury through the golden brown alcoholic beverage, the idle fingers stirring ice. Yet post 9/11 it takes on an ominous tone. One imagines the people on the ill fated planes enjoying their last drink, their last view to the outside world. The person with a wedding ring. It becomes an emotionally charged moment since the passengers do not yet know their planes will be hijacked, and as the shadow on the cup extends longer and longer, it becomes a bad omen predicting the shadow of not only the two towers falling, but of the lingering shadow of terrorism itself.
But it’s possible that I am reading too much into this.
It’s possible that there is no story at all.
For the most part, it is up to the visitor to project their own memories, emotions and anxieties on the pieces in the September 11 exhibit. The plaques do little more than contextualize when and where pieces were made. Because of this, the exhibit compels the visitor to narrativize each of the pieces in their own way. In and of themselves, the pieces do not possess any significance to 9/11, only resemblances, traces. As a result, the exhibit reflects the confusion of how we as a country are supposed to remember 9/11 if we continue to encounter it daily through new airport security measures, laws to legalize surveillance, hyperbolic news reports from Afghanistan and Iraq, profiling an entire religion as potential threats. This exhibit doesn’t indulge in melancholy practices as much as it painfully reminds one that terrorism and anxiety remains a part of daily life, much as it was ten years ago.
In coming to terms with this anxiety, the problem of remembering 9/11 is also a problem of producing a coherent story that explains terrorism. But of course, there is none. If a narrative adds logic to a given scenario, then there can be no story of terrorism since inherently, terrorism has no logic. To do so would be to graft a story onto what is simply not there. In choosing works that depict this in absentia, the exhibit plays on 9/11 as a signifier with no signified. The confusion of what to remember is the confusion of how to forget that there is no story.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment