by Jerome du Bois
Imagine that the Pearl Harbor Memorial to the USS Arizona had an art gallery inside which had nothing to do with the Memorial. The rotating shows presented in the gallery would routinely be completely irrelevant to WWII or the surprise attack on December 7, 1941. Animation gels from Disney, Marsden Hartley, Rauschenberg, Martin Mull, Elizabeth Peyton, whoever. But what if the gallerists decided to show Japanese ink drawings of the wartime Imperial period? Or Japanese soldiers' sketches of the same time period? Who would object?
It is my contention that the motivation of those people behind getting the Drawing Center smack dab in the center of the 9/11 Memorial complex at the WTC site is to trivialize that nation-shaking, world-colliding day as soon and for as long as possible. (Read the DC's pdf about their programs and plans for the new site, from Google. There is no mention of 9/11.) They want to make it all so ho-hum. They want 9/11 to take a back seat to art, of all things. Art! To make it so that visitors will come to the WTC for the venues like the Drawing Center and the International Freedom Center (how ill-named can an institution be?), and that morose thing next door --haunted by the 3,000 innocent dead-- will fade into insignificance, like some forgotten statue.
But it won't happen. For many, anyway. The horror, for those who stand there in the Memorial and think, and look, the horror will not fade. For some it may, but not for most, if we can continue to see it as it was. Still, the fools who somehow secured this corner of our pain hope for our amnesia, no matter their protestations otherwise.
Consider the possibilities at the Center:
Ignore 9/11.
Attack 9/11.
Pay tribute to 9/11.
Though only the last would ever be proper, it would end up being lugubrious; they're all losing propositions. The only justification for the Drawing Center's existence is to trivialize 9/11/01. What is a little twee art engine doing there in the first place? The Memorial should have been the only institution at the site. Any addition is a subtraction from the solemnity. It's hallowed ground: they died there. You want to lay your loopy-doopy vinyl-tape installation all over those nice new hardwood floors, while deep underground and all around the restless dead are shaking their heads? Yeah, too many of you do. That's the problem, it's no problem.
Let's consider the options.
Option 1: Ignore 9/11. Mount all kinds of shows --William Pope L. drawing with peanut butter and tubes of newspaper, Art Spiegelman filling the walls with trembling figures like R. Crumb's fancy brother, Leonardo Drew flooding the floor with popsicle sticks collected from around three boroughs, Will Cotton painting the walls with confectionary sugar . . . whatever. It's whistling past the graveyard, spitting on our shoes, and pissing on our graves.
No art is stronger than reality. Put down your brushes, your pencils, your hammer, your video camera; behold reality and tremble and try to be strong. Art these days is a shield of tissue, a selfish illusion. In a time of war, when we're all under the sword of Damocles, this five-sided joker --contemporary art-- wants to share the stage with warriors and engineers and policy analysts, with those who report the truth under fire, with those who stand on a wall for us all, with the wartime dead, and with the innocent dead of 9/11. And all the time he wants to tell us the secrets of his navel. We should not let this joker take the stage.
The secret anger and envy of many artists post-9/11 is that the veil was ripped down the center of their stumpy temple, exposing these pomo poseurs as the naked mole rats they are. While serious people grapple with our precarious future, these wankers wallow in their psychological coprophagy.
Option 3 --let's take the last one second: Pay tribute to 9/11. But this exposes the weakness of art. How does one encompass an event of this magnitude? Tumbling Woman? I think not. How can it be reduced? It shouldn't be, that's our answer. It should not have any artistic interpretation. It should be presented as is, on a scale of 1:1. How? Here's a suggestion.
Take the square footage of the Drawing Center and clear out everything but the load-bearing walls. Then go collect all available physical remnants of the impacts and collapses which a human can comfortably carry --say fifty pounds maximum-- and assemble them in that space on the floors in neat rows and on shelves on all the walls. Cell phones, twisted metal conduits, briefcases, lots and lots of clocks, melted rolodexes, congealed file drawers, thermostats, computers, monitors, printers, purses, watches, perfume bottles, framed desk photos, unidentifiable combinations of matter . . . Thousands of them, everywhere you look, an organized disaster site, and completely unambivalent: This horror happened, it says. Could any art approach such a display? Should it? Should it ever? Maybe in a hundred years, but to bring it down to triviality in five? No. No. No.
[Another suggestion, which if it hasn't already been done would surprise me: get Christian Marclay, or someone like him, to archive every appearance of the Twin Towers in any film, ever --except the last exposures, of that day-- and splice them together in his inimitable way.]
Finally, Option 2: Attack 9/11. And here's where it really gets ludicrous. New York Governor Pataki announced yesterday that it will simply not be allowed. He doesn't seem to realize that every other artist out there bloviates about "site-specific installations," so anyone in the know will know all the America-hating artists, such as Richard Serra, who will want to "respond to the site," giving them the excuse they need to attack the United States. Who is going to babysit the Drawing Center curators to make sure they don't allow artists to violate Pataki's rules? After all, their most recent statement refers to the "inevitable tensions" between "remembrance and cultural activity." Remembrance is one of the most profound and mysterious of cultural activities, since it triggers thoughts of transcendence, death, and the obligation to go on, to do good, to try to figure out why the dead died, and to make sure these innocents did not die in vain.
Yet these Drawing Center people, as good pomo sociopaths, wish to privilege the second-hand scrapings, noodlings, and ruminations of living, mostly New York, artists over the reverberating chasm of pain which many Americans from coast to coast, including we two, carry around with us every day.
Art used to help heal. Artists used to care about the future. These days art is almost always salt in the wounds, so let me stick my thumb in your eye, Contemporary Art. Go fuck yourself.
Go away until you can do us some good.
[Update: Jeff Jarvis argues, as we do, that the IFC and the DC should be moved offsite. And readers can sign a petition here, at TakeBackThe Memorial.com.]
Posted by Jerome at June 27, 2005 07:25 PM | TrackBack