REMEMBERING 9/11 BY EXAMINING ITS POLITICAL FALLOUT

Metropolis Magazine, NY
Sept 19 2005

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.

Diamonda Galas’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
Galas, 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.