Note: the Artists Network and "Our Grief is Not a Cry for War" performances are mentioned towards the end of the article.

The Washington Post Sunday December 30, 2001

Cataclysmic Changes in Art?
The Creative Response to Acts of Destruction Takes Time to Take a Distinctive Shape
BY: Philip Kennicott and Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writers

If all that was necessary to make art was emotional inspiration -- some shattering upheaval -- than we would be awash in art right now.

But the connection between art and emotion is not the same for people who love art and people who make art. The tragedy of Sept. 11 has made all of us return to the human project of making sense of the world with new vigor; but four months out from the bruising blow to the nation's sense of security, there is little coherence to the sense being made by our professional "sense makers," the nation's musicians, playwrights, poets and visual artists.

Consider a case from the past. In 1940, in the middle of the Battle of Britain, the English sculptor Henry Moore was forced by the German aerial bombardment to take shelter in the tunnels of London's subway system, with the rest of the city's beleaguered masses. The jumble of sleeping figures, stretched along the train platforms, produced in the artist a response so breathtakingly self-involved that it seems almost a joke:

"When I first saw it quite by accident -- I had gone into one of them during an air raid -- I saw hundreds of Henry Moore Reclining Figures stretched along the platforms. I was fascinated, visually. I went back again and again." Self-involved, but also fundamentally artistic. In the midst of catastrophe, Moore continues to see the world in a way unique to strong creative artists: as raw data, visual inspiration, material.

This is the way artists think. This is, in part, why the sense they make of 9-11, if they make any sense of it at all, will be a long process, perhaps a maddening and frustrating process, filled with surprises and little of what we most want from them: quick consolation.

Art is not journalism, artistic response is not immediate and artists are not merely barometers of the public mood -- despite romantic ideas of artmaking that still prevail. For all the huge outpouring of public and political sentiment, the artistic response feels, so far, like a scattering of small things.

An encore composed by Michael Abels for the National Symphony Orchestra's Encores Project was written after the attacks, and took a different, more somber view of things than the composer had originally planned. There have been proposals for a memorial project at the World Trade Center site -- two shafts of light rising into the sky -- that capture the imagination and may yet come about. And Maya Angelou has written a disposably sentimental poem on the subject of heroes: "Without their fierce devotion / We are only forlorn and only fragile / Stumbling briefly, among the stars."

If there is to be a raft of lasting plays or symphonies or works of visual art that take up the subject of terror and its aftermath, it will come piecemeal, over the coming years. For now, many artists are still stumbling among more mundane things, finishing work begun a year or more ago. After all, Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem," perhaps the greatest musical response to the Second World War, wasn't heard until 1961. "Was great art ever created in three months?" asked Robert Atkins, an art activist and critic who helped found 911 -- The September 11 Project, a teeming clearinghouse for post-attack art, good and bad, that is representative of a tendency to use the Internet to gather ideas rather than sort or synthesize them.

The world of art, like most corners of society, was affected by the terrorists -- but without moving in one clear direction. Priorities changed, context changed, moods changed.

The much-celebrated "death of irony" -- probably more a new emphasis on seriousness -- reared its head among artists as well. The need to be, or at least to seem to be, serious led to changes in exhibition schedules and concert programs. A fall show of playful bronzes by Tom Otterness at New York's Marlborough Gallery was postponed to happier times. Leonard Slatkin's historic appearance as the first American to conduct the Last Night of the Proms in London turned into a somber occasion, with traditional British patriotic ditties replaced by American elegies. Memorial concerts displaced the usual season openers throughout September; the national anthem (and, even more, "God Bless America") cropped up on concert programs with regularity. The general anxiety of the times tested the mettle of touring artists, and a few famous names -- violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, for instance, canceled a Kennedy Center performance because of fear of travel -- earned notoriety.

Finding art about 9-11 throws one up against the fundamental issue: What is art? If anything made by anyone to express something is art, then there is plenty of art to be taken into account. The Internet is awash with grief and healing images by artists unlikely to be taken up by museums.

"My feelings of helplessness gave way to an inner strength that moved me to give something of myself, anything to help," wrote an artist identified as Allan Linder. His Web site of paintings, called the "America" series, represents the country as a giant, with superhero muscles and a cape made of the American flag; the giant is weeping, cradling the Twin Towers in his arms.

"I would damn some of this work as only therapeutic," Atkins said.

Photojournalism -- again, is it art? -- flourished, capturing events as they happened, and producing what will certainly be the most memorable images of the tragedy: human beings so coated in dust and ash that they seem like animate statues; surreal and jagged moonscapes that felt, if one could ignore the reality behind them, like abstract paintings. Perhaps more than anyone else first confronting the magnitude of the tragedy, photojournalists faced the tensions between "artsifying" and truth-telling, between finding beauty in ugliness and simply letting ugliness speak its own meanings. Thomas Hoepker, a photographer for the Magnum agency, put it this way: "When I looked at the pictures from our photographers, there were some that were wonderful or clever compositions, but they emphasized the artistry in photography rather than telling the story."

We may be at a moment in cultural history when "just telling the story" is a prevailing aesthetic. For a new work by the Miami Contemporary Dance Company, choreographer Ray Sullivan turned, in part, to media accounts of the tragedy to assure the authenticity of his raw material. Even before the tragedy, more than a few contemporary videos already looked strangely like the endlessly looping footage of crashing planes that tortured us for hours on Sept. 11. Installation artists have also long taken the look of haphazard documentation -- the impromptu shrines and memorials that cropped up from walls in Penn Station to Union Square Park -- and turned it into high art. Raw records and responses to the attacks end up looking just like some of today's most highly regarded art.

One of the most important curatorial responses to the attacks looks set to work in just this collaborative, documentary mode. Exit Art, a major nonprofit art center just blocks from Ground Zero, has initiated "Reactions," an absolutely open call for 9-11 art with just one stipulation: Submissions have to fit on a standard 8 1/2-by-11 sheet of paper. The entries -- thousands of them, unedited, including texts and sheet music and printed e-mails as well as images -- will be papering the walls at Exit Art from Jan. 26 to March 30. "They're communicating ideas to you," says Exit Art co-founder Jeanette Ingberman. "Does it matter if it's art?" She also points out that her project allows professional artists to make work about a subject that might not suit the idioms they usually work in. Robert Gober, a prominent American known for surreal sculptures whose subjects can have an almost disappearing subtlety, gave Exit Art a sheet of biographical text, with a scrawled image of two towers barely visible behind it, that doesn't look much like his usually cryptic and meticulous artwork.

Not every medium or discipline or style is suited to coming to grips with historical events, however epochal such events turn out to be. In the early 1950s, when Robert Motherwell turned out his gorgeous, lyrical suite of abstract paintings called "Elegy to the Spanish Republic" -- fields and blobs of saturated oils, often in red and black -- he arguably said more about how raw paint renders raw emotions than about the victory of iron-fisted dictator Francisco Franco a decade earlier. When Charles Ives wrote his short tone poem "The General Slocum," which refers to New York's second most lethal tragedy, the loss of some 1,000 people on a steamship in 1904, it was probably inconceivable that the title would one day draw a blank from listeners; yet the music, a fearsome collage of clashing sounds and harmonies, is now entirely disconnected from history, except as an exercise in radical composition decades ahead of its time.

Even when history provokes great representational art, the art doesn't always help evoke history: "Guernica" is more likely to recall a painting by Picasso than a Spanish town savaged by civil war. Whatever "9-11 art" ends up looking like, one thing is sure: The best of it won't be the feel-good stuff that people may imagine now. Great art, even if it aims to heal, is almost never easy medicine; sometimes it picks at scabs. There will be martial fanfares, and healing elegies, and worshipful bronzes of police and firefighters. All of these are underway already. But there will also be all kinds of less predictable reactions.

Looking at the long list of art events on Atkins's 911 Web pages, a project by a group called the Artists Network of Refuse & Resist jumps out.

Just weeks after the attacks, hundreds of contemporary artists gathered for a performance titled "Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War." If art is the barometer of the public's mood, then this one's out of whack.

"Artists can come at issues from a new angle," says Anne Pasternak, director of Creative Time, a New York nonprofit that launched a poster competition on the theme of 9-11. The group went out of its way to seek submissions from artists, designers and writers whose work was already issue-centered: Political engagement from conceptualist Hans Haacke rather than playful, ironic kitsch from Jeff Koons; expressive representation from painter Leon Golub rather than exuberant abstraction from Frank Stella. Of course engaging difficult issues has its own perils, especially when the public expects art to give it healing, or even simple civic boosterism.

Within the performing arts, there is now a rancorous discussion of whether the presenters of music, theater and dance should limit themselves to a conservative role, offering consolation and familiarity rather than intellectual or aesthetic provocation. The Kennedy Center's Michael Kaiser called for performing arts presenters to stick to their core values, to keep offering new and interesting work even if ticket sales were threatened. Others have championed the idea of retrenchment, arguing that Americans want and deserve a retreat into works they know, understand and already appreciate.

In response to 9-11, some artists will work to console, and others will strive to provoke -- but we won't know for ages which ones, if any, have somehow got things right, and made great art. For now, however, only one thing is sure: It's the freedom to get it wrong that is essential.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.