With mixed feelings I rushed to PS1, to see its September 11 show. The promise was indeed intriguing and somehow relieving: in a lavish shower of commemorative events, PS1 curator Peter Eleey wrote in his statement on the show that “the exhibition considers the ways in which 9/11 has altered how we see and experience the world in its wake.” The public commemorations seemed to be unthinking. Perhaps art would present a rich alternative.
Yet, I went to the show with some trepidation. I’m getting more and more uncomfortable with contemporary art curatorial projects: less for professional reasons, while working with an artist often invited to group shows, more personal reasons, as a viewer. Following Sontag, I might decry interpretation. Yet, I must add an important qualification. Art critics are not the problem. Curators are.
I find contemporary art all too often trapped in labeling, paradigm-itizing and contextualizing; as if the death of universal values art had been addressing for centuries became conclusive with the need of pinning down the reading of art and awarding more or less random collections of artworks under common thematic, paradigmatic labels.
It does not mean that I don’t appreciate interesting juxtapositions of artworks, revealing their unexpected meanings, which have been proposed by some curators of group shows. The issue starts when these juxtapositions are radicalized, with artworks only used as a mere illustration of a curator’s statement. The art curator becoming the artist, placed somewhere between film director and writer, seems to me to be a corrupted idea. I’m sure many curators would disagree with me, and I would like to underline that it doesn’t apply to the profession in general. Rather, I address the scary moment of transformation from witness/revealer/“midwife” to superstar. I’m sorry, but I can’t help the feeling that I’ve been manipulated as a viewer. Art as manipulation is not a viable alternative to unthinking commemoration.
But Eleey’s was an interesting invitation, and there were notable works at the exhibit.
Watching a short film “Little Flags” by Jem Cohen (embedded below), depicting the carnivalesque welcoming of soldiers coming back after the Gulf War, leaves disturbing thoughts about the continuation of that story.
So does the “REPORT” by Bruce Conner, addressing the astonishing fact that there is hardly any complete TV footage covering JFK’s assassination, with the artist’s statement that violence is ultimately without the representation: quite mind-blowing, considering the fact that 9/11 attacks were probably the most intensely visually present catastrophe in history of humanity.
Very successful are some intimate artworks in the show, as a photograph turned into wallpaper, by Shannon Ebner, called “Ash Wednesday” (2001). A close-up of a man with a point made with ash on his forehead poses questions about the hues of public manifestation of religion and their complex meanings, as well as un-obvious responses to them. Would the ash on one’s forehead ever evoke the same reaction at the airport as a burka? Do peyote “weigh” the same as the Muslim beard? And how much had it changed in a period between Ash Wednesday of 2001 and 2002…
Lara Favaretto’s “Lost & Found” project of displaying suitcases, found with some personal things of their owners and sealed so that their content would remain unknown, promptly brings to mind “If you see something, say something” campaign for “civic vigilancy.”
Yet, the show leaves discomfort of moving from invitation to reflection to terrorizing with “nine-elevenism” of perception.
Diane Arbus’s (sic!) photograph “Blowing newspaper at a crossroads, N.Y.C” (1956), as written in the press release, “assumes a haunting cast in the context od 9/11 (despite having been taken in 1950s).” Really?
Among many “terrorizing” artworks, Maureen Gallace’s “Late Summer” (2002) – a small painting rendering a house with no doors nor windows, looked through some bushes in the foreground – is the extreme of the curator’s expectations towards the viewers. I would assume that we should decode “late summer” as September, and the Bushes as…
It reminds me of an old Soviet anecdote about the oppositionist caught by the police with a handful of brochures he was disseminating. Asked why he was spreading blank sheets of paper, the oppositionist replied: “all is clear anyway.”
Call me old-fashioned, but I object to the ubiquitous requirement to use given lenses for contemplating art. Yes, art does address current issues, as it has been doing for centuries now – when Brueghel painted his “silly peasant” with metal funnel on his head, everybody at the time knew he was commenting on Erasmus’s broadly discussed work “The Praise of Folly.” Yet, we can still enjoy his painting despite illegibility of some of the encoded symbols, clear and witty for his contemporaries.
Presenting artworks from a particular perspective, arbitrarily gathered “on the occasion of,” and arbitrarily claimed to be eligible for a particular interpretation, creates a danger of promoting a “journalistic” reading of art and disables not only a possibility of expanding meanings. It disables the viewers learning something about themselves through the art experience.
I officially declare my personal war on terrorism. The terrorism of perception.
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