9/11 ART AS A GLOSS ON WITTGENSTEIN
I learned two truths from the attacks of 9/11, both
of which I would be glad never to have come to know. One
was that
everyone is capable of heroism, and, correlatively, that
the moral aftereffect of tragedy is a mutual commiseration
among
survivors. For months after the event, there was a spontaneous
bond between New Yorkers that expressed itself in a rare
warmth and consideration. The other truth was that even the
most ordinary
people respond to tragedy with art. Among many unforgettable
experiences of the early aftermath of the event was the unprompted
appearance of little shrines in fronts of doors, on windowsills,
and in public spaces everywhere. By nightfall on 9/11, New
York was a complex of vernacular altars. In the course of
that terrible day, a reporter had phoned, asking me what
the art
world was going to do about the attacks. I could not imagine
that anyone not practically engaged in coping and helping
was able to do anything except sit transfixed in front of
the television
screen, watching the towers burn, and of the crowds at street
level running from danger and, later, trudging through smoke
and detritus in search of someone they knew. I thought the
last thing on anyone’s mind was art. But by day’s
end the city was transformed into a ritual precinct, dense
with improvised sites of mourning. I thought at the time
that artists, had they tried to do something in response
to 9/11,
could not have done better than the anonymous shrine-makers
who found ways of expressing the common mood and feeling
of those days, in ways that everyone instantly understood.
In his Notes on Culture, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes, “Recall that after
Schubert’s death, his brother cut some of Schubert’s scores into
small pieces, and gave each piece, consisting of a few bars, to his favorite
pupils. And this act, as a sign of piety, is just as understandable as the different
one of keeping the scores untouched, accessible to no one. And if Schubert’s
brother had burned the scores, that too would be understandable as an act of
piety.” I have always been moved by this passage, and by Wittgenstein’s
use of the term “understandable.” Schubert’s brother acted
in a way that was at once novel and immediately grasped. Naturally in any given
culture, there are rules for conduct in moments of extreme feeling – weeping,
rending garments, burning candles. What was so affecting on 9/ll and just afterward
was the immediacy and intuitiveness of the shrines, though of course there
would have been some degree of emulation. But emulation itself presupposes
understanding.
One says to oneself: I must do that or something like that. Cultural understanding
in its way is like linguistic understanding. We understand the meaning of gestures
we have never seen performed before, as we understand sentences that have never
before been uttered. And of course we expect that kind of creativity from others
in everyday life.
For the first anniversary of 9/11, I was invited by Katrina van den Heuvel
to write an article about art and 9/11 for The Nation. By that time, a number
of
my friends in the art world had told me of art they had made that somehow fell
under the category of understandability, as described by Wittgenstein. Audrey
Flack’s initial impulse was to pitch in at Ground Zero, but found that
no help was really needed there. She was seized by the need to go to Montauk
and paint the fishing boats there, which she did. That, I thought, was “understandable
as an act of piety.” It was on another plane altogether from painting for
its own sake, though the difference was invisible, as acts of piety often are.
Lucio Pozzi told me how he sat down and copied an earlier watercolor of his own,
a landscape, and then, immediately after, did another copy. I thought that if
I were to do a show of 9/11 art I would want both Lucio’s two watercolors,
as well as Audrey’s fishing boats, though they might look as if they had
nothing to do with 9/11. That is how it is with religious acts. One has to know
the spirit in which they are performed to grasp their cultural meaning. So I
began to ask some other artists I knew whether they too had done any art that
belonged to 9/11. I had already written about Leslie King-Hammond’s marvelous
shrine, which I had encountered in October, 2001, when I visited the Maryland
Institute, where she had put it in the faculty show. It had been a time of personal
turmoil for her and she at first thought she had nothing to show. But the shrine
was natural to her West Indies background, and that is what she made. Mary Miss
told me about designing a peripheral zone – “A Wreath for Ground
Zero” - that would vary with variations in the Zone’s configuration,
where people could come to express their feeling of desolation and loss in
the company of others bent on the same mission.
As I had intuited, all the artists I contacted had done something of the sort
I was thinking about. Robert Zakanitch, a founder of the Pattern and Decoration
Movement of the late 1970s, whose work celebrates the impulse and meaning of
fabrics and ornaments in domestic interiors, had decided to paint lace. I had
just seen a show of Ursula van Rydingsward at the museum at Purchase, and knowing
something of the place of ritual in the texture of daily life in her Northern
European background, I felt certain that 9/11 figured in the provenance
of some of her pieces. Cindy Sherman responded to my query that she indeed
was working on something that responded to the event. “I am fine, though
it is hard to think of what kind of work to make at this point, other than
decorative,
escapist, or abstract. I suppose I’ll explore one or all of these things.” I
could not imagine her making anything escapist or decorative, let alone abstract,
and I later I saw a photograph of hers showing a woman in a kerchief, looking
as defiant as if in propaganda poster, and I was not surprised that this should
have been among her responses – this and her magnificent series of clowns.
Reading proof on the Nation essay for inclusion in my 2005 collection, Unnatural
Wonders, I thought what an interesting philosophical exhibition this might
make, and proposed the idea to Steven Rand at apexart, exactly the right venue
for
it. I wanted the show to coincide with this year’s anniversary of the event,
symbolically, I suppose, our Holocaust, in being caused by a parallel order of
evil. There must have been any number of artists that might have been included,
but I wanted the show to be made of people who were part of my life. Jeffrey
Lohn, at one time my student, figured as the character J in my first book on
the philosophy of art, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Jeffrey had photographed
a number of the photographs that went up in various sites around the city, of
missing persons, bitterly sought. He then rephotographed them as the days passed
and rain and dirt disfigured their faces until finally, in a second death, there
was nothing left. My wife, Barbara Westman, had been deeply affected by the memorial
blue lights – the only appropriate memorial to have emerged – which
she and I observed from the roof of apexart. She published it as a cover for
NYArts on the 2004 anniversary of 9/11.
I am not a curator, but I felt that such a show would itself be understood
not as an ordinary art exhibition, but as what Wittgenstein calls an act of
piety,
and serve as an aspect of the question of what art is after all for, and how
it, just as Hegel had said, serves, together with religion and philosophy,
as a moment in what he called Absolute Spirit.
Arthur C. Danto
© 2005
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