But here, there was something odd in that shaft of light, something alarmingly monumental about the glass and its glowing shadow. Obviously, it had nothing to do with 2001. William Eggleston’s photograph Untitled (Glass in Airplane) (1965–74), for example, depicts an aeroplane tray table, sun streaming in through an iced drink stirred by a disembodied hand, taken when air travel was still romantic. In practice, this meant forcing works to bear meanings never intended. It is represented in the exhibition by a dashed-off collage Kelly made to visualize his idea: a photo of the site ripped out of The New York Times, with a green paper trapezoid pasted on.Īccording to the show’s curator, Peter Eleey, in this image Kelly saw a ‘palliative notion of abstraction’, and this became the model for ‘September 11’: a preference for the oblique and suggestive. Only a single piece in the show directly addresses 9/11: a 2003 proposal by Ellsworth Kelly to cover Ground Zero with a simple mound of grass. Much of the work on display was created before 2001, almost all of it for other reasons. There are no images of the burning towers and nor is it a show of artists’ ‘responses’ to the attacks. But it is, at its best, something else entirely: an attempt to pry September 11 loose from 9/11. Opening on that tenth anniversary weekend, the exhibition obviously participates in the national imperative to memorialize. ‘September 11’, at MoMA PS1, attempts to speak to those moments. But there were moments that preceded all of that, which lurk somewhere, raw and unresolved. The language calcified, the horrible details were examined endlessly, and President Bush told us we would all be OK if we went shopping. Of course, it didn’t take long for the events of September 11 to become the thing called ‘9/11’. I remember when the distress came from too little explanation rather than too much. I remember friends finding office memos from the towers in their Brooklyn backyards. As a New Yorker, there are quite a few things I can remember without the aid of TV: the panic and confusion, the smell in the air, the cloud of dust moving across the city. Somewhere outside the hegemonic directive to ‘never forget’, and the 9/11 industry that command begat, there is the idiosyncratic experience of remembering. Harder to express are feelings that aren’t cynical at all. On CNBC, finance expert Suze Orman presented Money Lessons of 9/11.Įxpressing cynicism at this point is redundant. HBO re-broadcast the 2004 baseball documentary Nine Innings from Ground Zero, about the October 2001 World Series, while SportsNet NY had Reflections on 9/11: New York Mets Remember. National Geographic Channel presented both Inside 9/11: War on America and Inside 9/11: Zero Hour. You might have tuned in to America Remembers on NBC, America Remembers on CBS or America Remembers Ten Years Later on ABC. On the weekend of 11 September 2011, you could have watched 9/11: Day That Changed the World on the Smithsonian Channel or 9/11: Timeline of Terror on Fox News. Ellsworth Kelly, Ground Zero, 2003, Collage on newspaper
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