HVCCA: Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art

Nancy Hall-Duncan puts the challenge of recording post-9/11 culture directly: "9/11 was one of those events where you had a way of approaching life before 9/11 and a way of approaching life after. It was like the Kennedy assassination....That day changed the world."

So much so, she says, that "as long as there are people alive with personal memories, there will be people who say that you shouldn't be making art of it."

Five years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the tangled questions of how art responds to catastrophe have only intensified as memorials multiply, major films are released and visual artists begin to move past simply commemorating the event.

But what is art's responsibility to 9/11? Is tragedy the province only of those who experience it, or does it belong to those who shape it as well?

Whose grief is it, anyway?

In 2003, when Hall-Duncan, senior curator of art at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, opened "JFK and Art," some patrons said they stayed away because their memories of the assassination 40 years later were still just too raw.

But a 9/11 tribute the next year - the museum displayed Robert Rauschenberg's "I Love New York" (2001) and "The Face of September 11th" (2001) by his associate, Darryl Pottorf - was much more meaningful, she said. The community and the museum had families who had lost loved ones on 9/11 and the exhibit comforted her. The museum eventually acquired Rauschenberg's pigmented inkjet print of the Statue of Liberty holding a miniature Twin Towers.

"A lot of our lives are lived in memory," Hall-Duncan says. "All of us have layers of memory of New York before 9/11 and after 9/11. I think art can be a solace. It's always a solace to me."

But while art can be a solace or an inspiration, a spur or an escape, it is first and last a means of self-expression.

"The artist's obligation is to produce the best work for the artist," says Bartholomew Bland, curator of exhibitions at The Hudson River Museum in Yonkers and consultant on the Westchester Arts Council's exhibit, "A Community Comes Together: The Making of 'The Rising,' Westchester County September 11th Memorial."

That doesn't mean that artists are holed up in their studios, oblivious to all but their vision, says Matt Distel, executive director of the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill.

"The thing artists are always doing is responding to their environment," says Distel. His "Only the Paranoid Survive," opening Sept. 17, considers the roles that government and media play in our post-9/11 age of anxiety. "A lot of artists say if you're not experiencing the world, you're not making artwork."

So artists will respond to 9/11. If they are receptive to the world around them, they must.

"I think 9/11 speaks to artists in a way that they have to voice it," says Joyce Picone, executive director of the Putnam Arts Council and the Belle Levine Art Center in Mahopac. "I don't think (artists) have a choice. They're compelled to do it."

Michael Singletary, a Mount Vernon painter who turned to art - his own and Pablo Picasso's "Guernica" - in the aftermath of 9/11.

"Guernica" (1937) remains the benchmark of epic artistic responses to epic tragedy - the Nazi bombardment of a Basque town at the behest of the fascist general, Francisco Franco. The work's disjointed, Cubist style has become a symbol of the chaotic horror of violence in other times, including the Vietnam era and 9/11. "Painting is not made to decorate apartments," Picasso said. "It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy."

Against the enemy that is despair and hatred, Singletary created an acrylic and oil assemblage called "9/11: The Learning Curve" (2001), in which a howling face, gnarled paint and telling pieces of fabric - a bra made of two surgical masks, a bat-shaped eye mask - fuse into a cry from Hell on Earth.

Pulling out the work a couple of weeks ago brought a flood of memories and a trickle of tears, Singletary says: "It's one of my most difficult paintings, and yet one of the paintings I had to do....There was nowhere else to go."

Even now, artists have to approach the subject with care.

Speaking of the HVCCA's show, Distel says: "Artists need to be aware, too, that whenever they address a subject as loaded as civil liberties, they do need to make sure they're doing so in a thoughtful way." That thoughtfulness is harder to come by when there's money involved, he adds.

In that context, his colleague Daniel Fuller - curator of new media at the Hudson Valley Center and organizer of its "Paranoid" show - criticizes Oliver Stone, director of "World Trade Center," for choosing a 9/11 story with a happy ending. "In Hollywood, you have to make movies that are marketable," Fuller says. "A painting can show what an artist wants to show."

The nature of each art form plays a role in defining its obligations. Surely a public memorial like "The Rising" - the soaring 80-foot stainless-steel sculpture honoring the 109 Westchester County residents who died in the 9/11 attacks - has more of a responsibility to those directly touched by the event than does Singletary and his highly personal painting.

As the text for "The Rising's" companion show at the Westchester Arts Council notes, County Executive Andrew J. Spano was determined that the families involved would select the location and tone of the memorial, which is being dedicated today on the Kensico Dam Plaza in Valhalla.

"Every individual is memorialized here, not only by stones and personal inscriptions at the base but by shining steel at the top," Spano says of "The Rising," which cost $900,000, most of it donated by Westchester residents.

If a public memorial has a duty to those it remembers, popular media have other challenges.

"A painting or a sculpture is an abstraction of an event, whereas a film intends to recreate an event and is therefore going to be more visceral," says "The Rising" consultant Bland, who adds that he was "shaken" by the movie "United 93."

Ultimately, it is not the medium that matters but the messenger and the message itself, says Alison Crowther, who lives in Upper Nyack. If anyone has a right to talk about art and anguish, she does.

Crowther is a violinist at home in the world of the New York City Ballet and American Ballet Theatre. Her son, Welles Remy Crowther, was an equities trader for Sandler O'Neill and Partners on the 104th floor of 2 World Trade Center when he perished in the attack. Before he died, the 24-year-old trained firefighter, organized a rescue effort, saving lives as "the Man in the Red Bandanna" - which his mother says he kept in his back pocket.

He is, of course, more than a lhero. He is her child. So she is particularly sensitive to the ways in which 9/11 is portrayed.

Of the films, she says, "I don't see them as exploitative. I personally observed that they've been very respectful of the families." She cannot, though, watch these movies or even the trailers: "It's for the rest of the world. We've already lived this."

Still, Alison Crowther believes in the transcendent power of art. Each year she and her family hold a Concert for Remembrance. The 2004 memorial saw the American premiere of "Lament and Restoration," a violin concerto written for her by Ron Wasserman, principal bassist of the New York City Ballet Orchestra.

This year's concert, Sept. 17 at Grace Episcopal Church in Nyack, features the unveiling of "Phoenix Rising," a sculpture the family commissioned to commemorate their son's sacrifice. Created by Eznic Karakashian from a section of a World Trade Center steel beam, "Phoenix Rising" will hold the church's paschal candle.

From its bronze base, coppery flames morph into a brass phoenix, whose wings soar - a metaphor not only for the good that can come from evil but for the way in which art can bridge suffering.

"We didn't turn inward," Crowther says of herself and her family. "I would've died. We turned to our family and friends." And to the arts. "That

" she says, "was the focus that saved us."

Return to Previous Page