Aesthetic Value
Why is there so little 9/11 art?
By Kriston Capps
Friday March 9, 2007
As far as we can tell, five years after the fact, Sept. 11, 2001, changed visual art in only one significant way: It prompted artists and critics to ask, “Where’s the 9/11 art?” Their cousins in the literature game, after all, have recently pumped out novel after 9/11 novel: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country by Ken Kalfus, and Terrorist by John Updike are just a few titles from the shelf. A comprehensive exhibition of World War I-era Dadaist art—which kicked off 2006 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and closed at MoMA in New York on the 5-year anniversary of 9/11— sharpened the point. Indeed, that show was all about themes that gained renewed currency when the towers fell: absurdity, national existentialism, full-tilt militarism. And while the war in Iraq in particular, and the Bush presidency in general, have become irresistable punching bags for visual artists—a scowling Cheney effigy is as likely as any portrait you’ll find in a contemporary gallery—the art establishment, while outspoken on Iraq, has been largely silent on the attacks of 9/11.
One exception, a so-called “Classical Realist” painter named Graydon Parrish, picked up the theme. Commissioned this winter by the New Britain (CT) Museum of American Art, Parrish produced a tribute so execrable, so phenomenally terrible, that even his most likely defenders—The New Criterion, a publication whose conservative aesthetic nearly mandates that they support reactionary artists like Parrish—panned his Cycle of Terror as “yet another tragedy of 9/11. It is literal if not didactic. It is a machine for illustrating technical skill, far more than it is a moving memorial to September 11”.
Most critics wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole, even after so much talk about the absence of just this sort of painting. Yet the lack of a response to Parrish’s piece, and really the entire Classical Realist genre as a whole, opens up the debate in “identity aesthetics,” revealing exactly what art by and for conservatives is all about, and explains why there can’t be 9/11 art.
In four pages of explanatory interview notes meant to accompany the painting, Gregory Hedberg, former director of the New York Academy of Art and currently a gallery director in New York, details what each of Parrish’s figures symbolizes, leaving no symbolic element unexamined. (How else would you know that there’s a family among those figures? Or that the Two Twins represent the Twin Towers? What should we make of the jet planes?) His walk-through doesn’t mention the allegorical significance of the magnanimous mammaries hanging off the three crouching women (the Three Fates, for the uninitiated); without a doubt, the enormous breasts constitute a figurative mistake, if we are to hold Parrish to a realistic standard set by historical portraiture and not Pamela Anderson. Neither does New Criterion editor James Panero mention any compositional missteps in his negative review of the work, posted on the magazine’s blog, Armavirumque.
For the conservative fans of Classical Realism, to even consider the painting on its technical merits would run counter to the faith. Consider what Panero writes about Classical Realism:
But beyond a mere style or technique, Classical Realism is a value system. For many, it borders on an evangelical faith. A sort of beaux-arts radicalism, it can be reactionary and thuggish: a sociological phenomenon; a form of “identity aesthetics.”
Crucially, the investment in Classical Realist painters such as Parrish, Jacob Collins, Frank Arcuri, Nicholas Kjellgren, and others is ideological. Roger Kimball describes Parrish as a leader in the “counter-revolution in taste and sensibility,” an insurgency that
Kimball has long advocated in the art press. In a piece on Parrish, art historian Lee Sandstead describes the perfidy of the last century: “Not only were hundreds of artists purposely ignored, but also 600 years of accumulated artistic knowledge was jettisoned.” With real hubris, Hedberg compares The Cycle of Terror to Picasso’s Les desmoiselles d’avignon, suggesting that the former undoes the unfortunate revolution fomented by the latter.
It makes Panero something of an enigma in that he adores Classical Realism but snubs the Cycle of Terror. But then, his chief complaint about Parrish is not that his work is garish, it’s that he strays too far from the fold: “When your work is about the international AIDS crisis, or the attacks of September 11, your interests are suddenly far from ‘art for art’s sake.‘” To admit that art has a social function based on the intent of the artist would be to admit a lot of undesirable elements from the art world—so Panero throws the baby out with the bathwater.
But what about the liberals—all those sculptural-intervention artists, where were they? “For several years afterward I looked intensely for 9/11-specific artwork, finding little,” wrote Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes on the five year anniversary of the attacks. He mentions two candidates, Iranian expat artist Shirin Neshat and mixed-media painter Lari Pittman, but neither artist’s work makes any obvious reference. Other observers have run into the same wall.
Artists would seem to make unlikely saber rattlers. And there may be a loose parallel between artistic and political dovishness. In the atmosphere immediately after the attacks—when Americans rallied behind an unpopular president, when Christopher Hitchens switched sides—perhaps liberal artists stepped forward as uncertainly as liberal Democrats did. That scans with the rebound, rhetorical and electoral, that Democrats have seen in recent years, because while 9/11 art was in short supply in the years immediately following the attacks, political art about the Iraq war is evident today.
But perhaps there is another, more aesthetic explanation for the lack of 9/11 art. After all, the attacks were, in a real sense, images themselves, and pretty unambiguous ones. The horror that Americans felt was a response not only to the attacks directly, but also to images transmitted through film and photographs. How could the event be further explicated through imagery?
Yet the most likely artistic explanation, one that Panero inadvertently nails, is that artworks “about” 9/11 in an explicit sense would be suddenly far from “art for art’s sake.” The conservative premise about art today has it all wrong: Art is not caught up in a dogmatic pursuit of a liberal agenda. While contemporary artists have exploded the narrative and representational modes of the post-World War II artists that preceded them, narrative and relevant representational work does still exist. They just don’t (and won’t) look like Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s Third of May. If they did, they would probably fall out of step with the direction of contemporary art.
Another example is Richard Serra’s “Stop Bush,” which references the infamous digital photograph of a hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner taken by his American tormentors. Serra has explicitly said that his infamous image is not art but activism, a distinction that could be read as a vote of no-confidence in his own sculpture’s ability to do the same work. It was a premature claim on Serra’s part. His work and that of other post-historical artists may yet reveal 9/11 in a subtle way—just as Dada reveals World War I—once there’s enough historical distance and critical perspective to assess the relevant works. But it won’t come from conservative artists, even though conservatives immediately took up 9/11 as their territory: Classical Realists have too much at stake in combating mainstream art to actually address the world at large.
Kriston Capps is a
Washington, D.C.-based arts writer. He blogs at Grammar
Police.
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Comments
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great article.
— billary obama - Mar 9, 07:13 PM - #What a spectacular stretch of the imagination to paint all classical realists as conservative?
The author looses most credibility with his snarky broadbrushing of an entire segment of artists.
He also fails to explain what the “direction of contemporary art” is? Judging from what one reads in the NY Times and the art glossies, it is a return to realist painting, which is the overall umbrella under which classical realists, both Reps and Dems, operate.
— Dillon - Mar 12, 10:46 AM - #In the medium of comic books, I can immediately think of two pretty spectacular works of art rooted in 9/11: Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and Rick Veitch’s phenomenal Can’t Get No.
On a local note, Jon Haddock’s Cartoon Violence ( http://whitelead.com/jrh/cv/index.html ) and Embedded ( http://whitelead.com/jrh/embedded/index.html ) series both include Twin Towers scenes. (Full disclosure: Jon and I are related.) Now, I can’t vouch for the national art scene, but I imagine there are quite a lot of less-famous artists working 9/11 into their work.
— Thad - Mar 13, 07:24 PM - #there was a “performance art” piece called The Falling Man, wherein an artist dressed in a business suit, dangled himself upside down from wires and struck a horrific pose… the reference was to people who fell/jumped out of the WTC... a little too literal, or maybe too soon, for me…
— Pete Bogs - Mar 16, 05:56 PM - #most artistic reflections are not connected directly to any one even, if we wanted that we’d look to the news. Instead you group the ideas, thoughts and fealings into a new form… i’m sure every artist was effected by 9/11 just as every american was- look close, you’ll see it
— jerry - Mar 16, 06:36 PM - #I appreciated William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition for it’s very artistic evocation of that day’s prime images and the after-effects of that day on some of it’s characters with aesthete and intellectual tendencies.
— RT - Mar 17, 01:46 AM - #Last year, Václav Havel may have put his finger on it with his reference (http://bicycle-diaries.blogspot.com/2007/03/nycs-freedom-tower.html) to the new Freedom Tower. Art seems to have shifted from remembrance to amnesia by burying 9.11 along with the dead and the destroyed buildings.
But here in the City of Big Shoulders there’s been quite a bit of 9.11 art, one example of which I own. It’s the third jpeg down in the post listed above.
— Da' Square Wheelman - Mar 17, 04:09 PM - #