Date: 11-09-2001
Owning Institution:
Publication:   Vogue Features 1989 – 2006  
Subject: Now    

Like just about everyone else, I remember where I was on the day the Twin Towers fell. I was standing on a beach in southern Tuscany, working on a documentary about the seventeenth-century painter Caravaggio. The news came out of nowhere, by mobile phone, which only seemed to heighten its suddenness and incongruity. There I was, in the bright sunshine, trying (and failing) to do a piece-to-camera about an artist who had been dead for four hundred years. A few oblivious late-summer holidaymakers were playing batball, or swimming lazily in the warm waters of the Mediterranean. And a few thousand miles away large passenger aeroplanes were being flown into two of the world’s tallest buildings.

Later on, the strangeness of the circumstances in which I learned about the attacks seemed, itself, to become part of what they meant to me. Perhaps this was no more than an example of the mind’s obstinate habit of trying to find order in every chaos that confronts it (or perhaps September 11 was one of those days that infects the way in which you think about more or less everything). So for example Caravaggio’s life story, on which I had been working, suddenly started seeming unexpectedly topical: in particular his involvement with the Knights of Malta  – a medieval Christian equivalent of the Al-Quaeda organisation, who took it upon themselves to strike at random against Moslim civilians, killing and enslaving “the infidel” in the name of the one true faith. After September 11, such backwaters of the dim and distant history of East-West conflict seemed much less remote than before. The World Trade Center attack was so shocking, after all, at least partly because it projected an ancient form of murderous fanaticism, with such withering force, into the heart of the world’s greatest modern metropolis.

Even the fact that I had heard about it by mobile phone seemed to reflect a part of its significance. Modern technology means that almost anyone can be reached, almost anywhere, at almost any time. As September 11 showed, it also means that anyone can be killed, anywhere, and at any time. Terrorism has been part of the fabric of European life for so long that perhaps most of us on this side of Atlantic had already become reconciled to this unpleasant truth. But in America, it came as a shock; and as a result a misplaced belief in national invincibility has been replaced by a sense of ill-defined but universal vulnerability. The New York-based painter Leon Golub compares the widespread fear of further attacks, whether by biological warfare or means as yet unknown, “to a low-lying infection that can’t be shaken off.” 

Moments of crisis or catastrophe create a deepseated need for explanation and reflection – and an even more pressing desire for the kinds of defining statement which, traditionally, people have come to expect from art. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the barbaric executions carried out by Napoleon’s troops in Madrid during the Peninsular War provoked Goya to create his great pictorial scream of outrage, The Third of May. Nearly 150 years later, the atrocities committed by Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War incited Picasso to paint the flailing, agonised frieze of Guernica. But who will be the artist to shape September 11 for posterity? So far, the muted response of painters, sculptors, video artists, installationists and conceptualists alike to the attacks of a year ago suggests that it would probably be unwise to anticipate the imminent creation of masterpieces equivalent to those of Goya or Picasso. September 11 and its aftermath may tell us quite a lot about contemporary artists; but whether contemporary artists will turn out to have much to say about September 11 remains an open question.

Norman Rosenthal, director of exhibitions at the Royal Academy, curator of “Sensation” and the perhaps presciently titled “Apocalypse” (to name two of his more recent shows), takes the cynical but forthright view that “September 11 has had absolutely no effect on the art world whatsoever. At first we all thought it would, but I think one can all too easily underestimate the force of the status quo. Artists who do disasters, like Jake and Dinos Chapman, will continue to do disasters; and artists who don’t, won’t. Gary Hume will carry on painting luxe, calme and volupte regardless. When the planes first crashed into the buildings, it seemed for a moment that nothing would ever be the same again. But everything is almost the same as it was before, now, and it’s happened amazingly quickly. The parties are going on as they did before. The market for new art seems undisturbed. And the kind of artists who you might have expected to take inspiration from September 11, well, they’re either all too old, rich and comfortable – like Bruce Nauman, or Robert Rauschenberg – or, like Joseph Beuys, they’re dead,.”

But if Rosenthal is right (and the matter is not entirely cut and dried) how is one to explain the situation which he so acerbically describes? It may be that many contemporary artists feel, naturally enough, that any response which they might choose to exhibit to September 11 has been rendered almost superfluous by the very nature of modern culture. The balance of power, when it comes to the communication of large-scale historical events, has shifted decisively away from fine art to the big media of television and the newspapers. The making of a work of visual art is no longer an act of record, in the sense that it was in Goya’s time, or even that of Picasso. Goya famously wrote “I saw this” on one of the grislier plates of his Disasters of War series, as his way of vouchsafing the shocking truth of the image, of insisting on its veracity, in which lay much of its power. Nowadays anyone with a camera can “see” on behalf of others. Perhaps part of the explanation for why relatively little art has, to date, been produced in response to September 11 lies in the truly staggering amount of veristic photo-reportage that has been generated. The tip of the iceberg of it all was on view at The Wapping Project in London during the summer, in “NYC: Magnum Photos”, an exhibition of massive Cibachromes showing the devastation of the city and the scale of the human suffering involved. The exhibition also included Evan Fairbanks’ extraordinary silent 23-minute video (silent because in the moment of trauma he forgot to switch on the sound on his camera), shot from the foot of the second tower as it was hit and as it collapsed. And if the publishers’ stands at the recent Berlin book fair are anything to go by, this autumn will see a deluge of further September 11-inspired books of photojournalism. All this is proof positive, it would seem, that the artist’s role as a witness has been well and truly usurped by the camera.

But many modern artists are so deeply convinced of their own political impotence (or irrelevance) that it seems a little too easy to put the blame solely on the mass media, and the way in which it has cornered the market in rapid visual response to catastrophe. At a recent public talk at the ICA in London, the artist Pipilotti Rist was asked whether she felt her work had been affected, in any way, by September 11. A collective groan went around the audience, as if to indicate what the contemporary art crowd en masse thought of the question. It seemed peculiarly revealing that such collective embarrassment could be caused by the notion that an artist might seek to address the larger political issues of the time. It also served to strengthen the suspicion that in recent years artists, especially younger artists, have grown so used to barricading themselves away behind a wall of cool that the very idea of being anything other than marginal figures – the naughty schoolboys and schoolgirls of contemporary cultural life, forever mucking about at the back of the classroom – has come to seem more or less unthinkable.

Peter Howson, the Scottish figurative painter and former War Artist in Bosnia, is a distinctly untrendy and openly politically motivated artist to whom none of the above can be said to apply. But although he would like to address (in his words) “the big issues” raised by September 11, he says he felt simultaneously challenged and daunted by the attacks and their aftermath, and has not yet been able even to begin to translate them into his practice as a painter. And while he is at pains to distance himself from “the self-consciously ironic, hip type of artist who couldn’t even bear to dirty their hands with real subject matter”, he thinks the root cause of most artists’ apparent indifference lies deeper than the attitudes of the art world alone. What the attacks really left him reflecting on, he says, “with a kind of clarity that I had not previously experienced”, was the depth of political apathy which currently prevails in Britain, and many other western democracies, at all levels of society.

“I remember watching the attacks on television, and being disturbed by how exhilarated they made me feel, for all the horror of them. I suddenly felt more alive. The feeling lasted for several days. I felt quite guilty about it. Part of our problem nowadays is that most of the time we don’t really have strong feelings about anything. We don’t even feel strongly enough to vote. I think this is why the fanaticism of Osama Bin Laden can be almost refreshing, no matter how abhorrent the actions it leads to. It’s like a return to the passions and religious beliefs of the Middle Ages, like one time intersecting with another. I’ve started reading Dante’s Inferno, maybe partly in response. He’s dealing with the biggest issues of all – death, salvation, faith – and it makes me feel that most of the issues most artists are tackling today just don’t come up to scratch. I don’t have an answer to it. I’m just, er, gestating.”

Rachel Whiteread, another artist of whom that might be said, albeit of a very different persuasion, believes it is far too early to start either praising or castigating artists for their response (or lack of it) to September 11. Because she is known, in part, as a creator of memorials – the most conspicuous of which is her Holocaust Memorial in Vienna – Whiteread was approached not long after September 11 by one or two American journalists who wanted to know what kind of monument she might create to commemorate the attacks on the Twin Towers. “I was sickened by that, I have to say. How on earth can you be expected to take in the scale of such an horrific event, and then digest it, and then figure out its impact on the world and on society in five minutes flat? I ignored the various faxes and requests. Silence seemed to be the best answer.” She does not rule out the possibility of September 11 affecting her work, but clearly thinks discussion of just how it might do so is still premature: “As an artist profound events in history always affect you somehow. I’m sure that I will be affected, but it may take years. I’m not reacting to it consciously in my work, I don’t react in that way to those kind of things. It just made me deeply sad and deeply anxious.” Not long after the event, she travelled to New York, and found herself noticing that a lot of her friends there – artists and non-artists alike – “had suddenly become very much more family-oriented and home-oriented. It had made them take stock of their lives, and what they were doing, and why they were doing it.”

Leon Golub, who belongs to an older generation of American artists, and who has persisted for many years in creating overtly political pictures intended (among other things) to call attention to the less salubrious consequences of his own country’s foreign policy, remains mutedly optimistic about the potential of painting as a medium for addressing the larger themes of modern life: “Contrary to what some people think I believe that the nature of painting has not been inherently undermined by the prevalence of other media of record like photography and so on. Painting still does things, still carries inflections and insinuates meanings, in ways that those other media cannot. But as for September 11… Well, you can’t say that no one will be able to take it on and make an impressive work of art from it. But you can say that it’s a long shot.”

Golub’s own work could be described as a continuing attempt to focus people’s attention on the uneasy contradiction between the freedoms enjoyed in western democracies and the brutal suppressions of freedom carried out elsewhere with the support of those very same democracies. “We can disappear you” runs an inscription across one of his recent canvases, a painting of a jail that could be anywhere in the unfree world, a place of torture and interrogation patrolled by the savage dogs which feature so prominently in much of the painter’s recent work. Golub feels that his painting is unlikely to be greatly affected by the events of September 11 and hints that this may be because those events, for all their horrific and spectacular nature, have done little to alter his fundamentally sceptical view of the modern world. 

Even allowing for the fact that it is probably far too soon to say how September 11 will affect the collective mentality of the modern artist, it remains difficult to imagine any artist today responding with a latterday Guernica – and not just because we no longer live in an age of bold political statements in art. As long as the ultimate significance of September 11 remains unclear (as, arguably, it still does), it will be hard for any artist in good conscience to create a work setting out to define it for future generations. A terrible thing was done in New York, and thousands of innocent people died. But as the consequences of September 11 have spread into Afghanistan and fanned the flames of the Arab-Israeli conflict in Israel and Palestine, the only obvious moral to be drawn from “the war against terrorism” now seems to be that we should beware of all those who think that such an obvious moral might exist.

When I put this point to Leon Golub, he remarked that it struck him as a more European than American way of looking at the situation – but acknowledged that a version of the same ambivalence affects his own attitude. “The motives of the people who carried out the attacks were based on a belief, and a sense of outrage, it seems, that they and their world were so thwarted and compressed by American power and dominance, that the only way they could try to free their society was to attack the great Satan – I’m not saying that’s my point of view, but I can understand their coming from there.” This seems to go to the  heart of the difficulty which September 11 and its aftermath poses, even to those relatively few artists interested in tackling it head-on. “It is very hard to find absolute clarity in the situation. I’m reminded of the strange moral shadows that cloud the Arab-Israeli situation at the moment. For example, this notion of the ‘terrorist’ as it’s used in Israel just now. When the Israelis target somebody and shoot them down, they claim they have the right to do this; but when a Palestinian does it it’s a ‘terrorist attack’. It seems to me they’re both terrorist attacks.” Like Rachel Whiteread, he appears saddened rather than outraged by the attacks and their aftermath; and it takes anger, perhaps, rather than sadness, to produce a latterday Guernica.

The problem for artists is intensified by the fact that the attacks themselves were so visually dramatic, so premeditated, so thoroughly artful, as almost to qualify as works of art in their own right (albeit of a singularly violent and malign kind). As such they continue, to a great extent, to defy their appropriation by others as artistic subject matter. How could anyone paint a picture as full of passion, as shocking, as visually arresting as the television pictures that almost everyone in the world saw on that day a year ago? The composer Karl Heinz Stockhausen said as much in the immediate aftermath of the attacks: “that people rehearse like mad for ten years – totally fanatically – for a concert and then die, that’s the greatest work of art there is in the entire cosmos.” Stockhausen should have chosen his words with more care, and he was, predictably, much maligned at the time for saying what he did. But he was fundamentally correct, however unmpopular his message.

“Of course Stockhausen was right,” says Rachel Whiteread. “In fact, that’s probably why people hated hearing him say it. It was too close to the bone. The attacks were horrible, terrible, an awful thing; but they were clearly planned as a visual spectacle, and however vile a spectacle it was, it was impossible to take your eyes from it.” Nicholas Logsdail, the director of the Lisson Gallery, concurs, although he suggests that a different artistic analogy may be more accurate than that suggested by Stockhausen. The terrorists’ model was not, in his view, a well-rehearsed concert, but a blockbuster movie. “The whole conception of the attack was extraordinary, because it not only hit America militarily and psychologically, but it did so using the dominant visual idiom of American popular art – the visual language of Hollywood. It was as if it had been scriptwritten. It was like a real-life enactment of a Hollywood disaster movie. But saying ‘this isn’t cinema, we’re doing this for real.’ Which made it all the more chilling, and effective, as a statement.”

Logsdail has been to America several times since September 11, has seen the smoking wreckage of Ground Zero and smelt its acrid stench, but still admits that he finds it hard to arrive at an overview. Like many others he believes that it is too early to diagnose the attack’s effects on the mentality of artists, either in Europe or America. But despite its entirely negative short-term influence on the art market – “when Americans don’t travel, modern art sales suffer” – he is optimistic about its effects on culture at a deeper level. “September 11 made many people very much more reflective. They thought about what they were doing, about the meaning of their lives, and about what might give their lives meaning. I believe it made people think a little bit less about their shopping, and a bit more about culture – because the world of culture, and contemporary art is part of that, is what makes us human, and separates us from the animals and the beasts. When something beastly happens, we do become more reflective about our humanity.”

This suggests one way in which artists may choose to respond to September 11, without even seeming to – not by attempting to create works of art which compete with the violence and astonishing visual impact and scale of the attacks, but by going in the opposite direction, making work which perhaps emphasises the frailty and value of single human lives. Shortly after the attacks took place, I remember reading a short but touching statement by a part-time artist and art teacher in the letters pages of the New York Times. His response to his own sense of helplessness in the face of such a cataclysm, so much death, such upheavals in world politics, he said, had simply been to go home and make some drawings of his young daughter. This was a small but cogent reminder of the fact that the act of resolutely refraining from making political work can, in its own way, amount to a form of political statement.

For two artists, at least, September 11 is neither a hypothetical nor an optional challenge but a subject to which they are contractually obliged to respond. Earlier this year the British collaborative pair Langlands and Bell accepted a commission from the Imperial War Museum to create a series of works – scheduled for public display next spring – on the theme of “The aftermath of September 11 and the War in Afghanistan.” They were drawn to the commission partly because, as Ben Langlands puts it, “it is always interesting to have a new challenge”, but also because they had an eerie sense of having begun to explore certain elements of the September 11 attacks, even before they had happened. “For a number of years we have been interested by the way in which air transport systems are organised and coded, and by the consequences for modern life of the speed of communications,” explains Langlands. “We had even made some preparatory works which now look quite spooky in the light of September 11 – for example we had made some digital animations using frozen-sky circles of three-letter flight codes, which we projected on to the facades of tall buildings including Canary Wharf Tower and Centre Point. When people saw them at the time, they remarked that they made the buildings look like targets.”

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed that artists, like dreamers, could occasionally see into the future because their antennae are naturally tuned to the “universal subconscious”. Seen in tha light they are rather like canaries in a coal mine, potential monitors of the psychic zeitgeist, and their work a form of early warning system, capable of sending out signals about war, or other forms of trouble, that may lie ahead. With hindsight quite a lot of intriguingly prescient contemporary art might appear to have justified his theory. New York artist Richard Phillips’ paintings of George Bush smiling out at a troubled nation weirdly pre-dated September 11, as did his sculpture of two men covered in white dust, looking for all the world like begrimed survivors of the Twin Towers’ collapse. Even more uncannily, Nancy Davenport’s one-woman show, called “The Apartments”, featured photo-collages of American high-rise buildings under rocket-attack from terrorists and opened at Nicole Klagsbrun’s Manhattan gallery just five days before September 11.

But in the case of Langlands and Bell, the process was entirely conscious, in the sense that they were already thinking along lines suggested by an earlier terrorist attack. “We had originally been set along the route of our plane-code pieces by the Lockerbie attack. We were very struck by this random visitation of violence in a completely innocent civil population – a violent attack being carried out over an enormous distance, affecting a group of people who could not have been expecting it. It brought home to us how interconnected everything is: even if you’re not aware of it at the time, you are always in the middle of all these vectors and passages, which can at any moment impinge on your life. I suppose that was part of the September 11 terrorists’ message to America – which had been so used to thinking of itself as being somehow on the other side of the world, on its own continent, which it dominates so totally…”

Langlands and Bell are not sure what form their work will take, although it is likely to involve a mixture of media, “which could range from computer work or video work to carpet weaving”, consciously intended to span Afghan as well as European and American experiences of the conflict. “At one point we had a press conference about what we might do, on the subject of September 11, and I think one of the journalists present, who had a perhaps rather old-fashioned view of ‘the war artist’, asked us whether we would be taking our sketchbooks off to Afghanistan. The curator at the Imperial War Museum, Angela Waite, made the good point that there are so many ways in which events are recorded these days that recording, as such, is not really what an artist can most usefully do.”

Listening to Langlands talk about how he and his partner Bell intend to tackle the distinctly large themes of “The aftermath of September 11 and the War on Afghanistan”, it is striking how much their awareness seems focussed on what it is not possible, or desirable, to do. They are determined not to create an art of record; not to create an art of salutary rage or passion, in the Guernica mould (“we do not work in that way, really”); not to try too hard to compete with the overwhelming visual impact of the attacks themselves; not to “focus so closely on the surface of things that one forgets the reasons they occur; and not to create a work which overtly or unduly takes sides. “Although it is obviously impossible to escape your own culture, your own history, we would like to make a work that might contain something both for, say an Arab or Palestinian sympathiser as well as someone coming from an American or European perspective. It is a balancing act.”

Perhaps their dilemma about how to tackle the subject contains within it, in microcosm, the dilemma facing all contemporary artists confronted by September 11. The most useful thing an artist can do with this event, hints Langlands, is get other people to think about it, and its consequences, with some kind of level-headedness. Forget the artist as prophet, the artist as seer, the artist as drunk, the artist as fool, the artist as child. The era of the artist as diplomat may now be upon us.