"September 11 "art" sparks outrage" - your reaction?

My first reaction is to find it offensive. I can see that it would be therapeutic to re-enact something dreadful so that one could consider why it is disturbing and examine one's feelings about the subject. But I wonder about this as performance art. It is less of a personal examination and more of a public display.

I need to think on this some more.

Sure - and I was more pondering on it as a personal thing, than an artistic one.

Traumatic re-enactment, by the way, is more a sign of trauma, and even a re-traumatising factor, than a healing one - I was trying to figure out what this one was - if either.

I am wondering how much of 9/11 stuff is avoided in our collective psyches, and what effect this has?

This piece certainly confronts.

How is it any different than the corporate media making ratings off of showing the towers collapsing over and over again?

Big deal, we have bigger things to worry about. Just don't look at it if it offends you.

It is in such poor taste and complete disregard for others it is sickening.

If this "artist" is using his photos as a way to handle his own personal trauma then fine keep it to himself - do not make these pictures public. It is a personal trauma, keep it personal.

This is the telling statement, I think. What self-indulgence (if, indeed, it's a genuine statement of his motivations, which I somehow doubt -- all publicity being good). I've known quite a few folks who've worked under the guise of performance art, and many of them are driven simply by an inflated sense of self-importance, a need to be noticed that overpowered any need to be appreciated or respected, and an urge to overstate/inflate their own personal pathos.

That said, on the personal importance scale, this ranks for me about where it does for roverroad...

I find nothing "artistic" about this "stunt" Poor taste at the best and utter stupidity at the worst.

Hmm - I have never really "got" performance art - and it often seems very self-indulgent to me.

I was kinda hoping some folk who know a lot about it might have a different view, though.

I've never been a great fan of performance art, either, Deb. I don't know why, it just often seems a rather clumsy, unsubtle way of making some political point or other .... I don't find the falling man particularly distasteful. I'm not sure what I think, about whether it's art or not ... It just seems that you wouldn't make the connection to 9/11 unless you were told that that's what the performance was about. It seems more a type of therapy for the performer to me.

Some earlier performance art -- like the "happenings" in the 60s (which the Merry Pranksters sort of adopted as an MO) were playful, bizarre stuff, designed mainly to startle the squares and amuse the, er, rounds. Seems to me that at some point pretty much everybody doing it lost that playfulness, and just decided to shock, or pontificate, or whatever.

But, then, I only know about the good old days from books, not having been conceived at that point.

if he was really into his art he'd ditch the harness

I have a friend who goes parachuting each year on the anniversary of her son's death, despite her fear of heights.

Some of our mutual friends shake their heads at L's actions but I think of it as preformace art even though it is on such a personal level.

Art isn't always about beauty and comfort.

My favorite preformace artist is William Pope and I especially love his "Candy Mountain". For "Candy...." Pope dresses like a milkman and foxtrots with strangers to "Big Rock Candy Mountain" while chatting about the nature of democracy.

As he preforms this in public and anyone can dance with him, people from all walks of life, people you would never expect to, dance with him.

While it all seems rather strange, I know a few people who have danced with him and they insist is some of the most interesting minutes of their lives.

Whether you "get" it or not, it does force you to think differently. You have to step out of your box (such a cliche, I know) to participate and I think that forever changes the person who does it.

And getting you to think is really what preformace art is all about.

This is really my round-about way of getting to the point that I don't find this particular piece nauseating, disrespectful, or outrageous.

It is indeed provocative and, to me, thats all it needs to be.

It certainly has people talking, doesn't it?

I've never viewed the people jumping from the WTC as a "last resort" but more of a "last choice". That is not to say that I don't think it's tragic. Without doubt, it is tragic.

By forcing people to confront their feelings about this, and to remember the people who jumped, he has done what he set out to do.

People might disagree over whether this is good art, bad art, or even art at all but I think the artist has proven that it is simply by provoking so much emotion.

Michael Jackson sleeping with little boys also gets people talking, but I don't consider that art.

I don't think any criminal intends to get tongues wagging, prefering instead to keep their dirty little secrets, secret.

My point is that you can classify anything as art if you want to - art is mearly a point of view.

Even if something is art - it can still be in poor taste and hurtful to others. What good is it if this form of art helps this one individual, but hurts hundreds of others. He should really keep his art to himself.

I do see your point, Linkat.

But I don't think that September 11 is an off limits topic for art. "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" spends a lot of time thinking about the people who jumped off the WTC.

Should the book, a novel, have not been written for fear that someone would be offended by it?

I'm sure some people were.

Thanks Boomer!

I don't find it disgusting at all, either.

I am so with you on "the last choice" thing - at least that is how I handled it. I saw it as a sort of transcendent thing to do - jumping, I mean - taking charge. Though burning is a death I fear way more than splatting, and their deaths must have been instantaneous.

Some of the horror was in the sheer LENGTH of the fall, though - I so hope they found the sort of peace that many airline passengers seem to find as planes crash - (something we begin to know something about from mobile phones.)

I was utterly moved by one shot I saw of people holding hands as they fell.

That is something I worried about - people's trauma being triggered by the piece.

Though I dunno - so many things must trigger folk with trauma from 9/11.

So anyway there's this painting that may or may not be still hanging at the UN and it's about the violent irrationality of war and it makes people uncomfortable. GOOD.

Yes - sigh.


They covered it, I think - unbelievable.

Was that while frigging Iraq was debated - it was seen as inflammatory, or some damn thing?

As you say - GOOD.

(oh blimey, yes it was:

The Lessons of Guernica
'Profound symbolism' as U.N. hides Picasso's anti-war masterpiece for Colin Powell's call to arms

Bush's `game over' remark makes it definite: U.S. will attack

by William Walker


UNITED NATIONS—On the second floor of the United Nations building in Manhattan, just outside the Security Council entrance, hangs a seminal piece of 20th-century artwork that offers a graphic and chilling reminder of the horrors of war.


A copy of Picasso's Guernica serves as a mute rebuttal to a pair of pro-war demonstrators calling for U.S. action against Saddam Hussein outside United Nations' headquarters in New York on Wednesday. (Photo/Graham Morrison)

But as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell sat down last week to deliver an historic speech about why America must go to war with Iraq, Pablo Picasso's Guernica was concealed by a large blue drape.

To twist an old axiom, those who ignore the horrors of history — or cover them up — are doomed to repeat them.

"The game is over," President George W. Bush declared, just 24 hours after Powell's presentation failed to sway doubtful U.N. Security Council members.

"Saddam Hussein will be stopped."...............

..............Pablo Picasso's powerful anti-war tableau "Guernica"
"A diplomat stated that it would not be an appropriate background if the ambassador of the United States at the U.N. John Negroponte, or Powell, talk about war surrounded with women, children and animals shouting with horror and showing the suffering of the bombings."
www.artdaily.com

When Powell completed his 85-minute presentation to the Security Council, he and its members walked out into the second-floor hallway and past the covered tapestry of Picasso's 1937 masterpiece, Guernica.

The tapestry was donated to the United Nations in 1985 by Nelson Rockefeller as a tribute to the international agency's mandate.

Picasso was living in Paris during the civil war in his homeland of Spain when Adolf Hitler agreed to help Gen. Francisco Franco's Nationalist regime.

Hitler sent his air force to bomb the small Basque village of Guernica in northern Spain.

In three hours of relentless bombing, 1,600 of Guernica's civilians were killed, many of them women and children.

It was the kind of atrocity the United Nations was created to stop.

And it's the kind of atrocity many predict will be repeated in Iraq when Saddam's soldiers hide among civilians in Baghdad and other cities, looking to sacrifice them in hopes of turning world opinion against an American-led military coalition.

The official reason Picasso's masterpiece was covered up? It hangs over the exact spot where Security Council members stop and speak before TV cameras. It was decided the violent anti-war images would not be the fitting backdrop for talk of a new war.

"It is, we think, we hope, only temporary," said Faustino Diaz Fortuny, a Spanish envoy whose government owns the original painting and shows it at a Madrid museum.

"It's only temporary. We're only doing this until the (TV) cameras leave," said Abdellatif Kabbaj, the chief U.N. media officer.

It wasn't the first time the lessons of art have been ignored as the Bush administration pursues its post-Sept. 11 war-on-terrorism agenda.

Attorney-General John Ashcroft threw a similar blue drape over the Spirit Of Justice statue last year at justice department headquarters to obscure a naked marble breast while he conducted a TV briefing. At the time, Ashcroft's FBI was arresting and locking up young Muslim men all over America, many on no criminal charges at all.

In the disbelief that clouded the minds of many in the days after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, few could have expected such an unfolding of events: a war with Iraq that could spark wider war in the troubled Middle East; the emergence of North Korea as an "axis of evil" country threatening counter-attacks against America over its nuclear program; Bush's "strike first" pre-emptive military doctrine, now being eyed by countries like India and Pakistan, both nuclear powers.

Author Russell Martin was standing in a Madrid museum, viewing the original Guernica on the day terrorists struck America. He was researching his new book, Picasso's War.

Says Martin now: "In the aftermath of Sept. 11, and in his impatience with the U.N.'s global approach to disarming Saddam Hussein, George Bush leads a U.S. administration that appears to observers in other nations to be belligerent, utterly uninterested in dissenting perspectives and determined to make war at any price."

Still, those who support Bush argue that, if world leaders had stepped in and dealt with Hitler after he intervened in Spain's civil war, there might not have been a World War II.

They see parallels now in Saddam's 1991 invasion of Kuwait and the need to stop the Iraqi dictator before be regroups and resumes his alleged goal of dominating the Middle East.

More an art critic than a political one, Martin describes Guernica as featuring "a screaming horse which has fallen, pierced by a lance; a wailing woman holding a dead child in her arms; another woman, her clothes on fire, attempting to escape from a burning building; the severed head of a soldier.

"It spoke to the horrors that humans have visited on each other for millennia and, because of this, the painting began to symbolize war remarkably soon after its creation," he says.

"Guernica has become for people around the world visceral, visual evidence of the true nature of war, a perspective very unlike the heroic and optimistic one so often presented by politicians who have never seen war close at hand."

Laurie Brereton, an Australian Labour MP and U.N. delegation member, reflected on the draped-over Picasso after Powell's Wednesday speech.

"There is a profound symbolism in pulling a shroud over this great work of art," she said.

"For throughout the debate on Iraq ... there has been a remarkable degree of obfuscation, evasion and denial, and never more so than when it comes to the grim realities of military action.

"We may well live in the age of the so-called `smart bomb,' but the horror on the ground will be just the same as that visited upon the villagers of Guernica ....

"Innocent Iraqis — men, women and children — will pay a terrible price. And it won't be possible to pull a curtain over that."

SOURCE









Though - I guess the fella ought to have been jumping in Saudi Arabia, eh??? To be fully confronting, I mean - or amongst the apparently resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.