Artistic and aesthetic responses to Sept. 11

By Linda Myers

The faculty panel discussion titled "Artistic and Aesthetic Responses to 9/11" on Sept. 10 in Call Auditorium included panelists Franklin Robinson, the Richard J. Schwartz director of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art; Amy Villarejo, assistant professor of film studies, feminist and gay studies; Steven Pond, assistant professor of music; and Salah Hassan, chair of the art history department. Porus Olpadwala, dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, served as moderator.

Steven Pond, right, assistant professor of music, and Salah Hassan, associate professor and chair of the Department of History of Art, listen to audience comments during the panel "Artistic and Aesthetic Responses to 9/11," Sept. 10. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

Robinson said that visual images have acquired more meaning since Sept. 11, 2001, when the world was mesmerized by televised images of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers falling. Nevertheless, he said, "so far, no one great work of art has emerged summing up the experience" of the cataclysmic events of that day -- an opinion concurred with by other panelists.

He also mentioned the Johnson Museum's nightly showing last week of a video on its exterior façade by artist Janet Biggs and her husband, Robert Cmar. A response to Sept. 11, it showed the view from Cmar's office window, across from the Twin Towers, on Sept. 25, the first day the dust settled at Ground Zero.

Villarejo described a "hip-hop, anti-cinema film" called "Nine eleven" by Big Noise Films. Made from bits and pieces collectively assembled via networks, the film included images of "spontaneous memorials and public sites of grief and discourse" and was streamed over the web. Such methods of assembling and widely disseminating art are leading to "new communities of artists and activists," said Villarejo.

Pond discussed the ability of music to respond to emotionally powerful events like those of Sept. 11. He described the performing of Mozart's Requiem in relay fashion around the globe this Sept. 11 as "a remarkable bringing together of the sense of loss that we share." And he played excerpts from popular music -- from rap to rhythm and blues to rock -- that he said responded to deeply felt, universal emotions such as anger, loss and longing for peace and justice.

Hassan commented on "a rise in stereotypical images demonizing the enemy" as well as a rise in artistic censorship and in patriotic imagery that "bordered on jingoistic nationalism" following Sept. 11. Among the images he showed and discussed was a censored "Boondocks" comic strip faulting former President Reagan for the training of Afghanistan terrorists in an earlier era.

Noting that artists can be astute social commentators, Hassan also showed Otto Siebold's bitingly satirical Sept. 11 memorial proposal in the New Yorker showing the destroyed twin towers replaced by replicas of the giant Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan.