example two: Art Spiegelman and the form before the form
another excerpt from my earlier writings about 9/11 art
Art Spiegelman did not witness the attack on New York from a distance. He lives one mile from where the World Trade Center once stood, and was on his way to vote in the mayoral primaries when he heard the first plane crash into the towers. This was his landscape, his neighborhood, and he was an eyewitness. Unlike Campo, his experience was not mediated by television. And yet, when he realized he had three days to create a new cover for the New Yorker (where his wife, who was with him that morning, is the covers editor), he also turned to the images of the towers, and to process. As he wrote in 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11th:
I tried to juxtapose the deadly blackness of the event with the wondrous crystalline blue sky that underscored the surrealism of that bleak day. I sketched the towers, shrouded in black as if by a Christo in mourning. They floated against a tranquil Magritte sky above a Lower Manhattan cityscape. But Surrealism was inadequate to that moment, and the vividness of the color seemed to obscenely mock the blackness at the heart of the picture. I scanned the sketch into my computer, and gradually desaturated and darkened the color of the sky and cityscape until my screen was virtually black. Only when my picture all but disappeared did it accurately reflect the painful new emptiness I and many others needed to see. (Spiegelman 286)
He envisioned the towers covered by a black cloth, standing against the backdrop of brilliant blue sky, but in the end, he created an image of almost complete blackness, much as Rafael Campo did in The Enemy. His subject, it turned out, was not the towers, or even the attacks, but the process of understanding their collapse - and the process of creating art from that understanding. He wasn’t sure what was appropriate (or even possible) aesthetically. His image appeared on the September 24, 2001, cover.
Figure 3 (not posted here) Art Spiegelman. September 24, 2001, New Yorker cover (left) and cover illustration for 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11th, 2002.
The towers in this picture are not representations of buildings, but of loss itself, and the picture as a whole can be seen as a representation of artistic process in the aftermath of 9-11. The towers are barely present, shapes you must strain to see - reflecting the process of many New Yorkers, as they imagine ghost towers in the skyline. In its blackness, Spiegelman's picture seems to say that there is no way to give form to this loss - no art that can do it.
When Spiegelman later designed the cover for 110 Stories, he teetered between representation and abstraction. He had, in fact, returned to the original image he intended for the New Yorker, before he blackened it. The towers are depicted as ghostly shapes, the only hint of their shape in the drape of a black cloth. The empty space peeking out from below the Christo-like cloths reminds us that this is an illusion, and the image seems to be saying something about the inability of art to completely retrieve what was lost. The rest of the skyline has reappeared, clear and unscathed, but the towers are still missing. And yet, there is hope in the image, a kind of resolution. Art has come back from the blackness:
The afterimage of the towers lingers, insisting on its presence through the blackness. But now, in the months of “new normalcy” that have followed, the rescue and salvage operation that continues near my front stoop has allowed me the luxury of trying to rescue and salvage my first image. I’ve “sandblasted” and scrubbed my first sketch and now, with some distance, that blue sky – on the cover of this book – seems at least a little more possible. (Spiegelman 286)
In choosing to reference Christo in his 110 Stories cover, Spiegelman is challenging the public (and other artists) to find the aesthetic inside 9-11. Christo is known for draping buildings and other structures – natural and manmade – with fabric in order to encourage people to transact with them on an aesthetic level – to see the shapes and play of light, to think about how one normally sees (or fails to see) these same spaces and structures. By covering the missing towers with a Christo-like cape, Spiegelman is challenging us to think about our relationship with the towers and what they mean to us. In so doing, we can uncover an aesthetic dimension to the attacks as well.
Sources:
Spiegelman, Art. "Re:Covers." 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11. Ed. Ulrich Baer. New York: New York University Press, 2002.
ps: I hear something similar happens in Fahrenheit 9/11 - that Michael Moore never shows the planes crashing into the towers. Instead, he shows a blank screen, with audio only. I have not seen the movie, but I suspect he is continuing an already-established tradition in 9/11 art. As soon as I see the film, I will post about it on evidentiary:alchemy.