These are images that have been seen many times before. Many, seeing them again, will still feel their muscles tense, as the events of that day live again in eternal playback: the weaponized 767 roars through the sky of pure video blue and into the World Trade Center’s south tower. Always to be shown in succession, we see it once more, and now a new angle from another channel. The plane is engulfed in steel rectilinearity, fiery reds and oranges blooming out of 24,000 gallons of fuel. Three minutes after nine, before even the New York Stock Exchange’s opening bell, the catastrophe was well underway.

The aftereffects September 11th continue to ripple outward, in ways few might have foreseen. A calamity of this scale had never been televised; the destruction of the World Trade Center was an unprecedented media event that cut a deep scar across Lower Manhattan. Within hours, myths were both built up and torn asunder, as a formerly impervious beacon of capitalism was annihilated, nearly bringing the financial capital of the world to its knees. An array of unanticipated events happened that day, and just as quickly as blame could be assigned, unexplored intelligence was found, with so many cascading failures leading to colossal disaster. The global military, political, and legal campaigns initiated in the aftermath proved to be an unexpectedly violent beginning for the 21st century, all leading from the heart of a complex once triumphantly declared by its architect to be a shining monument to world peace.

The original towers by Minoru Yamasaki were forced icons of urban renewal, built to specification in a complex that never truly encouraged the public to venture into the unwelcoming plaza that lay at its heart. While undoubtedly a fine place to work, the massive project was, at the core, another attempt to create an airless, high-Modernist utopia for commerce. The new tower is a fortress; those who work there will enter through the securitized and blast-resistant lobby, or one day, through Santiago Calatrava’s nearby skeletal PATH station, years delayed and billions of dollars over budget. The everlasting loss of the site is illustrated in the competition-winning design of architect Michael Arad; his memorial of two yawning cubic pits, which replicate the towers’ immense foundations, are dazzling feats of engineering. Their synthetic waterfalls flow with precise technical choreography, and are sure to be the primary stop on the pilgrimages undertaken by those still unsure that the events of that day did, in fact, occur. This plaza is rigidly patrolled, and codes of conduct are enforced, with the expectation that public grief is to be measured while here.While the luminous One World Trade Center is now present, built to a soaringly patriotic 1,776 feet, it is Arad’s monuments and the adjacent, subterranean 9/11 Memorial Museum that have been tasked with the active remembrance of the events of September 11, 2001. The museum promises more than answers, or even simply the means to navigate a dark and terrible day — in these exhibition spaces, one is promised a direction in which one can focus their grief and sorrow. Now, with its solemn grand opening, the space is finally coalescing into its idealized form. With the surging crowds of summer, it is immediately evident that many of the complaints made against the master plan of the original World Trade Center could be made of this iteration.

The museum offers an involving narrative to follow, to lose oneself in. What awaits each visitor is a thoroughly controlled experience, activated through architecture upon entering the airy aboveground glass and steel pavilion, which seems to collapse in upon itself. On the descent down to the exhibition spaces, lighter woods give way to darker ones. Although the museum is new construction, it is sited in the excavated chasm between the foundations of the twin towers. The path down is revealed to be a ramp, an allusion to the larger one that was formed in the clean up of ground zero and slowly evolved into an emblem of the painstaking rebirth underway. At its terminus, the ramp transforms into a mezzanine, perched above the enormous “Foundation Hall,” which is flanked by the vast original slurry-retaining wall built to contain the Hudson. The wall is now left exposed in what is perhaps the museum’s most dramatic example of loss. The profusion of artifacts begins on the final escalator ride. Throughout, the hall is traversed overhead by the long mezzanine, twisted through the s-curve of the foundations in alignment with the acutely buckled structural columns left standing after the buildings’ monumental collapse. Installed in the center of the vast hall is the museum’s sole commissioned artwork. Spencer Finch’s Trying to Remember the Color on That September Morning (2014) consists of 2,983 attempts to replicate in watercolor the shade of blue of the sky on September 11th, one sheet of paper per life lost.

The first gallery contains a slideshow of lives violently ended. The display, called “In Memorium,” consists of a black box theater surrounded by identifying photographs, revealing the analog age that September 11th belongs to. For some of the dead, no images exist, and in their place a memorial oak leaf is displayed, mirroring trees planted on the surface above. Inside the theater, more images and brief biographies of those who died are projected, each name painstakingly read out in metronymic regularity. While the cavalcade of loss and grief extends throughout the museum, in this space it is allowed to pause, one of the few breaks permitted along the planned route.

“September 11th, 2001,” the central exhibition, offers horrors of a kind that one is more accustomed to viewing through the lens of institutionalized history. It is rare that contemporary events are seen under the particular glare that is offered here, as this recent history is still very much with us, it allows a visceral recall not possible with the distant past. As this museum is no doubt expected to serve as a shrine for many, it is appropriate that it contains endless individual altars. Mutilated ID cards, singed cash, tattered snapshots, and illegible memoranda are all cataloged and displayed under vitrines. While the appearance of these items here seems an invasive exposure of private lives, as representatives of the compacted contents of a thousand desk drawers, the inventory has its intended effect, turning the mundane and personal into heroic relics. Tissue dispensers are discreetly placed throughout the galleries of this detailed chronicle of the attacks and their aftermath. Images assault at every turn, staggered, staged, spread across the walls — each gallery offers a salon-style rendering of destruction. We see the horrified faces of onlookers, the firefighter’s climbing the boundless flights of stairs to their death, and the ashen survivors staggering away from the remains of the World Trade Center. The event has been claimed as the most photographed in human history. These images depict the scenes that made the day as dark as it was, but seen in such profusion, they form less detail with each new surface, eventually reducing tragedy to texture. While the pictures may be well known, the audio presented is not. In addition to the sounds of visitors, the galleries are inundated with the looping playback of final desperate voicemails and emergency service dispatchers, some requiring handsets to hear, while others crackle over invisible speakers, often still audible after one has moved along to another gallery. The audiovisual density is confounding — multilayered to a degree that eventually little can truly register. It is this extraordinary bombardment of things that forms the core of the experience.

In a gallery near the exhibition’s end, an original architectural model of the World Trade Center complex is displayed. It is a space dedicated to the era before the buildings’ destruction, filled with postcards and stills from iconic films, the famous skyline seeming oddly historical to eyes now accustomed to seeing its new alignment. The maquette appears the embodiment of breezy period-contemporaneity, with intricately etched sheet metal scaled to the massive planned heights, while models of 1960s vintage cars encircle the plaza, ants next to the towering behemoths of Western capitalism they swarm by. The wistful quotes on the walls from those involved with the project’s conception hearken to a future we have left behind, a mid-century sense of revitalization that most governments have now neither the will nor the finances to implement. As constructed, the museum resembles an eerie simulacrum of the commercial space it memorializes, but in this form it appears to be history for the sake of history, with little attention paid to the context of the original.

We no longer live in the world that existed when the World Trade Center’s master plan was unveiled, where a nation’s aspirations could be shored up in cascading tensile steel. The glittering monumentality of the towers is still present at this site, now re-purposed and rendered through a screen of security measures, the sense of progress once attached to them now long gone. There is scant opportunity to contemplate this, in these spaces, with all attention held captive by the finely structured sea of grief. While the reasons behind the attacks are carefully explained in text and video, they are secondary to the canonization of suffering presented. In every gallery there is a desperate search for an elusive significance to the day’s events, which, of course, often cannot be definitively located. A great deal was lost at the site of this museum, most likely more than we care to acknowledge, and certainly more than any monument could be expected to attest to. The resolutely tasteful gift shop proves to be a surprisingly effective commemoration. The space provides a tactile transport back to a now-lost Before, replete in gleaming warm white lights, a world conjured once more through souvenirs emblazoned with the twin towers’ stark profile. It is a sleight of hand not lost on visitors: a chance to buy the past, a token from what now seems a halcyon age of assurance that, however illusory, is sorely missed.

The post In The Shadow of Loss, Make the World New Again: The 9/11 Memorial Museum appeared first on artcritical.

January 16 to February 22, 2014

303 Gallery
507 West 24th Street
New York, (212) 255-1121

In Eileen Myles’s autobiographical essay, “Everyday Barf,” the poet writes, “I don’t mind today, but the everyday makes me barf.” For contemporary New York feminist artists like Eileen Myles and Sue Williams, daily life after 9/11 can seem particularly revolting, and, on a bad day, impossible to stomach. Nevertheless, Williams’s new paintings (all made in 2013), now on view at 303 Gallery, felicitously work alongside the hate that breeds disgust and contempt. In her own satirical style, Williams speaks back to the revulsion prompted by the incendiary political climate that followed September 11. The explicit political critique embedded in the work’s content and titles revisits some of the material mined in her 2010 show, curated by Nate Lowman, Al-Quaeda is the CIA, and her contribution to the 1993 Whitney Biennial, an all-too convincing pornographic puddle of vomit titled The Sweet and Pungent Smell of Success. In the abstract paintings of WTC, WWIII, Couch Size, the push-purge impulse is no less present, as Williams addresses fears of flying debris, dizzying nausea, and the urgent, unexpected libidinal sparks that occupy post-9/11 life.

The most dazzling painting of the six large color-saturated canvasses, Philip Zelikow, Historian (titled after the executive director of the 9/11 commission) expands upon Williams’s career long preoccupation with violence, astonishment, and flight. The painting, a cascading flood of variegating intensities, moves from varying shades of sea-foam, spring, and blue-greens; as these colors gush from some invisible sphincter across the canvas, they precipitate what one critic referred to as “Pepto-Bismal pinks.” The painting also calls to mind Mary Heilmann’s Pink Trance (2010). Unlike Williams’s Philip Zelikow, Heilmann’s Pink Trance  embraces the sleepy slow-motion drag of a drug like Dramamine whereas Williams’s pink tones carry an inflammatory charge designed to arouse and excite; in Philip Zelikow, these erratic pinks verge on magenta, and seem especially explosive as they jump alongside contrasting shades of electric teal and popping peony yellow.

Philip Zelikow revels in the fact that fascination can be an anchor, a way of connecting to political history, or the alienating televisual spectacle of those two flaming icons, the Twin Towers. These paintings animate through abstraction the aura of wartime tumult as they dramatize the violent collisions between the personal and the political. How does anyone internalize a historical event on the global scale of 9/11? Williams’s paintings inhabit this zone of lingering stupefaction as she revisits the World Trade Center and the disorienting swarms of historical precarity which surround it. Departing from her previous and more condensed, comic abstractions, her new paintings have dropped the sharp contours that separate shape from action, intent from effect. Trauma renders rage and distress by refusing to distinguish between them. In Retire in Fla., smoke from a firework, or an explosion dissolves the edges of emotions. There’s a recognizable heart at the matter of such queer emanations, but the roiling matter that moves out of the frame is fugitive, and evades capture. Recalling September 11 in the presence of these works, one may immediately remember that the event and its aftermath was a mess, to put it lightly. To consider the catastrophe in hindsight as WWIII, as the title of the show suggests, is not a hyperbole, for the circumstances and the stakes were real, but, at the time, abstract. Who was it even happening to? New Yorkers, or the United States? Ten plus years later, Williams’s new works reflect the anticipation of impending war while transposing it into the present moment, without sentimentality or patriotism.

Amid the melting streams of candy-colored arcs, there lies an intuitive and hard-won set of tensions exhibited in every canvas, most quizzically reflected in Otis. The bending buildings in the background scattered among dildonic shapes in the foreground coalesce in a frenzied landscape where dimensions, as in Wackyland, give way to jet streams of frothy colors whose chafing in turn produces even stranger monuments. Otis, presumably the teal moose in the middle, opens his eyes wide, but not necessarily as if he were taking it all in; his gaze suggests the quagmire of just being, especially when you’ve lost track of your emergency exits, and you can’t find the bathroom.

The post As Abstract as Indigestion: Sue Williams at 303 Gallery appeared first on artcritical.