September 22, 2017 – January 14, 2018
Joe and Marité Robinson Strolling Gallery, and Main Gallery
68 Elm Street, Summit, NJ 07901

Alongside her oil paintings, Julia Jacquette is showing a suite of text-image gouaches on paper she titles Playground of My Mind. This unique book-form graphic narrative, splendidly published in 2017 by the Wellin Museum at Hamilton College (where this exhibition originated and accompanying installation shots were taken) explains a good deal about the methodical fun that characterizes her painting.

Playground begins with a supergraphic portrait of the artist hand-in-hand with her mother, striding forward circa 1970 in a “strikingly minimal” (as the text puts it) blue wool coat inscribed with a red circle. Design in Jacquette’s family was a progressive force. “Less is more,” her mother says of an over-ornamented Christmas tree in the lobby of the modernist public housing tower where they live. Jacquette’s carefully crafted pagespreads –– distilled from snapshots into deft grisaille with rare spots of color –– describes and, indeed, demonstrates how the artist’s upbringing was design-centric and infused with feminist pride. From “deep play” toys to innovative, modular playgrounds, she was taught defiance of garish patterns and of the over-ornamented, passive version of womanhood peddled by Madison Avenue and Hollywood.

The bulk of paintings in the current show are canny photorealistic zooms into exactly such luxuriously soft targets: glittery fashion and jewels, cosmetics, scotch on the rocks, pools and yachts, movie star lips and hairdos. If her debts to the three Rs –– Rosenquist, Richter, and Ruscha –– are obvious, so is the potency of the lessons learned about reviving skillful painting through emulating, not the photograph per se, but the image of the photograph. In Reclining (2014) and Actress, Gold Dress (2015) Jacquette takes guilty pleasure in close-cropped mirages of pearls and klieg-lit skin, depth of field and lens flare. Heidi Klum Throws Glitter (2012) is a quietly dazzling abstraction. Closer in spirit to Vermeer than to Audrey Flack’s or Marilyn Minter’s operatic treatment of similar material, the paintings are hermetic in their even-tempered, unfussy surface. Every mystery of appearance is resolved and blended to a sheen.

Jacquette put her mark on this atelier approach to media seduction in the 1990s by adding ambiguous, possibly personal texts that accumulate into overt feminist dissent. A couple of paintings on view restate this signature approach. In Thirty-six Sofas (2104) the titular subjects are cleanly differentiated with saturated color, as in a superstore catalogue. Below are 36 sentences labeling not the furniture, but thoughts of inadequacy, such as “A relentless self-judging inner narrative,” and ” Guilt about experiencing pleasure.” Do these assessments come from a coruscating diary, a self-help manual or a psych ward evaluation? In any case, the collision with the plush sofas is diagnostic, providing an oblique view into the alienation of consumer capitalism. Another text/image painting, Your Every Word (2014), is a stand-in for a large body of work in which romantic pathos delicately intrudes upon luscious desserts. Here, an array of flawless parfaits, whose vivid, slightly stiff illusionism feels like taxidermy, is tagged by the rebus, “Your Every Word a Perfect Jewel and Knife in My Own Heart.”Disciplined, cool, yet in love with excess, Jacquette’s paintings manage to critique her cake and eat it. Although Playground of My Mind says nothing about the source of Jacquette’s pathos –– defying the voyeuristic conventions of the autobiographical novel –– it makes abundantly clear how she comes by her design acumen.

If Jacquette’s story begins with her mother, it centers on her father, a landscape architect during a dazzling moment initiated by New York City parks commissioner Thomas Hoving, future director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Playground design, cookie cutter during the long Robert Moses era, was suddenly open to liberal ideas of child development and Bauhaus-inspired design. The artist narrates how her father and his partners were responsible for building audacious and imaginative meccas of free play, in particular in Central Park, that exceeded even the best European paradigms. Richard Dattner’s pioneering Adventure Playground, built in 1966, and Ross Ryan Jacquette’s Discovery Playpark, following in 1973, brought principles of modularity and geometry, but also non-linear variation, earthy textures, and ancient, monumental forms to generations of lucky New York children and urbanites in general. With keen insight from a child’s perspective, and in documentary detail and lucid schematics, Playground of My Mind resurrects the optimism of that ambition. (Disclaimer: my own father was an architect during those halcyon, or at least less dystopian times and worked with some of these designers, making Jacquette’s story in many ways my own.)

Playground is both a moving filial tribute and a required architectural history. It is also a design polemic, in which the medium is the message. In ways that recall David Mazzucchelli’s masterful graphic novel, Asterios Polyp (2009, Pantheon), a gripping metafiction about an architect, Jacquette deploys architectural wit in telling her tale, which unfolds (and folds) through plans and isometrics, diagrams and visual puns. At one point Jacquette asks, of childhood fun and games: “Can beautiful design teach us?” In fact, Playground educates the eye. Read the book and then give it to a kid –– and then take that kid to one of the playgrounds Jacquette eulogizes. Even after cheesy, risk-averse modifications, these still work their magic.

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October 27 to December 17, 2016
510 West 26 Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 399 2636

In a show of new sculpture at Alexander Gray, Siah Armajani has made the gallery a mortuary temple stocked with the tombs of two poets, one philosopher, and one martyr. The sculptural/architectural proposition of the tomb has traditionally encompassed both subversive and normative figures from Alexander to Oscar (the Great and Wilde, respectively), so his choice of Arthur Rimbaud, Frank O’Hara, Richard Rorty and Dietrich Bonhoeffer doesn’t stray from tradition. Still, the act of publicly commemorating cultural figures via intricate and monumental sculptural tombs certainly fell out of favor over the course of the 20th century, so Armajani’s pieces, invoking wit and anger with his crisp visual riddles rather than melancholy, is a welcome return to one of humanity’s more enduring tropes of visual culture. The artist’s process is on display in the exhibition as well, with preparatory drawings presented alongside the executed sculptures, but this decision posits much more of a quandary: while the two-dimensional renderings of the monuments are arresting in their sharp orthogonal perspective, their inclusion, as well as that of maquettes for the larger works, primarily serves to double the number of objects in the show and display a variety of scale that is largely irrelevant. In an architecture exhibition, drawings and maquettes are included because the final product isn’t. Armajani is not an architect, he is a revolutionary in terms of the direct connection between politics, life and art which he insistently draws in his work, and the inclusion of these Lilliputian doppelgangers only serves to create a false sense of the magisterial controlling master plans that are the bane of most monumental architectural projects. Armajani’s sculptures, despite their aspirations to the eternal and their sleek signature aesthetic, are humble, deeply heartfelt and personal.

Do the tombs evoke the individuals they represent, or are the titles more of a playful allusion to the artist’s own intellectual meanderings? It’s hard to tell: Armajani expects a lot of his viewers in terms of background knowledge.Tomb for Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2016), a sleek vermillion coffin on black sawhorses, clearly evokes the courageous minister, fitted with a noose, which was the instrument of his martyrdom at the hands of the National Socialists. The tombs of Rorty, Ribaud and O’Hara are not quite as explicit. Tomb for Frank O’Hara (2016) is a jolly affair and a much looser interpretation of the tomb — five disembodied and legless chairs emerge from two tables implying a late-night drunken conversation. The presence of a dark casket arbitrarily placed on the white tables pulls the whole assemblage back to the funereal; but this surreal centerpiece serves to heighten the absurdity, again directing the mind towards a besotted Irish wake rather than an eternal resting place. Tomb for Arthur Rimbaud (2016) also is a play on furniture-as-sculpture, lifting the everyday to the monumental. The “punch line” or pivot around which the piece moves is a pink and baby blue ramp or distorted table, perhaps alluding to Rimbaud’s youth and melancholy nostalgia, as well as his overall surrealism — in this tomb there is no box for a corpse.

The philosopher’s tomb, Tomb for Richard Rorty (2016), is the most architectural, and by that token the least sculptural; a large beige box stands atop a scaffold, like a fisherman’s hut on a pier, while the end of an umber coffin emerges from a rectangular orifice in the side. Both the coffin and its housing are not completely opaque: there are sizeable chinks between the wooden slats allowing for a visual permeability that negates the monolithic quality of the massing. How this is related to the father of neopragmatism is anyone’s guess though. It does seem a very pleasant dwelling place for the hereafter.

Written Iran (2015-16) and 100 and 1 Dead Poets (2016) utilize text in much the same ironic way that the artist repurposes furniture (and, to a subtler extent, architecture). In both cases, Armajani uses words to construct a fabric: in the former, text becomes an urban expanse, and, in the latter, an abstract pattern punctuated by a few small drawn objects referring to the text. As with the tombs, text becomes the jumping-off point of visual experience, and what the words actually say is sometimes less important that what they symbolize or the individual who wrote them. Written Iran brilliantly hops back and forth between the proposition that the city is a regulating geometry and presentational structure for the writing versus the words supplying the building blocks of the city. Armajani’s bridges and towers, recurring images for the Iranian-born artist, function much in the same way — their obvious but limited practicality only serve to highlight their metaphysical and textual meaning as beacons and links between people. In his sculpture, Armajani emphasizes a clear but limited color palette — and one that seeks to visually delineate the different parts of the construction — rejecting the idea of unifying the form through a sameness of medium but instead outlining a narrative by distinguishing the multiple parts and aspects of the piece. This brings a depth of vibrancy, warmth and humor to a dauntingly titled series.

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Composed of industrial-grade, black-painted steel, Polish artist Monika Sosnowska’s mammoth Tower (2014) sprawls across the gallery floor at Hauser & Wirth on 18^th Street in New York like the shed skin of an enormous snake. The gallery itself is cavernous but even so, the 105-foot-long, horizontal span of the sculpture commands the space. Sosnowska is known for tremendous works that investigate the intersection between sculpture and architecture. She represented her native country at the 52nd Venice Biennale, where her work 1:1 (2007) was exhibited at the Polish Pavilion. That work took over the space where it was installed, but at Hauser & Wirth the viewer has room to walk freely around the entire structure, which makes for a different experience, and a different kind of sculpture.

Here, Sosnowska grapples with the International Style of architecture, first conceived of by Mies van der Rohe. Drawing inspiration from van der Rohe’s iconic Lake Shore Drive apartment buildings in Chicago, Sosnowska has replicated the façade of those two towers in steel, minus the glass windows. But the steel has been further manipulated. Twisted and crumpled, cracking apart at its seams, Tower stands not vertically, but stretches out horizontally across the gallery floor, a tremendous helix that nearly renders the International Style illegible.

Tower is the result of an artist’s labor-intensive process. Sosnowska first creates a maquette of her projected work and then, with the assistance of engineers and skilled technicians, the maquette is enlarged in 1:1 scale. (Unfortunately, the maquette for Tower is not on display at Hauser & Wirth. It would have been valuable to see it alongside the final version, in order to get a clearer sense of both Sosnowska’s working process, and the sheer magnitude of her undertaking.) After it was fabricated as a complete entity, Tower was subsequently broken into more than fifty parts in order to facilitate its transportation to New York. The deliberate breaking of the work contributes to the poignant quintessence Tower embodies.

There is a formal beauty to the mangled steel. A viewer standing at the wider, open mouth on one end, which peters out into a lip, is afforded a view of a winding, industrial road. From this vantage point, the smaller opening at the opposite end of the room is obscured by the sculpture’s own steel ribs. When engaging with architecture, one typically experiences the building as it was meant to stand — that is, vertically. The structure mimics an erect body. But Sosnowska has not situated Tower as one expects, and a full circumnavigation around the work affords the viewer a unique, corporeal experience. It’s possible to understand, in a more intimate way, the true massiveness of a building, and what it means when it is destroyed.

It is difficult to engage with Tower without also thinking about the towers that were razed in New York 13 years ago. Sosnowska makes no specific reference to the World Trade Center, but it seems prescient that the work had its debut in New York in the week leading up to the anniversary of that horrific day. The Trade Center towers were also of the late International Style (sometimes called International Style II), a somewhat watered-down version of Mies’s original vision, which was popular through much of the 20th Century, particularly for commercial architecture. Comparing an image of the Lakeshore Drive towers alongside one of the World Trade Center, one can easily see the influence of the former on the latter. Tower unsettles, for it looks eerily like images of the twisted steel skeletons the world saw replayed and reprinted on television, in newspapers, and online for weeks, months, and years after September 11, 2001. However, an image cannot compare to the experience of being in proximity to hunks of architectural wreckage. Standing alongside Tower at Hauser & Wirth, one has a bodily sense of how terribly awe-inspiring it was for those two structures to come crashing completely into ruin, in one fell swoop.

Sosnowska is a resident of Warsaw, a city whose own, long history of mass destruction far exceeds that of New York’s. The city is still suffused with effects of Hitler’s attempt at its total annihilation during World War II, as well as the grim Soviet rebuilding and expansion efforts that followed during the Cold War. The artist has noted that she often walks around her hometown, documenting demolished, abandoned, and otherwise overlooked sites which nonetheless contain essential, elemental truths of its embattled past. In a way, Tower serves as a connector between the two cities, one with a very old notion of violent destruction, and one much more recent. However, Tower also, curiously, awakens in its viewer a sense of uplift. Standing at the smaller opening, gazing up through the great steel ribs bathed in sunlight, the pathway through Tower is clear, and seems to offer hope.

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Kneeling where Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue triangulates Atlantic and Fourth, my job was to hold the end of a measuring tape against a street lamp. At the other end, sculptor George Trakas calculated the distance to an open spot in the triangle and noted it on a drawing he brought with him. The purpose of this exercise was to corroborate a spot on the unfinished plaza surrounding the Atlantic Avenue subway kiosk where a tree could take root without interfering with the usual tangle of utilities beneath the asphalt. Trakas had earlier delineated this patch of earth as the best place to plant a Silver Linden, a tree that would serve as the culmination of a project he has labored over for a decade.

We met at the Atlantic Avenue station to tour Hook, Line and Sinker, the abbreviated title for an amalgam of interconnected sculptural elements riffing off the commercial and natural history of this busy transit hub. The project was initiated in 2004, but to date, the northwest end of the street-level plaza remains unfinished, closed off to traffic by painted demarcations and temporary lighting. Trakas envisions this section to be elevated a foot or two to the height of the finished plaza and shaded by the tree.

Currently all that rises above pedestrian level is the landmark-protected brick and sandstone kiosk, designed by Heins & LaFarge in 1904. Though abandoned as an entrance after the station’s renovation, the kiosk was preserved for its elegance, its symbolism of past civic munificence, and to provide a skylight for the expanded public space below. Work on the plaza surrounding the kiosk was partially completed in 2004 and updated in 2013 with enhancements by Trakas, working in conjunction with Parsons Brinckerhoff di Menico and Partners, including granite seating elements meant to be shaded by the tree. But the end of the plaza is unfinished, and as long as it remains so, and as long as the tree remains unplanted, Hook, Line and Sinker will also be incomplete. The tree is crucial to the interlocking metaphor Trakas has wrought below ground.

Hook (Archean Reach), Line (Sea House) and Sinker (Mined Swell), the full title for the tripartite installation, addresses the borough’s development along roads that extend inland from its waterfront. As a port city’s pathways tend to develop perpendicularly from the water, Brooklyn’s gently curving shore caused its neighborhood streets to clash at odd angles, thus creating the borough’s distinctive civic centers. It is this web of routes emanating from the sea (as much as the street names themselves) that inspired Trakas to introduce nautical imagery to an underground subway station.

With an extensive body of site-specific sculptures stretching from La Jolla and Bellingham to the banks of the Hudson River at Beacon and at Newtown Creek in Brooklyn, Trakas has earned a reputation as an artist committed to reminding us of our archetypal connections to the water’s edge. Addressing public concerns ranging from shorefront repair and reclamation to simple accessibility (and often both) Trakas has dedicated his career to creating places rather than pieces. He is not a monument builder. Visitors to his Newtown Creek Nature Walk (2007) in Greenpoint sometimes raise the question, where’s the art? What Trakas brings to his work and what he leaves for the public to contemplate is a deep sense of what was there originally, how it shaped the site he encountered, and how it affected what he built on it, or beside it, or within it.

My guided tour of Hook, Line and Sinker began with explicit instructions from the artist that I was to take the D train from Bleecker Street to the Atlantic Avenue stop, just one of many paths I could have followed to the site. Taking this particular route was intended to prepare me for a narrative of movement and landscape that informs the sculpture. My trip began underground at Bleecker, stretched over East River via the Manhattan Bridge, descended again beneath Flatbush Avenue to the inevitable ascension, this time by foot, back to street level — a rolling sea voyage, replayed as an ordinary commuter trip. When I met up with him at the Pacific Street entrance he launched into the history of the work and how its title invites and encourages overlapping interpretations.

Hook (Archean Reach) refers to the curved passageway leading from the Pacific Street entrance to the tracks below, which he has emphasized with a sculptural wainscot of polished metamorphic granite, undulating wave-like as it amplifies the floor’s gently rolling movement from turnstile to platform. Substantially more sculptural than the ceramic tile wall it undergirds, both its weight and color succeed as image and structural enhancement. Care was taken in its design so as not to interrupt the commercial and practical aspects of its location. Thus clean breaks were inserted to allow for a newsstand, vents and maintenance doors.

The sculptural aspect of Line (Sea House) is more implied than physically present, as it constitutes the interior vertical space directly below the kiosk. The kiosk itself has been transformed into a symbolic lighthouse, while architecturally serving as a clerestory opening, providing daylight to the platform and stairs below. For this space Trakas had originally settled on the inclusion of new steel markers embedded in the old walls where the original stair stringers once descended to a cramped landing. But an opportunity to solve an unforeseen problem led to one of the site’s more overt seagoing references. Electric lamps had to be installed to provide lighting at night, raising the issue of how fixtures were to be maintained in the now-floorless kiosk hovering over the stairs. The solution was a rolling gantry Trakas designed in the shape of a boat hull, with a functioning helm able to move the entire structure laterally on rails across the open space, thus providing maintenance workers (entering through the now-locked street-level doors) the ability to re-lamp light fixtures, while inadvertently enriching the artist’s rail and sea metaphors.

Sinker (Mined Swell) is an incline made of huge quarry-faced granite blocks that widen on their dressed sides as they descend between parallel staircases below the sky-lit platforms to the lower trains. They follow the stairs while enclosing the base of several steel columns. As the most massively sculptural element in the design, Sinker creates a visceral outcrop of bedrock that, when washed with the daylight from above, emphasizes the connection between street traffic and its subterranean rail extensions.

What’s missing is the tree: a single declarative chord sounding the opening of the three movements playing below. Not only would it provide an organic contrast to the steel and masonry underground, its branches would reach out toward incoming commuters from every direction, its roots suggesting the disseminating subterranean routes.

Trakas had submitted his proposal for the final plaza design to MTA’s Arts for Transit program and to the DOT in 2011, including the drawing that showed the exact spot where the tree could be planted. According to Bonny Tsang at the Department of Transportation’s press office, “DOT has been working with community stakeholders and Forest City Ratner Companies to develop a plan for this plaza. The formal design phase will be initiated in the near future.” Apparently the decision has yet to be finalized.

The question of whose design will be applied to the remaining street level space remains open and thus explains the long delay in finishing the project. When decisions are tossed back and forth between city agencies, while developers and “various stakeholders” vie for advantage, the only thing that is certain is that the artist, though a primary stakeholder, is but one voice.

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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.

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