The day after the 15th anniversary of the 11 September attacks, the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York opens an exhibition that looks at artists’ reactions to the event and its lingering legacy.
Thirteen artists, all of whom have direct ties to New York and some of who were directly affected by the attacks, are represented in Rendering the Unthinkable: Artists Respond to 9/11 (opening 12 September). Among them is Christopher Saucedo, whose brother, a firefighter, died in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Saucedo is showing a work on paper that depicts the buildings as clouds.
For Eric Fischl, who is showing the sculpture Tumbling Woman (2002), the most unforgettable images were of people jumping from the towers. “It was something that was so terrifying to witness and it spoke directly to how horrible it must have been for the victims, that they would choose one form of death over another,” Fischl told The Art Newspaper.
The collapse of the towers made it impossible to recover many remains. “It became a very complicated grieving process”, Fischl said. “The grieving language took the form of loss of architecture, as if the building were that important. I felt very strongly that it was important to reassert the body into the memory and the process of grief.”
Fischl says the work also speaks to the difficultly of the US’s self-understanding after the attacks—a problem that remains unresolved. “Tumbling captured the feeling that America has—and has had, since the event—of being off-centre.”
Among the other artists represented are the Blue Man Group, who are showing a video in which they read from the many scraps of paper that floated across the city as they fell from the towers, and the brothers Doug and Mike Starn, who also used paper scraps from the towers that settled around their Brooklyn studio, printing images of leaves on them.