In a recent cover story, New York Magazine asked: What if 9/11 had never happened? Sometimes these days on the streets of Manhattan it seems that it never really did. Ground Zero remains an open hole in the ground, a destination for tourists behind a tall wire fence. The rest of the US goes on shopping, worrying about the exploits of Tom Cruise or Lindsay Lohan, the drama of JonBenet Ramsey, or the cultural rise of MySpace.com.
The events that have followed September 11 2001 - the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the creation of a Homeland Security department, the “war on terror” - mean that searching for causes has typically been a political act. And the dialogue has often been about the consequences of 9/11, rather than the events themselves.
Five years on, there has also been an outpouring of artistic responses to the events. In Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore - probably the best-known filmmaker of the events around the attacks - was sure of his stance and was not afraid to state it. But many artists have been reluctant to step into that dangerous vortex of political forces, while others have refrained from peering too closely at the events of that day.
The US is still struggling to decide what to think about its national tragedy. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are ongoing, Americans do not know how to judge the origins of September 11 or its effects, and are uncertain how history will judge it and them. And when it comes to commemorating, representing or depicting such an event in the arts, five years is still very soon to have a sophisticated response. Previous national and international tragedies have typically had to wait much longer for artistic interpretation.
In the days after September 11, many commentators remarked that the epic scale of the attacks was like a Hollywood disaster movie. The horror was that it was real. US artists have engaged with the events of that day in a variety of art forms, from photography and film to sculpture, installation art and fiction. Each medium has tried to do something different.
From the first it was the iconic felling of the twin towers, rather than the attack on Washington, that seized the popular and artistic imagination. The US’s artistic journey after 9/11 began with the raw power of the images on that beautiful blue-sky morning in September. Shortly after the attacks, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the German composer, suggested people think of them as “the greatest work of art ever”. A year later, British artist Damien Hirst said they were “visually stunning” and that on this level the terrorists needed “congratulating”. (Amid the subsequent furore, both men apologised.)
Photography was the first art form to take advantage of the power of the images. This was initially a documentary response - a factual record - rather than an artistic interpretation, by the thousands of people in Manhattan who witnessed the events. Theirs seemed a natural urge - to reach for their camera or cellphone. They focused mainly on the planes crashing into the World Trade Center, the collapse of the towers, and the fleeing of shell-shocked and injured New York residents.
In the days and weeks that followed came more formal images caught by professional photographers. Some, such as Joel Meyerowitz, focused on the ruins and rescue teams at Ground Zero. Others captured the ordinary onlookers who came to see what was left; Kevin Bubriski called his series “Pilgrimage: Looking at Ground Zero”. In the general narrative of that period firemen and police officers were elevated to be saviours of the nation. But it was the expressions of the witnesses and survivors in the photographs that signalled the magnitude of what had happened - and that something, still unclear, had utterly changed.
The photographs that were splashed across every newspaper front page around the world in the days after September 11 have since become taboo, confined to books about the event. It’s the pictures of survivors, rather than destruction, that have created the narrative and the lasting photographic legacy.
After photography, painting has tried to capture some of that same mesmerising power of the events of the day. In the aftermath of 2001, there was an outpouring of realistic painting focused on the towers, the planes and the rescue-worker heroes. But the images had become so familiar that most of this art - which came to be known as Tower Art - could say nothing new.
Quilts and murals were also made - simple gestures or offerings made by people moved by the enormity of what had taken place. But few of these constituted artistic responses to the events, says Andrea Henderson Fahnestock, curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of the City of New York: “Many paintings were e-mailed to me after 9/11. Most were just very emotional, sort of cliched, lots of images of firemen. Very few stood out.”
Professional artists noted the weakness of Tower Art. At first, most serious artists referred only obliquely to September 11 - but even their escapist, soothing art was itself a reaction to the events. New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art’s biennial exhibition is one of the best snapshots of what US artists are thinking - in 2004, the exhibition largely avoided 9/11. Some of the work was dark and threatening, indirect allusions to the world outside, but in their installations, paintings and sculptures the artists seemed to be looking the other way, as if they were not yet ready to process the event.
“There was a lot of escapism, people turning in on themselves to fantasy worlds in reaction to 9/11,” says Chrissie Iles, one of the curators of the biennial. “Some of it was mourning, some very beautiful. People who came to see it kept saying: ‘This is really helping me to come to terms with all of this.’”
This art was also a rejection of the broader society the artists saw around them. In the notes to the exhibition, Iles and the other curators said that the escapism allowed artists to “investigate new belief structures that might replace those of the contemporary world that appear increasingly bankrupt”. And artists wanted to respect the dead and their families. “It was not appropriate to make art after so much death and destruction,” Iles says.
Artists in the post-9/11 world had to work out how closely they could look at death, personal suffering and darkness. Anyone who gazed too closely found that their work was not tolerated. In September 2002, Eric Fischl’s “Tumbling Woman”, a bronze sculpture of a naked woman falling towards the ground, was installed in the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. After a public outcry and complaints, it was quickly removed.
The work that “succeeded” in the early years after 9/11 was that which focused instead on US defiance and recovery, or at least reprieve. “Tribute in Light”, installed in 2002, was an installation of 88 searchlights that rose in the Manhattan skyline where the twin towers had stood; it is now repeated every year on the anniversary.
Colleen Mulrenan’s video project “Daughter, September 13”, was about Mulrenan’s two days waiting for her father, deputy chief of the New York City Fire Department, to return from working at Ground Zero. The short video shows Mulrenan washing soot and dirt from her father’s uniform after he finally came home. It was projected on to the Holland Tunnel Ventilation Building near the Hudson River in September 2002.
The works for the 2004 Whitney biennial were created before the war in Iraq. Since then, a lot of the art has been a reaction to the events that followed, and therefore political in nature - mostly critical of George W. Bush.
This change in tone was captured in the 2006 biennial. Some of the art echoed Vietnam or other anti-war protest art. One of the most talked-about pieces was a poster by the sculptor Richard Serra which shows the dark outline of an Iraqi prisoner at Abu Ghraib beneath the scrawled words “Stop Bush”. In another prominent piece, 180 artists recreated the Peace Tower, an anti-Vietnam War installation put up in Los Angeles in 1966. While this work recalled much art of an earlier era, some of the responses seemed to express the dark anxieties about a war-torn world in a bold new language. Paul Chan’s “1st Light,” a video projection, showed dark consumer objects rising upwards as bodies hurtled down.
This political art is a new chapter in the responses to the events that followed 9/11. But artists have also been harking back to the day itself. While all references to, and depictions of, falling people remain taboo, it appears that the US is now ready to watch the scenes of that day in two important films released this year: United 93 and World Trade Center. Both stay clear of the political aftermath and go back to a realistic depiction of the events of September 11. The quasi-documentary style of both films underlines the desire to recount the episode.
United 93 was released in April by Universal Studios. It tells the story of the hijacked aircraft that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, killing all 40 passengers and crew as well as the four hijackers. British director Paul Greengrass used transcripts of the phone calls the passengers made to the ground and extensive interviews with their families and friends to draw up a 20-page treatment that formed the spine of the film.
“These were the first people to inhabit the post-9/11 world,” Greengrass said of his reasons for making the film. During filming - on a real aircraft in Pinewood Studios near London - Greengrass held up a clock to ensure the actors hit the cues on time. They were not allowed to deviate from what was known and established, although they had to improvise the rest.
It was an examination of what might have happened, a recreation of scenes that were beyond the reach of TV cameras and photographers on 9/11. (Greengrass believes that it would have been “impossible” to roll a drinks trolley down the central aisle to attack the hijackers. The passengers would, he thinks, have opted for something more immediate - two seconds is a long time when you believe that the hijackers are carrying bombs - and less cumbersome. This has a bearing on how they may have fought back.)
When Lloyd Levin, one of the film’s producers, spoke at the Tribeca Film Festival the day after the film’s release, he was at pains to emphasise that the reliance on known fact was meant to show that the film was taking no sides in the political debate, nor was it dishonouring the dead. Instead, the film was meant to be a semi-historical document that in part memorialised the passengers. “Our intent was not to indict, not to blame, but to put it together in a believable truth,” Levin said.
The second film, World Trade Center, directed by Oliver Stone and released in the US in August by Paramount Pictures, turns to the events in the towers on September 11. It tells the story of two real-life New York Port Authority police officers, John McCloughlin and Will Jimeno, who were trapped when the twin towers collapsed but were pulled from the ruins alive.
The two films depict events of the same day. But even when considering such horrific material, the genre still works best when following narrative “rules” - a strong film has a prominent central character or characters, whose personal and emotional story we follow. World Trade Center does this - and so it’s a freer, and more powerful film than United 93. United 93 chooses no single point of view - who knows which of the passengers were “heroes” and who were not? Greengrass did not want to slight any of the families - his camera considers them as a group and focuses on none in particular. But it loses power because of that.
In World Trade Center, Oliver Stone takes the firmer artistic decision to focus on McCloughlin and Jimeno, eclipsing the stories of other people. (The widow of a fellow officer, who is shown in the film being crushed to death by falling debris, was opposed to the film being made.)
Viacom, parent of Paramount, said the film company preferred the World Trade Center storyline because it represented life whereas United 93 ultimately represented death. That preference has been borne out at the US box office where World Trade Center has garnered $56m in the period to the end of August, compared with United 93’s $31m since it opened in April.
Despite World Trade Center’s greater commercialism, like United 93 it makes a claim for factual authenticity. One of the opening frames reads: “These events are based on the actual accounts of the surviving participants.” In addition, it is resolutely unpolitical. This surprised some critics since in some of his earlier works, Stone assumed strong positions on subjects such as John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Richard Nixon and Vietnam. But, when dealing with 9/11, even Stone steers clear of big political themes. As a result, rightwing groups in the US greeted World Trade Center as a healthy and clear-headed confirmation of the American way of life.
“It is an exploration of heroism in our country - but it is international at the same time in its humanity,” Stone said when the making of the film was first announced last year.
But how long can politics be kept out of 9/11? Towards the end of World Trade Center two odd events take place. After building up policemen as heroes, Stone reintroduces a fat policeman who is busily eating hot dogs at a makeshift stand on the rubble while people are still trapped all around him. Then, a few minutes later, an ex-marine who has gone into the ruins to help suddenly gets a strange glint in his eyes and starts talking about revenge.
It is as if another film, full of different political judgments, is intruding from the world that followed 9/11 - where not all authority figures are to be trusted, and where the same beliefs that motivate someone to do good can also drive a person towards something more questionable. In the future, 9/11 is likely to be judged in the light of the events that followed it. But, for now, five years on, the US and its artists want to see, grieve, and pick over the events of that day once again.
