Metro Pulse/Artbeat/Deconstructing Tragedy

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Deconstructing Tragedy

What and Where:
Baldwin Lee at the Knoxville Museum of Art
A1LabArts- hosted exhibitors at the Townsend Gallery (in the Candy Factory), World's Fair Park Drive

When:
KMA: through Sept. 22. Call 525-6101 for KMA information; admission free on 9/11.
Townsend Gallery: Sept. 11 through 29. Townsend Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday 11-4, Sunday 1-4. Opening reception for the A1 show at 8:45 a.m., Wednesday, Sept. 11, with an evening ceremony at 6 p.m.

Artistic Catharsis in the Wake of 9/11

by Heather Joyner

Almost a year after the tragedies at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, finding words to adequately communicate the impact of those terrible events remains difficult. Creating images or music or performances that express our collective despair is also a challenge. Whatever the results of our efforts, they can feel disjointed—much like the events themselves.

Photographer and UT professor Baldwin Lee (at the KMA) and participants in the upcoming A1LabArts-sponsored show represent but a few of the countless individuals commemorating those who perished last September. Yet as members of our community using art to convey their responses, they do more than share genuine grief over September 11. They reflect our diversity as well as that of the victims. Through their work, our need to eulogize the dead on a scale in keeping with the magnitude of loss is addressed, if not satisfied, the purpose served with grace and substance.

Both shows remind us that we need not react to tragedy in the same way, nor must we agree en masse to specific political solutions. When Americans killed hundreds of thousands more defenseless people than did terrorists a year ago—albeit in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during wartime—were our actions any less heartless? Are we allowed to ask such questions and still be considered patriotic? The point is not that we all have the same response, but that we honor the different responses we have. In my mind, these exhibits celebrate freedom of expression as well as honor lives lost.

Lee's exhibit, titled "Landscapes of Sorrow," features five large collages that combine photographs made in New York City three months after the disaster. Although an in-depth and interesting description of Lee's technical process is offered, it hardly matters that he employs digital equipment or pieces together "prints" using a computer. What matters is his choice to show mourning sites bordering Ground Zero in the way that he has: from a dizzying range of angles revolving around selected vantage points. Normally, this approach might be too self-conscious, detracting from the images themselves. In this instance, however, it becomes a brilliant visual analogy for the complexity of the circumstances. Overlapping angles are as disorienting as the photographs' subjects are disoriented. The situations depicted, like the collages they inhabit, are too much for a single person to comprehend within a few brief moments.

Growing up in Manhattan's Chinatown, Lee spent many youthful hours scouring "Radio Row" for electronics parts before that block of shops was destroyed to make way for the World Trade Center in the early '70s. When the planes hit last year, his mother was living only blocks away. In his eloquent artist's statement, Lee mentions memories of the Yankees losing to the Pirates in 1960, saying, "It was impossible for me to reconcile failure with the idea of New York." Further into the statement, he remarks, "The omnipotence of the New York I knew in my childhood no longer exists. My photographs attempt to describe this lament." They also evoke the shock we experienced as a nation upon realizing that we're indeed vulnerable to the sort of violence common in other countries.

In his book Firehouse, David Halberstam describes Jack Lynch, the father of a fireman killed last September 11. He writes that the elder Lynch "spent so much time at Ground Zero that he became a member of a new, informal community there—a community of men like himself who had lost a child and who had come to watch over the workers and to keep their own vigil. They had, not surprisingly, a special, albeit terrible, bond to each other, and there was rarely much need for words.... The fathers would simply give the names of their sons and daughters and what they had been doing that day at the towers..." Of his subjects, Lee says "they show themselves as they have probably never shown themselves before in public; they have neither reserve nor embarrassment about revealing their most private emotions."

Just as moving as his human subjects are Lee's images of an impromptu shrine. In his piece titled "Ground Zero, #7" we see wilted bouquets, children's drawings, votive candles, and stuffed animals alongside barricades—personal and spiritual effects against a backdrop of stark cement and chain link fencing. It's almost too much to bear. The Collected Portraits of Grief from the New York Times, a book with more than 500 pages of biographies and photos of faces that will never grow older, accompanies Lee's work.

When the Knoxville-based multi-disciplinary organization known as A1LabArts recently sent out a call to area artists, they got responses from painters, sculptors, photographers, musicians, and writers (among them poets Marilyn Kallet and Laura Still, and artists Chi-Chen Chang, Susana Esrequis, Moema Furtado, Joyce Gralak, Mignon Naegeli, and Mona Shiber de Kay). The upcoming exhibit, organized by Birney Hand, marks "the first time since those tragic events that a collection of [local] work directly related to the attacks will be shown."

Including the efforts of amateurs and school children as well as professional artists, the A1 show will begin this September 11 at 8:45 a.m.—the precise time the first plane struck the World Trade Center one year ago. At that time, the names of approximately 3,000 victims will be read outside the Candy Factory by members of the Knoxville Writers' Guild. The gallery will be open throughout the day.

Next Wednesday will be rewarding in some respects. It will also be very, very tough.