Battle at Ground Zero

This weekend, 60 artists and “cultural leaders” – performers, writers, architects, lawyers, scholars, and activists – will descend on the neighborhood surrounding ground zero to display their work and hold panel discussions about art. The “International Cultural Summit,” slated to take place on the fourth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, will not be convening to remember the fallen or to honor their sacrifice.Instead, the four-day affair “in honor of the United Nations’ 60th anniversary” will pay tribute to the late Edward Said, the Egyptian literary critic known for his justification of terrorist attacks against Israel, and the late Susan Sontag, the celebrated writer who went on record just days after September 11, 2001, with her objection to calling the 19 hijackers “cowards.”The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the organizer of the event, will sponsor art exhibits themed on government censorship of artistic expression, including a suitcase bomb (which contained 4 pounds of TNT in a previous exhibition), a straitjacket made from an American flag, and a panel of 37-cent “Patriot Act” postage stamps featuring a gun held to the head of President Bush.There was a time when momentous events and deeds stirred the hearts of artists and inspired them to create genuine and lasting works of art: “Of arms and the man I sing,” opens Virgil’s epic poem, “The Aeneid.” “Sing, O Goddess,” Homer commands, as he begins his epic of tragedy and heroism, “The Iliad.” In “Henry V,” William Shakespeare writes of the battles of kings and men, “This story shall the good man teach his son, / And Crispian, Crispian shall n’er go by, / From this day to the ending of the world, / But we shall be remembered.” In the magnificent “Easter, 1916,” William Butler Yeats honors the good men who had just died for a free Ireland: “I write it out in a verse – / MacDonagh and MacBride, / And Connolly and Pearse, / Now and in time to be, / Wherever green is worn, / Are changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.”Where is, in response to an event that contains the humanity of September 11, our epic poems, our “Easter, 1916”? Where is our “Guernica”? Today, artists take potshots at easy targets, their work as precisely programmed for preconditioned responses as a television comedy sitcom. Lacking imagination and courage, artists link their work to significant events not to honor them or unveil their truths, but rather to get attention that their meager work cannot garner on its own. So we get art displayed in galleries and shows, meant to be taken seriously, that is more appropriate for “National Lampoon.”Though exceptions such as Eric Fischl’s thoughtful “Tumbling Woman” were rejected by the public as offensive when they were honestly difficult and disturbing, that is never an excuse for any true artist to back off from attempting the real thing. Instead, they shrink and commemorate current events in a political context, reaching for the equivalent of the applause line: the knowing murmur and nod from the self-satisfied sophisticate. Then, ironically, though they mock Mr. Bush for tying September 11 to the Iraq war, they do not confront the barbaric act that was September 11 for fear of engendering feelings of nationalism and being seen as endorsing the war.Perhaps artists feel impotent confronting an event that everyone witnessed live: They may feel there is nothing left to tell. However, it may go deeper than that. While the AIDS crisis in the 1980s produced a flood of art in response, September 11 has produced almost none. Artists were comfortable with their ability to present the message of AIDS as they saw fit. However, from the moment the second plane struck on September 11, to the office workers leaping to their deaths, to the sacrifice of the rescue workers, the world was confronted with truths that were self-evident and that they – the artists and their community – had always rejected. Unable to redefine them and unwilling to confront them, they have instead chosen to ignore them: America as the innocent victim; non-Western, non-English-speaking, non-Judeo-Christian people as the aggressors. Evil as a concept and the just sacrifice of good men and women, their submission of the self to something greater, perhaps even patriotism and faith. This was September 11, and they and the community that surrounds them accept none of it, so we have not seen it.The artists cannot accept- nor do they have any idea of how to portray – the battle between the endorsement of American values and a barbaric enemy that not only hates them and their art, but would kill them in an eye blink. And giggle about it afterwards. They are stuck; the only defense against such an enemy is the American soldier, but the artists endorse nothing for which he or she stands for. So we get the New York Times pummeling September 11 families in editorials, demanding they accept all evidence of the attacks buried underground like some ancient tomb, sealed with the towering tribute to moral and political relativism, the “International Freedom Center.” This is the final denial of what happened September 11, 2001, and what is necessary in response.Somewhere along the line, art descended from honoring and elevating mankind’s station in life to merely being “challenging,” “controversial,” and “provocative.” No less than William Faulkner demanded more. In his 1950 Nobel Prize speech, with words more fitting today than even then, he said: “There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” Forgetting this, he said, the writer must dedicate him- or herself to “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Otherwise, Faulkner warns us, “He writes not of the heart but of the glands.” “I decline to accept the end of man,”he said famously, “man will not only endure: he will prevail.”It is the “poet’s, the writer’s duty” and “privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”In failing to honestly confront September 11 and “the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice” demonstrated that day, today’s artists have failed in that duty and forsaken that “privilege” as a pillar to mankind’s triumph. They have instead chosen to be small, safe, and insignificant. They are thus threatened to be overrun by modern technology, which can report far better than they can. On the Internet, everybody can voice an opinion more effectively. They are, in that which really matters, rendering themselves obsolete. If that is their choice, they can at least have the good grace to get out of the way and let the history of September 11 speak for itself.Mr. Burke is the brother of FDNY Captain William F. Burke Jr., Engine 21, Manhattan, who perished in the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Battle at Ground Zero

Battle at Ground Zero

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