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Night Vision
: Notes from the curator
Late in September 2001, some weeks after the 9/11 attacks,
I attended several evening gatherings of artists
in galleries and watering holes around the city. Many of
us had been avoiding venturing out to social or public
events, and several of us had not spoken to one another
since before the attacks. Ground Zero was still smoking,
most of us were back at work, but no one was really
functioning normally and no one was even thinking about the
true meaning of “recovery” just yet. War was on the
horizon. We began to talk of our experiences and feelings of
the past weeks, and also about our work and what we
thought we should or shouldn’t be doing as artists.
One question that came up was whether it would be
appropriate or even possible to make work that responded
directly to the attacks. Then there was the question of
whether it would be possible to make work that didn’t
respond to them in some way. With the events of 9/11 we
had immediately experienced the recontextualizing
of artworks already installed in galleries which found
their meanings irrevocably changed, sometimes much to
the chagrin of the artists: Nancy Davenport’s digitally
manipulated photographs of people jumping from buildings,
and Wolfgang Staehle’s real time video panorama of lower
Manhattan are two well-known examples of this kind of
diverted meaning.
There was another, more plaintive question thrown out by
several artists: how could we work at all at a time
like this? What importance could our own stories have,
dwarfed as they are by the magnitude of this catastrophe?
Is making art irrelevant right now? It was this question
that prodded me, since I found myself grappling with a
rather different source of discomfort. My own work had
long been drawn from the same image banks that were
being used to illustrate the current unfolding crisis in newspapers
and on television: satellite transmissions of war,
declassified Department of Defense diagrams, Gulf War
night vision imagery shot from the '91 evening news. Far
from feeling suddenly irrelevant, I felt I was being
shadowed by an awkward sense of responsibility. How had the
events of September changed the significance of
these—my—subjects? Did I have the emotional fiber and the
creative flexibility to handle the changes? What part of
these huge and complicated subjects should I be addressing?
What was I doing working this field to begin with if I
couldn’t handle it now that I’d experienced a catastrophic event
first-hand? Was my problem the sudden lack of mediation?
Was I too close?
The specialized niche where I had done my research and
made my work was now no longer private; it had
become a stage for mainstream production and consumption.
Could one conduct a critical artistic analysis just as
events unfolded, almost journalistically, when so little
was clear and emotions were running riot? What would
constitute a clear line of inquiry? What kind of art could
significantly approach what so many had witnessed unmediated
and en masse? And how
could we expect anything we did to take on meaning or make an impact when we
were
already becoming fatigued by the 24/7 onslaughts of
imagery and commentary? In a matter of weeks since 9/11
we had become a supersaturated public, and yet what we
actually knew amounted to very little. What possible
difference could an artistic treatment of these images and
issues make, and how could that compete with mainstream
sensationalism in this most competitive attention economy?
I was not alone in these thoughts. There are many artists,
both in the online community and in the traditional gallery
realm, who have engaged the subjects of networks and
surveillance, optics, military technology, and media images
of war. I knew of artists and media theorists who called
this their territory, and who had developed analytical, critical
approaches to dealing with our culture's fetishistic
relationship to apocalypse and destruction, communications and control,
and to the ambivalently aesthetisized images generated by
the military and by the media. These issues had importance in
theoretical, philosophical and artistic circles, long
before they had become, in a shallow simplified form, ubiquitous 24-hour
news items.
By the end of October, and after much discussion, I
finally felt clear that this was not the time to turn away from these
subjects. It seemed that this was an important moment to
bring a group of such artists together.
At the outset of the current war in Afghanistan, the U.S.
Army coined the motto, “We own the night,” referring specifically
to their advanced infrared and heat seeking equipment, and
to the unparalleled technological advantage afforded them
during nighttime maneuvers. But this show's title, “Night
Vision,” is nothing if not ironic: to be able to see in the dark does
not necessarily mean one can make sense of what one sees.
Since the language and the job of art is to raise and reveal
complexities rather than attempt to resolve them, we may
take advantage of its unorthodox methods of inquiry and multiple
readings. Art offers us a respite and an alternative to
the one-liner narratives we have become so inured to, whether
they are commercial or entertainment-driven, newsworthy
and informational, or activist/political in nature. Art offers us rare
protection against the effect of psychic numbing produced
by a bi-polar and overzealous mainstream culture.
—Joy Garnett, New York, May/June, 2002
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