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In the post-Sept. 11 era, artists help us to process our feelings, find meaning and embrace healing

Sunday, September 08, 2002

By Caroline Abels, Post-Gazette Cultural Arts Writer

he arts are often what our society is not.

Artistic works take time to create, in a country that values speed. They challenge, in a society in which we embrace the comfortable. And they are steeped in symbolic imagery, in a culture in which we tend to communicate in straightforward ways.

	Daniel Marsula, Post-Gazette. Click image to his discussion about the illustration.

But in other respects, disciplines such as theater, music and visual art are like all of us. They react deeply to tragedy. They attempt to build connections between people. And they seek a little sanity in an often unfathomable world.

Because the arts are all of these things, works of art created after Sept. 11 were all of these things: emotional, personal and probing, but also challenging, uncomfortable and ethereal.

Artists reacted to the events in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, as most Americans did, but in ways that most of us didn't -- using artistic languages that affect people on deeper levels than the everyday language used on newscasts, in politicians' speeches and at the water cooler.

But many artists declined to tackle the confusion, grief and political fallout from the attacks. Americans needed comfort after Sept. 11, and they needed it quickly. Making sense of the senseless in the ways artists do takes more time.

	The Arts Respond: The Visual Arts Classical Music Architecture Books Dance Theater Pop Music Television

"One of art's values in this speeded-up and overwired culture, what differentiates it from everything else, is its reflective quality," said Robert Atkins, an art historian and former art critic for the Village Voice who will speak at Carnegie Mellon University on Sept. 11. "It can't emerge on demand."

A range of responses to Sept. 11 in the arts and entertainment world are addressed by Post-Gazette critics in the stories to be found at the links in the reference box to the right of this story... .With the exception of pop songs and television shows, many of these works are likely to be unfamiliar to the public, given that art cannot be mass-distributed.

But making art can appeal to the masses, something evidenced by the many organizations -- mostly, state arts councils and schools -- that invited people of all backgrounds to submit works in response to the attacks. In Iowa, for example, the state department of cultural affairs posted poems, essays, drawings and photography by Iowans on its Web site.

Carnegie Mellon University also is soliciting artistic responses from the public to display on campus from Sept. 11-15.

"It's a way to examine how much flexibility people feel they have to express themselves" when the culture already presents so many opportunities for expression, said Judith Modell, director of CMU's Center for the Arts in Society.

For professional artists, an issue after Sept. 11 was how to create meaningful images about the day's events when television images of the day's destruction were imprinted on our mind's eye. Artists also debated whether new works should address Sept. 11 directly or delve into broader issues of fear, anger or suffering.

"I would never be interested in competing with the day or attempting to explain the meaning of the day," said Pittsburgh playwright Lynne Conner, an assistant professor of theater at the University of Pittsburgh. "But what I'm sure will happen is that the way the day changed me will come through in something I write. It won't be literal, and a critic may not see it."

Some artists felt the urge to foster understanding between the Arab world and the West through artwork that raised issues of discrimination and cultural hegemony. Others used their craft to either oppose or support the attack on the Taliban by Western allies.

Many arts organizations quickly adjusted their programming to include works with patriotic themes or played up tragic themes in preprogrammed works. It was a marked contrast to the uncertainty expressed by arts organizations in September over whether to keep the house lights on. (In Pittsburgh, most groups came to believe that the show must go on.)

"Though art seems like frill to many when national tragedy or financial hardship strikes, there is no more important time for art," sculptor Tara Marvel wrote in the December issue of Art Times.

One reason is that art helps humans process overwhelming feelings. Suvan Geer, an installation artist, wrote in the catalog for "Art Heals, Art Works," an exhibition now on view in Fullerton, Calif., that philosophers and psychologists throughout history have long believed this to be art's power.

"In making visual the nebulous and churning feelings surrounding tragedy or pain, artists were seen to be reaching for what psychologist Lev Vygotsky termed a cathartic 'annihilation' of overwhelming, unspecific emotion. ... [Art] put 'edges' on the feelings surrounding things that seemed impossibly huge because the scale of an artwork is always smaller than the scope of a tragedy."

In recent history, writers, visual artists, filmmakers, playwrights and composers have primarily tackled long-term afflictions such as the Holocaust, the AIDS crisis, slavery, the Vietnam War. Specific historical events the nature of 9/11 are less frequently addressed.

"We're tempted to come up with historical analogies now, and that's a way of processing, but the therapeutic moment comes when we can process the particularities of an event, when we can understand what makes it unique," said Michael Witmore, an assistant professor of English at Carnegie Mellon.

Whether post-Sept. 11 works have lasting merit "will depend on the values of society 20 or 30 years from now," Atkins said. "A lot of people were saying when Enron was unfolding that that was a much more important occurrence."

For now, whether we find meaning in timeless works or embrace newer works created in our time, we can understand that as life goes on, the arts move forward.

"Hard times for an artist are deeply involved times," Marvel wrote, "as there is serious work to do."