I have been watching the coverage of the terrorist attacks in London, and I find myself transported back in time - to 9/11. The posters of the missing haunt my dreams. I marvel at the incredible faith it takes to wander the streets with those pictures. Everyone knows the likely fate of the missing, and yet, their loved ones hope.
As an MFA student at Antioch, I wrote my critical paper about art after 9/11. I called it Form Zero: Creating in Cultural Crisis. One section of the paper dealt with the missing persons posters in New York City after 9/11. Here is a shortened version of that section, adapted for this blog:
Missing Persons as Found Art
Following the 9/11 attacks on New York City, missing persons posters were taken down, photocopied, and framed for a national museum tour. The show, Missing: Last Seen at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, was organized by Brooklyn Heights resident Louis Navaer, with some funding from the Mesoamerica Foundation. While the show was well received in Los Angeles and San Francisco, it failed in Washington, DC.
But what does it mean to aestheticize missing people? And is that what the show ultimately does? Can missing persons posters function as found art?
The posters were not created as aesthetic objects, though they certainly contained an aesthetic dimension, both intrinsically and in the reactions and attachments New Yorkers formed around them. Once removed from New York, however, they lost their primary function and meaning. They could no longer help locate lost loved ones. Tearing them down symbolized the transition into a new historical moment: the attacks had officially become history, and the posters could no longer point toward a future - only the past. Their immediate emotional connections severed, the posters transformed into something else: a catalog of the dead, a visual account of human loss, evidence of the horror.
But does that make them art or historical artifact? Both? Do we lose some sense of the history - of the real human dimension - when the posters are curated, framed, and displayed? Or is it a matter of finding the right way to display them?
In Washington, DC, in particular, the show was hung with little consideration for these questions.
Garance Franke-Ruta wrote in the American Prospect:
Here in Washington, just across the river from another attack site, the framed “Missing” fliers are being displayed cheek-by-jowl with a cheery group of unrelated paintings in three gallery rooms donated by the Artists’ Museum (where they will be until March 29). Local gallery-goers know this venue for its middlebrow art and kitsch, such as a recent show of glittery papier-mache masks with feathers on them. And in this context, perhaps it’s only fitting that Nevaer has purposefully aestheticized the 210 posters on display, excluding black and white fliers from his show, he says, because they are less attention grabbing. Indeed, the show’s March 8 opening struck an offensively irreverent tone: Gallery-goers wandered amidst the posters drinking glasses of chardonnay while live jazz music thrummed in the background from a band playing in another gallery down the hall. (Franke-Ruta)
The frames are significant because they draw a border between art and non-art. Western culture has come to associate them with a high-art context. Framing a missing persons poster, however, creates a whole new set of questions: How do we look at them? Why do we look? What does it mean to be missing? What does it mean to separate the missing from the non-missing? Are we supposed to think about the ways in which we objectify the dead? Or perhaps the ways in which we transact with other people’s images – in the media, in art, in life and death?
But this does not seem to be the intention of the show. First, as the American Prospect reported, black and white fliers were excluded from the collection. This implies a formalistic set of criteria, as opposed to a social/historical/cultural one. Second, no physical separation was created between the posters and the permanent museum collection - no threshold, no curtain, no door. This implies the missing persons posters fall under the direct jurisdiction of art.
The fact that this particular museum is dedicated to kitsch art adds another dimension. It wouldn’t necessarily be a problem to hang the posters in this context, but an experience needs to be created to separate the kitsch from the solemn atmosphere of missing persons posters. What kind of space could achieve this? The separation itself would have implications for interpreting the images. Perhaps the best curatorial design would be a hallway: the literal liminal. Viewers move from the mundane (the kitsch), through the space of the missing, and into the unknown.
References
Franke-Ruta, Garance. "'Missing' Sensitivity." The American Prospect. 20 March 2002. Online.